Maureen Dowd
 Arabs put their women in veils. We put ours in the stocks.
| Or send them to work for the New York Times... |
Every culture has its own way of tamping down female power, be it sexual, political or financial. Americans like to see women who wear the pants be beaten up and humiliated. Afterward, in a gratifying redemption ritual, people like to see the battered women be rewarded.
| That's all Americans, right? No exceptions. To include Maureen? Kinky, isn't she? |
That's how Hilary Swank won two Oscars. That's how Hillary Clinton won a Senate seat and a presidential front-runner spot. And that's how Martha Stewart won her own reality TV show and became a half-billion dollars richer while she was in prison.
| It is? I'm not sure who Hilary Swank is, but Hillary Clinton won her Senate seat and a presidential front-runner spot by being pretty much a consummate politician. She used the tools that were available and she's getting what she wants. Martha Stewart has my sympathy, because she was railroaded, but it had little to do with her sex, much more to do with the fact that there were crooks crawling out from under every rock in sight and she'd done something vaguely similar — without being a consummate politician. |
We've come a long way, baby, from the era of witch trials, when women with special power who knew how to curse were burned at the stake. Now, after a public comeuppance, they are staked to a lucrative new career. In this century, the scarlet letter morphs into a dollar sign.
| There are millions of women in this country for whom a scarlet letter morphs into nothing but a welfare check. |
Maybe temperamental, power-mad divas always needed to be brought down a peg. They used to do it to themselves. Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe were gorgeous monsters, but were so self-destructive there was no need to punish them further. But Hillary and Martha - the domestic diva with the new ankle bracelet echoed Judy Garland on her Web site yesterday that "there is no place like home" - are not self-destructive. They are brass-knuckled survivors who elicit both admiration and an enmity that Alessandra Stanley memorably dubbed "blondenfreude."
| Martha's part of the cultural background noise. A year from now she'll be mentioned in the same context as Lizzie Grubner. Or was it Libby Grubner? |
From pornography to "Desperate Housewives," women being degraded has an entertainment value far greater than men being degraded. People liked Hillary and Martha a lot more once they were "broken," like one of Martha's saddle horses, ice queens melted into puddles of vulnerability.
| Feeling sorry for yourself, Maureen? No dates recently? Feeling degraded? |
Maybe it's because both women sometimes overreached, treated the help badly and displayed an unseemly greedy streak. Maybe it's because a dichotomy about their roles made them seem disingenuous: they gained renown for traditional feminine roles, and apron-and-hearth books, assuming guises to achieve male power and taking a route to the mahogany epicenter through the kitchen. Hillary was America's first lady, photographed smiling in her designer dress as she oversaw table settings and placement for state dinners, even though we knew she did not care about such domestic piffle and was instead maneuvering to take over huge chunks of domestic policy. Martha was America's first lady of gold-leaf designer lifestyle nesting, even though we knew that her ÃŒber-nest was so scary that her husband had flown the coop. Though she was the ultimate professional homemaker and nurturer, she left her daughter out of the litany of things - cats, canaries, horses, chickens and dogs - she would miss in jail.
| I'm at a disadvantage here, because I have no idea why Mr. Stewart flew the coop. But one wonders what Maureen's opinion of either Mrs. Clinton or Ms. Stewart would be had they been executives in a different line of work — perhaps vice presidents at Lockheed or Raytheon. Perhaps it was merely their visibility — one in politix, the other in the entertainment industry — that brought them to Maureen's attention. I'd bet my next paycheck she doesn't know the name of the head of Lockheed's information technology division (hint: it's a woman. And she's black.) |
Obviously, many men are uncomfortable with successful women, so when these women are brushed back, alpha men can take comfort in knowing that alphettes are not threateningly all-powerful and that they had better soften those sharp edges.
| Again, Maureen ignores the real world of actual business and concentrates on the straw world of politix and entertainment. We really have come a long way, baby, in the real world, where men actually do work for women and women for men and the other two logical combinations as well, and without the bugaboo of "sexuality" or gender entering into it any more than shoe size does. |
I learned covering Geraldine Ferraro's vice presidential bid that the reaction of women to extraordinarily successful women is also ambivalent, with as much hostility as sisterly pride. An Icarus crash can mitigate the jealousy, while intensifying the feminist attachment. After her husband's philandering with Monica, Hillary played the victim card all the way to the Senate. After her own bad judgment about her stocks, Martha metamorphosed from jailbird to phoenix.
| Knock off with the Martha, fergawdsake. The woman was sentenced on a shaky charge. She took her lumps like a grownup, now she's out, and a year from now it'll be mostly forgotten. The small-souled will gloat at her misfortune, never admitting to themselves that they don't have what it takes to do what she's done. |
Why don't we need to see Oprah, another titan known by her first name, slapped back? Probably because Oprah never had an icy or phony side to her public persona and because her struggles in her childhood and with her weight take the edge off any animus that might be leveled at her for a net worth of $1.3 billion.
| Either that or because nobody particularly cares. If Oprah decides to do a Zsa Zsa imitation and slap a cop, or she proceeds to gut her business enterprises, then that'll change. I suspect she won't do either, because she sells her personality. If the product she's selling isn't the one people are buying, then she'll go out of style. Otherwise she'll keep making money. She realizes that when you're in the personality game, it's not hard to tag yourself out. Maybe she knows Stacey Keach. |
And what about Condi, who's now being touted for the Republican ticket in 2008? Perhaps she does not need to play the victim to make people feel better about her power because she was never seen as a termagant, pushing people around and bending them to her will. She always seemed subservient to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, a willing handmaiden and spokesman for their bellicose bidding.
| Only in Maureen's special world of straw. I've always seen Condi as a decision maker, giving advice and laying out alternatives for the president. And I'm convinced that if she was in fact a Knickerbocker male that people like Maureen would see her as an eminence grise, exerting sinister influence in the corridors of power in the furtherance of some Bilderberger plot to dominate the world. |
One Democratic image maker admiringly predicts that, having survived their virago and victim phases, our two most relentless blondes will outlast everyone: "When the world ends, there will be left only a few cockroaches, Cher, Hillary and Martha."
| But at least we'll be rid of Maureen. That's something to look forward to. |
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