Chocolate

Yesterday, in Tavistock, I saw a cute little sign in a “stuff” shop: “Some things are better rich: Men, coffee, chocolate.” It put me in mind of a pillow I used to have with the same sentiment needlepointed on it. A good friend gave it to me when we were both between husbands 20 years ago; we both liked coffee and chocolate, if not men for a while as we were both recovering from the effects of marriage to a couple of substandard models.

That beloved pillow became, ludicrously, a bone of contention with one of my stepdaughters. She carried on about it several times, accusing me of marrying her father for his money. Simon is brilliant and does well, but he doesn’t have MONEY. I did, in fact, date a very nice and decent millionaire as well when I was first dating Simon…but I chose Simon. So no, I didn’t marry for money; I married for love. 

And, indeed, the only person who wanted her father’s money illicitly was that very stepdaughter who proceeded to steal from Simon over the next year before we discovered it and put a screeching halt to her access and her excess. Needless to say, she is not named in his will. 

But…back to a much more pleasing subject than family rancor, chocolate.

Chocolate has been much on my mind since I saw that sign yesterday, the pillow of contention notwithstanding. I awakened thinking about a chocolate cake I made for one of the other stepdaughters, Julia.

Julia seldom ate sweets, but loved the chocolate cake at The Olive Garden and asked if I could make one for her birthday dinner about four years ago. Sure. Well, maybe. It was an almost flourless cake—3 tablespoons of flour, I think, and a ton of chocolate. The thing had to be baked in a spring form pan wrapped in aluminum foil and plunged into a Bain Marie. A water bath. Yipes. However, I did it, and it was delicious. I haven’t done it since.

I might do it when Julia visits with her husband and baby in the fall. They can’t stay long, as her husband’s job is very demanding. So, I’m trying to make sure I fatten them up in every possible way in the scant week we have to work with. Chocolate never goes amiss, ultimately.

Sometimes chocolate gets a bad rep from those who equate pleasure with sin, as did the hard-shell Baptist wannabe townspeople in the movie Chocolat. Chocolate is, I think, a sacramental substance that can do good or evil, depending on how it is used. Like wine. Like any of the transcendent creations of humanity. Coffee. Tea. Rosewater. On that last, I’m admitting here that I adore Turkish Delight. I would say I especially like it coated with chocolate―as manufactured by Fry’s and purveyed in every Spar store in Britain―but I don’t. I prefer the two heavenly substances pure and unsullied by other equally seductive flavours.  Turkish Delight is an acquired taste, I admit. But chocolate...or chocolat, if you prefer.....ah....

Chocolat is a film worth seeing more than once. Although many of the characters are caricatures, such caricatures help us to more clearly see the gifts we have by seeing such gifts simply and clearly drawn. The caricatures also show us the gifts we might ignore if, like a caricature, we should attempt to close off any part of ourselves―especially our desire for flavour (the British spelling seems so much more appropriate to the word used this way). Our desire for beauty, for real spirituality―that is, enjoyment of the wonders that are here for us. For friendship. Delight. Laughter. Wonder. Appreciation. And love.

In Chocolat, Vianne Rocher (played by Juliette Binoche, magically) brings all that to a small French village through her Mayan-influenced chocolate shop. She opens the doors at the beginning of Lent when the townspeople, held under the boot of a loveless nobleman far more than they are coerced by the young priest’s bemused attempts at religious rigor, are desperate for signs that the world is, after all, a delicious place to be. In the town, two elderly people need to fall in love at last, having denied themselves the pleasure for decades. An abused woman needs freedom and peace from her vicious spouse. A sour young widow needs to make peace with her mother, her child, and the man she loves quietly from afar.

I must admit, finally, that I love Chocolat because it presents to me all those things my journalist’s discernment ignores in its apparently endless quest for the unethical, the unconscionable and the distressing. I came by that trait honestly, though. When I was in kindergarten, the teacher asked me why I never smiled. I said, “Because I don’t see any reason to smile.”

Before you conclude that I had a miserable childhood, I didn’t. It was quite fine, in fact, with a doting grandmother whose special project I was, and lots of lovely little friends to play with. The fact was, I just had a sort of “glass half empty” mentality, and still do. So it is with some wonder that I find myself volubly appreciating sappy films such as Chocolat. Or wondering how we can pack more than a year’s worth of love into a scant week with Simon’s daughter Julia and her family. How to tell her how glad I am that she and Kevin and little Austyn have found their life together in a very nice first home near the beach in Maryland. How to tell her I wish her all the chocolate in the world, as I still wish chocolate for her two sisters who went wildly astray into theft and drugs and other very non-chocolate things. If only chocolate could return them to themselves and to those who love them.

Maybe it can. Maybe if I wish chocolate for them hard enough, they will repair their frightened souls. Or maybe not. The only thing chocolate can do, really, is open the pathway to delight, to the recognition that there is a deep richness, a just-right sweetness, a soft silken path through the universe that any soul can use to achieve, if not greatness, love and joy.

And on that note, to salve my inner crying for the two lost sisters and the yearning to see Julia, the stepdaughter whose inner beauty and outer grace make up for so much, I’m going downstairs for some chocolate.

Who do women sleep with?

Wikipedia reports Tristane Banon is the god-daughter of Strauss-Kahn's second wife. Sheesh. Curiouser and curiouser, but then, her mother, Anne Mansouret, is only a minor  contender for the Socialist nod to run for the French presidency, and politics makes strange bedfellows. (Wiki Commons photo of Banon in 2001)

My late stepfather was a wise man. He often told other men, when they were wondering whether to agree with their wives/SOs on household matters, "Give in. You will eventually." I liked that.

What I liked even better was Ed's contention that, "Men sleep with whomever they can; women sleep with whomever they want."

He was not speaking of forcible rape, with bruises and contusions both inside and out. He was speaking of the usual run of male/female relations. And he was right. A man will try it out as often as possible with a desirable woman on the off chance she will say yes. All a woman has to do, in essence, is say yes or no. A man may persist; a woman may persist. Must persist, in fact, if she expects to control her own destiny. Except in the case of forcible rape, the woman wins. Always.

If the woman says no, she has made the decision. No problem.

If the woman says yes, she has made the decision. No problem. Well, almost no problem. What if, later on, the woman is mad at herself for accommodating a particular man? Might she not then blame him for imposing his will upon her, as a coward's way to refuse to recognize her own culpability for failing to be discerning? I have in mind various cases of celebrity men taking advantage of offers by hotel maids and the like and the maids later regretting their loose behavior and falsely accusing the men of rape.

If the woman says maybe--recall, the "tease" has been with us as long as men and women figured out what to do with each other in the privacy of their caves--then there's a problem. The modern knee-jerk feminist will say that the man SHOULD have known she really meant no despite the flirting and provocative clothing.

Knee-jerk feminism
The modern knee-jerk feminist will say that women don't act like teases anymore. (Really? Consider what all the skanky clothing on females from 8 to 80 signifies. It advertises the goods, leaving the price thereof open to male interpretation. Men might well be excused for thinking little clothing means a little price for the goods barely contained therein.)

And now comes the case of Tristane Banon, 22 years old when she claims--eight years later--that Dominique Strauss-Kahn attempted sexual contact with her when she interviewed him, alone, in an apartment. She didn't complain to the police then; her mama, Anne Mansouret, told her not to and she obeyed. Mansouret was a Socialist Party functionary at the time, and Strauss-Kahn was a more important Socialist. As he still is. Only now, apparently, Mansouret would like him out of the way so she can run for the French presidency.

What to do, what to do? Ah. Remember the heavy flirting business the kid raised all those years ago? Trot that out and see if it flies. After all, Strauss-Kahn is on the ropes--right?--because of some sexual exploits in New York.

Except that the New York woman doth protest too much. She protesteth so much--attempting to convince people with brains and five senses that a 60+ man could force a 30-something woman to clean his magic wand--that finally someone got a whiff of something smelly.

Ripe for the plucking
I think the Banon thing is just a bit too ripe, too. Eight years too ripe, if indeed it would ever have borne fruit at all. Let's see: sweet young thing goes to apartment to interview powerful older man. She complains to her mother that he attempted--what?--with her. Eight years later, she doubtless recalls every detail perfectly; anyone would. (OK. Tongue firmly in cheek.)

Eight years after the fact, reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Banon has decided to press forward with bringing a case in French courts contending that, "Dominique Strauss-Kahn tried to rape her during a book interview" and so she is filing a complaint "in order to clear her own name of suspicion that she had fabricated the accusation."

If the shoe fits....Tristane, darling, no one had ever heard of Strauss-Kahn putting the moves on you back then. So you really didn't have any name to clear, until YOU brought it up. And why would you need to clear your name, if Strauss-Kahn is supposed to be the culprit?

Indeed, no one had ever heard of Tristane Banon before she decided to recall, in stunning detail after eight years, a pseudo-attack on her by a man more than twice her age at the time. What is it with these young women? Did they spend too much time in front of the TV, so much that doddering old fools can pin them to the carpet and fondle at will because they are too weak to fend them off? I mean, how embarrassing. If I were 22 years old and couldn't find some way to shift a geezer older than my father--if indeed I had stupidly allowed a ludicrous flirtation to get to that point--I think I'd just pack it in.

Serial whiners
Or maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe the ethical basis of all womanhood has descended to the level of the serial whiner or paid shill. Maybe the filing of completely insane charges against Julian Assange by the two CIA hired guns in Sweden has set a new low precedent for trumped-up innuendo. Even MSNBC once referred to Assange as an unlikely babe magnet. No kidding.

On the other hand, fame and fortune seem to be the major draw for women involved in trafficking in sexual innuendo these days. Nothing to do with pecs, abs, great hair or a large salami at all.

Banon said she had waited eight years before filing her complaint because "it's very difficult for any woman in this situation ... and it's even more difficult when you know in advance that it's doomed to failure," according to the Atlanta paper, cited above.


Strauss-Kahn will likely be free sooner than later
Let us pray. Let us pray that all this female-perpetrated sleaze is doomed to failure. The latest word from New York is that all charges against Strauss-Kahn will be dropped no later than July 18. Then he's free to head home to France, and see his name bandied about once again for something sex-related.

With an EU passport, though, he need not actually go back to France, even if the US shows him the door. Any EU country will have to take him. And that, in essence, may be what Mansouret is after. If Strauss-Kahn is parked elsewhere, for reasonable fear of having to go through the New York exercise all over again in France, the way is clear or Mansouret to climb over whatever bodies are in her way, including that of her own daughter, apparently a serial shill for her mother's ambition.

I can't make this stuff up; it's not fiction; just read the news and read between the lines.

Aside from wondering where politicians draw the line regarding stretching the truth for their own purposes, I have also concluded three other things out of all of this. They are that:

• America has exported its insane Puritan viewpoints of sexuality to once-reasonable France, and locals there are now acting as nuts as the entire US population, almost, did when Bill Clinton engaged in a extra-marital adult relationship and was pilloried for it by the paid-in-full efforts of Linda Tripp.
• America has exported its penchant for turnip-minded female politicians to France. That's probably OK; the French like root vegetables. They also like organ meats...but I won't go there.
• Women have forgotten who has the upper hand in ALL sexual matters except forcible rape: Women.

To repeat: Men sleep with whomever they can; women sleep with whomever they want. Teach it to your daughters, and keep it in mind when these anti-feminist greedsters crawl out of their holes and try to pervert men's ordinary conduct into something more.