Think On It

Hillary’s Cleavage: a letter to the Washington Post

August 1st, 2007

I am an American citizen living in Italy and I am also older than Hillary Clinton. I am also not a Clinton adherent. This entire media flurry over seeing the top 1/2″ of Ms Clinton’s mid-chest region makes me angry to a point that I plan to write about it on my own international blog.

That amount of cleavage could just be the result of tugging down a top to keep it from bulging under the jacket, after all. It doesn’t have to be a choice, but really, if it is a choice what can it mean?

The inanities that are today’s US celebrities flash their unpantied crotches at news photogs. People who are 30 pounds overweight deck themselves in Spandex. It’s almost impossible to buy a midrange pair of tailored trousers or jeans in which the waist isn’t barely over the pubis. Those are worn with shrunken tops that bare the rest of the belly.

Is Ms Clinton supposed to wear a habit decades after the nuns have stopped wearing them? Is she supposed to dress as if she is in Norway when she is in hot and sweaty DC under thousands of hot watts of light? Is she supposed to keep from our minds that she is female? Ms Clinton has often seemed fashion challenged, but aren’t we to appreciate that she has her mind on health care and education instead?

US citizens have twice elected someone who is wrecking the country and making us look like the veriest idiots. When I read what some ordinary citizens have to say as they comment on international issues I cringe. The ignorance displayed by graduates of our educational system is appalling. The schizophrenic demonstration of way too much interest in body parts, way too much judgment about people’s sexual proclivities and an exaggerated campaign on family values, all the while destroying any possible move toward real family values, is disturbing when seen from outside. Families spend time together, eating, talking, working, not driving to play dates and soccer matches and keeping separate plates of Hamburger Helper for whenever the various members get in to eat it. The culture of working sixty to eighty hour weeks to gain respect is the same culture that requires you to be married to have sex. The culture that wants girls to marry as virgins also blinks at violence and even violent sexual assaults.

How can I resolve the issue of a culture that allows children to see Lara Croft as a heroine with a Barbie shape and a killing instinct and then shows disgust at a middle-aged senator with part of her chest showing? Which woman really is the hero?

Could it be that the pandering of the media to a public easily seduced by scandal and gossip is both unethical and irresponsible? I believe it is.

The above image is a still from a C-span video as published in the Washington Post.

Entry Filed under: Fashion, Brains, Beauty