Anna Paquin, winner at age 11 of the Best Supporting Actress award at the 1994 Oscars, now 27 and staring in True Blood, revealed yesterday she's bisexual in a public service announcement for Cyndi Lauper's "Give a Damn" campaign against sexual-orientation discrimination.
Let's see, she's been in Hollywood since age 11? Perhaps more interesting news would have been that she's straight.
It defies credulity to suggest that such women are the object of discrimination. Based on an abundance of movies, sitcoms, men's magazines, women's magazines, teen magazine's, talk shows, websites, porn sites, and idle male conversation, civilizations from other galaxies have long since decided that such women rule our world.
Indeed, men on every planet from here to Andromeda are high-fiving Paquin's True Blood co-star and fiancee Stephen Moyer on what should shape up to be a very happy coupling.
The danger here is not in discrimination but in the creation of an identity out of this now rather commonplace behavior. This is Paquin's ego telling her, "I am not enough." This is true of all sexual identities: straight, gay, bi, transgender. We are not categories.
Whether it's a flashy car, a large house, a sexual identity or even a religion, every ego, according to spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle's book A New Earth, tries in myriad ways to "escape the unsatisfactoriness of personal selfhood."
None of these temporal things, says Tolle, has anything to do with who we really are: "Unconditioned, formless, eternal." Far from encouraging these kinds of identifications, he say dis-identification from "the world of form" is required to achieve inner peace.
This doesn't mean we don't enjoy the new car, the large house or sexuality. To the contrary, we are free to enjoy them more, so long as we don't "try to find ourselves through them."
How far Paquin's fiancee takes this last bit of advice I suppose is up to him.
Photo credit: Blog Marco
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What is refreshing about Eckhart, which you point out in this blog, is that he doesn't condemn or scoff at worldly pleasures and materialism. They in themselves are not a problem and can be enjoyed. It's only when we use them to dupe ourselves further into belief in a false egoic identity that they become a big OUCH! And BTW I like all your wise cracks about gorgeous gals ruling the cosmos...
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