The Women’s Movement, Advance Back to the 1950’s

There are many ways to move backwards. One of the more popular ways is to embrace what we perceive as tradition. We view a seemingly idealistic pattern of behavior that has been rejected perhaps by previous generations and see it with fresh eyes and renewed vigor. We see the upside, forgetting or ignoring that a downside ever existed.

It is perhaps even natural to want to return to the past. The present is unsettling, and the future is obscure and insecure. In the past it seems like values and virtues were firmly set. People were honest artisans who farmed organically and used beasts of burden and not dreadful gasoline guzzling, sheet metal monsters to travel about. Men were genteel and women were kind and gracious, capable of walking on air. People has a special sense, a sixth sense, if you will, to perceive things that escape us today.

Of course, no one wishes to dwell on the realities. The health issues, the dangerous horse doody and the piles of garbage in the streets. We forget the levels of ignorance, illiteracy, and genetic maladies that left us with goiters, wall eyed, hairlipped, or with an extra leg hanging out of our chests. We ignore the millions who starved because organic farming wasn’t quite getting it done. We admire the honest craftsman but ignore the fact that until here was mass production most went without most things. Many went without even shoes. Most people had two outfits. Every day and Sunday. There were no color choices or the need for shoe racks or designer hangers.

And then we have the Women’s Movement. First off, there is no denying that there are great many skilled, highly intelligent and competent women practicing in any number of professions. These are great women who have changed the course of history and made tremendous contributions to their industries and disciplines, and to society as a whole.

More women than men are graduating from medical school and law school. Women, overall, earn more money than they ever did. On the less grand scale, there are more working women, showing up at the office or working diligently from remote locations, mainly because they have to contribute to the household income. They work because they have to, they want to, to the point perhaps where they never give it a thought.

But then there are increasingly more younger women who lack the desires of the women who pioneered the Women’s Movement. Maybe it is a generational thing. Perhaps it is even rebelliousness or a backlash of sorts. Or maybe some have arrived at the harsh reality that sitting at home is a lot better than showing up at an office where you are forced to deal with politics, harassment, and the duties inherent with your profession or job.

Some may argue that this is not the case. And some may argue that these women have the freedom to do whatever they choose. It’s about choice. Yes. Certainly it is. But when you are taking up space in an elite law or medical school so you can be a better marriage prospect, rather than a contribution to that community, something may be wrong with this picture.

As Marilyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, was quoted in an article in the New York Times, “It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?”

In the same article Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, ” What does concern me is that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn’t constructed along traditional gender roles.”

Simply put, a lot of precious space is allocated in schools that produce influential inhabitants in their disciplines, people who move forward to assume places at the highest levels of their professions. People who become inventors and innovators, judges, developers of vaccines, leaders in their communities and their nation. This is not necessarily the place where someone takes up one of the few seats to practice for a couple of years and then move on to stay-at-home motherhood.

And with this type of behavior, we are referring to the achievers. We are referring to the elite. Beneath the elite we have those who quite simply just want to marry the richest guy with the most stuff on the best career track who can let them stay at home. Where professional challenges were once the major concern for young women in college, it seems now the big ticket it merely to find the guy. Find the guy. Marry well. Marry rich. As for love…maybe?

That way you can stay home, have lunch with your girlfriends and wax for hours on the celebrity hit list and other people they don’t know. This new attitude, as noted before, may be an act of rebellion. It may be a reflection of the economy. It is tough economic times and life is tough out there. Find someone who will take care of you. Not someone you can be with and share the joys and misery. Someone who will take care of you.

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There is no blame, really. And this is hardly a rant. It’s an examination of the overall policies, social and financial, that have left this nation, hurting, wanting, and very insecure. As a market driven society where consumerism made up two thirds of the economy, going cold turkey on the shopping impulse is like being a junkie at a revival meeting. You don’t know what to do with yourself or when the pain will start to fade.

In a society where air brushing as created the perfect form of beauty that no living being could ever recreate, it is bound to drive women crazy. To think that our celebrities and movies stars, who appear to us after sixteen hours having designers, makeup artists, etc., preening, fussing, and dressing them, can be copied in real life is bizarre. Truly bizarre. Yet that belief is the standard. It is an accepted reality, in spite of the facts. In spite of the facts that the celebrities and models can’t duplicate in real life the perfect image of themselves.

Yet here we are with women believing that with a few good beauty tips and some high priced cosmetics they can actually look as good as their aspirations. So women, smart women, exchange beauty and dressing tips, talk about their favorite celebrities and seem never wonder how they allowed themselves, no voluntarily, jumped into this box in the first place.

Men don’t escape responsibility. When it comes to romance and related social issues. Most men are idiots. Inarticulate idiots, at that. “Dude. Dude?” The idolize the marketing version of the sex symbol that is both unwieldy and unachievable. It makes them feel awkward to think they have settled for less than the stay at home beauty queen.

It is understandable. Most men really don’t have much to work with. They have their jobs and the things they buy and they things they believe they possess. Like their women. Most men have been programmed that anything remotely resembling taste, outside of cars and lawn care, is effeminate or gay. They are taught to believe their wives know better about everything except the job and the industry they compete in nearly every day of their lives.

More importantly, many men are threatened by thinking and successful women. They want their women to stay at home. They don’t want them competing. It is tough to have a bigger penis contest with someone who has you out outmaneuvered because they aren’t wearing one. It is tough to go up against the traditional social pressures that have evolved since Mom and Pop partnered as equals in the Mom and Pop shops.

After all, your mother and father probably set up the family that way. Others around you have condemned you as less of a man if you can’t carry the weight of a stay at home wife and three kids in the self-indulgence program on the weight of your designer shoulders. This is your job. Nay. This is your duty. Sit there and be mute, forgetting the lessons of the past.

What past? When the little woman sat home and allowed her brain to atrophy on nonsense and more nonsense. When the high point of the day was doing battled with that dreaded ring around the collar. When the woman was viewed as chattel, because as such they had no real ownership other than what was allowed by law. When soap operas and smores took priority over the Cuban Missile Crisis and the advent of social change.

Part of that change was Women’s Liberation. More succinctly, Women’s Rights. I remember when a good job for a woman was being a teacher. “You could always teach,” or so it went. “Or teach for a couple, few years until your husband gets his career off the ground. And then you can stay home and go out of your mind with the children.”

Okay, it’s different now. With the advent of illegal immigration and cheap labor, many women have a helper. They have a nanny and a housekeeper. They don’t clean, they don’t have to clean, cook, or do the laundry themselves. The maid does it. If you explain it correctly in broken Spanish, then she may even hang the delicate fabricates and not cram them into the dryer.

It is different. Women’s careers. Been there done that. Women are free to go to the top schools in the country and then be the stay at home mother. They can nosh with friends on salad and sushi. They can discuss the merits of Young Einstein. Rather than try to be one themselves.

As for the women that still march on, working to achieve at the highest levels of profession and society. Bless you for keeping the bar at some civilized level of progress. I realize it is tough sledding in the face of those who criticize you and wonder if you have a screw loose for not seeking out the perfect fellow and settling down. At home. But you are the ones who the next generation may use as role models. You may yet inspire the next generation of women, not to stay at home but to take advantage of their talents, their brains and, yes, their sexuality. Take advantage so that society can benefit from your unique and special skills.

When Exceptional People Grow Older

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Years ago, when I was first starting out as a writer, my agent in the Los Angeles had a small second floor office in the old Writers and Artists Building, in Beverly Hills. On several visits to her, I would run into the notorious gangster, Mickey Cohen. He was one of my agent’s clients. Jane was new in the business and maintained an eclectic roster reminiscent of Broadway Danny Rose, only with class.

Since we shared the same agent, Mickey and I would nod at each other and maybe manage a few words. He was sick and dying, preoccupied with getting his book to press, before he passed on. He didn’t have much time for chitchat, or maybe I read it wrong and he nothing but time. He looked lonely and out of touch, out of step in the modern world. His old bookie joint on just off of Sunset Strip had long been converted into a leather shop and finally a hair salon.

I thought to myself that this had been one of the most feared men in America. He ruled Los Angeles and was said to have been one of the luckiest gangsters, having dodged several assassination attempts. He made his enemies pay for such transgressions. He lived long after them. And now cancer was taking him down. He was old and fragile, not the fearsome sort of long ago.

Since that time I have been fascinated by the enigma of age on exceptional people who performed extraordinary deeds. Age can eventually make us all appear frail and marginal. Age can disguise our pasts and the things that took place when we were young, virile and a little bit crazy. But with people, ordinary or not, who committed themselves at one time or another to extraordinary acts, it is so strange how time and age can all but eradicate any sense of the deeds we performed.

On many occasions I found myself staring at persons of some notoriety, waiting for their remarkable character to break through the layers of camouflage and some how reveal itself. You wait for that projection of energy. Sometimes you can catch a glimmer, and sometimes you can’t. Sometimes, depending on life and its fortunes, enough of that character remains, albeit in a slightly muted form.

I was reminded of the vagaries and cruelty of age, recently, when I sat down with an old friend who had been ill for some time. Here was a man who served as a war correspondent in countless third world garbage dumps, who had interviewed potentates and politicians of every stripe. He was a man who has investigated some of the greatest scandals of our time. And now, as he sat across from me, it was tough for him to talk. Over time and a couple of drinks, however, that special glimmer of significance did overtake his earlier reservation. He became more animated and under pain and duress projected some of his old self. Still, seeing an old an ill man in front of me, I had to search of evidence of a greater past.
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There was a former member of the Navy’s Underwater Demotion Unit. A frogman, before there were Navy Seals. He was old and moved slowly, but was a wealthy man as a result of having bought and sold enough real estate to develop a good part of Los Angeles. There was no indicator to what acts of courage this man had performed. He was just another tired old man, still moving forward in the quest of making a buck. But he still had the skin burns from the demolition cord he used to blow up enemy submarines that were docked in their bases. Swim in through the protective netting and swim out again. A few less submarines.

Some people still retain that sense of character. Old actors. Rock and Roll Stars. Performers still manage to put on that face and put on that show. An aging Mick Jagger still looks and appears like Mick Jagger of his youth, albeit, a little slower and a little more craggy. Anais Nin was dynamic almost up to the time she grew terminally ill. She had that special grace and allure, moved across the room like she was gliding on wheels. From what friends say, Henry Miller, her lover of yore, maintained his special presence. Beatrice Wood was still going strong into her 100’s. She was a world class potter but also the lover of Marcel Duchamp. Maybe it’s love, exotic romance at its best that keeps some vital and young in spirit. And delightfully crazy.

I remember meeting the Newton Boys. They were old time bank robbers, cowboy types who still retained their wit and sense of humor. With them, ironically, I could see them as they were, holding up a bank. If they thought they could get away with it.

And then there are the ones we are left to wonder about. What would Marilyn Monroe have been like at eighty? Would Amelia Earhart be dynamic and special, projecting that special aura when they periodically honored her as a pioneer for women’s rights? John Lennon?

So the next time you see someone who is elderly take a second look. Before you judge them merely old and frail, pathetically marginal, look for the signs of an exceptional character . Not everyone will have it. Let’s face it, while we can be kind and classify everyone as special, there are some of us, a few of us, who in one form or another have gone the extra mile. We may not even like what they did. We may not approve of it. But we can recognize that at one time or another they did something extraordinary.

Under the layers of personal history, trials, and disappointment, age may have obscured that special character. But it can never quite remove it entirely.

New Video Artist Cut of Tron, Featuring Cheech and Chong

Artist Cut of Tron starring Cheech and Chong.

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A psychedelic, economic melt down remake of the 1982 sci-fi groundbreaker “Tron.” Starring Cheech and Chong. “I don’t think you should watch anything like that straight. It’ll have lasting, traumatic …

The Amazing Michael Jackson Death Tour

The other day I made the mistake of cracking wise about the Michael Jackson memorial service that was held at the Los Angeles Staples Center. I cracked that while Jackson is there at the home of the NBA Champions he maybe should try out for the Lakers. The person was scandalized, like I besmirched the Pope or called Mother Theresa a strumpet.

To say the least, the Michael Jackson death watch has gotten way, way out of control. Or, rather, it is very much in control. In fact, it is a money machine, generating multiple millions in primary and ancillary markets. Those in control of the Jackson’s estate are milking this for all it is worth. For the entire last year, there were approximately, a million and a half music downloads of Jackson tunes. In the last week or so since his death, the music downloads alone have totaled over two million.

Then of course there are the tee-shirts, coffee mugs, assorted memorabilia, and all the money made before an after the Staples funeral service where thousands of adoring fans splurged in a bad economy is well in the millions. To make it sweeter, all this money is being raked in without Michael Jackson partaking in his legendary spending. Huge debt loads are now being worked back to substantial profits, and the troubled estate is troubled no more.

Now there are plans for a second memorial service. An annual memorial service review couldn’t be far behind. Then could come the memorial service roadshow where singers and performers hurting in income thanks to a bad economy, can do the music theater version of the Michael Jackson memorial service. This should generate some revenue from the adoring fans.

I am not the only one who finds this Michael Jackson Funeral Death Tour anywhere from in bad taste to absurd and grotesque. Far from it. Still, we are in the minority. We are among the seemingly few who wonder how the American memory, not the best in most times, can conveniently forget about his past transgressions. Okay, so he was never convicted of child molestation, but the lack of belief that it is possible, is, well, unbelievable.

A poor lifestyle is responsible for stress and anxieties, and hormonal deficiencies. purchase tadalafil online Chow, who was Parker’s viagra no prescription own Instructor, in 1949. Formal training during the education years may not suffice for workplace click to find out more now cialis price challenges as they are far from different that one faces during his student life. The browse around to find out more order cheap viagra dosage ought to conceivably be dictated by your health advisor. For those who wish to contest this. Who in Jackson’s death have become ardent defenders of the Jackson psyche, I will ask you the same question I have asked others….would you let your eleven year-old child snuggle up in Uncle Mikey’s bed? Well? If you say yes, then you are probably lying. If you say no, then, pray tell, what gives you pause? This question is, after all, the bottom line in dealing with that particular controversy.

I am sorry if I don’t find Michael Jackson quite ready for deification. I cannot put him up there with Albert Schweitzer and, yes, Mother Theresa. I think he was a notable talent, but I find it arguable whether he was the king of all pop. I loved the Motown sound but, frankly, I was never all that much of a Jackson Five fan. Forgive me for preferring the Temptations, the Four Tops, Smokey Robinson, etc., over one talented child and several less talented siblings.

In fairness, I loved Thriller. I think it was a seminal record as it was the first to really combine the visual effects with the music on such a major scale. It was a truly wonderful work that neither Jackson or anyone else ever duplicated. Michael Jackson’s reputation as a music great could stand alone on Thriller.

But back to reality. The reality being this–are we so starved and so hollow that the death of a pop singer could generate so much emotion? Is his death more a comment on the cynical marketing activity to make a buck on anything than it is his actual passing? Years ago, while still in the music business, I remember clearly a discussion among friends where one commented that Jackson, who was undergoing some controversy at the time, was fated for a tragic and early death.

But nevertheless, we are being saturated by the news media and every other source that can distract us and pull money out of our pockets. Forget the North Koreans and their misguided missiles. Forget the recent Ahmadinejad power grab in Iran. Forget this economic disaster, the job layoffs, our casual slide into our status as a second tier nation. What’s all that when compared to an eccentric celebrity who insisted on welshing on loans to support his personal amusement park and zoo. For the children, of course.

Maybe some day, if we haven’t dumbed down any further than we already have, generations will look back at this and shake their heads in wonder. They may have no idea why we behaved like idiots and gave our emotions over to a cyncial marketing and money machine. They may not have a clue. They will, however, still have Thriller.

Live Naked and Save the Planet

The new green is nudism. Or so says Kathy Blanchard on her The Naturist Society Website. According to an article in the New York Times and on Ms. Blanchard’s website, the tough economy is causing many potential vacationers to look for cheap spots where clothing is optional. A good choice, opines Blanchard, since going nude cuts down on the laundry bill, saving energy and the repurchase of clothing. You keep the planet clean by not dumping as much soap into our water systems.

Who am I to argue? It is just that I don’t relish seeing Al Gore and others who cross my mind lecturing me in their birthday suits. In fact, anyone who has been to a nude beach can attest it may be a freer way of catching the surf and sun, but hardly the sexy tableau that invades our imagination. But then again, according to the naturalists, going nude is not supposed to be sexy. It’s supposed to be natural. And green.

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Especially those ornery two inch long, urinphilic Candiru, that are know to inhabit the Amazon River. These little Catfish-like buggers are spiny and painful and can penetrate the human urethra. That’s the penis and vagina to the medically less informed. They then start snacking on mucous membrane. This was enough of a problem that the indigenous people often wore some type of cod pieces, a coconut shell.

Okay, like most of us, I have no intention of swimming in the Amazon. It’s hard enough to go to Santa Barbara, what with traffic on the highways and the nonsense at the airports. Most of the swimming I do anymore is in a swimming pool, where I could swim in the nude. I guess. I would just have to change my paradigm. I wouldn’t be scaring the neighbors; I would be saving the planet.