February 27, 2007
Alegra’s very disturbing story (see her blog http://www.nyc.com/people/AlegraDemos/home.aspx ) got me thinking about what a truly misogynistic land this country has become. Aside from the fact the young girls are not only willing to objectify themselves for their fifteen seconds of fame, they will stand on line in order to do it, they will beg, borrow and steal and behave very, very badly for it.
It is exceedingly difficult for young girls to see that they have a worth beyond that which is tied to sexual gratification. The fact that very young girls (and sometimes their mothers) will refer to pre-pubescent clothing as “sexy” or “hot” is an indicator of how wrong things have gone when it comes to the role of the female in this society. While is true that there are more jobs out there for the professional woman (the highly educated middle class), there are fewer and fewer for the underclass female outside of some sort of menial job or one that engages in some form of sexual exploitation. This is surely an indicator that the US is moving away from an economic model based on a strong middle class and more towards one of social and economic disparity, with a very powerful elite class at the top. Economic disparity always has a disastrous effect on women – witness the unbelievably cruel and institutionalized prostitution in Eastern Europe.
But are we any better over here in the land of the Free and the Home of the Brave? Our female leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton, and Condoleeza Rice, are routinely made fun of for their unglamorous qualities, and yet someone as physically repulsive as Dick Cheney is never qualified based on his looks or his sexuality. Under the guise of political commentary, pundits can attack the very womanhood of a female leader in a way that these same pundits would never attack a male leader. The same holds true for wives and daughters of Presidents: it is okay to view them as sexual objects, be they attractive or repulsive. How do we value ourselves as females, how does society value us and how do we let these values live or die in our daily lives?
If in our interpersonal lives we can reduce our partners to needless objects worthy of discards, how are we treating our brethren on a wider social level? If a man and his lover can plot to have his wife committed to a mental hospital, what does that say about this culture? It says that this is the same culture where “girls gone wild” and reality TV feed us a steady stream of objectified young women willing to undergo surgery, humiliation and perversion in order to see their faces on television.
While the so-called press and the so-called news networks are busy with the salacious details of the lives of tartlets and dead centerfolds, our country’s leadership is growing ever more fascist.
Something is terribly, terribly wrong here.
Y que lastima Alegra que tuviste que sufrir así; vas mejorar, seguro que si.
Tags:
deception, fascism, misogeny, pop culture, sexual objectification, sexuality
© All rights reserved.
Posted on 2/27/2007
(
Permanent Link
)
Send to Friend