Now that the stat counter has plummeted back to normal, the decidedly mixed feelings I have been having about blogging have returned. I like the exercise and the discipline of it, but I can’t shake the feeling that I am little more than entertaining peep show for all but a handful. I am interested in other things besides blogging about my own life exclusively. Politics. Well, not so much but I am incensed about the fact that sexism is sticking me yet again with a self-entitled and smug male. It’s feeling like the Reagan era all over again when I had to listen to people telling me how wrong I was about trickle down economics and deficit spending and that Reagan really wasn’t a doddering old front man for the evil wing of the Republican party. Charisma is the only thing that matters to Americans anymore. It’s why Bill won and Hillary won’t, and the sad thing about that is that she would have left a better legacy than he did. I am also thinking a lot about my writing and what excites me about it and what I am struggling with. I love just sitting and writing. Seeing the words appear on the screen. Watching characters come to life and their stories unfold. Lately I have developed a habit of taking people I see when I am out and turning them into characters for a story I am working on. There was the no-necked cafeteria worker at the Royal Albert Museum and the double chinned woman at the imaging place yesterday. I wrote about them practically on the spot because I always have a little notebook and pen in my purse these days to jot ideas down as soon as I can. And pens. I am writing with pens now when it used to be I could write with nothing but pencils. How odd is that? I remember Will teasing me about my aversion to writing with ink and he wondered why I couldn’t seem to put anything down that I couldn’t erase. I wonder now too and wonder what has changed more – me or my life. Some might argue that it is my life but I am not so sure.
Identity
In response to my lament about Hillary Clinton’s souring bid for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency, a fellow blogger reminded me that this is not the first time women have been asked to step aside and let black men go first. When it became clear to the women working feverishly for the Abolitionist cause in the mid-1800’s that women were equally disenfranchised in their own country, and they wanted to link their cause with that of the slaves, Horace Greeley had this to say to them, “Remember that this is the Negro hour and your first duty is to go through the state and plead his claims.” Wow. Even before there were buses women were already sitting in the back, doing our duty. Greeley might as well have said “the Negro man’s hour” because he surely didn’t mean black women any more than he thought about the rights of white ones.
Newsweek devoted much of its current issue (March 17th) to the fact that it was/is women who are keeping Sen. Clinton’s presidential hopes alive. They called it a “backlash”. If it is, and I don’t doubt that, it won’t be enough because it is mainly older women who are indignant. Young women foolishly buy into the “you’ve come a long way baby” myth. Apparently all it takes to satisfy a twenty-something female is her right to dress provocatively without being called into question by her peers and the illusion that the playing field has been beaten into submission even though very little has changed since I was in high school in terms of women in the workplace or the household or in intimate relationships. We are still very much doing our duty in all the aforementioned areas. So it’s not much of a surprise that they truly see another man in office as change just because he is black. Mostly, I think, they are just used to being told that it is. They are a generation raised to be superficial and as instantly gratified as possible and conduct most of their relationships from a distance thanks to Al Gore and Steven Jobs. People like this aren’t going to find a grandma as president as exciting as a good-looking middle-aged black man.
As a matter of explanation for their magazine’s stance, the Newsweek’s Editor, John Meachem, wrote a piece explaining how he reached the decision to devote so much print to the idea that sexism is one of the real reasons Clinton is struggling. He was reminded by a number of female staffers that the Senator is being treated by the press and her two main opponents, Obama and McCain, in a way that would not be tolerated if she were a black or Jewish man. Obama has accused Clinton of being on the attack when she “is feeling down” as though calling your opponent on issues is something that only female politicians do when they are suffering from PMS. McCain was asked how he planned to “beat the bitch” and instead of calling the questioner on the pejorative, this father of four girls let that little word go. Because “bitch is the new black” according to SNL’s Tina Fey, and she’s right. Women who don’t stay in their God designated spot in the back of the bus and let the men do whatever it is men do when they are questing for power and self-acclamation and following their destinies, these women are bitches. Right? If someone were to sling the “N” word at Obama, it would make the front page of every paper in the world, but men in New Hampshire can catcall Clinton at a rally with “Iron my shirts” and the press ignores it. They ignore the fact that Clinton has to prove she is strong and by doing so she is calculating and unlikable, but Obama and McCain had the testosterone things covered at conception, so they can be charismatic and feisty.
So it is once again the black man’s turn. The man’s turn. Because if you think Michelle would have even been given the chance her husband was, think again. Or better yet, watch a rap video and really listen to the lyrics if you can do that at the same time your mind is reeling from the misogynistic images being seared so deeply on your mind’s eyeball that you’ll need a large spork to dig them out.
Anna Quindlen has an excellent essay on the whole “second” thing. Only in America can a woman as vice-president be seen a victory by young women and men. The former because they are so easily placated with tokenism, and the latter because with luck they can breathe easy for another eight years.
If Clinton weren’t a capable candidate, I could go along with the party line on Obama even though he is mild and status quo and nakedly ambitious. He learned nothing in the Senate except how to play the game from the ultimate insiders but he couldn’t do worse the current administration. But she is capable. She is experienced. She would do a good job. And the fact that she represents me, a woman, is more than icing on the cake. It is ice cream too. I want my cake with ice cream, and I’ll be sitting in the front of the bus while I eat it.
I wrote a piece over the weekend about weight and women. The idea came to me after I had watched a very old flick in which a quite young Angelina Jolie had a role. I was struck by how plump the camera made her seem in comparison to the tabloid photos you see of her these days at the grocery, and it occurred to me that the same contrast could be seen in many actresses as they advance into the thirties and especially their forties. Several comments on that blog entry took me to task because they misread the piece as an attack on Ms. Jolie even though I made it clear the piece was not about her as much as it was about society and its unhealthy physical expectations of women and how that effects us as we age. I am not going to claim to be a fan of the woman however. I mean she is just an actress and, her humanitarian work aside, I think she’s weird. Frankly, celebrities make poor role models overall because many of them, in my opinion, live frivolous, high consuming lifestyles that are more the result of their genetic windfalls than of anything approaching true artistic talent or hard work. Still the original blog entry was about women as a whole, and I don’t think I am off base when I say that most of us have body image issues to some extent and much of this is a result of the constant emphasis on our exteriors from the time we are quite small. One has but to thumb through the dozens of fashion, women’s and celebrity magazines at the checkout of any grocery to see that how a woman looks is not an insignificant part of how the world judges us. We are pummeled with all sorts of messages that cannot help but reinforce the fact that we can never be too thin, too coifed or too perfectly coutured.
As a result of that entry I had close to 400 views in a twenty-four period and it is still the most read piece of the last week. I haven’t had this many hits since the days when I was still posting at the YWBB, and my blog was linked in my sig line, so any time I posted a comment or started a thread people would check out my blog and photos. It was a creepy experience then, and it is just as creepy now because I know that the majority of the people who took a peek were hoping to find photos of a fat Angelina. How sad is that? People trolling the Internet in search of fat actress photos. Voyeurism at its worst? Probably not, but still quite icky when you think that many of the searchers really wanted to see a hefty Angie because it is that kind of thing that make others feel better about themselves in comparison.
Which brings me back to the original point of my first entry, body image. I spied copies of the new Valerie Bertinelli book at Chapters when I was out with my husband Sunday. Her book was all about losing weight. She had gained quite a bit of it. I remember seeing her meaty self on Touched by an Angel a few years back and not being that surprised really. She is, I believe, a bit older than I am and it is normal to put on weight as one ages though she may have been a bit too heavy for someone so short. On the cover of her new book, she looked very much like I remember her from her TV woman in peril movies of the 1980’s. Normal sized and healthy. It was a relief really to see a female peer who didn’t have that extremely bony appearance that seems de rigueur for famous women these days. I didn’t pick the book up. I am not interested in these types of books, but I wondered why, with everything she has gone through, the most important thing she could think of to share with the world was her diet and exercise plan?
It’s all about looks isn’t it? I flipped through Glamour and then More magazines while I was at the library today waiting for my yoga class to begin. The ads were all for make-up and clothes and hair products. The articles were about hair, and clothes and getting in shape and staying in shape and how all of these things will help you feel good enough about yourself to find a man or keep the one you have satisfied enough with you to stay.
In the film, Garden State, Natalie Portman’s character keeps a well-stocked pet cemetery in her backyard. It is mostly full of hamsters who were too dumb to get off the exercise wheel and died running. I was reminded of this when my husband asked me how many of my “sisters” I hoped to save from the hamster wheel by writing some of the pieces I write, like this one for example. I told him “none”. Salvation comes from within.
anniegirl1138 