Perched in front of the computer screen the other day, a sponsor’s commercial once more interrupted the streaming TV show I was watching. I heaved a sigh as a Dove Cream Oil Bodywash ad rippled out in tasteful grayscale, featuring an array of radiant women with a secret in their eyes, robed in suds. A swingy singer crooned, "I'm...blowing bubbles..." as the women smiled coyly over their bare shoulders. The female voiceover informed me of their "richest blend of cream and caring oil" in warmly familiar tones. The images of swirling lotion and magical nutrients reminded me of nothing so much as food porn. I was being brought in on a delicious secret – and what was more sensual, more rich than butterfat?

That got me to thinking. Over a half-century of hit-‘em-on-all-fronts public health campaigns, we've been thoroughly trained in self-denial. A virtuous diet has long been the new holiness. What is clean, and unclean, that which will elevate cholesterol and that which will be your talisman against cancers...all this has been made known, brought down to us by leaders in white coats. Away with saturated fats and simple sugars! What they'll do to your heart, your blood, and your metabolism is downright sinful.

This might be very helpful for overtaxed health-care systems. For a purveyor of consumer products, however, the popularity of virtuous self-discipline might have been troubling at first. Fortunately for consumer society, marketers clearly rose to the challenge: One brilliant approach has obviously been to charge people more money for less product. In recent years, repackaging of said product in cool shades of “eco” green or “light” blue was an additional triumph. Bonus points went to products that managed to work “thin” or “natural” into their names. More subversive marketers have even played it both ways, advertising the sinfulness of a treat while halving its volume. There’s nothing like a daintier, more preciously wrapped wafer to signal fake indulgence.

All this I’d noted before as a grocery-aisle skeptic, raising my eyebrows at “new and improved” labels. What I had not previously considered was how often the hunger for richness transcends the grocery aisles altogether. If a woman's desire to eat her emotions can't be exploited as reliably, why not encourage her to sublimate cravings for rich foods into more acceptable outlets? After all, ad men established long ago that desires are easily transposed. This may be Marketing 101, but it amuses this layperson to articulate the observation: so that explains the proliferation of edibles in cleaning products, cosmetics and skin creams.

If you can’t take it internally, simply purchase the topical application and take it in by osmosis! Wearing the indulgence on your skin or as a scent in your home spares the waistline and, more importantly, the guilt. The more advertisements evoke decadent consumption without the messy guilt-triggering process of actual ingestion, the better. On the menu we've got whipped coconut-lime creams, cocoa butter masques, oatmeal-and-brown-sugar scrubs. How cathartic it is to slather on the forbidden fruit, fats and carbs! Drugstore aisles overflow with mouth-watering combinations, putting frozen dessert aisles to shame. This foolproof strategy ensures that we indulge liberally and often. Why should flavours exist, if not for sampling?

My belly is a-stormin'
Fraught with currents of the abstract variety
Shall I focus on class, or rather take arms against a sea of
criticisms and by opposing them
simply write the damned thing, to hell with the problem, problematizing
and complicated implications of
whatever the schmucking hell is the nonsensico-gibberish, politico-socio-
working-class hegedemonic spectacular spectacular
it comes bubbling out of my throat like some noxious
elixir, the fountain of life and tree of knowledge
gnarly roots in my throat, heaving it all up
It all comes back up,
my cerebellum and gut snarled up in a nasty, nasty
knot in the stomach,
knee in the gut
sucker punch
heavy laden
violent broil, storm's a-comin'
brew it out, bear it out.

Last week I laid out my admiration for a luminous Hollywood starlet, one boundary-defying citizen of the world, and my own tough-as-nails grandmother. To round off this three-part series on heroes, I present to you my final pick. In my mind, this figure represents the last word in human progress and heroism. After all, it’s nor really extinction-event meteors or mutant villains that this planet needs defending from. More than anything, we’ve needed someone to save us from ourselves.

On days when one too many surly teenagers threaten my faith in humanity, the thought of this individual’s life and philosophy provides some much-needed perspective. As much as ignorance, aggression and narcissism command a lot of airtime these days, I’d like to believe that human nature is no better or worse than it was a century ago. If Gandhi could make inroads for non-violence in a most hostile, embittered social and political climate, there’s got to be hope for even the most belligerent present-day party. I once researched Gandhi’s life and legacy for a high school philosophy class and it turned my teenaged cynicism right around. His concept of satyagraha – loosely defined as the firmness of love and truth – is remarkably pure. It’s based on a beautiful paradox: truth and love are transformative forces that empower people not to undertake violent revolution, but to act with self-discipline and dignity even while taking part in large-scale civil disobedience. Gandhi himself was no less a study in paradoxes, having gone from British-educated lawyer (starched collars and all) to the iconic figure of India’s slight, cotton-swathed spiritual leader. Although I’m reluctant to put Gandhi-the-person on a pedestal for every last one of his beliefs or practices, the overall positive impact of his philosophy is undeniable. He altered the course of history in his own time, provided the philosophical backbone of many civil rights protests, and continues to be a reference point for latter-day movements. This person set us earthlings a new standard of behaviour, and I for one hope dearly that we keep trying to meet it.

Continuing on from last week’s post about the risks and possible benefits of holding heroes in one’s heart, I’ve decided to build a personal hero profile – a compilation of people whom I admire. This is basically an exercise in crystallizing the people-characteristics that are dearest to me. Digging deep into one’s own psyche should be of some benefit; “know thyself,” and all that noble stuff, right? In the spirit of getting beyond shiny one-dimensional heroes, I’ve decided to plumb my mental databases for fan-girl crushes and awed reverence alike. With such broadened search parameters, the results will hopefully be a diverse cross-section of my personal heroes. I’ll post the first three this week:

*Assumes “please don’t judge me!” cringe*

The Hollywood Hero: ELLEN PAGE

This gifted actor is cerebral, articulate about her craft and industry, and rocks smudged eyeliner like she was born to it. In interviews, she has wit for lighter subjects and earnestness for her serious points. Page seems well rooted in a place and community, and her vibe alternates between sensitive and high-spirited. In "Juno", she manages to nail the quicksilver shifts between brashness and vulnerability that are so characteristic of precocious young women.

Reporters often asked Page about the purported "anti-male" violence of her movie "Hard Candy" – in which she played a young girl who baits, traps, and threatens to castrate a would-be child molester. Each time, Page countered by highlighting the incongruity of viewers' shock:

“I’m like ‘you know what? You can get over it.’ There are how many shows on TV that could be called Naked Women in the Dumpster Part 7 — Who Did it? Who Raped Her, and Cut Her and Threw Her in the Dumpster? Guys can handle one movie.” (Quote taken from Page’s interview with OK! Magazine.)

That response alone sold me on her. The SNL skit in which she asks – maybe rhetorically – why she can’t just “hug a woman with [her] legs in friendship” just sealed the deal.

The Courageous and Accomplished Hero: STANLEY ANN DUNHAM

Free spirit, world-traveler, anthropologist and weaver. A white American woman who married a black Kenyan student, and later re-married an Indonesian man in the 1960's – a time when some U.S. states still had anti-miscegenation laws. She lived a short but evidently exceptional life, raising two children across a number of cultures and continents while accruing staggering academic and life-experience credentials. Described as a secular humanist and a feminist who lived well ahead of her time, this remarkable woman’s oldest child is one Barack Obama.

The Lived-through-it-all Hero: MY MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER

My grandmother is one tough lady. She survived - oh, how she survived. She lived a hard life, yet still knows how to enjoy what she has earned.

Grandma was born in China to a landowner. As a girl, her feet were bound, but her father relented when he saw her pain. Her marriage to my grandfather – by all accounts a difficult union – was arranged. In the upheaval of mid-twentieth-century China, my grandmother and her firstborn - my uncle - nearly starved after her in-laws kept the money my grandfather sent from Hong Kong and turned them out. Thankfully she kept her wits, and with her unbound feet they survived.

The young family reunited in Hong Kong. They made do in a shack near the Chinese border, where my mother used to wake in the night to find emaciated refugees standing at the window, desperate for food. My grandmother gave what she could. Later, there were five children to feed. Each morning, my grandmother took up a long pole with a basket on either end: in one she placed cloth scraps to sell; in the other she placed her two toddlers. She carried this burden forty minutes to where she (illegally) set up shop by the roadside. This, too, they survived.

My grandmother was a plain woman who worked hard and kept a sharp tongue and a good heart. She was illiterate when she arrived in Hong Kong but taught herself to read. Over her husband’s objections, she placed my mother in school and eventually saw her graduate from university. Today, she likes her tea strong, her food spicy, and her Tiramisu from Starbucks. Each morning, she reads Hong Kong newspapers online.

You can learn a great deal about someone by asking what he or she admires in a person, and what heroic figure occupies his or her heart. Having grown up with few heroes and even fewer celebrity idols, this subject has for me the thrill of novelty. As long as I can remember, the having of heroes has seemed risky – equal parts wishful thinking and flirting with inevitable disappointment. Growing up and out of an intensely religious community also makes one wary of gazing too closely in worship: few ideologies and fewer lives stand up to scrutiny from all angles. In particular, the broad, uncritical adoration of mortals unnerves me because it seems to tempt fate. It is like saying: “Behold, this is more than a person in mine eyes! On this person, I build my Self.” I have intense memories from childhood in which authority figures were suddenly compromised or revealed to be vulnerable. These memories are accompanied by the sensation of the ground shifting out from underneath me; there is the sickening sensation of weightlessness. How do children re-orient themselves when those they take to be the earth and stars fail them?

Then again, refraining entirely from the admiration of others seems equally, if not more pathological. Hero-worship is just as much about nurturing a capacity for love, admiration, and enthusiasm; do away with that, and you’re left with narcissism and apathy. Is there such a thing as a true nerd without a hero? How can we know what we believe if it is based only in abstraction, and there is no one to model ourselves after? Perhaps the safest route is to take one’s heroes as necessarily imperfect and limited in scope. The figures on pedestals ought to be starting points from which we conduct further calibrations. The postmodern generation no longer expects to value - much less imitate - every quirk of a hero’s character. If anything, cultural developments of recent decades have shown that anti-heroes’ flaws make our wary affection for them more poignant. We like our protagonists awkward, our superheroes beset by moral ambiguities. This is a revisionist age: every fairy tale is ripe for retelling and comic book paradigms beg to be subverted. Revision entails taking another look, re-assessing initial regard, or even to look from an alternate angle. When it comes to heroes, perspective is everything. Wouldn’t a multi-angle close-up be more informative than the view from far below?

Sometime between going away for university and leaving the parental nest for good, I concluded that life in the suburban hinterlands was irredeemably mundane. Home base was a picturesque house on a tree-lined street, in a housing development equidistant from an affluent Jewish neighbourhood and the quite differently affluent Chinatown North. It was a colony of laneways, lawns, driveways, garages, street names evoking long-dead meadows, and inscrutable houses. Marooned in this landscape during my last summer at home, my marrow fairly ached with restlessness. I groused to anyone who would listen about the vacuum that was suburbia. “Whither the culture?” I wailed. “Whither the quirk?” One summer evening, however, an unexpected vision presented itself in that unlikely setting. Evidently, one need only gaze longer and closer to glimpse surrealism in the suburbs.

I was to pick up my brother at his friend John’s* house. John lived one residential development up the road from us. The micro-neighbourhood in question was tucked against a well-manicured ravine, behind a plaza known for its Asian Entertainment District credentials (re: snooker, teashops, and internet cafes, ad nauseam). To get there, I drifted my station wagon through a short curving street lined with glassy office buildings, all housing ephemeral tech firms with little name recognition – quiet fortresses of "Canada's High Tech Capital." One turn at a stop sign and a neat subdivision appeared like an oasis. That night, pulling up to a row of indistinguishable townhouses, I saw with some puzzlement that what appeared to be a yellow bicycle with a motor and exhaust pipe was parked in front. I parked just ahead of it, and waited for my brother to emerge. Momentarily, a young man came out of John’s house. The movement in the rearview mirror caught my eye. He was in his twenties, with longish brown-black hair. He appeared biracial – “Just like John,” the back of my mind noted. Taking in the rest of him, I did a mild double take. The man wore black pants, a black tuxedo-style vest, and – beneath the vest – a white blouse with a splendid ruffled front, and full sleeves blooming into frilly cuffs.

I stared for a full two seconds, then quickly glanced away as he cast a cursory look about the sedate street. My eyes returned to the rearview. I thought to myself that he must certainly work at some sort of theme restaurant - perhaps a pirate gimmick? But his movements were breezier than one might expect from a person about to start a bar-and-grill shift. Clearly, he relished this attire. The next thing I saw wiped any notion of a kooky night shift clear out of my head.

Slinging a helmet from the crook of his elbow, he drew out a black mask - a bandit mask, like Zorro's - and casually affixed across his eyes as easily as if he were donning sunglasses.

My mouth hung agape. With difficulty I feigned indifference by leaning back and glancing at the absolutely uninteresting asphalt and lawn before me. Then I watched again.

He set his helmet on and flipped down the visor, careful not to disturb his mask. I felt an urge to pinch myself. Nearby, a father was walking his Hello-Kitty-clad daughter to the park. The houses were all the same colour. The window dressings were neutral.

Gracefully, he swung astride the yellow bike (my brother later identified it as a moped). The engine’s vrrroom shredded the genteel silence. My brother ducked into our wagon just as the masked man was puttering away from the curb. Flabbergasted, I turned to him for explanation. As we, too, pulled away, my brother explained with great nonchalance that John’s brother was a fashion designer. Whenever he went to "studios," that was his outfit of choice. Evidently, John’s brother had a closet full of fascinating clothes that he'd designed himself. I tried to imagine what this wardrobe would look like, in that oatmeal-lite house. The only image I could muster involved weak baby blue jerseys and faintly pimpish track-suits. Abandoning the effort, I remained thunderstruck by his bravura. This was the most banal of habitats. His neighbours were mostly middle-class Asians; most of them drove reasonably sleek yet serviceable sedans, most were in the early quarters of reasonably happy lives, most were financing the above with reasonably satisfying paycheques from reasonably respectable jobs. Most were committed to a very demure status quo. Thus the contrast so neatly framed in our windshield was striking – a singular and beautiful thing.

We left the perfect little pool of identical townhouses behind. I couldn't resist one last look back at the wondrous stranger. Taking a leisurely drag on a cigarette, he cut a dashing figure by the great red stop sign. He was absurd, to be sure. But also dashing, as only a masked man in a ruffled blouse, on a bright yellow moped, riding into a placid suburban sunset can be.*Names have been changed in the interests of preserving respectability.