Witless Wednesday: JLo and the SOTU

I wrote this over at Stand Firm today about trying to watch the SOTU as if it were even a thing, and I was going to just plunk it here and be done…hang on, here is a taste:

Well, I was committed to not watching the State of the Union because I never watch it. It’s one of the small pleasures of life—not to watch the State of the Union. Whenever it was, 20 some years ago, that I realized the president would stand behind a podium for two hours, making ordinary people stand up and be applauded by one side of the room while the other side of the room sat silent, all to demonstrate the wonderful accomplishments of the one behind the podium, and to stick it in the eye of all the people sitting down, I discovered that I would always have something better to do.

This is where my meme, “I’m not from here,” never gets old for me. I never have understood the SOTU as an insider. It is always as if I am watching the exotic rites of alien people up close. I might as well be photographing the Maasai ritual slaughtering of a cow and the drinking of its warm blood. Which is to say, it’s a curious thing to behold, but I am not really emotionally invested, except maybe on behalf of the cow. When it’s all over I can go back to my comfortable hotel room and be grateful that I was not called upon to taste the blood, and that there are some true pleasures to be being a stranger in a strange land.

So, observing as I do from my recumbent position, I must say, Mr. Trump seized the occasion and wielded it to his utmost advantage. To have Ms. Pelosi seated behind his head, arrayed in the crisp white of the abortion lover, the enemy of his political soul, whispering and gesturing throughout, could not have been more effective. To take, then, the opportunity of the speech to trample on all those political ideologies that she holds most dear was for him, the work of—well, it’s still two hours, not a moment.

But then I read this perfect thing. Apparently the NYTimes isn’t all bad all the time. They can pull it together and not ruin every single one of my ten free reads a month. Truly, this kind of writing is what I dream of. Look at this perfectly expressed thought:

Whether women singing and dancing in barely there costumes or otherwise celebrating their bodies is empowering, or an assault on our ability to move through the world as men’s equals, is one of those forever fights that flares up whenever sex workers’ rights or pornography are debated or Emily Ratajkowski posts a topless selfie. What gave this iteration its special sauce, however, was the age of the woman at its center. If there was one thing the Shakers and the Clutchers could agree on, it’s that Jennifer Lopez looks amazing. At 50, she is a force of nature, a woman who looks so amazing it’s like evolution took a tiny step forward, just for her.

And this one:

Some members of my social-media community were in awe. Others — myself included — were feeling personally judged. I’m just a few months younger than J. Lo, and, with every birthday, I have asked: Is this the year it ends? Surely there’s a finish line; a point we’ll reach when the You Must Be This Hot in Order to Participate sign at the amusement park ride disappears, and we all get a seat on the roller coaster (right alongside the lumpy, balding, graying, potbellied men who’ve been riding the entire time).

And this one:

The answer, I think, is to watch these types of performances like a man. Women watch a 15-minute show featuring elite entertainers and, in some cases, end up feeling bad about ourselves. Men, meanwhile, watch a three-hour game, played by elite athletes with single-digit body fat, and most won’t feel a single twinge of self-doubt, or miss a single chip from the nacho platter.

READ THE WHOLE THING. I’m serious. It’s all true. Sure, I was in the camp that objected on vaguely moral terms—as in, I was actually fine until all the little girls were trotted out on stage to sing along, as if the most important lesson a young girl can learn is that her self-actualization and empowerment is intimately clad in almost nothing, and that she will only really be beloved by the world if she can be as sexy as Jennifer Lopez—but, deep down, it is bitterness, shown to me by this brilliant article, that drives my critique.

I know I return to it again and again, but there’s that line in Black Lamb Gray Falcon about the sheer foolishness of a woman, the mother of many children, mourning her youthful body, hang on, I’ve got to go find it…ah, here it is, West is describing the rambling beauty of Diocletian’s palace and she says this:

Yet there is no sense of disorder or vandalism. It would be as frivolous to object to the adaptations the children of the palace have made to live as it would be to regret that a woman who had reared a large and glorious family had lost her girlish appearance. That is because these adaptations have always been made respectfully.

As if, Gwyneth Paltrow standing rail-thin in the center of her rose-crafted most precious portion of herself, or JLo slithering across a stage, or me trying to shove myself into trousers made for a ten-year-old boy (which is what all of them look like as I pull them off the smooth glass shelves, one by one, looking for something that will accommodate the frailty of my person is even that beautiful) is a useful exercise that says anything about the soul.

It’s not beautiful, though it is up to date, which is very important to me on account of my childhood trauma of having to search through the missionary barrel stocked with items from the 70s, in the latter part of the 80s. I don’t really know what beauty is about myself, any more than any other woman in this vast land. But I do know that the tortured quest to be accepted is not that pleasurable, and that I wish that JLo had come out and sung in something stunning and voluminous, and stood still, and let her voice soar.

But she didn’t, and so here we are.