Calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean, I need it right now!
Late the other night a political meme popped up after vice president Kamala Harris’ turn on a CNN Town Hall that just blew me away! Not because I support Harris, oh no, I am not thrilled by either of the front runners. I am not openly supporting either. It had more to do with how the summation of the difference in perception of both candidates and how it relates to the world of patriarchy. Particularly patriarchy as it has trickled down from toxic high demand religions into every day ways that society holds expectations of the sexes.
What did the meme say? Van Jones of CNN said this after viewing the remarks by Harris:
“They aren’t taking the same exam. He gets to be lawless. She has to be flawless.”
I like Van Jones, he tends to say things I’m thinking live on air. Injects some common sense into an increasingly out of touch CNN. I suspect that’s why he’s not been promoted into a lead position at CNN, the world doesn’t much like people who are wrenches onto the way things have always been.
What is a wrench? Someone that refuses to shut up about the wrongs in this world. They throw a wrench into things, stopping the smooth function of the worst things. The world doesn’t much like wrenches, but they serve the valuable function of keeping people from believing in every toxic idea out there. I know I am a wrench and I am okay with that.
Back to the meme. If this isn’t a picture of what it means to be a woman in America I do not know what is! This is the same culture that has bled down into every layer of society. Non-denominational Evangelicalism started this nonsense way, way back, maybe as far back as the founding of the Paul-based doctrine of the early church. What is notable in the U.S. is that we’re still internalizing this garbage to this level when most of the civilized parts of the world have strenuously rejected it! Most folks never catch onto the fact that this idea is utter twaddle.
This is one of those ideas that the world of Quiverfull, Evangelical and Fundamentalism have taken to some scary extremes. You’re required to be perfect, all the time. It’s why there is rampant use of anti depressant prescription use in very religious communities. Women end up broken down eventually when this is taken too seriously, melting down from those inner critical voices and inability to actually be perfect wrapped around awful theology. No one is perfect!
What awful theology I hear you say? Example? Just look at the entire issues of modesty and clothing in the church.
The only reason I am picking modesty is that this is one of those moving target/changing the requirements all the time things that damages so many. No one agrees on what this looks like, or how best to implement it, but it has one simple goal – to keep men from straying into the sin of lust. It puts the entire responsibility for the man’s sin on the woman, giving him a “get out of sin” card like we’re playing some twisted form of Religious Monopoly. It also reduces men to crude animals, unable to control their lusts, eager to mount any stray vagina just like Don Draper unzipping a dress off a multitude of women.
Don Draper being a character on “Mad Men” that seems to get with so many different women you just know that whoever writes the scripts has to be doing some sort of weird wish fulfillment. Why is that? Ah, because even in the world of religion many guys look up to that, the player, the man who does what they dream of. It’s also part of the problem that anyone idolizes that sad pathetic sexual merry-go-round. By the last season of “Mad Men” we get to see that Don Draper is broken not perfect. It’s part of the lawless – flawless dichotomy I’m talking about.
As women we’re told we’re to be modestly dressed, but that dressing also needs to be male gaze friendly, or just not offensive. Since the eased freedoms around the LGBTQ community have happened I’ve been treated to puzzling males in my space expressing opinions about how women and others have stopped dressing ‘the right way.’ I’ve had to disabuse a few of them from those notions, pointing out that everyone has the right to wear that thing that speaks to their soul without the weight of male judgment. It’s not all about men! What a woman or man wears is literally none of your business.
Just look at the way Kamala Harris dresses as the vice president. She’s got that only acceptable way that women dress in male dominated spheres – the boring business suit usually in muted colors. I know that’s what I wore during my short ill-fated stint selling new cars. It’s the least threatening thing a woman can don, unless of course if it’s red. The psychology of color says red is too threatening to don in a competitive environment around men.
It shouldn’t be that way. Harris should be free, same as Trump should be, to wear what she wants. Like John Fetterman is doing by showing up looking like that dude from Game Stop to vote in the Capital. I don’t care for what he wears, only with the fact that he should have the freedom to do so.
I ramble, this is not my main point beyond how the standards are unequally meted out between men and women. The main thing I’m stumbling over is that he gets to be and she has to be. There’s a great deal there in that sentence that blows up the lie of equality that our society supposedly honors. It’s implied that he has the rights and freedoms that come with entitlement, with having choices. While his opponent no freedom, at best she has bounded choice. Bounded choice is when your choices are limited by a cult theology that you are in allegiance to. Hence the business suit.
This is what happens in a society that pays lip service to the ideals of equality, yet actually practices just the opposite. Pondering this today listening to P!nk’s song “F*cking Perfect” right now.