Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (36 page)

At the beginning of each new season, fashion designers provide a great service for the women of America. They make them laugh.

They do not rely simply on their prices. Each season they supplement sticker shock with some new concept that is sure to amuse anyone leading a reality-based life. Several years ago they made evening dresses with big puffy skirts that rose below your chin like taffeta goiters when you sat down, and this spring a few of them had a bad attack of fuchsia and chartreuse, apparently unaware that women do not want to look like toucans.

Then there are sad retailing stories that no one is buying clothes. That’s because the emperors are designing them.

For fall they’ve outdone themselves. “This season you can be sure there will be a zippered leather jacket and a tartan pleated skirt in your fashion future,” the fashion column said yesterday.

I’m sure.

When I realized that the fashion future was going to be Terminator
chic with parochial-school overtones, I had to remind myself that fashion is not about clothes. I was going to say it is about the way we see ourselves, but that’s not true either. It’s about the way people with perfumes named after them see them-selves.

Calvin Klein, for example, has paid a great deal of money for a little magazine that came packaged with
Vanity Fair
. It consists of photographs that have something to do with rock concerts, something to do with motorcycles (I feel a theme developing here), something to do with naked men, and a good deal to do with sex. It is said to be an advertisement for jeans and must have something to do with how Calvin Klein sees himself, sort of like a surreal high school yearbook for a grown man.

Designer motorcycle jackets might mean designers see women as strong, adventurous people who take no nonsense. Or they might mean that designers see us as a lean, mean coven of empowered witches roaring in to try to mow men down.

Or they might signal a massive identity crisis, a backlash from the gimme-gimme eighties. Chanel has made some of its suits this season in denim, and the couture house filled the windows of Bergdorf Goodman with Harley-Davidsons and mannequins wearing biker boots, megabucks organza, and what someone at the store describes as “authentic Marlon Brando motorcycle caps.” The message is clear: Déclassé! Danger! Divine!

The kindest possible thing you can say about this is that it is an affectation. The motorcycle jackets may have one saving grace, and that is that it is difficult to imagine someone approaching you on the street to hiss, “How many cows died to make that coat?”

Perhaps some designers are inspired by Madonna. But they must remember the difference between the business meetings of Madonna and the business meetings of the rest of us.

Woman named Madonna: I want $3 million.

Male authority figure: Fine.

As opposed to:

Woman named something else: Your Honor, I’d like to approach the bench.

Male authority figure: Why?

Woman: I represent the defendant, Your Honor.

Male authority figure: In that ridiculous motorcycle jacket, I thought you were the defendant.

The thing to remember is that high fashion has little to do with what women wear and a lot to do with what retailers mark down later. Occasionally they get it right. Many of us would like to shake hands with the designer of the elasticized waist or the person who resurrected flat shoes. And some mistakes were our own. There were those suits with the neck thing like a dead pocket handkerchief that almost killed feminism.

There remains a gender gap between men’s clothes, which have been the same since the pharaohs shopped Brooks Brothers, and women’s clothes, which date even as they hang on store racks. Some men therefore find women’s clothes confusing, except for short skirts and anything strapless, which they find completely understandable.

Here is all anyone needs to know about this fall: leather motorcycle jackets and plaid pleated skirts. On models. And on the racks that say
SALE PRICED
in January.

GETTING A SECOND WIND
February 23, 1992

Desiree Washington says somebody offered to pay her off. She told this to Barbara Walters on national television Friday night. Ms. Washington is sweet and earnest, the kind of young woman who would have shown up at a train station with a small valise, big eyes, and high hopes in old-fashioned movie musicals if old-fashioned movie musicals ever cast black people. She is the woman who was raped by Mike Tyson.

She says she was offered a million dollars to drop the charges, which is an awful lot of money to offer someone if you think they’re lying. The matter’s under investigation, so she wouldn’t name names. But she says the people who offered her money also offered her names to say, magic words to explain to the public why she was loath to go forward.

Patricia Bowman. Anita Hill.

She didn’t budge.

It’s been a great time for women in America. I know that conclusion seems contrary to fact. The reason many were shocked
that Mike Tyson was convicted was not because they thought he was innocent. Quite the contrary. It was that for the last year being female in America seemed like a bad country-western song: “Can’t Win for Losing.”

It wasn’t only, for example, that Dow Corning had manufactured a product of questionable safety after questionable research. It was that the suits who run the company were dismissive of women who complained about their breast implants. In this way, they deftly turned what might have been handled as a public relations problem into the national nightmare they richly deserve. They were cold and closed-minded when openness and compassion were called for. They treated their consumers like crybabies. They didn’t take them seriously.

That is why it’s been a good year—because we’ve taken ourselves seriously. Any good reporter knows that the best way to illuminate an issue is to write about the people who embody it. It’s been more than two decades since the world began to change so dramatically for women, but this revolution has been long on issues and short on people to embody them.

When Barnard College asked its entering freshman class to list the women they most admired, Eleanor Roosevelt led the pack. Among the living, Margaret Thatcher was the most popular choice. Madonna, Mother Teresa, Golda Meir—the list revealed something obvious: There has been no Rosa Parks of women’s rights in recent years, no splendid average person whose indignity summed up injustice.

Now there are real women to hang the issues and the anger on. Mention Anita Hill and there is still an adrenaline rush. “I thought I’d stop feeling angry when it was over,” one woman said of the hearings, which Jay Leno likes to say could have wiped out the federal deficit if they had aired on pay-per-view. “But I’m still mad.”

And why not? History repeats herself. Many of the members of the Senate treated Professor Hill’s accusations the way the officials at Dow Corning treated the pain of women whose implants had gone haywire. Hysterics. Complainers. Crybabies.

Women who get beaten up by their husbands can tell you about this phenomenon. They know the moments when their eye is slowly turning indigo and their old man says, “You made me do it.” “Why did you stick around?” people asked Anita Hill. “Why did you go there?” they asked Ms. Washington, who was believed, and Patricia Bowman, who was not. The good guys of America should be tired of this blame-the-victim stuff, which assumes that any woman with half a brain knows that her male counterpart is the functional equivalent of a loaded gun.

People have been predicting the death of feminism for years now, but feminism isn’t dead. Like any distance runner with a long way to go, it was just getting a second wind. Now there are more real people to make the political personal, which is to make it real.

Rape victims have stepped forward. Women who feel that they’ve been maimed by big business and big medicine are speaking out. And Professor Hill has come to stand in many minds not only for sexual harassment but for courage, dignity, and a refusal to move to the back of the gender bus. I bet she’ll be near the top of the Barnard list come September. I wonder how much her example encouraged Desiree Washington not to back off but to move forward.

MS. PRESIDENT
April 19, 1992

Donna Karan, the only fashion designer who seems to recognize the existence of hips in her clientele, perhaps because she owns a pair herself, recently ran an arresting series of magazine advertisements.

In one, the woman in the pin-striped suit is standing behind a bunting-draped lectern. In another, she is sitting on the back of a convertible amid grim guys with headsets, confetti dappling her hair. In a third, she is raising her right hand, a handsome man at her side, while a judge holds the Bible. Congratulations, Ms. President.

The model looks scarcely old enough to meet the constitutional requirements and too décolleté to meet the public ones. She’s accepting the tribute of a grateful nation with a lace bra peeking out from beneath her half-buttoned blouse, fashion’s current Madonna/whore obsession. The slogan is “In Women We Trust,” but there’s something slightly camp about the whole thing.

Camp is how the nation still sees it as well.

You’ve got to wonder, approaching a new century, when America will begin to take seriously the idea of being led by a woman. The concept heretofore has always been presented as a cross between a futuristic fantasy and a sitcom premise. Cue the laugh track.

We’ve heard the rationales. We’ve heard that there are not enough terrific women in the pipeline, that with so few in the House and the Senate it is inevitable that most of the major players are men.

There are about to be two problems with the pipeline excuse. One is that a record number of women are running for seats in Congress this year. The second is the dirty little secret that has suddenly become so apparent: there are not that many terrific men in the pipeline, either.

In a recently published study called
Women in Power
, two psychologists talked to twenty-five of the country’s most powerful female elected officials. They found that many of them did not run for office until after their families were well launched, foreclosing the Wunderkind status and power-base building that accrue to men like Bill Clinton or Al Gore. They found that many of them were gingerly negotiating the contradictions between traditional notions of leadership and traditional notions of femininity.

But many had been told from childhood that they could do anything, and they still believed it. Given the chance, maybe they could convince us, too.

Consider Ann Richards, who became famous for her convention speech about how good ol’ George Bush was born with a silver foot in his mouth—and who, God bless her, has no dirty linen left unaired after a snake’s belly of a gubernatorial challenge. Governor of Texas, a biiig important state. Smart, can-do, and as charming as a full moon on an autumn night. Truth is that if Ms. Richards is not soon mentioned as a national candidate, it won’t be because of her competence. It will be because of her chromosomes.

I’ve heard women wonder aloud about when the idea of a woman president will be something more than an occasion for gags about the First Man. Opportunities for women have expanded so much that those gender deserts in which change is scarce water have become more wrenching.

This month the American Catholic bishops released another draft of their pastoral letter on women’s concerns. It begins well, calling sexism a sin, and then ends, sadly, with the Church’s continuing theology of exclusion, its reaffirmation of the priesthood as the exclusive preserve of men. “This constant practice constitutes a tradition which witnesses to the mind of Christ and is therefore normative,” the letter reads.

I could inveigh here against the sheer foolishness of any system that excludes at least half of its finest potential leaders. But the murmurings about a woman president (as well as women priests) are not only about expanding what seems to be a shockingly shallow applicant pool.

They are questions about how we as women are valued, and how we learn to value ourselves. Neither political nor church leaders seem to adequately appreciate that a system that, by custom or covert agreement, considers women unsuitable for its highest positions sends them a message: You are subordinate clauses in the world’s history.