Madame President

Growing up in the 80's I feel I have actually encountered many of the aftershocks of Coverture Culture in my own matriarchy.  However, that was what was expected. Countless times growing up I was told: "be a good girl" to the point now as an adult woman when I hear that phrase it literally creates an immediate Pavlovian response. I have seen first hand how working-class families by sheer circumstance have equality built-in. There aren't enough hours in the day, strength in your bones to discriminate. Yet to that point one could say "more money more problems" and nod to the remake of Little Women in theaters now that belies the point has much changed at all? Or have we come so far, we should congratulate ourselves that we have evolved to a generation that takes these liberties as a given paired with snobbery in our electronic age that FINALLY, intelligence isn't a liability to beauty? Is it the...Enjoli?

 (Links to an external site.)The Enjoli Perfume ad, the disco template that women are born to serve their masters and die grateful and gorgeous. I too wanted to grow up and be Enjoli! I was obsessed with that blonde ambition that still to this day has only ever been achieved by literally playing a role and tasked to wearing a blond wig. Now with our current political landscape jangling my nerves with a tweet, I ask you, are we victim or victor to our own progress? Obvi I have been #triggered, this fury that I feel when I read some of the language used for, to and ON women from early colonial America is positively shattering. I want to start a picket line in my own kitchen, then a moment later demolished at my own ignorance for being unaware of the details of HERstory which consolidated woman to a commodity less than even a decade ago.

Is that then the subconscious of the "Enjoli"? This need to control, be controlled ourselves, be eternal ingenues, be "good girls" or die trying? The thirst for patriarchal power from tribal to syndicate as the embarkment of the industrial revolution pressing women to remain the cultural underpinning of home, yet at what cost in the undertow to themselves? To be recognized as equal mind you, even in the privacy of their own bed isn't possible? Yet to follow into the fire sipping a tincture of Stockholme Syndrome is plausible gravitas? Mon Dieu. This reduction to an indentured harem identity that can not be reconciled in its own duality is so positively outrageous that it deserves its own #slutwalk to levy the polluted criminal mindset of its own incredulity. Howeve's 300+ years ago that kind of whisper would most certainly end up in a riot of Salem style witch trials portions with our dear Sisterhood of The Traveling Pantaloons naiveté shotput into a war room scouring the King James Bible to cite any Paul in Corinthians like Miranda Rights to avoid a Scarlet Lettering style drowning for merely having an opinion: The sky is blue, the water is wet.... GET YOUR FOOT OFF MY NECK.

I shudder to think, yet this has been thunk and thought out in a much more refined manner than mine which rails from under this cyber-bush like a wild thing who's code was just written in The Matrix of Cro-Magnon. Regardless, my PTSD is valid non-withstanding.

I digress, collecting my jaw off the floor to learn what the brave stalwarts of this said sisterhood began to tackle; "I am humbled" is a mumbled understatement. Literal tears are more apropos as it being Presidents Day (this present administration excluded, this trash gaggle of hooligans) I reflect on the Lady Libertines in all their alliterations I have in my eye, my heart and my spirit. Cleopatra always arrives first: a neo-feminist that shattered Rome with whiplash wit and smile. Her echoes of a flesh and blood ruler turning the patriarchy on its ear becoming the most powerful Queen-Madame President that even she could not have known, now in a death like the Nile she descended and defended, flows on for eternity lighting our way.

Let us keep going, in gratitude I go with you in this safe forum -feme sole- that our Grandmothers bravely whispered: "It isn't a liability to want more, what's in it for me?"