Grooming the next generation of sluts
"" She Persisted." Chelsea Clintons little book of feminists aimed at grooming youth to activism sounds encouraging. "" 'She Persisted' is for everyone who has ever wanted to speak up but has been told to quiet down, for everyone who has ever tried to reach for the stars but was told to sit down, and for everyone who has ever been made to feel unworthy or unimportant or small," Penguin Random House says.
But what is being said is also noteworthy.
Hillary Clinton, although making a pictorial appearance, was pointedly left off her daughter's short list of 13 women. Chelsea explains to Entertainment, "I didn't want her story to overwhelm the book."
Well said, considering Hillary tends to beat up on those women who get in her way and/or her husband's way, sets the example of sticking up for a serial abuser, and uses sex as a vehicle (I'm with her!). Chelsea was just being prudent. We won't mention Russian connections or the mysterious cloud of suicides following her like a haze of flies. "Overwhelm" is an understatement.
After all, since Hillary is "persisting" to whine about why she lost the 2016 election, she is also currently "persisting" in sending mixed messages and, like her daughter, targeting youth.
The message? "It's cool to be a slut!"
No shame, no harm, no foul and – so long as you engage safely – no STDs either. (Or worse, a punisher baby. Thank you, Barack Obama.)
Teen Vogue, which brought girls as young as 11 the likes of [list-withheld-purposefully-because-it-is-so-disturbing], will now be "guest" edited by Hillary Rodham Clinton. One can only anticipate what will be left in and what will be edited out: scruples, integrity, accountability, humanity?
Keeping that list to 13 presents a real challenge!
Hillary's "persisting," all right; but sadly she's only editing the December issue of Teen Vogue. Merry Christmas!
White woman power!
All Dorothy had to do to get home from Oz was click her heels three times – invoking the magical "there's no place like home" – and voilà, nightmare over. She always had the power. Today, in the real world (no choking on sarcasm now), all a white woman (accent on white) needs to do is clap her hands, conjuring the specter of racism, sexism, or doe-eyed-innocentism (perceived or otherwise), and all transgressions – or more pointedly, omissions – are suddenly absolved. (Apparently Oprah Winfrey has no power.)
Watch and learn.
Sixties bombshell Barbarella, Jane Fonda of Hollywood Fonda Fame, has always been a liberated woman. Translated, she could do whatever she wanted and handle it, too, including staving off the 41st century evil scientist Durand Durand (not to be confused with the 80s rock group Duran Duran) who dared to bring evil back to the galaxy with his Positronic Ray (personal accountability?). And all this while wearing a silver jumpsuit that does nothing but heighten a viewer's sense of her innate abilities.
The power of flesh – her own – and the promise of fantasies fulfilled (or not) was hers to wield. Fonda had come a long way, baby. Daddy Henry, or any man for that matter, was the new anathema. Disgusting! Women like Fonda didn't want or need protection. They spat on it just like an empowered Hanoi Jane who used her famous name to turn the proverbial screws on those men serving our country in Vietnam.
Men weren't protectors or providers, fathers or even friends, but objects upon which to assert payback.
A woman needed a man like a fish needed a bicycle. That was the motto of the day – a line spewed by one-time Playboy Bunny Gloria Steinem who subjected herself to subjugation in order to write "A Bunny's Tale" for Show magazine. The 1963 telling of the pointed exploitation of women is over 50 years old now.
New York University cites excerpts: "What really goes on in their 'glamorous and exciting world'? To find out, Show chose a writer who combines the hidden qualities of a Phi Beta Kappa, mane cum laude graduate of Smith College with the more obvious ones of an ex-dancer and beauty queen. A few weeks ago, she started her investigations armed with a large diary and this ad: Girls: Do Playboy Club bunnies really have glamorous jobs, meet celebrities, and make top money? …"
Journalistic giant Barbara Walters took a personal peek inside the Bunny machine first in 1962:
"The amazing thing is though," Walters is recorded saying after conquering the famous "bunny dip" where waitresses serve cocktails sideways in a graceful swoop, "That they (Playboy Bunnies) are more chaperoned, really, than – mmm – a television studio!"
Or maybe even a Hollywood studio? Co-anchor Hugh Downs goes on to lament, "It's been said that the atmosphere is depressingly moral in the Playboy Club because there is no hanky-panky whatever!" This after Downs told Walters what a cute bunny she made. What's more, Walters liked it.
Could Walters be the smart girl? The one purportedly spoken of by former Fox News scion Roger Ailes when giving career advice to NBC Morning Show maven, Megyn Kelly? Who knows?
Blunt Force Truth reports Kelly as stating, "Before you know it this person (Ailes – who apparently became a great career mentor) is talking to you in a way that is very familiar to you but shouldn't be in the office setting. He's lecturing you about how your very favorite anchor in the television industry slept her way to the top," she explained. "She was smart, he says. Hopefully you'll be smart too, he says."
Apparently, Kelly was smart enough to do a GQ spread to accent her journalistic abilities, but we mustn't point fingers – at least not at any women.
Confused? Well, if you're male, of course you are. If you're female, you just haven't gotten the latest memo. Empowerment equals spin. Situations must be handled. And everything can come clean in a spin cycle. The fallout of women bartering their own attributes is nothing of which to be ashamed. Putting one's pretty in the arsenal of career achievement is a grand tradition, denounced only when others cry foul.
If that happens, find whatever scapegoat you can.
Racism is Fonda's scapegoat of choice. Joined by Gloria Steinem, well, it's a sure fire way to deflect fire off oneself. After all, Fonda was a powerful white woman in the know. So why didn't she speak? Act? Why didn't Fonda do something back in her day to denounce the sexual intimidation of women? Acting the part of a traitor in the world press must surely be a more challenging than calling out casting couch yahoos.
"It feels like something has shifted," Fonda told Hayes.
No kidding, Jane. Looks like you're saying white, famous women have been complicit in bartering beauty – their own or that of others – for quite some time to get ahead. Not quite like women of color (or white women) or anyone unlucky enough to not be famous like you who just gets used because the price of virtue has been set so low. Thanks!
But women will wait. Men, too.
The "cold potato," Maureen O'Hara, didn't make any bones about it in 1945. But the ineffectual powerhouses of the 60s – those women who had it all – have nothing but excuses now and an empty bag of tricks.
It took decades for Fonda to admit in The Lily, "If I was used, I allowed it to happen. It was my mistake, and I have paid and continue to pay a heavy price for it," regarding her exploits in Vietnam.
Let's just hope it doesn't take that long!
How to lobotomize without drugs or sharp objects
Just when you thought things were getting worse, a new low is reached.
Colin Kaepernick, of "taking a knee for protest not prayer" fame, has a new job: Citizen of the Year.
Does it pay? Well, no. Not unless the former 49er quarterback raked in the dough for this may-as-well-be-a-mug shot on the cover of "Gentleman's" Quarterly, aka: GQ Magazine.
Features for the mag should read "Today's Tools," "Troll for Tyranny," and "How to Become Irrelevant – and unemployable – in Five Easy Lessons."
Is it heroic to toss off one's genuine opportunities for the chance to lead a revolution for the sake of revolution? Do today's "heroes" not understand they will be tomorrow's history as their misdirected zeal takes others where "they" want to go while the heroes will be summarily vilified once agendas change? (And they always do.)
Colin Kaepernick – Citizen of the year. But citizen of where?
Not the United States of America.