"It normalizes a passive dominant idea of gender,” the feminist leader explains.

Old habits take hold without resistance.  There is simply a forgetting of what it was you wished to remember.  You can remember a general theme--Change--but the details become murky.  You were going to do more in the mornings.  You remember that.  And after work, too.  But you don't.  Tomorrow, you say.  I just got off the plane.  But tomorrow, after your first day back to work, you are sunk in the mire again.  Time.  That is what they take from you.  All of it because you are exhausted when you leave.  You are better than some and manage to steal something for yourself like a trip to the gym or a yoga session, but then it is late and you still must make dinner.  Showered, you sit down and it is over.  You have done nothing different and can't remember what it was you thought you might do.  Just change.

I tell you I work in a factory, but I must admit I have a foreman's job.  I am not on the floor, so to speak, manning a machine.  My job is to make certain others do that.  I set schedules and assign jobs and answer to the higher administration.  Right now, most of the workers are on vacation while I try to catch up on my administrative duties.  That means I spend more time in meetings with my bosses.  Everyone is nice.  They smile and are pleasant to a degree that masks the real threat that I might be sent back to the floor again.  I am no longer seen as this or that.  The floor workers know that I am not powerful and bully me a bit, and administrators make me their lapdog.  So I am careful, for truly, after the trip to the hospital, the broken crown, the expensive trip to California, the disaster with the rental car, and all the things that have been neglected around the house that MUST be taken care of, I need the extra money.  I am a whore.

When I read Gloria Steinem's comments surrounding her cry for a boycott of NBC's new series about the Playboy Club, I thought many things.  The caption with today's photo comes from that.  Substitute "class" for "gender" or any of a hundred Manichean classifications and the quote still works the same way.  Such statements that once empowered postmodern critics have by now become tired and shopworn.  It is perplexing, to be sure, for the statement undeniably has one leg in truthfulness.  Not simply for gender, but for many perceived inequalities.  And Steinem's complaint is not about sex but about exploitation of sex for profit.  I think.  And again, by extension, you can make the argument equally for all exploitation.

So I like it.

And I don't.  Mostly for the same reasons I dislike religion.  It is totalizing rather than nuanced.  It ignores as much as it notices.  It is self-satisfied and dogmatic and is its own form of tyranny.  I'll leave it to you to sort out the pronoun references.  You know, "it" does some nice things for some people.  "It" does some horrible things, too.

I like Steinem O.K.  She kicked Norman Mailer's ass.  

There is a Christian group who is also calling for a boycott of the same show.  I enjoy this yoking of causes like hitching up a goat and a donkey to a plow.

I'll probably watch the Playboy thing now where I'm sure I wouldn't have before.

But I must hurry.  The factory bosses want to see me working, not thinking about gender and class and ideology.

Maybe I'll begin eating at new restaurants and see if that works.