freedom trash

Bra-burning never happened. It was completely made up by the media. A couple of women protesting a Miss America pageant threw some bras into a garbage can, and somehow that became this longstanding idea of feminists as bra-burners.

Jessica Valenti of Feministing.com in the Sunday New York Times Magazine.

NPR did a piece on the bra-burning myth a couple years back in which Carol Hanisch, one of the protest organizers, attested:

We had intended to burn it, but the police department, since we were on the boardwalk, wouldn't let us do the burning.

The perpetuation of the myth may have been born as the result "a New York Post story on the protest [that] included a reference to bra burning as a way to link the movement to war protesters burning draft cards."

Also tossed in the Freedom Trash Can that day: mops, girdles, pots and pans, and Playboy magazines -- items the protesters called "instruments of female torture".

and the power you possess

What Valerie developed is the art of telling people to go to hell and making them look forward to the trip.

Vernon Jordan, speaking of Obama Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett, in An Old Hometown Mentor, and Still at Obama’s Side in this morning's New York Times.

Jordan is a cousin by marriage to Jarrett and served as an adviser during the duration of the presidential campaign.


Over the weekend, for no good reason, I started fussing about Wonder Woman's super powers. As I could recall them they were few and rather passive: Bracelets, for deflecting bullets. A golden lariat, for extracting the truth. An invisible plane that failed to cloak its occupant and pilot, making her (I thought) a vulnerable target among the clouds.

Mr. Hoo argued that she was similarly outfitted to Batman -- a human being's mortal powers extended by technology and some trickery. But Batman had the advantage of money and power. Wonder Woman's social advantage, if any, were her connections with her Amazonian heritage. Her family.

And let's not forget the theme song from the 1970s television show:

Wonder Woman
All the world is waiting for you
And the power you possess
In your satin tights
Fighting for your rights
And the old red, white and blue
...
Change their minds
And change the world

I expect whole theses have been written about Wonder Woman as a male projected fantasy. Her superpowers are extensions of womanly wiles -- satin tights, extracting the truth via some dominatrix hotness, deflecting blows rather than leveling them -- she changes the world through changing the minds of evil doers, rather than laying them low the way Superman and Batman would.

Then this morning, while reading a NYT's flattering profile on Valerie Jarrett, and subsequently crushing on Obama's new Senior Adviser, I couldn't avoid the strong similarities in how Jarrett was painted: her impeccable suits. Her steady listening. Her family connections. Her piercing gaze. Her decision to take a less visible position within the administration rather than pursuing Obama's Senate seat.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions »

une vraie femme, complète

Photo: Art Shay

Subject: Simone de Beauvoir

This last week there was some fuss in France over the publication of an Art Shay photograph of Simone de Beauvoir’s curvalicious backside on the cover of Le Nouvelle Observateur.

I caught wind of it via a brief New Yorker mention (we’re too busy with Britney’s troubles -- and her sister’s! -- to be bothered by the naked bum of one of the 20th Century’s preeminent intellectuals here in the States) and given the weakness of my French I was consigned to follow the story in the English language press. The Times Online provided this recap:

The reaction of de Beauvoir’s admirers to the Nouvel Obs piece and its accompanying photograph was pained. A small demonstration of the feminist group Les Chiennes de Garde assembled outside the magazine’s offices, waving placards calling for Jean Daniel, the proprietor, to publish pictures of his own bare buttocks as well as those of various male philosophers. “My first thought on seeing the magazine,” said Florence Montreynaud, an authority on the relationship between de Beauvoir and her life’s companion, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, “was that they would never have considered putting a picture of Sartre’s bottom on the front of Le Nouvel Observateur.”

This is certainly true. And anyone who has seen a picture of the front elevation of Jean-Paul Sartre, fully clothed, will instantly understand why. The behind of the great rock star of French philosophy, Bernard-Henri Lévy, might be a different matter ...

Aren’t we past this by now? The idea that a woman may be only smart OR sexy -- but not both? And certainly not all at once?

Studying Shay’s lovely composition from the sidelines, in which I see a woman standing bare, except for her heels, before an open doorway in a friend’s house in which she was fully aware roamed another friend who was a photographer (and are any of us safe from those unscrupulous creatures, photographers?), and then reading the story of how when she heard Shay’s shutter close she turned, laughing, and said “Naughty boy!” -- I can only conclude that in this shot the 44 year old de Beauvoir has elected to be the subject -- meaning that she is by no means subjugated.

Because honestly: No woman wears heels for herself alone.

So if she welcomed the camera’s gaze, does that make her any less of a philosopher and intellectual? Does she, for this, become a dirty girl, and are all honors and privileges previously conferred upon her for her accomplishments nullified?

Let’s hope not. I prefer to hope that this is a brief insight into the possibility that de Beauvoir recognized the power inherent in female sexuality -- the turn of well-placed a curve -- a powerful force that historically our institutions and legislations have worked feverishly to control and contain.

I see in this shot a woman wielding her superpower called sexy (one that every woman who bothers to embrace it owns) in which resides the ability to captivate and hold the attention of others and persuade through the beautiful concert of both mind and flesh.

Any woman who has discovered the magical power that a low slung neckline has over some men (& women) knows that with great power comes great responsibility -- women should not use their physical powers to manipulate just as men should not (and of course, women have, as have men, which is where our fear springs from) -- but to revel in it? To share that beauty and, with it, a lust for life?

Hell, yeah.

So why does it seem that we still subscribe to this idea that to embrace the force of flesh means that your brain will wither and die? Or to be recognized and seen for these things means that the rest goes unnoticed?

The sapiosexual knows better.

And, frankly, enjoys life more.


p.s. The title of this post was pulled from a Times' citation of the Nouvelle Obs piece -- it was how one of de Beauvoir's former lovers, Claude Lanzmann, described her.