CSotD: Finding wisdom
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Nah, Randy, I don't want to triple my dating pool. But, unlike Rudy in today's Rudy Park, it's not because I'm not that good a swimmer. It's because I've paddled around in the muck enough, thanks.
I may have to go back to a practice I followed during the election, of staying off Facebook until after I'd done the day's CSotD. It put me in a foul, depressed mood then and I'm seeing the same level of ignorant, hateful toxicity again now.
I found my first Barcelona Truthers yesterday. These genius analysts have looked over the video and determined that it's fake, that those people aren't dead, that it didn't happen.
And then someone who noted that Nazis had perpetrated the Holocaust was met with the whatabout defense that the Soviets also committed atrocities, and then someone else pointed out that you really shouldn't hold the South responsible for slavery because it has existed throughout time.
Which is to say, "They all do it."
And so it's okay, or, at least, it's not fair to hold any particular group responsible for anything.
Many sides, many sides, and some very nice people, too.
And I don't think this shit — I use the word deliberately — is coming from Russia anymore.
I suspect that Putin's use of fakes and trolls and bots succeeded beyond his wildest dreams in bringing the eejits out from under their rocks and we're in Sorcerer's Apprentice territory now.
I wish I thought there were some Great Master Sorcerer who could appear and put it all right again.
But there isn't, and, while I have no intention of surrendering to the forces of hatred and willful ignorance, I think it's okay to maybe go into a rope-a-dope tuck once in awhile and hope they get tired.
Besides, I'm also hoping that, by Tuesday, the eclipse metaphor political cartoons will have gone away.
Meanwhile …
While I was preoccupied
Between Friends had an arc last week — click here to go to the start — that I kept wanting to comment on, but I was preoccupied with Nazi sympathizers and, besides, I wanted to see where it would go.
I'm a big enough fan of Sandra Bell Lundy and the Between Friends gang that I think I can argue with them respectfully on this one.
"A Woman of a Certain Age" — or "Une femme d'une certaine age," to be both bilingually Canadian and to take it back to its origins — is only "old" to those who lack a sense of nuance or, perhaps, little real-world contact with women of a certain age.
In searching for the origin, I came across, first, this brilliant Australian commentary, and then the William Safire column she cites.
Noting that the phrase suggests an age it is impolite to pin down specifically, Safire went on to contact Lillian Roth, author of a 1979 book, "Women of a Certain Age: The Midlife Search for Self."
Reached in San Francisco, Dr. Rubin, whose book indicates she is now in her early 70's, was surprised to learn of the long English history of the phase because "it has a long history in French, where it refers to women of fortyish and thereabouts who are able to initiate boys and young men into the beauties of sexual encounters. The early use in English seems to be about spinsterhood, but the French meaning has nothing to do with marriage."
In French, the phrase has erotically or sexually charged overtones. "It comes from a society where sexuality is freer," Dr. Rubin notes, "and more understood as an important part of human life."
And, by the way, that "older woman" may raise the image of Mrs. Robinson, but Mrs. Robinson was not une femme d'une certaine age, because, while she was just on the cusp of 40 — having dropped out of college as a pregnant freshman to have a daughter now an undergraduate — she hadn't the wisdom and aplomb necessary for the role.
To put it bluntly, she was too insecure, too pathetic, too often drunk.
Granted, whatever Hollywood and our own fevered imaginations may concoct, I'm not sure any 40-year-old — male or female — sleeping with a 21-year-old in the real world can do so without a suggestion of the insecure if not the pathetic, but there's plenty of value in une femme d'une age certain if you are also of that same unspecified age.
After all, Anne Bancroft herself was not only beautiful well into her unspecified years, but had the poise and aplomb and wit and sense of humor to be married to Mel Brooks.
And as I edge towards 70, I have found that my cohorts agree they wouldn't want to be 21 again, but they'd happily go back to their 40s.
As that Australian columnist notes, there's nothing wrong with vibrant maturity.
Many Hollywood actresses are rightly angry about the dictates of marketability, the stupidity of the gendered shelf life and the relentlessness of the photographic onslaught. We should join in their laments about ageism, because we don't want women in their prime wiped off our screens, or altered beyond recognition.
Nor do we need magazine spreads about being fabulous at any age or awkward grey power slogans, or whatever inane self-affirmations older women are encouraged to chant in order to walk in public both wrinkled and unmasked. We just need to rethink what it means to be a certain age. A certain wisdom, a certain comfort, a certain sexuality, a certain something. Growing more certain, not less.
Embrace age. Appreciate yourself.
Not only will it make others more likely to, but you won't fret if they don't.
Alas, we just lost one of the very best of the femmes d'une certaine age July 31
Nostalgia for what? Nostalgia is when you want things to stay the same.
I know so many people staying in the same place. And I think, my God,
look at them! They’re dead before they die. — Jeanne Moreau
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