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Category Archives: Cultural Critique

Betty Ford

20 Aug

Betty Ford has died.  I will never be confused for a political analyst, and my childhood memories are as suspect as anyone’s.  However, I am struck with the idea that Mrs. Ford was an American pioneer.  Long before the Huffington Post, the country knew Mrs. Ford’s opinions on serious social issues.  Decades (and generations) before any First Lady would be criticized for being politically vocal, Mrs. Ford made her position known on such subjects as legalized abortion, the ERA and premarital sex (remember, this was the 1970s, premarital sex was still up for discussion as a social ill.)

Before we had the luxury of watching newsreaders have their colon examined on national television, Betty Ford went public with her bout of breast cancer.  Before there were little pink ribbons, Mrs. Ford inspired tens of thousands of women to be screened and seek treatment.

Forty years before people would make a career from their public struggles with addiction, Mrs. Ford went public with her struggles.  She helped to create the treatment center which is now such a part of the American vernacular it is used as a verb.

Long before Gawker or AwfulPlasticSurgery.com, the world knew (and saw) Betty Ford’s face lift.  Almost unrecognizable to the yet untrained American eye, Mrs. Ford lifted her face proudly.

I know little, if anything of her husband’s politics (save for the pardon) but I am willing to venture that Mrs. Ford’s “firsts” outweigh her husband’s.  For better or worse, she really was our nation’s first; Public Figures, They’re Just Like Us!Bet

 
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Posted by on August 20, 2011 in Cultural Critique

 

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Get Ready For The Summer

20 Aug

It’s that time of year again.  Summer.  A season only second to Christmas in it’s forced hyped gaiety.  Do I sound like a bikini-clad Grinch?  Before I reflexively apologize, perhaps I should explain my resentment.  Unlike Christmas, summer delivers me no easy out of the frenzy.  I can’t exactly wave the religion flag as my get-out-of-gaiety card, can I?  Or can I?  Can I blame my disconnect to patriotism (Memorial, Independence, and Labor; the trifecta of summer flag waving) on being the spawn of sixties liberal reform Jews?  Doubtful, considering I love nothing more than a hometown parade.  But wait, what about the grandparents who scraped together the scraps of their working class paychecks for a week or two in the Catskills every year?  Don’t those incredibly dismal and depressing black and white photographs (with wiggly white borders) prove a genetic inability to conform to the seasonal culture of fun.  Puhlease.

My seasonal shortcomings are my own.  I love cultivated nature (botanical gardens, english box hedges and the like) but am most certainly about as indoorsy as they come.  That must be part of my “problem.”  And by “problem” I don’t mean to imply that I am anti-summer.  Far from it.  I enjoy an enormous straw hat and a strappy sandal.  I find nothing quite as lovely as the sight of the ice cream man (a man dressed in immaculate white doling out snack?!)  It is instead the notion (pummeled by magazines, television and the like) that I should be ENJOYING MYSELF!  This enjoyment should take the form of preparing/eating my meals out of doors (so much nicer in theory than in practice,) relocating to places remote or exclusive and/or adopting an entirely different life/persona for three months.
I love the summer in the city.  Just love it.  There is a quiet and sanity that feels (don’t ask me why) European.  But even as I sit at a cafe nursing a cappuccino, or at the Boat Basin, working my way through a mango mai tai and mahi mahi taco (say that really really fast!) I feel I am not living up to expectation.  What is most queer about this complex, is I have no idea why!  I do not succumb to any other media expectations (of which I am aware.)  Yet every year, at the end of May, here I sit, an involuntary Scrooge (in a stunning straw hat.)

 
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Posted by on August 20, 2011 in Cultural Critique

 

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Lending a (manicured) Hand

20 Aug

I had a disturbing realization yesterday.  I needed an image, not for myself mind you, but a visual image for a work project.  I was searching for an iconic representation of women mentoring women.  I scoured my memory, and search engine, for films, plays, novels, or real life examples which represented women helping women.  I asked colleagues and friends for help.  The best we could deliver were “mentoring moments” within film (ex., Truvy and Annelle in Steel Magnolias, Shug and Celie in The Color Purple.)  I could easily rattle off male mentoring as movie/play themes, as could you.  But any examples of women paired with women on screen uncovers the most cringe inducing phenomenon.  American women in cinema seem to despise one another.  They are in direct competition for the limited resources and options available to them.  When not coveting their professional position, they compete over men and children (The Women, To Each His Own, Gone With The Wind) or shoes (The Wizard of Oz.)  Now I’m not foolish enough to think Hollywood is based on reality (although to be perfectly frank I feel a little disingenuous even typing that sentence, in my heart of hearts I believe the world really wants to be a place where traveling suits, tuxedos and gowns are de rigueur.)  Surely art (created by human beings) stems somewhat from the human experience?!  There is some truth in fiction, is there not?
This is what is so perplexing, and flat out depressing.  I have never (to my knowledge) engaged in any Margo or Eve behavior.  I have worked in less than stable environments and have had my share of erratic and even “diagnosable” bosses.  I actually once worked for the woman known to many in this country as “The Queen of Mean.”  I have also supervised an entirely female staff.  If anything, all the women I’ve worked with (collectively) were more secure and mature than the men.
As far as women mentors, I have had the very good fortune of having two (concurrently) in my life.  I was in my very early twenties and was in a (slightly above) entry level position in a design house.  Maggie was Flemish and beautiful.  She was twenty years older than me and was by far the most stylish woman I had ever met.  Why she took me and my Sears wardrobe under her wing is beyond me.  Our relationship went beyond the sorry state of my attire.  She taught me about men, marriage, life and strength.  Her life had not been an easy one, and by example I learned what true grace is.  My boss at the time, Rosemary, set the bar far too high for supervisors.  She taught me everything about my job and hers and showed me a larger more exciting world.  She was my first and last supervisor who truly understood what it means to lead.  She believed, rightfully, that she was a professional success if she helped me to succeed.  She was not threatened by me despite that fact that the economy and hostile takeover led to my replacing her (I was much cheaper to keep on.)
Now that women in the workplace is a fully normalized occurrence, shouldn’t popular culture keep up?  Of course watching “Real” housewives claw each other is entertaining (?) but the relationships of women are far more varied and interesting than the one dimension of pettiness.  I’m hoping that I am wrong, that I have overlooked an entire collection of film and theatre that celebrates the women supporting women dynamic (remember I still think Judy is going to cajole me to put on a show in the barn.)
 
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Posted by on August 20, 2011 in Cultural Critique

 

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Lines Are Drawn

20 Aug

Have you noticed a cultural aversion to boundaries?  It seems the very concept of boundaries, and hence the concept of “others” has taken on a verboten quality.  A very disingenuous verboten quality I may add.
Certainly the phenomenon of parent as “friend” and child as equal member of the family has been observed and critiqued.  Do parents still even have locks on their bedroom door?  Whatever boundaries existing there are pretty much invisible to the naked eye.
But what of larger more far reaching lack of boundary phenomenon?  I recently was on the bewildering end of a religion conversation.  My conversational partner insisting that lots of Jewish people celebrate Christmas, and advising me that I was being dogmatic in my view of religion.  Isn’t that the whole point of religion?  Doesn’t a great deal of religious identity depend on identifying what it is not?  Judaism is a whole lot of things, and one of them is that it is NOT celebrating Christian holidays.  Do I know of many people of Jewish origin who in attempts at either not denying their cherubs or in their own ambiguous identity have embraced Christmas?  Absolutely.  But why is it wrong or “rigid” to maintain or at least recognize, a boundary?  Haven’t we fought wars over such things?  Don’t we have an entire government based upon parties whose very existence is predicated on not being a member of the “other” party?
We are all equal as human beings, but it is dismissive and offensive to maintain that we are all the same.

 
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Posted by on August 20, 2011 in Cultural Critique

 

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We’re Paying For This?

20 Aug

When they told me to pump my own gas, I took on Lady MacBeth characteristics, but I pumped. 

When they told me to please listen closely to all available selections as options have change, I listened as I manically punched “0.”

When they told me to swipe my own credit card to complete the most sacred of rituals; shopping, I swiped, and I silently wept.

And when I am expected to supply my own towel, paper towels, cleaning solution, and noise canceling device to enjoy the few machines that work in my sweltering gym, I do so.

I do all these things.  But not without speaking up, which I see as a moral imperative and those around me see as another excuse to label me as “difficult, high maintenance, crotchety” or any other label that allows them to distance themselves from the fact that silence equals complicity.

Having most recently spoken up to gym “management” regarding the ephemeral opening times of the gym (the pool opens when its waters can no longer stand the glassy top to their surface and the gym opens when someone decides that the hang-over is not in fact life threatening.)  I was treated this morning to being followed into the rest room by a “old enough to have recently graduated high school, but let’s be serious, she was most likely asked to leave” who “works” the desk.  I heard her muttering, not making eye contact of course; “Tobias,Tobias.”  It had a rather eerie “The Prince of Tides” quality to it.  I’m not sure when it occurred to me that she was actually trying to address me,  “Tobias?”  Had I not changed my name when I married, I no doubt would have been having some serious 8th grade gym class flashbacks.  Safely ensconced in my married name, I told the tot “I’ve never been addressed that way.  It’s Mrs. Tobias.”  She continued that the gym is no longer open at 5:45, it opens at 6:00.  This time change of course, the result of my compaints regarding opening time.  Fine.  I’ve no problem with shortening the gym day.  I’m not sure that I even mind being chased into the bathroom.  What I DO MIND is being spoken to as if I am a schoolyard homie, or posse, or BFF, or whatever the hell they call them.

I am a customer damnit.  I just want to be treated as such.

 
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Posted by on August 20, 2011 in Cultural Critique

 

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