"What Is It About Men?"

Amy Winehouse - What Is It About Men - YouTube

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzsRZx5gzWg       While reading this week's assignment, "Carrie Bradshaw's Queer Postfeminism", for some reason I was reminded of the late Amy Winehouse's song "What Is It About Men?" Amy Winehouse, dead at 27, was an entire generation removed from the feminists of the '70's.  Comfortable in their sexuality, women of this age group compete alongside men with full equality.  Yet, just as Carrie Bradshaw and her friends discovered, all is not equal in love and sex. In her song, Amy asserts her right "to take the wrong man as naturally as I sing."  Yet she finds this trait -- the troubling attractions to men, and her inability to resist them, "destructive.".  Her moral compass is askew.  She laments her "aggressive side" that compels her to take whatever she wants, regardless of the consequences. In "Sex and the City", Carrie and Mr. Bigg have an illicit affair after he has married and while she is in a committed relationship with another man (see Season Three, 'Easy Come, Easy Go').  She puts up a token resistance to this, but finds their hook-ups in increasingly tawdry hotels irresistible.  She may say she wants stability, but when it comes along, it has the face of Boring written all over it. Enjoying a sense of sexual liberation unknown to women in the 50's and '60's, thanks to their '70's sisters, these women take what they want.  But does this freedom leave them any less empty?  At the end of the day, Amy Winehouse bemoans: "my destructive side/has grown a mile wide", while Carrie and her friends just don't seem to get it -- it's friendship first, then sex, if it's a relationship you're seeking.

Stop Watching Bridal Shows! (or, it doesn't have to be a Downer Experience)

We are having a wedding in my family.  And it will have no resemblance to the shows we've seen clips of in class.  Hopefully, the lovely bride-to-be will never have an expression like this one:



This young lady looks to be getting a major migraine.  I've often noticed the tendency of human beings to act like lemmings; if one jumps off a bridge, just about every other one will follow.  That is the only way to explain the insanity, the incredible intensity, of the whole bridal experience nowadays.

Once again, thanks to this class for showing how the media manipulates the masses.  My children don't really watch television.   However, they have both been in enough weddings to know they don't want any part of the "traditional" fixings -- only the love, honor, and cherish part.  So, when they decided to get married -- my older son and his beautiful girlfriend -- they decided they would have a quiet ceremony in a lovely art gallery in D.C., which is where they live.  Laura went shopping one Sunday with her best girlfriend and found a gorgeous, affordable dress that she immediately fell in love with.  No angst there.  She e-mailed me the picture and I gave it my hearty approval.  After the ceremony, family and a few friends will have dinner at a favorite D.C. restaurant.

If it is all a little quieter than my husband and I would like, we can always offer to give them a party in our backyard.  Tents, flowers, something tasteful.  But that will be their call, too.  No Bridezillas here, and no Monster mother-in-laws either.  Thank God!

Kardashian Grrls

I have a guilty pleasure – I am a closeted (or not so closeted) watcher of the Kardashian reality shows.  I’m not sure how it happened – was it the heat waves this summer, my own minor surgery, too many boring baskets of ironing to plow through – however it happened, thanks to streaming and Netflix, I was able to watch all six seasons in a sort of mindless daze. 

That’s an awful lot of Kardashian at once.  Part of the fascination, I admit, is that I am part Armenian myself.  I thought it was cool that these dark-eyed, ebony-haired young women with features so much like my own were seen as super-glamorous, hot reality-show celebs.  After all, I grew up in the era of the Clairol commercials, “Is it true blondes have more fun?”  Although I have long reconciled with that media blitz and truly do like my own more exotic heritage, stuff like that sticks with you.  So part of it is that I love seeing the Kardashians described as “gorgeous” and “hot”.  It wasn’t so very long ago that brunettes couldn’t possibly be gorgeous or hot, unless they were movie stars.

Then one afternoon, out of curiosity, I googled their father, Robert Kardashian.  I remembered him from the O.J. Simpson trial.  And I was surprised to find this picture of Kim Kardashian with her father:

Kim is reportedly around fourteen years old when this picture was taken.  I think she looks a lot older – more like twenty.  But what struck me was her beauty, natural and pretty much unadorned.  She doesn’t really look anything like this Kim Kardashian:

Obviously, she is older in this picture.  But her nose, which looks so much like my own in the picture with her father, looks narrower.  Her  eyes look narrower, too – is that because she’s wearing her famous pointy false eyelashes?  And she has a sort of world-weary look about her.  That sweetness, that innocence, that exotic girl-next-door quality, is totally gone.  Now she has breast implants that she shows off at every opportunity, a boadacious butt (there was even one episode of the Kardashians that “proved” Kim hasn’t had butt implants by showing her butt getting x-rayed), and wears so much make-up that when they show her without it she is practically unrecognizable.

Whether or not Kim Kardashian has had plastic surgery is hotly debated on websites that are devoted to that sort of thing.  I think, looking at the picture of herself with her father, that it’s pretty indisputable that she has.  She still looks Armenian, but she’s taken the stamp of authenticity off herself.  Now she looks like a Hugh Hefner version of a beautiful Armenian/American babe.  And I think she’s lost something in the process.

Women Wrestlers: Empowerment or Degradation?

I admit I've never been into wrestling, male or female.  Women bodybuilders left me cold, too -- I could see the benefits of being strong, but never thought a muscle-bound female body was the least bit attractive.  Since becoming something of a gym rat and fitness addict for the last seven years, I've done some rethinking on the subject of women invading and succeeding in such a male-dominated sport.  The question about women wrestlers, especially as depicted on WWE, raises another question in my mind:  Are these women empowered because they are succeeding in a traditionally male-dominated field, or are they degrading themselves (and other viewers?)

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As much as I rail against the violence in any sport, even football, which is America's passion (and I love it, too), female-on-female violence seems especially bad.   Men seem to get off on it, which is upsetting, but the images of two women -- the fairer sex, if you will -- down on a mat, getting each other into head locks and grabbing one another's hair -- just makes me want to cover my eyes.  The first thing that comes to mind is the male jeer:  "Cat fight!" whenever two women get into it.  I've always hated that phrase.  Unfortunately, when I see two women in a physical confrontation, that is immediately what I think.   We think we should be better than men, at least in the area of decorum.  I was raised to "act like a lady".  Keep my skirt down, keep my voice down, don't swear, and certainly never, never hit someone. 

The women on WWE are so far from that it could be comical, if it wasn't so disgusting.  I know the fights are scripted.  I know they are being paid.  And I know people (especially men) love to watch them.  They are invading a male-dominated arena, and I suppose there's something to be said for that.  But somehow the price doesn't seem worth it.