Watching Now with Alex Wagner has been thrilling this morning. Her special segment on women couldn't have come at a better time for the campaign, given the "last gasps" of the dying party of fear and shame. The days of being able to silence women and men because of shame for who they are, what they've experienced, why they know what they know regardless of their exclusion from some old boys club, shame in where they are right now in their lives or where they've been (on welfare, suffering through bankruptcy or just living on the margins as best they can, which is where I've been for several years) or shame for how they managed to claw their way past all the obstacles that still exist in this culture all too often - these days are slip-sliding away, and I'm glad to see it once again.
I've lived through these heady days once before. The death of Helen Gurley Brown is reminder enough of the last huge crack in the fabric of the male dominated culture, and while it never healed over completely, the cracks have not resulted in a shift away from the fault lines of women's issues, including the right to be a sexual woman in this world.
We have seen many ways that this has been brought about since the 70's and I don't have time or space to launch a feminist diary. I am thinking more about the power of shame. That's what most people seem to miss in the way the media, the political operatives and the party of fear manage to make us afraid to stand up and be ourselves, naked and in the spotlight.
Just ask the two Republican embarrassments that emerged today. The shame is palpable today. And everyone seems to be piling on, getting in one liners and quips like the one Andrea Mitchell just threw out when she said "Fact finding, indeed!"
I have to chime to say that I don't think there's anything wrong with skinnydipping. Okay? Nothing. That's just as stupid as saying you must be married before you have sex. If you want to claim that you'll be a virgin when you marry, go ahead, but that's really more laughable and shame-inducing a stance than any would dare to make, and yet that's really where they are trying to move us to. The war on women that has been going on since the 70's and before is nothing new.
But we've been manipulated by shame since Monica Lewinsky became the only story and the only conversation anyone was having - in spite of the fact that there were plenty of other things to talk about. Now, before you go apoplectic over my bringing up Monica, the fact is that in the south, in the genteel, let's protect the women from the rapists (who are thought of as black even when they more often than not are white, I would guess) southern discourse there was a huge amount of shame that was generated by the behavior, the stance and the hue and cry over behavior from our president which was not something that was limited to his own proclivities but which was more admirably handled in the face of insurmountable SHAME on his part than any other public figure in my memory.
We know how easily people can be manipulated by shame. I was just reading the recent biography of Eisenhower, and there's a segment in the early chapters on General Patton which talks about his not going to school as a younger person because he was shamed by his poor reading skills. This is a bigger issue in my mind than the shame associated with any sexual indiscretions. The ability to read, to "read" the complicated information in legislation, to "read" the body language of a person, to "read" the subtle signals given by those who are claiming to be straight shooters while packing the crowd with pre-selected "plants" as has happened so often as to be predictable. (I often enjoy the decorative elements of any political crowd that is peppered with the red, white and blue of the campaigns for the last two decades and am even more amused by the checkered red, white and blue shirts Paul Ryan has suddenly found to wear on the stump - so as to look less like one of the leaders of the congress which has such a low approval rating, not to mention distancing himself from the pure capitalism of Ayn Rand and her cold, harsh and cruel perspective on humanity).
I have been skinnydipping several times, although for the sake of the visual images you might be exposed to in this moment, it has been more than 20 years since I've even been further than my yard in a bathingsuit, much less in the nude. But one of those experiences came back to me in a way I had not thought about in a very long time.
In the mid 80's, I had quite a transition from a mother with a successful small business to a single mother with two young boys, who had never finished college and who was no longer able to keep my business afloat because of the divorce and other financial issues that were part and parcel of the 80's, which are best left to another diary. I had found work selling Honda automobiles in North Carolina where I was making more money than I've ever made, before or since. It was during a time when I was involved with a man nine years younger than me, I was extracting myself from another relationship that was less than fully supportive, and I was finding a whole new freedom in my independence as a woman that I'd never known.
In this context, I attended a retreat for women at a beautiful lodge in Black Mountain, NC, where we were uplifted, celebrated, and actually breaking through inhibitions of all sorts that had been part of a life of being battered both physically and emotionally. I had entered college again although I was not qualified for financial aid and I had to drop out after a too brief and very wonderful attempt to restart my college education which had been cut short in 1969.
One of the most memorable moments of that experience was when the woman who had invited me to attend the event said that a few of them were going to sneak into the indoor pool and go skinnydipping. I'm not a prude, exactly, but I'm also not someone who really has ever been comfortable running around in the nude, even around my own sister. It's just how I grew up, and because my mother died when I was 17, I didn't really ever get to see her make sense of the 70s and 80's. I'm asking you to just accept the idea that even as a stewardess I was not a typical prototype of the "flygirl" image, (which of course was not even true, as far as I was aware). Therefore, I was a bit apprehensive of this experience but I was there to shed all sorts of limiting self-concepts and learn how to be more fully alive in the Christian sense and in other ways that we as women were sharing. So when four of us stripped down and leaped into that pool, it was an amazing and freeing moment for me.
Big deal. I know. It's silly, to tell you the truth. But what I'm trying to share with you is the fact that there are many, many inhibited women and many ways in which we are still not allowed to be "all that we can be" in the world. Especially in the deep south, there are all sorts of ways that we have to feel shame, and there is a generation that has never shed this "skin" of victorianism behind which too many of us still hide.
So just because someone was skinnydipping doesn't by itself warrant the kind of shame that might be tempting to blast the poor congressman with. But the real shame is the behavior as a whole and the hypocrisy that surrounds the entire republican party ever since the Tea Party took over - actually, let me back up - ever since John Ashcroft made them cover up the statue, Jerry Falwell and Pat Buchanan pointed fingers at Bill Clinton and Ken Starr poked his prying eyes into the minute details of President Clinton's life deliberately in order to publicly lynch him in the media and set up the situation we have today.
Thankfully, the winds are shifting towards more honesty, more reality, and in the new news cycle, with all the new tools available including Team Obama's app, Huff Post LIVE, Rachel Maddow and all the new voices which are so very refreshing, where Mitt is playing table tennis when he thought he'd get to play rugby or something.
DailyKos is still the place where I come when I need sanity. Thank you for all the changes you've made. Keep it up. I'm cautiously optimistic that there can be a real debate about substance instead of this male dominated message that has dominated the discourse for far too long.
Oh, and one of the four in that pool that night was a woman pastor who was part of the reason we were there, to say goodbye to her as she was moving on from one congregation to another. It wasn't the Sea of Galilee, we were only a little bit emboldened by wine, and except for the pastor we were just four ordinary women, not leaders trying to be the finger wagging monitors of public morals.