NY Times Op-Ed: Maureen Dowd: "Arabs put their women in veils. We put ours in the stocks.
Every culture has its own way of tamping down female power, be it sexual, political or financial. Americans like to see women who wear the pants be beaten up and humiliated. Afterward, in a gratifying redemption ritual, people like to see the battered women be rewarded.
That's how Hilary Swank won two Oscars. That's how Hillary Clinton won a Senate seat and a presidential front-runner spot. And that's how Martha Stewart won her own reality TV show and became a half-billion dollars richer while she was in prison.
We've come a long way, baby, from the era of witch trials, when women with special power who knew how to curse were burned at the stake. Now, after a public comeuppance, they are staked to a lucrative new career. In this century, the scarlet letter morphs into a dollar sign.
Maybe temperamental, power-mad divas always needed to be brought down a peg. They used to do it to themselves. Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe were gorgeous monsters, but were so self-destructive there was no need to punish them further.
But Hillary and Martha - the domestic diva with the new ankle bracelet echoed Judy Garland on her Web site yesterday that 'there is no place like home' - are not self-destructive. They are brass-knuckled survivors who elicit both admiration and an enmity that Alessandra Stanley memorably dubbed 'blondenfreude.'
From pornography to 'Desperate Housewives,' women being degraded has an entertainment value far greater than men being degraded. People liked Hillary and Martha a lot more once they were 'broken,' like one of Martha's saddle horses, ice queens melted into puddles of vulnerability."