Fried & True (30 page)

June 2006

LETTERS FROM CAMP REHOBOTH

I AM WOMAN HEAR ME SNORE

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that a study from the Stockholm Brain Institute (“Come have your head examined with us!”) says that lesbian brains react differently to certain sex hormones than heterosexual women's brains, thereby adding to the evidence that homosexuality has a physical basis rather than being “caused” by learned behavior. That's good.

But the bad news is that our brains react similarly to straight men. Ouch!!!!

Well, not quite the same, and that's a good thing because these days many straight men are reverting to cavemen when it comes to their behavior. And I for one don't want to be associated with it.

Naturally, I'm not talking about all straight men, anymore than Mary Cheney represents all gay women (Not! More about her later) but I've noticed a disturbing trend whereby straight men are once again being congratulated for being boorish, sexist and homophobic.

I'm talking about the subtle creep of creeps into commercials, TV shows and everyday life. In a single prime-time hour I saw a man proudly trick his wife into staying home with the kids while he went fishing, a restaurant showing a huddle of men grunting “Beef!” and that icky Dodge commercial with the silly little fairy. In it, a big hairy guy throws a fairy (a literal one, with wings) against a wall and the fairy's wand turns the macho guy into a lithe little fellow in strange socks, walking a tiny Chihuahua. We get the point.

In fact, after seeing a Yellow Book ad with women, no, girls prancing around in outfits previously only seen in darkened lap dance emporiums, it prompts the question “what do streetwalkers wear these days to stand out from the herd?”

Then I picked up a magazine and found t-shirts being marketed to teens with slogans like “I'm a Virgin…this is a very old t-shirt” or “Porn Star” on them. Click!

Are you seasoned enough to remember the old
Ms. Magazine
“Click” campaign? For years, the last page of
Ms. Magazine
featured advertisements, sent in by readers, that were insulting or degrading to women. The magazine used to print them with “click!” as a caption, hoping that people would hear that click in their heads when confronted with other sexist stimuli.

Watching TV last night I heard the click so often I thought the room was infested with crickets. Or was that poor Betty Friedan flipping in her final resting place?

The media is bad enough, but recently, a friend, introducing herself to colleagues in a professional class, told the group she was a feminist—and was met by the sucking of air and groans.

What's that about??? Are we so far into post-feminism that feminism becomes the F-word? Is sisterhood less about powerful women helping women and more about the tabloids following two anorexic women fighting over loutish Charlie Sheen?

Everyone knows that sixties and seventies-era feminism paved the way for more women legislators, doctors, lawyers and CEOs than ever before. But does the present generation of young professionals know how that happened?

Have they been told that their grandmothers advised their mothers to go to teachers college or nursing school “to have something to fall back on.” Now God bless our fabulous teachers and nurses—I would not be up to either job, but nobody's grandmother told them to get an MBA in case they didn't get their MRS. Instead, mothers told daughters not to worry about dropping out of college to get married because heck, they wouldn't be using their expensive educations anyway.

Mortified as I am to admit this, when my own mother gave me the line about having something to fall back on I bought it. Not only did I go to college thinking that picking a husband
was more important than picking a major, but if you recall, I started off wearing hose, heels, and, I swear it, false eyelashes every day to class.

To digress, one night, I parked my gluey eyelashes on the wall in my dorm room and the next morning as I staggered out of bed I saw two huge spiders on the wall and pulverized my Long and Lush Max Factors.

Fortunately, by October of freshwoman year, I'd been introduced to books by Gloria Steinem and “hippie” clothes. I failed to tell Mom that the only thing I wound up falling back on were pillows on the floor of apartments lit by lava lamps and featuring some groovy second hand smoke.

Oddly, I had no interest in this free love era (can you believe they called it that!). It took me another decade to work that problem out, but I did begin to understand the burgeoning theory that women mattered.

But now, my lesbian brain (the one that does not react like a straight man, thank you very much), is worried.

Are self-avowed feminists really being mocked? Is advertising once again celebrating women as sex objects? Is it okay for Jay Leno to make
Brokeback Mountain
jokes night after night? It would be hell to go backwards. I don't think I'd survive having to wear hosiery and heels to the Super G like my mother did.

And while we're talking about going backwards, there's Mary Cheney. Boy did she get it backwards. She couldn't come out and denounce her father's party, cronies and compatriots when they were campaigning to get elected. Noooo, she kept quiet like the good little woman, facilitating their election so they could trample gay rights, threaten the first amendment, kick privacy rights to the curb and gleefully plan to etch discrimination into the Constitution. And NOW she's cashing in by talking about being gay in America. Not to help the cause, mind you, but to help her sell her self-serving book. Too little, too late, too selfish.

Meanwhile back at that Scandinavian brain facility, (“Good
morning, Brain Institute, Press One for Lobotomies”) scientists held sniffing contests, with men and women, gay and straight inhaling male and female pheromones—those pesky little love aromas.

The good doctors deduced that heterosexual women found the male and female pheromones about equally pleasant, while straight men and lesbians liked the female pheromone more than the male one. Men and lesbians also found the male hormone more irritating than the female one.

That's nice. Frankly, I'm just plain irritated.

If we don't stop those alphabet generations from undoing the gains women achieved almost 40 years ago, we aging baby boomers are liable to have to pick up protest signs, (“not too heavy, I've got rotator cuff problems”) take to the streets (grab those Rockport walkers with the arch supports) and start singing protest songs. Nobody wants that.

So I'm making an appeal to our youngsters. Guys, don't be oafs. Gals, don't be objectified. Everybody, don't let feminism become a dirty word. And whatever you do, don't listen to Mary (Benedict Arnold) Cheney.

Because you really don't want to see me climbing the Capitol steps (hand me the oxygen, dear) waving a NOW poster and singing “I Am Woman Hear Me Roar.”

For all our sakes, I hope Feminism isn't dead, that it's just taking a snooze.

June 2006

LETTERS FROM CAMP REHOBOTH

GOOD TIMES ARE NOT ROLLING

I'm sitting in a hotel room in New Orleans, after seeing, in person, almost eight months following a hurricane, the most unimaginable destruction of neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the President of the U.S. is on TV fighting for a constitutional amendment against (omigod!) gay marriage.

What's wrong with this picture?

With 80 percent of New Orleans still up to its butt in mold and rotten sheetrock without, in large part, electricity, drinking water, grocery stores, gas stations or any open businesses, our self-described Decider has decided to abandon this historic city completely, and use his bully pulpit (and I do mean bully) to warn America that if they don't write discrimination against gays into the Constitution NOW, the apocalypse is coming. Guess what. It already happened in New Orleans. So here I am back in this devastated city, having been to a book conference here three weeks ago. Now I'm here for my day job with the Rehoboth Beach Main Street organization, affiliated with the National Trust for Historic Preservation. On my last trip I stayed in the French Quarter, sold books, ate crawfish, drank frozen Hand Grenades and bought t-shirts. We heard about the horrible affects of Katrina, but life in the Quarter seemed to be coming back.

Today, though, I got to see the unholy mess left in New Orleans neighborhoods for myself and now I'm mad as hell. In fact, as furious as I am at Decider-in-Chief for trying to rally his bigoted base with a strictly for show Constitutional Amendment banning same sex marriage—an amendment that has zero chance of approval, therefore making it a fools mission in every sense, I'm just as mad at him for abandoning New Orleans and the whole gulf coast.

Let's face it, he toured the same communities I just did; he
saw muddy water lines up to second stories in ruined neighborhoods; he saw holes in rooftops where people had to be cut out of their attics (and there are street after street of them); he saw homes where people died.

And what did this compassionate conservative do? He posed for photo ops in the only neighborhood still intact, and then walked away to obsess about (gasp) same sex marriage. If he's a compassionate conservative I'm that bitch Ann Coulter.

As we toured the city, dining at restaurants that have managed to reopen, and listening to great musicians, we heard the same plea over and over. Go back and tell people how bad it is. Tell them we need help. Tell them we must rebuild New Orleans and preserve its special culture. Tell people the truth. So here I go.

What Katrina's wind did is being repaired. What the rain wrought has been sopped up.

But the havoc that the broken levees and burned out pumping stations caused is not fixed. Yes, the levees are being repaired and built to slightly better standards. But the neighborhoods flooded by this man-made part of the disaster are not back, in any way, shape or living form.

The best way to describe what I saw is this: a hurricane hits your community (okay, if you are land-locked, pretend you live on a coast). And two days later, when people think the emergency is over, a swift-moving flood from a storm surge on both a bay on one side of town and the ocean on the other inundates much of the area. Your Main Street and three or four blocks on either side—your tourist area—is dry. But your city neighborhoods and suburbs are completely flooded. Picture it. Picture the flood itself. Neighborhoods, rich and poor alike, up to their roof eaves in mucky water, ruining furniture, appliances, books, photo albums, clothing, computers and cars. Killing over a thousand people—including some people you know.

It's not just the poor neighborhoods where people had no transportation out. No, lots of people stayed to ride it out
because the levees by the bay had never ever failed before. Now picture the scene eight months later, when NONE, I mean NONE of the neighborhoods have come back to life. There's nobody living in the homes on the bay or by the ocean. Everything from mobile homes and one story cottages to $500,000 houses sits rotting from the water and virulent mold. There are Mercedes, BMWs and Lexuses left to rust in washed out driveways. Shrubs and trees are brown and dead, killed by saltwater and neglect. Beautiful homes have crude writing on them, 12-feet high, noting that they have been checked by the police and animal rescue teams. Sometimes the writing spells out the terrible things rescuers found inside. Sometimes the writing warns looters to stay away; sometimes it carries the message “We'll be back!”

There are square holes in rooftops where rescuers sawed into the attics to save the occupants. Those roofs with jagged holes are where the occupants chopped and clawed their way out.

But my god, it's eight months later. The neighborhoods are still dark and deserted. Why aren't people fixing up their houses? Well, a very few are, if they managed to be on the short list for a FEMA trailer to park in their yard. First they get rid of all the debris that once was their belongings, then they gut the house down to its studs to fight the mold and water damage. Oh, they must supply their own generator and water, because no utilities are connected. There's not a food store open. No gas stations. No restaurants. Even cell phones get spotty connections. Contractors are overworked, materials impossible to come by and it's dark and scary at night because no streetlights or traffic signals light up any of the roads. Picture it. Suburban neighborhoods with hundreds of homes deserted; the blocks near the beach with not a soul living there; whole communities without a light on except for a trailer or two parked along the street.

But these are the lucky people, because they either had money in the bank to start to repair their properties, or they settled
with insurance companies. I say lucky, because most of their neighbors are still in the middle of a boxing match between the people they have paid thousands of dollars to for homeowners insurance and the ones they paid thousands of dollars to for flood insurance. Each group has been insisting the other is responsible for this particular disaster.

But humans are a resilient bunch. And folks in your town fight to bring back the community they love. In fact, area musicians, chefs, artists, police and fire officials all go back to work despite their homes being uninhabitable. Most of them drive to work from rental apartments over an hour away.

And your wonderful neighbors work together to help their friends and family, tell their elected officials that the town deserves to be rebuilt and must not be forgotten. You send a special message to legislators from other areas of the country who don't want to rebuild a city between a coast and a bay. You tell them that your hometown must be rebuilt—for its people, its culture and its future.

Well, that's what New Orleans is doing. And, just like residents in your town would do, New Orleaneans are trying to get the word out, telling people to come back to New Orleans, spend money in their city, visit Bourbon Street and let the good times roll so the city can come back to life.

So there, I've done what they've asked. I've told their story. And I really hope readers will consider a New Orleans vacation soon. You'll have a grand time and will be greeted and entertained by very thankful people. You can do a good deed and have a great vacation at the same time.

And meanwhile, with Americans (and Iraqis) dying overseas, polar ice caps turning into giant slushies, the national debt exploding, gas at $3 a gallon while gas execs get $30 million dollar bonuses, our president is spending capital, political or otherwise on banning same-sex marriage.

Not only am I mad as hell, but I have to tell Senator Santorum that if those naughty activist judges really do manage to legislate same-sex marriage, the next fight is NOT, I repeat,
NOT a push for marriage between lesbians and squirrels or whatever his demented fantasy is.

Hopefully it's a push to get our national priorities right. I hope the good times roll again in New Orleans. For our good times we might have to wait until the next presidential election.