So Maureen Dowd has written a column about Ret. Gen. and Democratic canidate Wesley Clark’s clothing, or, more exactly, his changes of clothing over time in (it’s assumed) a bid to appeal to a different voting group. While I generally get annoyed by clothing critiques in general, no pun intended, because talking about clothing distracts from things like issues, I have to admit a certain degree of schadenfreude.
Already some pundits, all of them male that I’ve seen, have started rolling their eyes, but the first thing I thought of when I read the column was a Doonesbury cartoon I read awhile back. One of the female characters, Alex it may have been, had written a newspaper article about one canidate or another coming into town. She described how the entourage (all male) looked in their suits, how they’d lost weight, how they’d picked the perfect accessories for their complexions. I believe it was Mike Doonesbury who ended the strip by saying, “You’re trying to make a point, aren’t you?”
So while people are rolling their eyes at Ms. Dowd’s column, I can’t help but smirk a little in the same way I always do when males get treated the way that females have for awhile. (An odd sensation to get, my being male and all.) And, yes, I know that this is pretty much a bad thing in the long run, a lose-lose situation, but it still feels good on some level..
“I can’t help but smirk a little in the same way I always do when males get treated the way that females have for awhile.”
Well, it’s been a while since my last pelvic exam. However, I did have a prostate checkup. The joys of age.
Ditto on the smirk comment.
I think Maureen must be remembering how her mother complained about trying to knit argyle socks during the war.
Now, if we were REALLY going to treat males in the same way as females, we would have to say something about the Kucinich rug, wouldn’t we?
I am so tired of reading, talking, seeing and purchasing articles of clothing. Bush & Co. is raping the serfs. This is serious and the costumes are irrelevant.
Dowd should’ve called her column “Civilian Eye for the Military Guy.”
Yep. I remember when Hillary Clinton’s haircut and suits were under the public microscope. Her looks were dissected and discussed no end.
I’m reasonably certain that the Doonesbury strip you’re talking about dates back to the late 1970s and that it was the female Walden Commune member (before Joanie Caucus) doing the reporting.
IIRC, it would be in the second Big Doonesbury Book.
I tried to point this out on Eschaton and got pig-piled on by anti-clothing people. (That sounds weird.)
My reading of Ms. Dowd’s article certainly parallels yours, but I don’t think she is writing the standard “critique the clothing” article, either. There’s something deeper, my cynical, as though she knows she’s treading on sacred ground (as per the Paul Krugman’s Rules For Journalists Article). She gets some very witty barbs in that are non-clothing related — critiquing Clark’s portrayal of “women’s views” of the military being male-dominated, etc. and the knowingly-ironic retort that the military is actually all those things. I think Ms. Dowd writes on a deeper level than most people are reading it, preferring her to write what they want her to write, the way they want her to write it. But nobody understands me when I try to say that, because it is vague the way I say it (my own problem, I’m not edumacated like y’all are), but I think she isn’t writing what most liberals are screaming bloody murder that she is writing. They are expecting that she is writing a “clothing critique”, and so that is what they are reading, when the article isn’t that at all.
Sigh. I wish I could write half as well as Ms. Dowd and then I could write a post that would explain my feelings.
I’m reasonably certain that the Doonesbury strip you’re talking about dates back to the late 1970s and that it was the female Walden Commune member (before Joanie Caucus) doing the reporting.
Nicole, IIRC.
I was born in 1969. The big Doonesbury collections were on a low shelf in my parent’s home. I’ve always been a voracious reader. No wonder I’m such a wooly-headed liberal.
Oh yeah, The Joy Of Sex was right there next to the Doonesbury books, too.
That was always one of my favorite Doonesbury strips. (really!)
The cover is sort of grey-green. I didn’t remember it as being a commune member, but, rather, a reporter on the newspaper that Mike was editing. but I’ll go double-check tonight when I get home . . .
Yep, it was Nicole (in her fake-glasses days), writing a column about the candidate’s cute hairstyle and measurements. /geek