“Civil Rights leaders”
So I type his name into Google news and the top stories are:
New York Times 4h ago
Kim Kardashian, Jesse Jackson, Jenny McCarthy and More Mourn the Death of Hugh Hefner
PEOPLE.com 6h ago
‘Godspeed, Hugh Hefner’: Playmates, celebrities, civil rights leaders remember the Playboy founder
Washington Post 7h ago
He sold women as if they were potato chips. He was not a beacon of civil rights unless you simply don’t think women are human beings.
Ah, but there’s the catch. It’s becoming clearer and clearer with every passing day how many people either actively do not believe women are fully human, or are passively accepting of the fact that objectification and dehumanization can be reduced to “locker room talk” or just a bit of fun around the water cooler. I have had this mansplained to me very earnestly this week, and I discovered (thanks to the knowledge of a couple of 20-something men) that really the only problem women have is that they aren’t paid as much as men (that’s only a small problem, apparently, not the enormous problem us pesky feminists think it is ) and that I, a woman of 56, don’t really know what it was like to be a woman in the 1980s and 1990s, and these 20-something males needed to set me straight, because somehow they miraculously knew what it was like living as the opposite sex before they were born (I suppose that knowledge is contained in testosterone? Or is it imparted through seminal fluids?)
I am on the verge of deciding I will never speak to any 20-something males again, a rather difficult feat when you teach college.
iknklast, as a man of a similar age to you, I certainly remember the 1980’s and 1990’s. Even so, I still cannot claim to know what it was like to be a woman back then* any more than I know what it’s like being a woman now. I do recall, though, that bad hair was de rigeur.
*Not strictly true. I have on a few occasions gone out in public dressed as a women and, thanks to the excellent make-up skills of my wife and my best friend (a woman; who’da thunk it?), very convincingly, too. The two most memorable were as a dowdy elderly woman in M&S florals, grey wig, and headscarf, and a blonde ‘bombshell’ type complete with pneumatic breasts and skin-tight lycra micro-mini dress. I have never felt quite so ignored and irrelevant as I did in the former get-up, nor so objectified as in the latter. These were, however, only for a few hours each time, so I still insist I had but the barest inkling of the real female experience.
‘….dressed as women…. Superfluous ‘a’ crept in there.
Might as well add; maybe your 20-something ‘experts’ could benefit from some well-applied make-up and prosthetics, and having a day or two living as women.
Kardashian’ Jackson, McCarthy… gee, such a set of endorsements.