inkbluesky

ellen pompeo portrait

I don’t know that this is much a counterpoint to the previous post as much as it is provocative. I mean provocative in a good way, to think about what we see and why we see some things the way we do, Slut Is Not a Four-Letter Word

I have had a threesome fantasy or two in my day—the two-guys-and-me kind, not that way overplayed other kind. I have boys-and-boozed it up just for sport, and/or to lift spirits that self-help books would’ve told me just needed some yoga or a lavender bath or special “me” time. I enjoy a good vibrator and great oral sex and hot guys wearing boxer briefs.

I don’t think any of this makes me very different from lots and lots of other women. But until recently, you wouldn’t have known many of us existed—at least not if pop culture was your barometer. Even the coolest chicks on TV have, if anything, been too busy being, you know, Strong Female Characters—chatty single moms, super-spies, angsty students, neurotic lawyers, mega-bitches—to get too down and dirty. In movies, women’s overt sexuality came with such lovely bonuses as gratuitous crotch shots and boiled bunnies. Music gave us our savior, Madonna—and then another 20 or so years of occasional tiny breakthroughs (Alanis Morrissette, I salute your idea of a good night at the theater; Kelis, sweetie, you can charge whatever you want; and Liz Phair, well, I’m speechless in awe), but no major movements.

Until now. Thanks to the Super Sexual Powers of a rag-tag team of surprising heroines—Meredith Grey, Christina Aguilera, Nelly Furtado, Fergie, and the Pussycat Dolls—our time has finally, ahem, come. And it is precisely because these women’s presences are so overwhelmingly popular, so mainstream—and so wonderfully slutty (that’s a term of endearment here)—that they’re so important.

Who knew the second coming of Madonna would appear in the form of a kinda wispy, kinda mousy, unfortunately whiny chick in scrubs? But love her or hate her, “Grey’s Anatomy”’s Meredith inspires more conversation than any one character in recent TV history. And thank God for that, really. Suddenly, all of America cares deeply about what happens to a woman who, the first second we saw her, had just slept with a guy whose name she never quite got the night before—and she barely cared, as it was her first day as a surgical intern. Of course we find out the guy is her boss, drama ensues, etc., but that’s not the point: We now have a blockbuster of a show whose central female character not only slept with a random—she did it on the night before a very important day in her career, she showed no regret, and then, by the way, she wasn’t even that interested at first when he tried to pursue a relationship with her. Oh, and later, once he succeeded and then broke her heart? She went right back to trolling bars for strangers, and when good old McDreamy called her on it, she called him on that right back with the greatest line ever uttered in a hospital stairwell: “You don’t get to call me a whore.” It’s no accident, incidentally, that this character was created by a female executive producer, Shonda Rimes.

I saw this episode and the the ones that lead up to it and unless I missed something I thought it was unfair for Pompeo’s character to more or less put those thoughts into her boss’s head. He was a bit of a jerk for holding back emotionally, keeping his options open, but she did the same thing only to a lesser degree. On the other hand maybe he deserved it for not getting his act together in general. Sought of like getting a speeding ticket you didn’t deserve that time, but there were a dozen other times that you didn’t get caught; in the case of Meredith and the Doc a little relationship karma. The rest of the essay is at the link.( Note that the writer of the excerpt above and the writer of the Alternet piece in the previous post both write for Siren magazine.)
Michel Foucault on how one becomes what one is and nostalgia:

“Man is a thinking being. The way he thinks is related to society, politics, economics, and history and is also related to very general and universal categories and formal structures. But thought is something other than societal relations. The way people really think is not adequately analyzed by the universal categories of logic. Between social history and formal analyses of thought there is a path, a lane - maybe very narrow - which is the path of the historian of thought.”