baserinstincts

The 50’s Are Back on The Bachelor

image via e online

There are many things wrong with this show before we even get to what happened last night. Chief among these are its perpetuation of an impossible fairy tale paradigm in relationships, its dramatization of what’s supposed to be a quest for true love, it’s focus on the shallower aspects of love, its seeming to take the issue of marriage so lightly, and its placing its couples in circumstances that aren’t reflective of real life.

I mean, I can go on and on here.

But I don’t judge or start a public outcry simply because the show happens to be one of my guilty pleasures. I view it as entertainment and not in any way indicative of the real world.

But last night’s show went somewhere that really pissed me off.

There are four girls left and the Bachelor, Jake has just finished visiting each of the girls’ hometowns and meeting with their families. The day of the rose ceremony comes around and one of the girls, Allie (admittedly my least favorite of the girls left) comes a’knocking on Jake’s door in tears. She sits down and tells him that she has a choice to make between staying there with him and going back to work.

Read: “I’m going to get fired if I stay here any longer.”

Now let me give a quick tutorial to those who aren’t familiar with the premise of the show.  The show picks a male or female each season who is supposedly looking for the love of his or her life. The show chooses from presumably thousands of contestants and picks around 25 men or women and places them all in a house and essentially the compete for the Bachelor or Bachelorette’s affections. At the end of each show the Bachelor or Bachelorette sends a person or persons home and at the end of the season there are two left standing. The Bachelor or Bachelorette then chooses between the two and gets engaged to that person.

I’ll wait for you to finish laughing.

Now at the time Allie drops this news, she’s left with three other girls, meaning she only has a 25 percent chance of ending up with Jake’s ring on her finger. She’s devastated saying she has to choose between the man she loves and the job she loves. She asks Jake to help her with the decision (read: “please tell me you’re gonna pick me”) and Jake says rather cautiously, “I can’t look at you and tell you for sure that I’m going to put a ring on your finger at the end of all this. But I also can’t tell you I’m not going to do that”

Noncommittal much?

I’m sure that helped a lot, Jake.

But in a way you can’t fault him because he has four sorta beautiful girls two steps from ripping each other’s throats out in order to be the last one standing, and as far as I can tell (read: as far as Jake’s acting has lead me to believe) he has roughly equal amounts of affection for all four. So of course he doesn’t want to reassure Allie.

Allie bawls and balws and when the rose ceremony comes around, she asks to speak to Jake in private and she bawls some more. Jake then tells her repeatedly that he doesn’t want her to go.

Hold the fuck up!

So this girl is supposed to give up her career (and let me just say here that in this economy the girl is beyond blessed to have ANY job much less one in her field and one that she enjoys) for a fucking maybe?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Jake should have stopped the show and told Allie that he was going to marry her. But the stand up thing would have been to tell her she should go home and go back to work.

For starters, do you think a man would ever let a woman come between him and his carrer? No matter how much he loved her?

Secondly, since when is it cool to let someone give up their life to be with you when you aren’t one hundred percent prepared to do the same? Suppose she stayed. And lost her job. And then Jake decided that what he really wants is to marry Vienna. Egg on your face doesn’t even begin to describe it. And he’d be ok with that because in the end, well, it was Allie who made the choice to stay.

Third, has Jake ever heard of a telephone? Email? Twitter? If he cares so much for this girl then letting her give up her career might not be the best way to show it. So what if she goes back home? If he misses her,  then he can call her. I doubt ABC will sue.

But what’s really got my goat is that the scenario once again reinforces the notion that women have to make a choice that men just aren’t forced to make in our society. We are constantly split between going out and making out way in the public domain and holding it down in the private domain.

And here it is again. Allie can either be a career woman or she can be a wife.

Have I suddenly landed in the 1950’s?

Would Jake give up flying planes for Allie, or for any one of them for that matter? Hell no! Would we expect him to? Hell no!

So why does Allie have to give up a part of herself for a man who may not even choose her in the end? For love? That special reality TV brand of love? Give me a break.

And I, for one, would not at all be surprised if woman who suddenly finds herself aimless in life ends up being decidedly less attractive to our little Bachelor.

In the end, Allie went home.

I was so glad. I think she did the right thing. She said to him “if you were mine it’d be a different story, the choice would be easy”

You got it all wrong girlfriend.

If he was yours, really yours, you shouldn’t have had to make a choice in the first place.

The Spoils of War

Photo by flickr user Captain Midnight.

It’s a very effective weapon, because the communities are totally destroyed,” he said. “You destroy communities. You punish the men, and you punish the women, doing it in front of the men.

This is what Maj Gen Patrick Cammaert, the former commander of the UN peacekeeping force in eastern Congo, told the BBC.

The article Quick Change movie full goes on to state the UN’s reaction and even says that the resolution is being hailed as historic.

Forgive me if I don’t jump up and down.

I’m more inclined to cross my arms, tap my foot and scream “It’s about damn time”.

UN Secretary General says that violence against women has reached “unspeakable proportions”. ANY violence against women, and especially when you’re talking about rape as one of the systematic tactics of war, is unspeakable.

The UN can’t really think that this a recent phenomenon.

Can they?

And why does it take thousands of women being systematically raped for the UN to take notice? What about the single woman that gets attacked in a random dark alley by some chump trying to prove his manhood.

How many women get raped here in the US every year? By their boyfriends? By their husbands?

According to RAINN there is a rape every 8 minutes in the U.S. 1 in 6 women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime (look around you, chances are you already know a victim if you yourself aren’t one). Only 6% of rapists see any jail time.

As a society, we say that we care about basic human rights and that senseless violence against innocents is intolerable. But our actions say “yeah, except when those innocents are women.”

In grade school during a sorry excuse for a sex ed class we were told not to scream “RAPE” if we were ever attacked because chances are no one would come. We were to scream “FIRE” instead.

A dear friend of mine suffered an attack by her ex-boyfriend after she left him. She reported it and was attacked by him again. Frustrated with the inaction and seeming indifference of the police, she complained.

“Just calm down miss,” the officer told her. “It’s not like he killed anyone.”

Boy am I glad to know that if he did kill her, the police might actually do something about it.

Another friend of mine, an older woman, told me a the story of her husband beating her in public on the subway platform. A cop comes over to break it up. “This is my wife,” her husband said simply. The cop nods and walks away.

These are only two of countless horror stories I’m sure.

The legal system has done a piss poor job of protecting women against violence and putting the perpetrators behind bars.

But furthermore, this patriarchal society we live in is what makes it easy, commonplace and even accepted for this type of violence to occur in the first place.

This resolution that the UN has proposed has been a long time coming. And while I agree that we should help the women in the Congo and women all over the world to live safer, healthier lives, America needs to take a long hard look in the mirror and take care of home as well.

Time to put up or shut up.

Vex Money

Vexed

• A Viking Saga video

(adj.) – 1. Crazy Eights the movie Frequency release Irritated, distressed, or annoyed

2. troubled persistently especially with petty annoyances
The concept of “vex money” was explained to me by my mother and is just one of many jewels given to me by her that I treasure.

All of the women in my family, on both sides, are fiercely independent.

There weren’t really many men around and the women made getting by without them look so very easy (and in fact preferable). I guess I always sort of had the idea growing up that men cramp your style (except during a couple of boy crazy phases during junior high and high school).

Anyway, one day as my mother was cooking (something that didn’t happen often so I remember it well) she said to me “Desi, never go out with a man unless you have money.”

I made some comment about that defeating the purpose and she just repeated herself more forcefully. “Even if he’s taking you out, you should not be going out with him if you’re broke. You must always have your vex money!” It was her way of telling me to make sure I had an out if my date ended up pissing me off.

I laughed it off then but it stuck with me.

My mother’s sound advice proved itself as such again recently when I was on a first date with a seemingly very sweet guy.

This sweet guy just seemed to be a little too fond of liquor for my taste.

For one, I could tell when I met up with him that he’d already been drinking for the better part of the evening.

It wasn’t long into the date that he was slurring his speech and talking in circles. He was amused by everything and as for me, well I wasn’t amused in the least. I suggested to him gently that he slow down a bit. He waved me off and ordered another martini.

Now had I not followed my mother’s advice I’d have been shit out of luck as far as getting home. See, he had promised to send me home in a cab whenever I was ready to go. But as the night went on, he got so trashed that I don’t even think he noticed when I just left and hailed a cab my damn self.

Now I know that on the whole women are independent and doing more than well for themselves. But there are still quite a few who depend entirely on a man in social situations. I mean depend on them enough to leave the house with an empty wallet and no way to get home.

It would be nice if sometimes we didn’t have to worry and let them take care of everything and yes, on occasion you can find one who’s happy to without being a creep.

But the truth is you just can’t put your stock in a man to take care of you. And yes that includes a simple dinner and cab home.

And what if he does turn out to be a creep or worse a lecherous bastard? What if he tries to feel you up (assuming that’s not what you want)? What if he’s on something or in my case extremely drunk?

Do you really want to leave yourself at his mercy?

You could end up like my cousin who got asked out on a date by a seemingly sweet guy. They had a great time. And when the check came he waited quite obviously for her to pull out her wallet (this same guy incidentally was with her some time later when his car got towed…he borrowed a couple hundred dollars from her to get his car back and she hasn’t seen a dime of it yet).

So I never assume a man is going to pay for me or make sure I get home safely.

And I always carry my vex money.

My Own Private Hillary

• Birthday Girl hd

I feel for Hillary.

I’m not saying that I am a Hillary supporter per se.

I, in fact, didn’t vote for her in the primaries.

I do wonder, however, just how much of her perceived shortcomings and personality flaws have anything to do with her as a person.

Or does she get a bad rap because she’s a woman?

I sought to find out why Hillary inspires such strong feelings and such strong rhetoric.

I came across this article

and it really brought it home for me.

There are many interesting points but this quote really summed up what I was looking for:

“Some of the more common adjectives hurled at Hillary are familiar to any high-achieving female. And, sure, the woman known in high school as “Sister Frigidaire” faces all the glass-ceiling, woman-in-a-man’s-job, underestimated, underpaid, overworked gender guff that also frustrates senators Olympia Snowe and Mary Landrieu. But what makes our reaction to her far more extreme? More than any other public figure, Hillary forces us to acknowledge that the path to power for American women is not all that clear, more an odyssey than a march…Ask your friends if their fear and loathing of Hillary has anything to do with her being a woman, and you’ll undoubtedly get a denial.”

It must suck to have people doubt your capabilities for no other reason than you were born with a slit.

And I truly feel that that is the gist of it. Hillary’s less admirable characteristics wouldn’t really be a big deal if she were a man.

And I know just how she feels.

I got promoted at work this past week.

It boggles my mind that in the four years this location of my company has been doing business, I’m the first woman to hold the position I hold now.

When I first began work in this department, I entered into a serious boys club. Having worked primarily with women for the entirety of my work history, I had quite a bit of adjusting to do. But adjust I did and I eventually earned the respect of my co-workers.

Well, most of them.

I found my victory (beating out two male candidates) to be bittersweet.

“Congratulations sweetie,” one coworker, who was now in effect my subordinate, said to me. “I’m so proud of you.”

Proud of me? I wondered if he would have said that if any of the guys had been offered the job. He made it sound like I beat the odds or something.

There was nothing for him to be proud of.

I worked hard to get where I was. I was the most knowledgeable and qualified candidate.

Period.

Another coworker, one of the guys who’d applied for the position as well and again was now my subordinate, quipped about how sexy women in power were and alluded to being willing to offer me sexual favors in exchange for a raise or promotion.

Was I in the twilight zone?

Just today, one of the guys almost bumped into me and then remarked snidely “Oh, I don’t want to hit the first lady.” A political debate ensued between him and another coworker, during which he states emphatically “America doesn’t want a female President.”

America, for him at that moment, was our department and that female president he resented so was me.

There was my boss (well he’s no longer my boss as we’re on the same level now), who tried with all his might to convince the panel not to vote for me (or so I’m told…the particulars of post-interview deliberation are not to be discussed once interviews are over but the scoop inevitably always leaks) saying that I was unreliable and that I was “too emotional”, but publicly, in the weeks leading up to the interviews, he was the absolute pillar of support.

And then there’s the Big Boss, who made no secret of his doubts on whether I could handle the job, even as he was offering it to me. I had to wonder if he’d have hit any of the male candidates with the same spiel.

And so instead of feeling great about my career and more confident in my abilities, I ended up feeling dubious and anxious.

I got over it though and decided the best revenge would be to prove them all wrong (bloody ignorant naysayers, the lot of them).

This speaks to a much bigger issue of course. Women in the workplace still don’t get the respect (and in many cases, the money) they deserve, even when they prove themselves, their brilliant, competent selves, time and time again.

Brilliant, competent women in the workplace are called bitches. Crazy bitches.

Brilliant, competent men in the workplace (and even men with talent that’s mediocre at best) are called CEO’s.

Pimpin' ain't easy (but it sure is fun).

I really don’t get why everyone is so shocked over the whole Governor Spitzer prostitution fiasco.

Do people really doubt that any of these politicians (much less the majority of them) are regularly cavorting around with working girls?

I don’t.

Maybe that’s just me being a jaded New Yorker.

Or a realist.

Wherever there’s powerful men and money, there are girls getting paid for their services. This is a given.

Not saying he’s right.

It’s just that they all do it…he just got caught.

Rock Me Sexy Jesus

Fast forward to a couple years down the road when I myself finally lost my virginity. I say finally because even though I was still on the young side, all my peers had been doing it for years. I suppose I was one of the lucky ones. He was a great guy, my first real love and we had a good relationship. But even through the dizzying feelings of first love and finally “becoming a woman,” I felt this persistent sense of impending doom.

I’d had sex.

I wasn’t married, hell, I was still a minor.

I was going to Hell now for sure.

While blossoming into a woman, a young sexual being, I felt great. Yes, there were the fears and insecurities that come with starting to have sex (and when you become a little more seasoned you realize that those feelings are there no matter how many times you do it) but in all, it was a tremendously joyous experience and a period of awakening for me.

The church tells you that you can’t have sex and have God, that you can’t be spiritual and be sexual. The two seem to be forever mutually exclusive. The exception is if you are married, and even then, there are still many who believe that sex exists solely for procreation and that birth control is unholy. God forbid you have fun while you have sex and when you do, you’d better be married and producing offspring.

Well, I call shenanigans on that rhetoric.

You can read the rest of my article “In Defense of The Unchaste”, here Fried Green Tomatoes movie .

Feeling the Love

I was at Loving Day 2008 and it was nothing short of awesome.

Besides there being free food, free booze, free ice cream and awesome music, there were plenty of diverse and beautiful people in the house.

Loving Day is an annual celebration commemorating the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving vs. Virginia that made interracial marriage legal in the US.

I, for one, could not even imagine not being allowed to get my swirl on.

Unthinkable.

Despite the tremendous heat, everyone was in good spirits and you could definitely feel the love in the air. I enjoyed seeing all the people; singles, interracial couples, bi-racial children. And the tunes were hot! People were dancing up a storm ad having a really great time. I learned some new things and met some cool people.

Go here to find out more info and get involved in Loving Day.