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Judith, I agree that the right messenger (at the right moment) could deliver most of your speech on gender. But maybe it would be easier for a woman to achieve liftoff. Anybody else remember Nicole Hollander's Sylvia cartoon on the wage gap? From her classic, Ma, Can I Be a Feminist and Still Like Men? (A: Sure, just like you can be a vegetarian and like fried chicken.) In it, four people respond to the question, How do you feel about equality for women? "I feel that women should get equal pay for equal work,'' says the white guy. "I think it's only simple justice that women get equal pay for equal work,'' says the Hispanic guy. "I think if a woman's doing the same job a man is doing, she should get the same pay,'' says the black guy. "Equality for women,'' says the Hillary stand-in, "means that our potential for physical, intellectual and emotional growth be supported and nurtured. It means being recognized as full and valuable members of this society. It means being given a chance to risk, to grow, to make a contribution to a better world, side by side with men.'' I think about this not infrequently. (Though perhaps not as often as I do my very favorite Sylvia, in which two hookers walk into a bar. One tells the other, "So he dresses himself up in this chicken suit, covers himself up with mostaccioli ... and then looks around real scared. He says: 'How do you feel ... about Title IX?' And I say, 'Senator, anything that turns you on, turns me on.'' And then I trigger the hidden camera.'')
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Hey Melinda, when you get off your fainting couch, John Kerry did NOT give that speech—not in the memorable, reimagining-family-values way that Judith is imagining. And yes you're right, Rachael, these issues are divisive, and I guess I have to reluctantly agree that it wouldn't be in the Democrats' interest if Hillary or Obama decided to have a Big Gender Moment. Which is why, as Dahlia and Melinda started out by acknowledging, we're not having it. But I applaud Judith's list, especially in its attention to economics and employment, which never quite seem to get their due and catch on fire, and so leave two-working parent families scrambling to keep it all together. I'd like to think that someday the country will be ready for and will find the candidate who will make universal preschool seem as important as saving Bear Stearns.
On a lighter note, earlier this week I watched Fifty Nude Women by Margot Roth of New Yorker Talk of the Town fame and marveled at its winsome playfulness. The women in this 12-minute film seem entirely at ease in their bodies, of all varieties. I'm with Jezebel in that the video made me think about weight but in a much less tedious way that usual. The curves and rolls and wrinkles and scars and stretch marks signaled vulnerability and also a record of lives fully lived.
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