Mayhill's got a new piece up at HuffPo, and it's landed square on the front page. I guess she managed to gain enough notoriety after her now-infamous piece as a supposed Obama supporter, the one where she nailed him on the "bitter" quote (some kinda support) to merit front-page status.
Good for her. *eyeroll*
I'd like to know, though, as a former strip-tease participant cabaret act burlesque performer stripper, why strippers are, for the likes of Mayhill, automatically linked to a John McCain vote.
I knew a lot of strippers when I was one. For all of the women (and men!) who were ding-batty, dumb-as-post, drug-loving hot messes, there were so, so very many who not only knew how to think, and beautifully, but created businesses from the money they made, obtained their degrees, sometimes their masters degrees, and sometimes even their doctorates and their licenses to practice law, often all while raising children as single parents. Some of the women I knew created an adult-entertainment union of sorts, or as close as they could come, given their trouble with unionization and how little people of that ilk are listened to and respected by the powerful and the wealthy (or, you know, Those Who Run Things). I learned more from those women than I did during my entire career as a fundamentalist christian family member (twenty-odd years vs. two or three). I learned how to see life from outside of the safety hedge of church; how to take care of myself; how to talk to people with wildly differing points of view. I learned that there are people who, while so totally different from me in every respect, still deserve respect for being themselves. I learned the true meaning of live-and-let-live. Something I'd heard preached about by christian-proclaiming pastors since I was tiny, but never got until I worked amongst strippers.
The sex trade gets dumped on routinely during a presidential (and every other kind of) campaign. It's such an easy target.
Sure. John McCain ought not to have eagerly handed his attractive, seemingly intelligent wife over to the hoi polloi in Sturgis for her use as a pretty plaything. That was beyond the pale, his having not defended her, given that she wasn't allowed to speak for herself, to make a choice about something like participating in what is evidently just a strip-tease in pageant-y disguise. She might have even made the joke at her own expense, but that would've been a different matter entirely, a choice made about her own body. (Why can't Republican men, and their devoted-to-the-point-of-blindness-women, see the difference?)
Mostly, I really dislike, as a liberal, as a feminist, Mayhill's general disregard for adult women and men, myself included, who are proud to participate (or to have done so in the past) in the sex industry, using their own bodies, harming no one in the process. To be painted as a mindless drone simply because I did something that many disapprove of does not do a supposed liberal writer (*cough* Mayhill Fowler *cough*) any honor. It only points up her desire to use incendiary headlines to grab as much attention as she can for herself while her moment of fame (or, rather, lame) lasts.
Mayhill, I'm assuming, would also mock women who choose to have abortions, for similar reasons - because it's headline-vaunting. And why not? Given the tone of her current piece, any woman choosing to do something with her body that another member of society might cast moral aspersions on must be a mindless drone, at least from Mayhill's perspective. After all, once a woman has made a choice for her body that someone else might look askance upon, she's fair game to be chewed up in a news crawl. Even if the person writing the crawl casts herself as a liberal, as someone who espouses to believe in the live-and-let-live screed.
Karma, though, as they say, is historically unkind to those who play such a dangerous, hypocrisy-ridden game. (Well, okay, they actually say karma's a bitch. In, uh, less-refined terms.) I suppose we'll have to see how long Mayhill's attention-getting agitations are allowed to play before one (or more) of them comes back to haunt her.
My advice to Mayhill, then, is: watch your back. As low as you're willing to go, there's a whole cabal who are willing to show you up. And in the media LCD limbo, you've gotta be pretty flexible. ('Course, at this stage, it's hard to believe you're not constructed entirely out of elastic bands.)
Deb, I've always said your most powerful and sexy asset is your giant--brain.
Posted by: cynematic | August 05, 2008 at 06:19 PM