Category: Social Media

International Women’s Day (2019)

Parker Hellman

Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker

In the same week as International Women’s Day, a BBC headline read “Kylie Jenner becomes world’s youngest billionaire.”  Wow! What are the chances?  And the Beeb, notorious for tagging everyone as a member of some social/political group, didn’t even mention she was a woman.  Now, that, girls and boys, is gender equality.

Actually, I not the least bit shocked to discover that Kylie Jenner is rich enough to buy a small country in Africa and turn it into a tanning salon for herself and her friends.  After all, she’s been on the social media circuit since Paris Hilton was hot, and that was a number of years ago.  (Ms. Hilton’s “leaked” sex tape was 2001.)  Anyway, with more media coverage that an Ebola outbreak, it was almost impossible for Kylie not to get stinkin’ rich.  And I, for one, say, “Good on ya!”  I’ve never been opposed to people using their bodies to make a living; after all, professional athletes do it every day.  Nor am I against self-promotion, although I am wary of such people.  What I do wonder, however, especially on a day like today, is what history’s serious women would think about the antics of contemporary females like Kylie Jenner — self-proclaimed feminists who whore their privacy for trending fame and ungodly gain.  What, for example, would Lillian Hellman have to say, or Martha Gellhorn or the tongue that launched a thousand quips, Dorothy Parker?

For those of you who don’t live on this planet, Kylie Jenner is the latest member of the Kardashian celebrity factory to cash in – big time! – on P.T. Barnum’s maxim “There’s a sucker born every minute”– and Lillian, Martha and Dorothy are her cultural great-grandmothers (from the 1930s) who cut the path for her to do it.

Oddly enough, on International Women’s Day, the last thing this world needs is yet another lesson in feminism.  In fact, there is a significant portion of the population who think people like me (old, heterosexual white men) should just shut up and lay low for 24 hours.  They may have a point; after all, I am a self-confessed relic of a different age.  However, I think we need to stop the gender train for a moment, let everyone take three deep ones and get some historical perspective.

Way back in the day, the women who first strolled through the Men Only door in the media arts were just as young, just as wild and just as controversial as any trending personality we have today.  Make no mistake: Hellman, Parker, Gellhorn and the rest drank and partied to excess.  They smoked Virginia tobacco and Mexican marijuana.  They listened to cool jazz and Cab Calloway’s hot jive.  They had sex with who they wanted; when they wanted.  They married, divorced and frequently took lovers.  They broke rules.  They danced in the streets.  They were young and they acted like it.  However, they were also serious women.  They had something to say and they said it.  Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934) dealt with lesbianism before most of America even knew it existed.  Meanwhile, the outspoken Parker was eventually blacklisted for her sharp and uncompromising political views.  At the same time, women like Martha Gellhorn and Margaret Bourke-White were making their bones as legitimate foreign correspondents.  Gelllhorn covered the Spanish Civil War for Collier’s and Bourke-White went to the Soviet Union for Fortune Magazine.  (She was the first Western journalist allowed in, by the way.)  Others, like photojournalist Dorothea Lange, were picturing the Great Depression and painters like Frida Kahlo were painting it.  When these women spoke, people stopped and listened.

Today, a lot of people are going to stop and listen to Kylie Jenner.  They’re going to watch her on TV and follow her on social media.  At twenty-two, her claim to fame is … uh … I don’t know what it is!  However, she and her cohorts are smart business people.  They know what sells, and they’ve packaged themselves as the product.  This is not a sin.

However, on International Women’s Day, I wonder what the women from the 30s would make of what female role models have become.

Popular Culture — Temporary Truth

pop culture

Pop culture is to culture what water is to granite: write your name in water and see how long it lasts.  But, eventually, even the mightiest carved granite tablet will be worn away by rivers of water.  Pop culture might be trivial and easily forgotten (I’m looking at you, Beanie Babies) but while it hangs around, it can change the way we think.  For example, for 99% of human history, a person had to work hard to be universally hated – mass murder usually did the trick.  Enter the Internet.  These days, all anyone has to do is disagree with Twitter once too often and they’ll find themselves on the business end of a Cybermob, howling for their blood.  Here are just a few other examples of how Pop Culture has changed our perceptions.  There are many, many more.

Look what happened to clowns!  Back in the day, clowns were fun.  They were colourful.  They were silly.  They had big feet and made balloon animals.  They hosted TV programs and were everybody’s first choice for their child’s birthday party.  They even advertised fast food.  Then, in 1986, along came Stephen King.  BAM!  Suddenly, clowns became evil.  And not just regular evil, either — eat-your-eyeballs evil!  Now, everybody’s afraid of clowns as if humans have always had a deep, primeval fear of painted faces.  We even have one of those meaningless psychobabble names for it – coulrophobia.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, vampires were created to scare the hell outta people.  They were the creatures whose very existence broke the laws of God and nature.  They were the secret horror that lurked behind us in the dark, thirsty for our souls.  Wow!  What a difference a generation makes!  Anne Rice and a couple of million imitators have turned vampires into that kinda odd, undead guy next door.  Vampires play video games and Monopoly, and aside from the nasty habit of wanting to feast on your blood, they’re no more dangerous than an angry Chihuahua.

For centuries, machines were our friends.  However, the prevailing wisdom of our time is that, one of these days, your laptop is going to become self-aware, leap up and slaughter you, the kids, your neighbour, your cousin and anybody else who gets in its way.  Apparently, this is the inevitable result of Artificial Intelligence.  Crap!  It’s too complicated to explain here, but trust me: there is no scientific proof for this, at all.  None!  It’s all based on recent science fiction books, television and movies.  Think about it!  My computer can’t even get Auto-Correct right; how the hell is it going to take over the world?

And finally, one of the best ones:

Of all the lame excuses in the history of lame excuses, sex addiction has got to be the lamest.
“Sorry, honey!  I slept with your brother, his best friend and Carl from work — cuz I’m a sex addict!”
“No, not all at the same time.  I’m not that addicted!”
I’m pretty sure sex addiction isn’t a real thing.  Mother Nature made us wanna have sex because that’s how we make more of us.  It’s next to impossible to be addicted to something that you’re biologically programmed to do in the first place.  It’s like saying, “I’m addicted to breathing.”  Contemporary culture made up sex addiction so we’d have someplace to hide when we act like emotional assholes.

My point is, be careful what you believe to be irrefutable truth because, as some Persian poet said, a thousand years ago, “This, too, shall pass.”

Gillette: Ya Screwed Up!

gillette

Gillette has just made a massive mistake that’s going to have consequences all over the world.  This is serious, folks — so you’re going to need a little background.  Gillette recently released an advertising video that, in no uncertain terms, calls their customers (men) a bunch of knuckle-dragging assholes who spend their leisure time teaching their male children to bully each other and harass women.  And then they take the virtuous stance that this has got to stop.  Applause!  Another multi-national corporation has found its soul.

Maybe.

Personally, I don’t think Gillette suddenly developed a social conscience last Tuesday and felt a moral obligation to join the #MeToo conversation.  I think their advertising department took one look at the gigantic numbers generated by the controversial Nike/Kaepernick collaboration last September and said, “Wow!  We need to get in on some of this social justice action!”  So, at a time when traditional advertising is dying, they decided to hitch their corporate brandwagon to the rising star of “toxic masculinity.”  Fair enough.  Unfortunately, there are a bunch of cynics in this world who believe Gillette is just newsjacking.  They think that the reality is Gillette doesn’t much care if its customers punch each other in the face or have pan-fried puppies for breakfast — as long as they buy razorblades.  Here’s the deal: if Gillette were actually serious about social justice, they’d be funding a string of Gillette Centres for Battered Women.  After all, the designated smoking areas in some German airports are sponsored by Camel.  Honestly, if a multi-billion dollar corporation is going to talk the talk, they should walk the walk — every once in a while.

But the real problem is there’s going to be an unintended consequence from Gillette’s global hypocrisy.  Millions of Gillette customers don’t like being told they’re the problem and then being asked to pay for the privilege.  They’re dumping their Gillette products in the trash and finding alternatives – alternatives that have a different chemical composition.  Thus, in the very near future, people all over the world are going to subconsciously discover that their sons, fathers, brothers, husbands, boyfriends and lovers all smell different.  Humans, like all animals, rely on their olfactory sense for any number of social and sexual cues, and when the people closest to us don’t “smell right,” that’s a major problem.

So, now we’re left with a bunch of pissed-off men, a lot of suspicious babies, wary relatives, cautious friends and an army of confused and slightly frustrated women — all because the folks down at Gillette wanted to cash in on the 24-hour Twitter news cycle.  Thanks, Gillette!  If that’s “the best men can be,” don’t do me any more favours.