:: Wog Blog ::
:: WHAT AM I THINKING ABOUT? ::
:: Sunday 22 February 2004 ::
Earnest Tedium
Prof Bunyip has a post up about 'Plath the Picture' and I was unfortunate to catch a review of 'Julia Roberts does Feminism' today, an equally pointless exercise venerating foolish women of the past.
Two Fools.
At one point the Roberts character rails angrily in the film about some girdle advertising. The script: " 'Buy a girdle and free your life." What does that mean. What. Does. That. Even. Mean?? Grrrr."
It simple means somewhere there's a bloke running a girdle factory with about ooh, maybe 40 employees, who is trying to sell some girdles, so he can buy some better machines from the bloke running the machine factory with its ooh, 60 employees, and they're both paying rent to the landlord property developer who's also involved in a housing property development to build homes for folks...etc etc.
You get the picture.
Julia Roberts characteracter does not.
Never enters her pretty head.
Cos its too chock full of thoughts about how wronged she is. Feminists then as now think about themselves all the time. The react to everything. 'How do I feel about this advert? Could it be oppressing me? I think I am oppressed by it. Grrrr.'
Pathetic. Actually pathetic.
Just like Naomi Wolf's allegations of harrassment 20 years ago. 'He touched me up. 20 years ago. I did not like it. My career is successful. But it happened to me. Me me me. I want justice. Even though it will not achieve anything except give me a feeling of justice. Me me me.'
God help us.
They cannot and never were able to see past themselves, whether it was Friedan or Steinem or Summers or any of the other dragons of the 50's and 60's and 70's or even Wolf now.
They railed against their underwear when the only reason bras and girdles were even around and popular, was because some women's bodies were gorgeous and perky and others were flabby and saggy and those f&s girls needed help to look gorgeous.
No big deal. Just usual female envy and vanity going on, as always.
Railing against doing the housework. Now railing about glass ceilings in the workplace and the absence of free child care for their stinking bairns.
Every feminist I know has a fat arse, a filthy house and is disgusted that tax payers won't let them dump their kiddies at day care for free, and preferrably right next door.
That is the great triumph of the feminist icons, Frieden and Steinem and Summers and now Wolf - that generations of girlies are now liberated enough, if they want to be, to have no shame about being pains in the arse. To have no shame even about making 'girle ads' of their own.
Every editor of every stupid women's magazine in Oz with the diet pages and the chocalate cake recipes and the 13 year olds modelling clothes is a woman.
Every one.
Same goes internationally for cosmetics businesses.
Nothing Julia Roberts' character would even have contemplated.
Why does it give me the shits so much? Cos wog women know a little something about real patriarchal society, real machismo, the horror of being chatted up by a Turk bloke. Ewww. Wog women know that liberation is not some Plath-like whitebread concept of oppression in ads and the horror of one's rank poems going unread.
Liberation is a serious matter.
And for me, whitebread liberation was never sincere about women at all. It was only ever about those particular women who never once stopped thinking about themsleves.
Just themselves.
:: WB 12:15 am [link+] ::
