Two words:
“Hello, ladies!”
Two words, and we’re back in the fifties.
Did we ever leave?
The teenage tv boy fakes a frown
with his head turned down
and offers to pick up his sister at school
to save his parents the trouble
of driving ten minutes in an air conditioned van
with plush leather interior.
They drop the keys in his hand
and the screen cuts to a girl asking why
her brother is doing the driving.
She hops in
and it all becomes clear
when her three friends
pile in the back seat.
The boy looks over his shoulder with a smile
and says to the young women
of the world
“Hello, ladies!”
I’ll admit that I’ve seen worse.
I saw a black and white tv tragedy
with a man cracking a whip of cologne
to “tame” the women in a cage.
But this tv boy cracking lines in our face
is like a splinter in our brain
too small to pull out the pain
or a gas chamber so bright and colorful
that it’s killing us softly
and we can’t even smell what’s choking us.
Just because the gas smells sweeter
doesn’t mean we can breathe any easier.
I see my sister
in the back of that boy’s van.
Does he see that
she spends hours typing at the computer
spinning complex plots out of silken strands of words and electrons
to weave a tapestry that the world has never seen?
Does he see that
she draws sketches and portraits
with lines, shapes, colors, and dreams all flowing together
to recreate heroines and heroes from video games and tv?
Does he see that
her fingers, hands, arms, heart, and mind
can move with the bow and body of a violin
until they all sing and dance a symphony?
No.
All he sees is a “lady”
a target for Cupid’s steel-tipped arrow
maybe even a warm firm body
that he can use and discard
nothing more than a vehicle
for his fantasies.
Go ahead, tell me I’m overreacting.
It’s all in good fun, right?
Boys will be boys?
Girls will be toys?
I’m not going to pretend that these two words
are some sort of tv guillotine
that single-handedly chops off the heads of all women
and reduces them to dead bodies
but having those words
those pictures, those sounds
raping our eye sockets a hundred times a day
every day and every night
cradle to grave
certainly lends the executioner a helping hand.
And for what? To sell a minivan?
“Hello, ladies!”
Goodbye, women.