This passage below is about all that Miley Cyrus freaking out business, but it is also a core theme of my manuscript -- women are told over and over again that we are not powerful and God forbid we should ever get angry. Well, I grew up angry and then became powerful (in business and elsewhere) in spite of a culture that punished me hard for it. Sorry, world. Gonna have to get used to it. Having said that, there are plenty of famous, strong women who have somehow managed to skirt (see what I did there) the label of crazy such as Madeline Albright, Oprah, Kelly Clarkson, Dolly Parton, Tina Turner, Barbara Boxer, Merle Streep, countless writers, poets and painters and on and on. . . though I have no doubt these women have the scars of being told to sit back down and do as they are told. A whole lotta of us say what Bruce Springsteen says: "When they told me to sit down, I stood up!" From Salon: "Girls and women who too brazenly display power, and are unself-conscious or unapologetic about it, disturb people. When famous women get too big for their, admittedly sometimes really small, britches, our culture likes to make sure that what’s inside that often “pretty head” is seen as crazy. Women who want power or get power are often considered “mad,” which has two interesting meanings. Michele Bachmann’s controversial Newsweek cover didn’t make her look enraged so much as demented. Film in general is exponentially more likely to portray insanity as essentially the purview of women, especially independent ones. Given infinite choices about how to portray one of the few female leaders of the 20th century, Margaret Thatcher, the producers of “Iron Lady” went with a dementia narrative. The entire film noir genre, with its femmes fatales, can be seen as a litany of women confronting gendered restrictions and rebelliously and callously defining themselves to death."
Posted on: Tue, 27 Aug 2013 00:22:01 +0000