Maureen Dowd wrote in her Sunday NY Times column Sick to Your Stomach? #MeToo:
I most dread the rhyming history we are plunged into now: the merciless pummeling of a woman who dares to obstruct the glide path of a conservative Supreme Court nominee.
It is unnerving to think how far women have come, only to find ourselves dragged back to the same place.
As I watch how the Republicans are revictimizing Dr. Christine Blasey Ford I keep flashing back to the women's liberation movement that began in the early 1970’s.
For all the societal advances made by women in the last 50 years there are men who would like to go back to the “Ozzie and Harriet” and “Father Knows Best” culture of their youth in the 1940’s and 50’s where “women knew their place.”
You've come a long way, baby
To get where you've got to today
You've got your own cigarette now, baby
You've come a long, long way
From TV commercials
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I think the way the male-dominated advertising and corporate culture tried to co-opt the women's movement is instructive. Case in point, Virginia Slims cigarettes.
Scrolling through all the print ads in this website about the advertising for Virginia Slims is instructive, appalling, and in many ways nausea inducing.
The thing is that the no doubt mostly male copyrighters who made these ads thought they were complementing women while in fact, they were using them.
I looked at every ad. There are no ads showing ordinary women as physicians, scientists, CEO’s, airline pilots, or members of Congress, or in any other then male-dominated profession from construction workers to farmers. In fact, one of the two professions (the other being nursing) where women outnumbered men, primary school teaching, is shown in this ridiculous ad with an inexplicable message showing an old-fashioned female teacher in an unflattering way:
Maureen Dowd ends her column better than I can end this diary:
Dr. Blasey is dealing with some demonic forces not in play with Professor Hill: a vicious partisan internet that drove her out of her house and being discredited not merely by the White House but personally by a president who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault, who has consistently defended predators such as Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and Roy Moore, and who is advised by the same man who enabled Ailes’s loathsome behavior at Fox News.
We haven’t forgotten our history. But we still seem doomed to repeat it.
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