Body Politics

I wanted to write about this a few weeks ago when my pal Richard posted about it on our political group blog CharlesCountyCafe.com.  It’s taken me a while because I wanted to transcribe some of the video and I also wanted to look up info and links on each of the people involved in the discussion.  At any rate, Richard found this little gem that I somehow had missed.  Perhaps it’s because, even though I need to pay attention to the ultra-right media, I avoid Fox news the way I avoid other nasty chores, like scrubbing toilets and cleaning up cat poop and hairballs.  Now that the election is over, I can post this without any presidential political weight to it and it can *just* be about body politics.

Anyway, Richard posted this on our political blog and I pushed the little “play” triangle on the YouTube video (at the bottom of this post)  and by the end of it was saying, “You tell them…er, what was her name!?!”  I hadn’t heard of her before and had to listen to the video and try a few different spellings before I hunted her down on Google.  Then came the horrible chore of listening to Megyn Kelly and  Andrea Tantaros over and over again, so I could transcribe some nice accurate quotes from the video.  I also wanted to be sure to transcribe what Ms. Piscitelli said because it was PERFECT!

Andrea said, “slap in the face” so many times, I thought maybe it was some kind of code that she and Megyn had worked out together to make each other hot.  Just kidding.  Sort of.

If you ask me, Andrea and Megyn are betrayers of their fellow sisters.  Before they were conservative Palin-loving concubines, they were born females.  They are now women.  They should put that first and this other nonsense second, in my humble opinion.  Furthermore, you would think women in their public positions would know the ridiculous pressures put on women to conform to the “beauty standard.” To sit on national television and say that women SHOULD be airbrushed.  Grrrrr!  What kind of traitors are they anyway?  Just watch the video.

All of the hub-bub was about an un-retouched photo of Sarah Palin on the cover of Newsweek.  About the cover Tanaros said,  “This cover is a clear slap in the face at Sarah Palin.  Why?  Because it’s un-retouched.  It highlights every imperfection that every human being has.  But we’re talking unwanted facial hair, pores, wrinkles.”  She also had the nerve to say, “Any woman that sees this cover would be shocked and horrified.”  Well, she forgot that some of us might be happy and refreshed to see women looking like women really look and not like poreless rubber dolls.

To further stick it to her fellow females Kelly said, “Any respectable magazine should be doing a little re-touching if you’re going to have the extreme close-up on anybody’s face.”

Then said, “They re-touch you to get rid of the normal flaws that human beings have. That’s what they do in the magazine business.”

Apparently above all – including the fragile self-esteems of throngs of American women, we are to worship the likes of Palin, who has thankfully been sent packing back to Alaska to hunt for wolves in her new designer duds.  Because she’s so, you know, mavericky.  If she had something positive to say to American women about being comfortable with the cover and thinking that expecting airbrushing was ridiculous, I haven’t read it yet.

But I think Julia Piscitelli said it best:

“The reality is that she is on the cover of the women and leadership Newsweek cover, which means that she is one of the top women in leadership in the entire country. And frankly, you know, get a close up, so we all haven’t waxed our lip every once in a while. This is reality and there have been very unflattering covers of Mark Warner, of Hillary Clinton and of John McCain and there have been some of Barack Obama also. It’s just reality and I think that demanding that political figures get re-touching like supermodels do on the cover of news magazines is going a little far. I mean, what’s wrong with showing women the way they actually look, particularly a woman as beautiful as Sarah Palin?”

Julia, Julia, Julia – don’t you know you won’t get anywhere with Fox News talking all rational and sheeit!   I, as an American woman who sees the insanity in the garbage Kelly and Tanaros were spewing, thank you for your sacrifice!  It must have been SO DIFFICULT not to just ROLL YOUR EYES!!!

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(If you cannot see the above video go here. Please wait a few moments, there is some black screen for several seconds at the beginning of the video. All of the other versions I had found before have disappeared and been removed from YouTube, so don’t be surprised if this one disappears at some point!)