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The One About Angelina Jolie, Creepy Voyeurs and Valerie Bertinelli


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.

Women Deserve the White House as Much as Blacks Do


 

There is an article on MSNBC discussing Hillary Clinton‘s recent resurgence in Texas and Ohio. The author talks about her main base of supporters being Boomer women with the typical being a 50 year old white woman who is jazzed about the fact that as a gender we are SO close to putting one of our own in the Oval Office. Despite the fact that my husband insists that I am pretty much within spitting distance of being this “typical” Hillarite woman (and I am so not by the way as not quite 45 is hardly 50 at all), I am equally psyched about the prospect of having a woman president. So psyched in fact that my dislike for Sen. Obama is probably at times simply driven by not much other than his “Y”-ness. Though his serious lack of anything resembling a plan for this country and his lightweight Senate rep is not helping him score any points either.  Then there is the issue of his glowing aura. Charisma, a Jesus Christ Superstar-like halo, and a fawning media are grounds for immediate suspicion, in my opinion. Nothing good ever comes of even one of those things and all three could be harbingers of the Apocalypse for all I know.  But like most other old women, I can read a hand-written wall. Messiahs are male and really cool. 

 

Having been accused of being merely a bigot for preferring a female in the White House and having been told that voting for a woman because she is a woman is merely proof that women should never have been given the vote in the first place, I must say that if Sen. Clinton was just offering me “change” and “hope” without any clear idea of how to accomplish something that might actually be “change” and provide real “hope” I would scoff and dismiss her out of hand, much as I have done with Obama. I am too old to be drawn in by style (which the media is quick to point out that Sen. Clinton doesn’t have in comparison to the Chosen One). I want substance with my president too. I want someone who knows that being the president is damn hard work and has a proven track record of being someone who works hard. Well, isn’t that a bit simplistic, you might think? How like a girl to believe that the highest office in the land is achieved by qualifications and elbow grease and not the hand of destiny plucking the worthy from the unwashed. But I don’t believe that such an important job should go to the most popular kid in the class.  Didn’t we all suffer through enough of that in high school?

 

The reason that older women like Hillary Clinton is that she is one of us. She came up through the ranks and, thanks to the shortsightedness of the early feminists, had to do it all whether she wanted to or not. Be the mom. Work the full-time job. Do it better and faster and without a net. And for all that, still be dismissed as just a woman, or wife or daughter or sister.  Somehow in the wake of the Obama tsunami, it’s been lost that a woman being elected president is just as great a victory for civil rights as an Obama win would be. It would be an equal stomping of the White Male American way of thinking and doing. More, in a way, because women are still the near daily victims of the rampant and ugly sexism that dominates not just America but the world.

 

Women in the U.S., it could be/is argued, are on equal footing with men, but we are granted only the superficial freedoms. They keep so many of us – younger women especially – blind and mollified that it might be better if American men were as open with their disregard and contempt for us as men are in other less “enlightened” places in the world.  At least then we would know for sure and be able to point it out. That’s Obama’s advantage over Clinton in this race. Racism can’t hide but sexism in the West is subtle and so easily denied that women have begun to doubt its existence. Pay no attention to that old man behind the curtain, little ladies. Just listen to what the big head is telling you the truth is.

 

And the truth is that it is no more a black man’s turn at the White House than it is a woman’s. 

Shopping in Edmonton, Alberta


Shopping in Canada is almost an oxymoron. Though I am months past my American consumerism cold-turkey stint, I still am sometimes caught off guard by what Canadians call “shopping”. Take today for example, we ran down to South Edmonton Common which is an area on the south side of the city that is and continues to be consumed by big box outlets. Between the road layout and the parking the area is nearly as bad a driving experience as Yellowhead during rush hour, but the truly maddening part about going there to shop is that there is little in merchandise to actually buy. Clothing stores in particular seem to suffer from empty shelf syndrome. Do you remember the Reagan Era news reports of Russians lining up for hours to get into stores with virtually nothing on their shelves to purchase? That is almost what a person finds in many of the more popular clothing stores here. The other thing a shopper discovers is that in addition to the dearth of consumer goods there is an almost equally chilling lack of service. I wonder what the growing hordes of jobless Americans would make of Alberta with its “help us please – come in and apply of job!” signs in nearly every retail and service establishment window? There might be a flood of legal U.S. citizens willing to risk deportation for a job north of their own border, eh? I popped in to Old Navy today to check out a few items I saw in their most recent advertisement. It was no real surprise to find that the items were mostly sold out or sold to the point of only the uber-large or the insanely small left. And there were lines. Lines that snaked around the interior of the store for the fitting room and again at the check-out registers. Standing in queue is one of those unique experiences I have come to expect as the norm up here. A combination of really sincere but inept help and employees who know they can do nothing awful enough to get fired in such a workers market. After a frustrating half-hour, I decided to put shopping on hold until I vacation to the States in a few weeks. Between the three of us, we are allowed about $2100 in duty free spending down there and with the Loonie doing so well against the ever-sagging U.S. dollar, I think I will take advantage of the discount and the much better service and selection in my old consumer heaven home. Last I read, retail was way down so there has to be merchandise and sales galore for an ex-pat like me to scoop up and bring home at the end of the month. Oddly though, on my last trip to the States, I didn’t find shopping as much fun as I had when I lived there. Perhaps “fun” is not the word. I didn’t find it interesting and indeed found that I had much better things to do with my time even though so much of life down there seems built around spending and acquiring. I guess I needed to get away from it to really see it. Empty people filling empty lives with stuff.