| 8:53a |
Linguistics; political language; eldering...
You know Time magazine? The one that can make you a superstar by putting your picture on its cover? The one that claims to bring us The Really Important News Of The Day? The one that claims to deal with Serious Matters? Usually I'm for it, and I appreciate the big overview stories it does that really are about important news and serious matters.
And then there's the issue Time came up with for September 10, 2007 -- the "We Are Very Confused Here; Please Join Us In That" issue. On the outside it has a cover occupied by an attractive young woman showing off her strong right arm and her clenched right fist and her attitude. On the inside it has a story (on pp. 71-74, written by Anne Kreamer) titled "The Gray Wars," with an intro blurb that reads: "To dye or not to dye. That is the question in the latest feminist debate over aging and authenticity."
Here's Kreamer on page 72:
"Today, four decades after the youthquake's transformation of the culture, most baby-boomer women have held on to the hedonistic forever-young part of their Woodstock dreams a lot more tenaciously than to the open-and-honest part. And in doing so, they have presided over a narrowing of the range of acceptable looks for women. Women may be CEOs, Cabinet officers and TV-news anchors and may openly indulge their sexual appetities -- but only if they appear eternally youthful. And a main requirement is a hair color other than gray or white."
And on page 73 -- after quoting a doctor who says that her "male colleagues gain respect with gray" and a public relations executive who says that women who are not "well maintained and current" in the South are going to hear people whispering "Bless her heart" -- Kreamer writes:
"Political professionals say that the double standard is a great unspoken inequity but that candidates and officeholders don't dare publicly discuss it for fear of seeming trivial."
Hello? For fear of seeming trivial? I respectfully suggest that it is trivial. We have war in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have genocide in Darfur. We have global warming. We have torture and terrorism. We have violence in our streets and in our homes. We have corruption and incompetence in our government. We have poverty and hunger and homelessness. We have hurricanes and tornados and earthquakes and wildfires and blizzards and tsunamis and droughts and floods and plagues. We have people dying just for the lack of clean water. We have a broken healthcare system and a shattered educational system and a crumbling infrastructure. We have real problems -- Serious Matters -- that require our urgent attention and energy.
And Time is telling us that today's women are doing the following little meta-warble in their workplaces and their public lives:
"I'm as intelligent and as skilled and as capable as any man here, and I can do any job you've got, just as well as any man! You can't tell me what to do, so just put that idea out of your head! Oh .... except you can tell me what colors I'm allowed to paint the hair on my head."
You know what really gets to me? This kind of thing.
I'm going to go sit on the Group W Bench, myself, with my gray hair on. |