It is being said that our Presidential election will be decided by women. We are 52% of the population and a larger proportion of the population of actual voters. That's why both major political parties are going out of their way to sway undecided women.
But this post is NOT about politics - I prefer to voice those opinions over at the MOMocrats. I only mention it because it's part of a larger picture, where the media-at-large appears to have finally noticed that we women exist, as opinion-shapers and a powerful economic force in our own right.
And I hope you will excuse me while I bask in this.
You see, at 52 years old, I really feel like I have lived the modern women's revolution. I have fairly clear memories of 1963, the year Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. I remember feeling inferior because my mom told me I was too dark skinned to ever dye my hair blonde, which meant that I would never have fun, because that's what Clairol told me on TV. I wanted to be Miss America when I grew up, because she was the national ideal of grown-up womanhood.
Fortunately, my mom never told me that I would likely be too short and ethnic to ever be a candidate. And by the time I was 12, I realized that I was too cool anyway to pursue that particular dream. That was the year the nascent women's liberation movement protested the pageant by throwing "items of female torture" into a garbage can - and earned the colorful label of "bra burners."
To quote another advertisement from my childhood, we've come a long way, baby. OK, so the Equal Rights Amendment got shot down by Phyllis Schlafly and her posse of moral alarmists. But after Hillary Clinton's historic candidacy and the media frenzy surrounding the Republicans' choice for Vice President, women are being actively courted -- and not just by advertisers.
Suddenly, our opinions matter.
I've seen more media requests for women in the last couple of weeks than I have in the entire five years I've been writing this blog: My MOMocrat sistah PunditMom, was interviewed by CBS (along with Lawyer Mama), Fox News and twice by CNN.
They want our opinions. They want our support. They create products they hope will appeal to us.
It's too bad they don't respect us.
Take the new movie, "The Women," opening today. It is based on Claire Booth Luce's 1936 play (and 1939 MGM film) about society women, and was revolutionary at the time for its all-female cast.
Seventy years later, that all-female cast thing is still unique. In fact, it was one of the reasons writer/director Diane English (who created Murphy Brown) spent 14 years getting the thing made: no one wanted to greenlight a project that did not include one male character - because WHO would want to see it?
You see, there is a fallacy among the people who produce motion pictures that the only people who want to go out to movies any longer are men aged 25 and younger.
A few months ago, most of the entertainment media was shocked at how successful the Sex and the City movie was. After all, it was a chick flick.
And this summer, they were surprised again when Mamma Mia surpassed their box office projections.
Neither of these films got very good reviews. News flash: Movies created for women and families are not deemed "cool" by a lot of entertainment critics. A movie appealing to these audiences has to be Oscar quality to get an embrace. The rest are received with little praise, even the ones that fulfill their meager promise to be an entertaining diversion (and I think that's the goal of most films and for most film goers).
I am expecting that The Women won't be treated any better by the critics. (I'll have my own review up at Socal Stuff shortly.)
I also expect that it will do very well at the box office. Because this is, after all, our year.
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