• I wish I had a psyche this organized…..

    From the Daily Mail this morning:

    “She is already known as the ‘first woman of Wall Street’. Now a British-born single mother is being heavily tipped to take on the world’s top banking job.

    Marianne Lake, 48, who has been CFO of JPMorgan Chase since 2012, is now  the favourite to succeed the bank’s long-serving chief executive, Jamie Dimon.

    She would be an historic choice for the role – the appointment would make her the first ever female chief executive of the largest US bank, tasked with running a £300billion ($419bn) empire that employs 240,000 staff in more than 60 countries….”

    And get this, she is a single mother of three young children.

    Respect.

     

  • The Truth About Cancer will save your life.

    Watch this doc this week – it is brilliant, it will save your life or that of someone you love one day. Plus if Big Pharma is responsible for buying and trashing all these tonics, protocols and cures, their CEOs and shareholders deserve to be roasted on a spit on CNN and fed to the dogs.

  • Women and Power, a Manifesto, by Mary Beard

    I spent odd moments this weekend reading Mary Beard’s slight Women and Power, 107 pages chronicling the misogynists of classical literature and culture and an awkward attempt to correlate today’s dislike of women like Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel to the male dislike of the woman’s voice, and male hatred for women in power. Beard is famous for her presentations of classical history on the BBC, and for the companion books, Pompeii and Rome. And for being a proud aging woman with long grey hair and no make-up on prime time television. This last has made her a hero to women and the locus of an impressive amount of hatred from the less evolved, much of it having to do with her vagina.  Now considered a folk hero for fighting back – she took her most vicious hater out to lunch, tamed him and wrote him a job recommendation – Beard is surprised, surprised! by the hate out there.

    She is right about the hatred directed at women in the public sphere who advance ideas which are prescriptive.  Right or left, the hate is personal, sometimes frightening and very often, disgusting.  Equally, one’s opponents lie and mischaracterize your ideas and associations and say horrible things about your appearance. This is true for men and more so for women, but men shake it off. They are used to fierce competition in the workplace, and in the world of ideas.  For women, because they are hard-wired to the vulnerable, it is earth-shaking, and ferociously hard.

    Beard’s solution is to have more women in positions of power.  Again yes, with a caveat.  Beard wants to change the face of power and have it be more inclusive of ordinary men and especially, women.  How this is to be achieved is left to others as are all policy prescriptions founded in emotion.

    This is the point of this somewhat dangerous age we find ourselves enduring.  It is in fact, the crux of it and the reason for the hate directed at Beard. We cannot legislate against hate.  That immediately becomes the major tool of the oppressor, to silence opposing ideas.  And, in the realm of women’s freedom, it is not necessary.  The advances of women in my lifetime alone are stunning, there are no doors left unopened, no ceiling left uncracked.  Affirmative action is the de facto rule in almost every profession and industry I’ve encountered.  Almost every western democracy has had a woman leader, and frankly, sex and race are not and should never be a qualification for the most powerful job in the world.

    At this juncture, our responsibility as women is to grow into our new roles. I grew up reading fiction (Edith Wharton springs to mind, Emma Bovary another) wherein women who left the traditional course or were ambitious in unseemly ways, ended up dead or disgraced.  Quite a different story today.  Women’s popular fiction is filled with bad-ass gals, many of whom are alcoholics, who solve mysteries and conquer or women under deep threat from serial killers who are their husbands, who conquer and save their children as well. The voice in today’s fiction is deeply personal, deeply concerned with every fibrillation of its psyche, honoring every perception, intuition, every feeling. This is fascinating for one reason:  women, as a class, are individuating. We are moving away from the collectivization that marked the lives of women for the last 5000 years. To follow Beard’s prescriptions, would send us straight back to the herd, mooing along in concert, under the spell of the overlord who tells us the right pretty stories about ourselves.

     

  • Billy Graham is dead. Or is he?

    Someday you will read or hear that Billy Graham is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it. I shall be more alive than I am now. I will just have changed my address. I will have gone into the presence of God.” Billy Graham

  • The snack bar that sold the bodies of young women to powerful men is closing in every industry.

    Adrienne Miller got the dream job of literary editor of Esquire Mag, for decades the gold coast where great writers lounged and toyed with their prey.  Much envied she was because, for other women, a job like hers was so far out of reach to be in an alternate universe.  For most women in the 80’s and 90’s, as Miller cites Henry James saying, “Everything had something behind it: life was like a long, long corridor with rows of closed doors.”  That every door had something behind it, Miller was about to learn.

    She paid.

    “I was put in my place at a party in a literary agent’s apartment on Fifth Avenue, when an elderly Frenchman approached me and another woman as we sipped our champagne, and croaked, “All women should be dead when they’re the Marilyn Monroe age.”