I know I'm around a week late to consider this current events...but here goes.
Leave it to Hoosiers to bring the Monica Lewinsky scandal into the presidential debate. Oh the audacity of college students....I know because I cringe at some of the questions I blasted at my own professors...all opinion and little true life experience to filter it through.
But the whole interchange (which I saw at noon, 5:00, 5;30, 6:00, and national news) got me thinking. Chelsea's response, while poised and dignified, is more telling of our societal expectations. She earned the praise of the majority of the nation when she drew the line in the sand..."That is absolutely none of your business."
What!! So much of everything has become our business. Stuff that is not our business has been thrust upon us and has been made our business. With the proliferation of media, YouTube, gossip rags, identity theft, etc...our personal privacy is becoming a most treasured asset.
And it makes me think of an article I read at work (I wish I could find the article to quote it here...but like much of the reading material at work, the cover was long gone and it was a few month old...granted I read it while I was doing a one to one with a woman who insisted on yelling sexually inappropriate commands at me...but that is not the point) The article was written by a feminist...but not the type of feminist I was used to. Most fighters for equality I know believe that personal power belongs to a woman and the most powerful thing a woman can do is to show restraint...to keep her sex underplayed. Most that I know believe that sexually explicit media such as pornography and prostitution are objectifying and demeaning to women.
But not this writer. She was of the school of thought that believes that pornography, prostitution, and all things "sexually liberated" are empowering to women, not demeaning. And even she thought that young Hollywood exposing their woman parts while getting out of their black cars is in poor taste. She argued that when total exposure is done without thought, when privacy is mishandled and messy, it is more demeaning to woman than anything. The whole point of her brand of feminism is to let women draw the boundaries with their lives, their bodies, and their sex. When there appears to be NO boundaries and women portray themselves as weak, and quite frankly, a mess....well this is far from what she finds acceptable.
Well at least we agree on some things.
And while I can't draw a distinct line betweek Brittney exposing her C-section scar to the world a Butler student asking about Chelsea's father's extra-marital affair, I do know that both were in poor taste. Both evident of a society that has a hard time telling what to expose and what to keep private.
So what am I going to do about it? I'm going to keep my relationships few and deep instead of counting my facebook friends as my meaningful relationships. (I truly had a woman at work tell her husband that she can't afford to get rid of their computer because "that's where my friends live.") I'm going to keep bringin' sexy back, and by sexy I mean modesty and restraint. And I'm not going to ask political candidates about their spouses' indescretions. I'm going to mind my business...and start focusing on what my business really is.
Comments