Unattractive (Scary-looking!) Men Exploit Young Women and Use Public Airwaves to Do It

via a poem by Lucille Clifton, see below.
FavD is just the age and identity stage of the Rutgers teammates, and she learned as they have, what it is to be judged harshly and unfairly by competing cultural forces, just because you love something and work at it everyday meaning to excel -- if you succeed to the point that they begin to notice you, they've got a "lesson" coming your way! They will label you, to see if they can get to your own sense of identity and undermine it, redefine it. Cultural Power of Story.

. . .I’ve survived spending almost every day with people who challenge my physical self-esteem.

Allow me to explain: I dance. I have spent endless mornings and afternoons and nights with people who look like models, if not super models. My best friend is 5′ 6″ and weighs 110 pounds. I am the national average, physiologically, and yet I am an elephant in comparison to almost everyone I know.

I think it is a good thing that I began with a fairly high opinion of myself, otherwise, I don’t know how I would have handled spending the majority of my time in a room with beautiful girls, and a mirror on every wall.

I vividly remember one of the internally ugly beauties calling me “pillow stomach”. I must have been ten or eleven, and it hurt.

But oddly enough, I responded to the outside pressure not with change, but with consistency - I accepted the fact that I looked different as an outward sign that I was different. It’s lucky, I thought, that no one will mix me up with them, because we are not the same. I am smarter, I am stronger.

Maybe it’s human nature to define ourselves in the face of adversity, all I know is that the self-image of different and special stayed with me. And that is why Lucille Clifton’s “homage to my hips” feels like a credo.

“these are big hips.

they need space to move around in.

they don’t fit into little pretty places.

these hips are free hips.

they don’t like to be held back,

they have never been enslaved,

they go where they want to go

they do what they want to do.”

Reading it, I can’t help but smile. My hips don’t fit into little pretty places, and neither do I, mind, body, or spirit. And I can’t help but be thankful for that. . .

Judge not, less you be judged.

Don Imus makes WAY too much money for his radio and tv bosses to get fired over this. He's a multi zillionaire and they give him two weeks suspension? That just amounts to him getting an extra two week vacation, so he can go sit on a beach somewhere and count his money. Meanwhile his agent will call him on vacation and congratulate him for ratings that probably went through the roof the last few days since he's been all over the news. Imus, like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, is someone who has gotten rich over the years using racial code words and double speak. It is why he is so popular. He knows exactly what he is doing. It is what his fans, unfortunately, expect him to do.

If you fire Imus, he won't care, he's filthy rich already, he'll go sit on his ranch in New Mexico and claim he is a victim of anti-free speech people. His words were destestable, his words were horrid, but when you start supporting firing guys for thinking and saying the wrong things, you veer towards Stalinism. Imus's words were terrible. Fearing his words is even worse. The solution is to not listen to his show so his ratings go down, and to not patronize his sponsors. Just as the solution to changing Fox News is not to righteously demand cable companies drop FNC, but simply to change the channel. Stop giving these people your business. If it is no longer good business for Don Imus to do his thing, if he no longer gets good ratings, he will either change his ways or be canceled.

If you fire Don Imus, as Al Sharpton wants, if you serve him up as an example of what should happen to racists in the media, he'll just become a martyr for the other side. In his own world, he'll become more popular even than he is now. The right wing will be enraged. Imus will end up even bigger than he is now. As it is Imus apologized, he went on the air with Sharpton, he is meeting with the Rutgers women's team. He swears he was just joking, and even if he wasn't, it is not against FCC rules to have divergent opinions, and it is not against FCC rules to be a racist and express those views on the air. The best thing now is to drop it and move on, stop giving this guy more publicity, stop patronizing his advertisers and stop listening to his program. That is how you punish a guy like this.

I never liked Imus. Never. But...

I got a new respect for him and his wife after reading John Kerry's book. They are doing some amazing things both with cancer patients and in trying to create healthier environments in schools and hospitals. They are doing some very great things with their success.

None of that changes what he did or what he represents on the air. But it does add depth to what otherwise (both on his show and in our responses to him) is usually a two-dimensional representation of Imus.

I have been considering a diary on this depth and the complexities of the issue, but haven't been able to get into it yet. Maybe that is indicative, but I will keep considering it.

Imus and the girls, I mean -- if you think of him as someone being thrust into harsh cultural judgment basically for doing his own thing really well, the way he does it -- celebrity is never kind to the individual inside the fame, right?

I'm not down on him as a person any more than I am on anyone else and certainly don't think people should be expelled or fired for personal opinions and subjective speech, especially when they are in entertainment or other creative arts.

Like mole, I'm still thinking about it in depth. But that was one powerful news conference!

from the simulcast, radio show under increasing pressure:
Imus Fired by MSNBC

At the Rutgers rally, one of the speakers was Chidimma Acholonu, president of the campus chapter of the NAACP.

"This is not a battle against one man.
This is a battle against a way of thought," she said.

Just before 5 pm Thursday - cable tv is announcing that Imus was just fired from radio as well as the tv simulcast. I think that means he is now off the air.

Supposedly this will not be the end of it. Keith Olbermann (for one) was using the public airwaves (well, basic cable, does that count?) to call for the firing of a whole hit list of people who offend him, to go next.

I wish I were younger so I wouldn't remember how easily and creepily this mob justice stuff gets out of control.

although I can't imagine why she belongs in the middle of this!

with David Gregory, is crediting Al Roker and Gwen Ifill. Al Roker apparently has daughters. Cynthia Tucker (black female) of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is a guest with David Gergen, and she says it's all the diversity in the media now (like Roker and Ifill) that made the difference.

Obviously the self-serving Jayson Blair was no help!

So it's not the blackness or the reproductive anatomy. It's gotta be the life and cultural experiences and the understanding, the perspectives, that arise from all that formative positioning. . .
(which is why Obama doesn;t appeal to me as bringing a new perspective, we've HAD privileged class Ivy elite lawyers to death, and then some, in the presidency.)

why would Al Roker take such offense on behalf of his daughters for something said about other young women, and then poke nationally broadcast fun himself, at epileptics having a seizure??

Glenn Beck was ranting about this on my radio today and while I didn't rant at Imus and I'm not ranting at Roker either, it DOES strike me as the same thing, especially since Beck has an epileptic daughter prone to very frightening and very real seizures. I just don't get why people can't be human about human issues no matter whose ox is getting gored today, or whose it will be tomorrow.

Seems like a pretty sorry lesson to be teaching our daughters about how the world works . . .and I am waiting to see how the media will pile on or not, and then how they justify it.