Free to be you, me – and someone else

October 8, 2016

Culture vulture that I am, I somehow missed the cultural appropriation wars that have erupted. That’s what you get for going on vacation and unplugging.

First, novelist Lionel Shriver apparently set off a firestorm at the Brisbane Writer’s Festival with a defense of artists using other people’s races, ethnicities, sexualities, etc. in their creations. Then Claudio Gatti outed the comfortable Roman translator Anita Raja as the author of the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante novels about the friendship between two poor Neapolitan girls.

Meanwhile, Bristol University cancelled a production of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Aida,” because students protested white people playing Egyptians and Ethiopians. ...

Trumping decency

October 8, 2016

Well, this is a first – the F-word, the S-word, the T-word and the P-word in political coverage. It all comes courtesy of the latest Donald Trump revelations – that in a hot-mike conversation with Billy Bush in 2005, Trump admitted to groping women.

I have to admit that I’m inured to his shenanigans by now. There are so many of them that I’ve grown a thick skin. What disturbs me here is not Trump, a lost cause, or the predictable blaming of Bill and Hillary Clinton as philanderer and enabler but the idea that this is just boys-will-be-boys banter. ...

For Clinton, other women, sick days are a luxury

September 15, 2016

In “Clinton’s Sick Days” – a column in today’s New York Times about Hillary Clinton’s failure to disclose she has pneumonia before getting sick at New York’s 9/11 ceremony – Frank Bruni writes: “Her self-protection is a perverse form of self-destruction.”

While I would agree that she is a controlled and controlling woman – the result of having an open, philandering husband, the lack of power for women and her own Scorpio nature – that’s not what’s at play here. Or rather all that is at play here.

Women are raised to care for others. The not-so-subtle message is keep calm, carry on and don’t make a big deal of your cancer, recent surgery, etc. Lives are depending on you. ...

Cover me: Burkini fever

September 4, 2016

The first time I saw the burkini – the controversial swimwear worn primarily by Muslim women, whose ban on French beaches was recently overturned by a French court – I thought, if I wasn’t often so hot, and not in a good way, I would definitely wear one.

Indeed, when I first hit the beach in Bali – the Hindu island of Muslim Indonesia, where everyone lets it all hang out – I was dressed in a one-piece and a sarong, accessorized by a beach umbrella.

I cannot have the sun beating down on my head – I take my daily constitutional with an umbrella or parasol in the warm-weather months – and I don’t want my skin overexposed to Mr. Sun either.

I’m not alone. British chef Nigela Lawson sports a burkini at the beach to shield her fair skin, and the swimsuit has been championed by members of both sexes and several major religions, along with lifeguards in Australia, where it was designed by Lebanese-born Aheda Zanetti. ...

Hillary Clinton – backward and in heels

July 30, 2016

From the moment I became aware of Hillary Clinton when her husband, Bill, ran for the presidency, I thought she would someday be the first woman president of the United States. The superbly orchestrated Democratic National Convention did nothing to change that perception.

She is not, and never will be, the seductive speaker her husband is. Nor will she ever strike the delicate balance between the intellectual and the visceral that President Barack Obama has achieved, inspiring us not only to hope but to continue striving. She lacks, by her own admission, the temperament for that, being more comfortable, as she said, with the “service” part of “public service” than the “public” portion. Indeed, her naturally secretive nature, at the heart of the overblown email scandal, is no doubt exacerbated by her husband’s ability to feel everyone’s pain – particularly that of nubile women. ...

The Athena principle: Ivanka and Donald Trump

July 24, 2016

A patron at a restaurant I frequent finds Donald Trump’s relationship with his older daughter, Ivanka, peculiar. He seems to be closer to her than to his wife, Melania, she has said.

Jill Filipovic – a lawyer and journalist who’s the author of the forthcoming “The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness,” offers an explanation: A man wants a nurturer in a wife, who will care for his needs, and an independent-minded, strong woman in a daughter, who, after all, reflects him. I myself saw this with my own father and I’ve seen this with every man I’ve known who had daughters. Whether or not he was a feminist, married or divorced, gay or straight, he always wanted his daughter or daughters to succeed and thus women to have opportunities and pay equal to that of men. ...

The hair up there: Trump and the age of transition

July 17, 2016

We live in wondrous, terrifying, complex, fascinating times. In the United States, we are about to embark on two political conventions – the Republican July 18-21 in Cleveland and the Democratic July 25-29 in Philadelphia – that offer productive change and stasis, the future and the past, though not in the ways you might imagine.

The motif of the presidential campaign is that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, represents the same old-same old inside Washington, while Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, is the fresh, brash outlier. But in fact, we’ve been looking in a mirror, and it’s the opposite. Clinton and the Dems, with their inclusive approach to race, gender and ethnicity, signal the future, and Trump – with his appeal to angry, white, working-class men – the past. ...