Skirt Chasing
Driving in Boston yesterday, I heard the word “skirt” mentioned twice on the radio. This kind of thing always piques my interest because I think that there may be someone, somewhere trying to tell me something through encoded random public broadcasts. Don’t judge me. It could be happening.
The first was in a report about a nut job accosting women by running around lifting up or pulling down their skirts to take pictures. This had been happening several times a week for 6 weeks. My first thought was “Seriously? How is that even exciting to anyone? You know there is porn available on the internet, right?” My second thought was that it seems so strange that someone should be vulnerable because of a clothing choice. I wear skirts all the time, almost exclusively, and it has never occurred to me that it was a liability. Dear lord.
But then the third thought hit me – it is a humiliation thing. You mo-fo crapburger – how dare you? Then I was pissed. Even more pissed than one gets usually fighting the Boston traffic. You are getting off by taking away the dignity of women who choose to wear skirts because they still have faith in humanity and would never imagine being assaulted in such a way? How dare you? Hey you! Skirt bandit of Boston! You are a nasty, low-down, troglodyte who must now spend the rest of your days finding ways to elevate and empower the human race, all while wearing a skirt. OK, the skirt is optional. Let’s just focus on empowerment.
The second time I heard the word skirt was when a blowhard talk show host kept blabbing about how the president was hiding behind the skirt of the US Ambassador to the UN – THE MOTHER FUCKING AMBASSADOR TO THE UN!!!. The accomplished Ambassador to the UN. The brilliant, eloquent, scholar was called the skirt. How idiotic is that? The revulsion in his tone when he spoke of someone allowing a skirt to…. to what? Appear in public? Be an Ambassador? Do her job? I am not sure what he was trying to say because his overuse of both skirt and woman as something so utterly disgusting infuriated me. Honestly – would anyone refer to Neil Armstrong as the biomedical injection disk because he sometimes wore one? No, they would not because that is silly and he is an American icon who is so much more than an article of clothing. Skirt? Are we in “Guys and Dolls” and no one told me?
Hey talk show host! The US Ambassador to the UN went to Stanford, was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, and the United States Senate confirmed her position by unanimous consent. Do you know what qualifies you to be an archaic, closed minded, freak-show of a talk show host? Having a mouth. Congratulations.
So, I think I may have been right. There is a message coming through in random radio broadcasts and the message is way less encoded than originally suspected. The message is that we are simply nowhere we may think we are in terms of women being viewed with strength and dignity. If someone is trying to take away a woman’s power by forcibly removing her clothes and photographing the assault, or reducing the accomplishments of a diplomat by disdainfully referring to her as a skirt – and being paid to do so on air, then we are sadly not where we think we are.
If we are in Guys and Dolls, would someone PLEASE start “Rocking the Boat”.
