So I just knew the whole “men hate hill” bullshit would come to a festering whitehead conclusion. Who knew it would be with the once-important Tina Brown. You might remember her from the 80s, maybe even the 90s. She use to run the elite of magazines, including Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Now she goes where writing careers go to die, Newsweek.
Let’s see who was once one the most important talking heads has to say:
It’s a revolt that has been overdue for a while and has now found its focus in Clinton’s candidacy. In 1952, Ralph Ellison’s revelatory novel, “Invisible Man,” nailed the experience of being black in America. In the relentless youth culture of the early 21st century, if you are 50 and female, the novel that’s being written on your forehead every day is “Invisible Woman.” All over the country there are vigorous, independent, self-liberated boomer women-women who possess all the management skills that come from raising families while holding down demanding jobs, women who have experience, enterprise and, among the empty nesters, a little financial independence, yet still find themselves steadfastly dissed and ignored. Advertisers don’t want them. TV networks dump their older anchorwomen off the air. Hollywood studios refuse to write parts for them. Employers make it clear they’d prefer a “fresh (cheaper) face.”
You have got to be fucking kidding. I knew Hillary and her supporters love to get up on the cross and be the martyr, but the “Invisible Woman”? I am sure the moms of the ghettos feel the pain of “vigorous, independent, self-liberated boomer women”. I am sure all those civil rights activists from 50s and 60s love having their struggle co-opted by yet another wave of self-righteous boomers.
And what is with “Advertisers don’t want them”? Are you serious? Every bit of programming from 9 am to 5 pm is tailor-made for the demographic of boomers. And “TV networks dump their older anchorwomen off the air?” You mean like Tucker?
And to take Ralph Ellison incredible book, and bend and contort it to fit the victimhood boomer women need to feel, to feel validated, is beyond incredulous. It is borderline criminal, devaluating an entire people’s culture to score some cheap talking points.
But it’s so true, boomer women are constantly being told to sit on the back of the bus.
Boomer women are denied space at lunch counters.
Boomer women have crosses burned on their lawns.
Boomer women are forced to take service entrances to their jobs.
Boomer women are treated like second class citizens under Jim Crow.
Boomer women face off with the KKK and Dixiecrats who try to use threat of death and violence to keep them from the polls.
Boomer women are constantly feed into a self-fulfilling cycle of broken promises and apartheid.
Poor, poor boomer women, when will the world truly understand your pain, and how it trumps that of the African-American experience over the last 300 years?
Like Oprah’s people!
Even Oprah abandoned them when she opted for Obama. Am I alone in suspecting that TV’s most powerful 54-year-old woman just might have endorsed him so fast for reasons of desirable viewer demographics as much as personal inspiration? Certainly, no TV diva in her 50s who values her ratings wants to be defined by the hot-flash cohort.
This is what happens to other women, especially those of a certain skin persuasion, who do not follow around white boomer women like a good mammy following Ms. Scarlett around the house helping her get ready for the big plantation dance.
I guess for Brown and Hill, good work is so hard to find these days. Why you could say the help are “invisible women”, just the way boomers like it. Except of course, when there is a dance on.
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a white boomer woman, agreeing with you. Perhaps I need more awakening in this area. I believe there are huge feminist issues to be tackled yet…but my own personal marginalization is not one of them.
And the idea that a white boomer woman gets cast as invisible when she’s one of three finalists for the job of President of the United States strikes me as the height of irony.
in a nutshell Hillary fries my white female boomer ass, and makes me want to hurl thing at the TV when her female brigade starts telling me I should vote for her. As for older talking heads Andrea Mitchel, Barbara Walters, Cokie Roberts, the TV is riddled with boomer women. The plasticine women and men who are seen daily on CNN are not regardless of age or gender news people.
I am over 50 and have never been invisible to anyone other then those who are so caught up their valueless, screw you shallow world view that I consider it a compliment. Most who treat me as invisable I must say are the same ones who always have. They are believers in conformity who feel they need to stay forever young at any cost and measure there worth by the fucking TV’s definition of a life, and define success as winning a game in which the rest of us are losers.
What’s the difference between these elitists insiders tagging this nonsense as feminism and Bush running around in in 2000 campaigning on how he was the victim of a class war. As an obnoxious ad from my youth (selling makeup) said “Dno’t hate me cause I’m young and beautiful”. No one hates Hillary because she is a woman and a boomer.
Ask me, I think she’s a disgrace to both and that makes this feminist mad. Entitlement is not feminism, equality is not climbing the corporate ladder. She spent her youth hustling for Goldwater how can she run as an advocate for either feminism or my generation? In both cases she wouldn’t know what the real values are if they wiggled up and bit her, as they are right now.
is also relevant:
it’s fashionable in the blogs to dismiss it or denigrate it, but it’s happening.
Isn’t it just so cool!
I was born in 1964. Am I one of the evil ones?
In about 20 to 30 years if we have a universe left, pinche you’ll be hearing about the sins of your generation. Unless you are perfect, in which case I request a shrine to worship at. 🙂 Need to atone right now.
we women are where we are because we had to give up a lot to keep men around to help us rear children.
now the last century or two, things started changing… some very dramatic changes inDEED. and we’re all getting used to the idea.
this is NOT some plot by men. women really are the movers and shakers of society. they made the right choice 1000s of years ago to do whatever they needed to keep men around.
this isn’t anybody’s “fault.” we are all breaking out of old ways. it’s not a plot. it’s not evil. it’s a seismic shift in society. we are having a hard time understanding that because it must be, must be, somebody’s fault.
but none-the-fucking-less, energy goes on. we are swept along with it… so let’s stop the whining. we want to change things, girls? then let’s do it.
number one? use our powers as consumers and in the board room to come up with things that work for working mothers. then maybe we’d stop talking like men at work. even more important, we need to STOP emulating their decision making. you can plainly see where that’s gotten us.
okay… kill me. but tough.
and hillary? she is in a tough spot because she fell into the trap lots of corporate women do (hello Ms. Pelosi)… they adopt the style of men in their decision-making and in the way they play the game.
she’d have my vote if she weren’t such a phony. yeah. that’s right hill. you’re a phony.
she had a choice about her behavior. she made the wrong one. imo.
is another person’s “acknowledgment and adaptation”
Well, no more incredulous than Ellison “bending and contorting”/”acknowledging and adapting” Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground”, which is the source both of Ellison’s title and of the opening monologue. Ellison takes the alienation felt by Dostoevsky’s narrator and uses it as a springboard to discuss the alienation of mid-20th century black America (and Dostoevsky would likely have hated Ellison for it – their beliefs are nearly antithetical). Brown wants to use Ellison’s version as a way of discussing the alienation she feels in being a 21st century woman. Each generation builds its self-identity on the wreckage of previous culture, often radically misinterpreted. Why is this any different?
By the way, I agree with your main thesis about boomer women not having experienced the same kind of systemic cultural marginalization as people of color, although I don’t think it’s helpful to reject a group’s claims to victimization outright, just because it hasn’t been as visible or violent as that of another group. There’s something to be said for not overdramatizing a struggle, but there’s nothing to be gained from unfairly downplaying it, either.