Tag Archives: Women

THE CHALLENGE OF WOMANHOOD

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“If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside.” Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess.

That sentence is in the banner of Section M of The Wall Street Journal last weekend. The headline to the article announces, The Royal Treatment. The sub-headline reads, “Little girls enchanted with princesses reign in kiddie kingdoms with regal details like castle murals, carriage beds and Cinderella chandeliers; a $70,000 ‘pink explosion’ playroom…”  The Caption to the picture reads in part, “Ms. Kickhout is spending roughly $70,000 to build a playroom for the girls that will include a performance stage, a treehouse and a mini-French cafe. A $20,000 custom rug will have colorful pathways to the play areas.”

I have read with bemused bewilderment of today’s professional women who want it all. A complete life is made easier if someone builds a $70,000 playroom. It is, or course, helpful to have additional benefits, a $20,000 custom rug sporting “colorful pathways leading to play areas.”

Don’t you feel that life is like that? Money to do anything and it is helpful when someone or something lays out a plan. Don’t think about life and its issues, problems and challenges. Wait for someone else to make decisions that will gently present an acceptable, comfortable way through life.

Reality makes a $70,000 play area and a $20,000 rug extravagant. Most people pay $20,000 for a car and buy it on time, sometimes over seven years. This poverty is a disappointment not letting any woman to live a full life, where she has it all.

It is also a horrible circumstance when one has to go to Starbucks, a regional chain, a local coffee joint or McDonalds when “a mini-French cafe” is not readily available. Having to travel to Paris, France, to Paris, Texas or to Perris, California will break the spirit of any human being and no woman can overcome.

It is bad practice to let children draw, fingerpaint or paint. There’s all that dirt and mess. It might be on the furniture. Children doing those activities are empty. The child learns nothing but is left with a day of senseless, random activaty – motion, impulse, glimpses from the imagination and have carefree time to grow. It is better that the child remain clean, regimented, structured and inhibited. Low expectations are the best way to teach men and women how to have it all.

The pink play arena is best. Girls will learn…. and know… and expect…

WARY READER

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I’ve read no Dostoyevsky. I tried something short: The Gambler. It is like reading of characters who are mentally ill. I’ll try another of Dostoyevsky’s stories, but I’ll enlarge this lesson.

The gambler is in love with Maria Philippovna. She knows it, but there are difficulties. He’s not suitable for her, and it’s easy to read why, from his own mouth. He says to her:

“It makes no difference to me…Do you know something else? It is dangerous for you to walk alone with me: many times I have felt an irresistible longing to beat you with my fists, disfigure you, strangle you. And do you think it won’t come to that? You will drive me crazy. I’m not likely to shrink from the scandal, am I? Or your anger? What’s your anger to me? My love is hopeless, and I know that afterwards I should love you a thousand times more. If I ever kill you, you know, I shall have to kill myself as well; well, I shall try for as long as possible not to kill myself, so as to savour the unbearable pain of being without you. Do you know an incredible thing? Everyday I love you more, and that’s almost impossible, you know. After that, how can I help being a fatalist? You remember, on the Schlangenberg the day before yesterday, I whispered to you when you provoked me, ‘Say the word and I will leap into the abyss!’ If you had said a word, I would have jumped. You do believe, don’t you, that I would have jumped?”

“What silly talk!” she cried.

APPARENTLY, being demonstrative and vocal is the Russian way of passion, although that passion is not present in Tolstoy or in Pasternak. It seems doubly impossible that any sensible woman would tolerate this creep and his crap. Are readers expected to believe this is Russian culture, played out in Germany? Is the manner of a nation of chess players – foresee, plan and plot with all subtlety possible and MOVE displayed in this passage or in this story? Dostoyevsky’s message, I love you because I want to smash in your face, is beyond the pale. Note for Dostoyevsky’s male, it is mere “scandal.” Any person who does not read beyond this paragraph is justifiably excused.

“What silly talk!” is the stupidest comment a woman can utter. Trying to understand such a man is foolhardy. Trying to reason with him reveals too many motherly tendencies (and probably too many Psychology courses in college). Hugging and comforting him demonstrates delusion. 

The best reaction is be an American: Disengage (not part of Dostoyevsky’s story). If he offers to jump into the abyss, encourage him. Don’t see him again. Tell him not to bother you. Change the locks on your doors. Be alert. Get a restraining order. And get a gun and learn to use it: If the situation arises, you can shoot off his pecker.

WOMEN: PERFECT HALLOWEEN CHARACTERS

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On Halloween, Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Section, page 1, had the following sentences, “A spate of supernatural series that has the TV industry spellbound simply fulfills need for strong female characters.” That caption to the picture read, “Julia Ormond’s character projects authority and power while protecting her daughters in Lifetimes ‘Witches of Eastwick.'” The article is further aglow about powerful women characters: “Witches, Crones, Harpies, Furies and Amazons.”

Really?

Since Harry Potter began, the Milleniums and the IC [Internet-Cloud] generations have gone gaga over supernatural figures, and heroes and cartoon characters found in comic books. That’s real life. It’s the reason why many twenty-somethings are living at home after college. They’re deep in student debt, have financial obligations and no income. They have the next sequel of Batman, Ironman, Superman and Spider Man to save them from evil forces, and everyone will live happily ever after in a world of soft goodness and complete understanding. Miracles happen. The Second Coming of who or what is upon us.

Nowadays there are women wanting to get ahead, whether they are at the hairdresser, watching DVDs in their parents’ TV room, following football and basketball games, at work in a job for which they were overqualified, or she is studying mathematics to understand economic theories.  According to current culture and society, her heroes are witches, crones, harpies, furies, Amazons, as well as the usual vamps, vampires and vixens.  It’s a great time to be a man because every man knows that’s what women are. Women must use supernatural, extraterritorial, overarching, spiritual communion, and so on to make her way in the world: Be a she-women to overcome the he-men. Be a wedge to our maneuver a hunk. Be a ball buster in a testical world. Huba-huba, buba-baby.

Monica Lewinsky tried that with Bill Clinton, and I’m not sure where it left her as a human being. We are centered on human beings, not supernatural beasts with male or female genitalia, both or none. What do the grunting-grubbing producers in Hollywood say? Getting and maintaining status for women is not in the paycheck. It is in the message. When a female superhero acts, she is open and obvious. Women do not have to coo, coax, wile or suggest. That’s passé, from the Fifties. Human beings have evolved beyond implications and inferences. Be upfront. Appear naked on the Internet! Show the world the woman you are!

When a woman has quiet time with husband or boyfriend, and things need saying but you don’t want an argument: You want his thoughts and hopes about you and the relationship, devotion and warmth – signs from him that he spends as much time as you have given to him and the relationship. It has always been a problem of communication – suggestion, implication, cajoling, teasing – but NOT today. No one expects subtlety. Be Xena instead, exerting authority, exercising power, exorcising demons and emasculating…

Are the Mistress of the Universe movies today better than films about human relations from the Fifties? Consider Crime of Passion, Barbara Stanwyck, Sterling Hayden, Raymond Burr. Stanwyck is a successful journalist in San Francisco with an Ask Abby column. She meets Hayden, Lieutenant LAPD on a murder case in Frisco. She beats him to the suspect. He proposes, and she leaves her career to become wife in LA. 

Although well-thought of and promising, Hayden is willing to wait for promotion. Being a housewife Stanwyck is bored. At a party she wants to join the conversation of the men where the conversation is about the police department. But she is relegated to the officers’ wives talking about casseroles. Stanwyck uses her abilities to move him high in the department. She sleeps with his superior, Burr, and because Burr refuses the promotion to an open position, she kills Burr. Hayden learns is wife killed Burr and walks her to booking in a poignant final scene.

Crime of Passion is a movie showing human issues, women living demeaning lives and never using their abilities. Today Stanwyck’s part would be held by a supernatural woman or a psychologically damaged woman to show her fallibilities and provide reasons for her actions. Stanwyck would never take the modern part especially if she had to cast a spell. That act and that bit of acting would diminish Stanwyck as a human being and as a woman. Stanwyck would take roles like Crime of Passion because she had to meet life as it came to her character and work through the problems.

For today’s films – fantasy, wonderment, fairy tales, comic book flicks – I suspect actresses capable to playing human beings like Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis need not apply.