I'd Like To "Juice" Jose Canseco's Head

Hey everybody, I'd just like to make a disclaimer that because I'm back in school, I won't be able to post as frequently as I'd like to. (But don't blame me, blame the two hours of Calculus homework we're getting each night!) Anyway, here's my response to another article by Maureen Dowd called Where's the Road Beef?:

In this article by Maureen Dowd, we’re given a glimpse into the world of major league baseball via Jose Canseco’s Juiced, where behind the glitz, glam, and bobble-heads, America’s boys of summer are using terms like slump buster and road beef to describe women. What is a slump buster, you ask? “It could mean [a woman who is] big, or ugly, or a combination of both,” says Canseco, and it’s how some of our beloved hard-hitters are coping with a bad season. As former Chicago Cubs first baseman Mark Grace put it, they’ll find “the fattest, gnarliest chick” possible and (to put it lightly) use them.

I use toilet paper. I didn’t know it was acceptable to use human beings.

Dowd’s article isn’t exclusively about Canseco and friends; in the grand scheme of things it’s about archaic standards of beauty, and the stigmas overweight women face each and every day. As she points out, “TV is full of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ pairings, with fat, lazy husbands and foxy, impressive wives.” But do we ever acknowledge relationships between slender guys and larger women? No. We live in a society where women are judged by their looks and men for the size of their wallets, and heaven forbid we reveal the face of “real” women who don’t have money to shell out for liposuction, implants, or Botox - and who wouldn’t want those things, anyway.

This article hits home because I can relate to it. I’m sure a lot of women and young girls can relate to it. Feeling like an outcast, feeling like your worth is determined by your body . . . it’s an unfortunate, unavoidable reality. And even if Dowd doesn’t call us to do anything to change the mentalities of locker rooms everywhere, her last line deserves an Emmy: “One thing is for sure, though. Guys who look at fat women as ‘slump busters’ are fatheads.”

Want a better chance of getting married, ladies?

Part of our summer homework for AP Language and Composition was to find ten op-ed (opinion-editorial) articles and respond to them. I wasn't looking forward to it until I realized The New York Times website has a nifty feature where you can "search" for any topic that happens to suit your fancy. I looked up "feminism" and that was it. My next three hours were pretty much set, reading up on tons of issues that I actually care about (sorry politics, I'm just not that into you). One of the best writers I've come across is Maureen Dowd, who infuses humor and a down-to-earth personality into whatever she's writing. Here's my response to her article Men Just Want Mommy:

Maureen Dowd certainly didn’t unearth the alarming trend of men preferring secretaries, assistants, and nannies (among other subservient roles) over successful, career-minded women, but she describes the plight with enough statistics and wit to leave me sufficiently scared for the future. According to countless studies all over the world, men prefer “young women whose job it was to tend to them and care for them in some way.” Dowd muses: “it’s all about orbiting, serving, and salaaming their Sun Gods.”

The sad thing is, women who strive for top corporate positions and six-figure salaries are often stereotyped as manly, aggressive, vain, insensitive, and neglectful of their familial duties. As Dowd observes, “art is imitating life, turning women who seek equality into selfish narcissists and objects of rejection, rather than affection.”

These feelings are never more apparent than in Hollywood, where the “soothing aura of romances between unequals” brings in the big bucks. How many movies can you think of have a leading man falling for his nanny, secretary, maid? Now how many can you think of where said man falls for his (female) boss?* Men are intimidated, it seems, by women who are competitive and self-sufficient, as if they’re incapable of also being friendly, nurturing, and compassionate. This certainly isn’t what feminists have in mind for “equality;” is it fair that women are penalized for being smart, independent, and pro-active, when men are respected for it?

Like always, Dowd uses hardcore facts to put things in perspective. For example, it would probably scare (scar?) a lot of single ladies to know that, according to a study conducted at four British universities, “the prospect for marriage [increases] by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise.”

Well that’s... ridiculous, sexist, and little disheartening.

Our conclusion, however, shouldn’t be to dumb ourselves down (possibly by listening to Pat Robertson for five seconds?) until we’re “desirable enough” for a man. We should strive to be all that we can, and if a guy comes along who just happens to love and appreciate our hard work and incandescent personalities . . . great.

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*I'd like to point out that the only movie I know featuring a man falling for his boss is Bob the Butler, which I'm pretty sure was pulled from the Disney Channel for a scene involving Tom Green's nipples.