Settle-mints

Some days it’s nice to think about progress. There is a great lure in thinking about it and I’m not saying progress is a bad thing. It is necessary and integral but it can also be deceptive. The difference between progress and crumbs being thrown your way can be a very fine line.

A good example is the Women’s Movement in its heyday in the seventies. There was an ad campaign for Virginia Slims cigarettes, which were, interestingly enough, the last cigarettes to be shown in a television commercial. I’m sure at least some of you remember it, as the main slogan was quite famous, “You’ve come a long way, baby!” The ads would show old photos of women hanging laundry on a line with a quote along the lines of, “Husbands would let their wives get out of the house from time-to-time,” or they would show women getting caught smoking with a clever quip about how they were living in such restrained times. Then there would be a beautiful woman in her modern clothes happily smoking her cigarette. See, you could smoke now, openly and freely. What a beautiful world. What progress!

Now it is just fine to smoke freely, albeit a pretty nasty habit. We have rights over our own bodies, although they are constantly threatened with removal. You know, one or two Supreme Court justices in the wrong direction and . . . There are certainly many groups who would very gladly see those rights taken away (there are even groups who want birth control taken away).

Women have greater opportunities in the workplace, jobs once completely dominated by men are now opening more and more to women. Of course women make 22% less for the same work. Women also enter male dominated fields like law, but they make partner much less often than men. Women in medicine are strongly represented in fields like OB/GYN and family practice but far less often in cardiovascular medicine or neurosurgery. So do we really have opportunities or are we feeding from the crumbs thrown to us, being convinced there is progress? It is a settle-mint, tasting great at first but then turning very bitter when you get to the core?

I remember being in a macroeconomics class in college and being told point blank that women were a bad investment economically because they could get pregnant. It wasn’t anything against women, I was told, it was just simply supply and demand. I also remember sitting in an advanced calculus-based microeconomics class and being the only women in the class. The professor made an offhand remark about a Dorothy Parker quote. Mind you, I’d read everything she’d ever written. He was then asked by the class to tell the story. He said, “Well. . .” and nodded in my direction. Everyone stared at me, the lone female in a class, in a world, where I was not welcome. It was their territory and I had invaded. It gets worse. At the end of class, the boys club said, “So what was the quote?” The professor stared at me. I furiously shoved my books back into the bag, turning red with anger and shame, and left the room as they all stared. I never went back. I didn’t feel that I’d come a very long way, baby.

The same is true with gay rights. Sometimes I look at things like the awesome Ms. Rachel Maddow and think, it is so great that we have an open and unapologetic lesbian bringing us news. We also have Ellen, greatly loved and adored, and she’s even doing Cover Girl commercials. Could you have ever imagined? There is a gay television network, but the commercials with happy gay couples are only shown there, not on any other networks. We’ve come a long way, right? We have an administration that made a lot of great campaign promises that have thus far not been realized and in many cases not even addressed. There are openly gay elected officials and closeted ones who rabidly vote for anti-gay legislation. We have gay marriage kind-of, sort-of and it can be given and taken away just as easily. We have kiss-ins right here in Grand Rapids. Of course we couldn’t have it near a group of children because what if they saw a same-sex couple kiss? That might give them the idea that it’s acceptable. We have gay pride celebrations here in conservative West Michigan and people bring signs that say things like, “Gays have two rights – AIDS and hell.”

Have we come a long way?

We have a long struggle and fight and we are really just beginning. We must be ever vigilant that we do not try to feed upon and then choke on the crumbs that are thrown our way. It is great to look at strides that have been made but never, ever settle. We can settle up but we should never settle down. We have a right to every right, not just the ones the someone picks and chooses for us. No one should have to get up and leave class just so a chosen few, born to their privilege, can hear the joke.