Jottings: Idle  And Otherwise 

By MRJ

IN THIS age of girl empowerment specially in America, it is odd but revealing that more than ever before American women are being subjected to increasingly limiting, even demeaning, standards of physical beauty—determined by men.

CRAVING EMPATHY: Thus, as a story in the Los Angeles Times on Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky makes out, the duo associated in the sex scandal that nearly toppled the Clinton presidency are now doing public penance, not by taking up charitable causes but in search of outer beauty and craving for public empathy.

Tripp, one is informed, has undergone extensive plastic surgery involving “a nose job, chin tuck, neck reduction, facial peel and liposuction”—in order to ready herself for her upcoming wiretap trial.

Lewinsky, on the other hand, is undergoing a less drastic transformation as she slims down—as is appropriate for a spokeswoman for the Jenny Craig weight-loss programme.

Notably, both women, one is reminded, have been vilified as much for their looks as for their indiscretions. However, as the author of the write-up pertinently points out, “neither the media nor the public felt entitled to make fun of the looks of Bill Clinton, Kenneth Starr or Newt Gingrich.” Very true.

Indeed, neither did Jay Leno take to task “the many comb-overs or rumpled shirts of the  Republican House,” So also that: “Fashion magazines didn’t offer Starr lessons on starched shirts or more attractive  eyeglasses,” Touche.

As per California psychiatrist, Harold H. Bloomfield, “making fun of Tripp’s and Lewinsky’s looks is, in part, society’s way of punishing them for breaking the taboos of adultery and betrayal.”

According to him: “Men could be ugly beasts, but they have the resources...The only way women could begin to control the resources was by being beautiful. That doesn’t excuse it. We have to transcend it.”

In America high school girls are still getting that message: You better look beautiful if you want to have a great life.” The only women who have been able to transcend these superficial standards are what, one is told, author  Laura Fraser calls ‘honorary men’ — powerful older women such as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Attorney General Janet Reno.

Also interesting is this bit of Americana. “Almost every woman touched by the Clinton scandals has had a public redo of some kind. Jones had her nose changed. Even Hillary Rodham Clinton went through a variety of hairstyles before settling into her current simple hairdo...

“By tackling their personal appearances — especially their weight-so publicly, Tripp and Lewinsky are connecting with the public in an empathetic way. Think of Oprah Winfrey, one of the most powerful women in America, who has endeared herself to TV viewers, partly with her public battles with weight loss.”

FOOTNOTES: Apparently, losing weight in a connective thread in American culture. As Fraser theorises: “We equate being overweight with being immoral. We immediately associated being overweight with greed, sensuality and just too much.”

Incidentally, while on the slimmer and much-chastened Lewinsky, who was recently interviewed on Larry King Live, it may be in order to recall her hope that as time goes by, her role would become “a shorter and shorter footnote in US history.”

That, I believe, is a hope that is not likely to be fulfilled since that particular “footnote” entailed a historic, and very costly, impeachment not to mention that it almost drove a US president out of office.

Here it may be germane to recall that more than a decade ago, the prospect of Gary Hart, a promising presidential candidate, was ruined by a pro-election scandal that surfaced when the American media displayed photos of Hart with curvaceous, scantily-clad Donna Rice on this lap, together with a story on how the spent the night on Hart’s Yacht.

Hart, as we know, had to bow out of public life while Rice went into hiding for eight years. When she resurfaced in 1995, she said: “After the scandal, I resolved to see all the devastation in my life used in a positive way for something bigger than me.”

Although like Monica, she confessed to “awesome mistakes”, she turned down publishers’ offers to write a kiss-and-tell version against cyber-pornography which is rampant on the Internet in America.

That only recalls that John Profumo, minister in Harold Macmillan’s cabinet in Britain, after resigning in the wake of the Christine Keeler sex scandal in 1963 spent the rest of his life working for the uplift of the poor in London’s East End.

CHANGE IN IRAN: A sartorial change in Iran was the focus of an interesting soft story disseminated by AFP the other day. What was the change? That Iranian men, or, at least, some of them, are starting to were the necktie, long banned as a symbol of Western decadence and still criticized today.

While one is told that doctors, manufacturers, lawyers and increasingly businessmen are sporting ties and that “no one turned around any more at the sight, and tie owners are no longer afraid to wear them”, however any Iranian official wearing one still faces expulsion. Having met scores of tie-less Iranian during my stint at the UN, I can vouch for the political significance of the reappearance of the necktie in Islamic Iran!