“America Made Me a Feminist”

Source: America Made Me a Feminist – The New York Times

Paulina Porizkova wrote an illuminating and excellent opinion for the New York Times. I read it and applauded her.

Since it is about her life as a woman, I fully intended to clip it and post it here, partially because it confounds a whole bunch of prejudices and fits well into my American war on women category. (Speaking of which, how amusedly pissed are you that Kamala Harris keeps getting interrupted and criticized by elderly and apparently senile GOP white guys as she does her really fine job at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings?)

I was reminded of it by Ashley Judd. Yes, the Ashley Judd, who tweeted praise for Porizkova’s essay, a tweet I read and said, “Geez, I forgot to do this,” and thanked her for reminding me and she liked my reply which showed up in my email inbox so here I am.

So, thanks again, Ashley, and given your brains, education and politics I hope you’ll consider anew running for office in your mother’s native state, Kentucky. (Her mom has a name oddly familiar to me.) A few years ago Ashley dipped her toes into a race against McConnell, OMG, and please please please…

Then, when I was clipping Porizkova’s essay from the Times, I read some of the comments. Here’s an example of one, uh, point of view:

All this from a woman who made her millions posing in lingerie and bikinis. Yup a true feminist depicting an ideal body than 98% of the women in the world will never be able to obtain but are expected to do so none the less.
She may think she’s a Feminist but then she has the one thing all feminists have. Wealth…
Poor women can’t afford to be feminists. They are trying to just survive.

There’s a lot of post-election rage, often tied to misogyny, out there and a bunch of it appears in the Times comment sections. (A lot of them, by the way, are from Bernie Sanders supporters.)

So now that you’ve picked up on Paul’s anger, read Porizkova–who does get to be and call herself a feminist no matter how beautiful she is. And she writes really, really well.

So OK, there are three beautiful, really smart women named in this post and if I weren’t afraid of getting a dunning letter from some photographic agency Rottweiler I’d find some pictures of them to stick in here. Except I’m not good and doing that so…never mind.

Paths Crossed: my brother Ethan was at some event somewhere and Porizkova and her husband, Ric Ocasek, came in. “Very, very tall people,” my brother said. “Very tall.”