Sometimes I wonder what future scientists will say about us.

Not really far future ones, like the alien archaeologists of 5200 who will probably make unintentionally hilarious conclusions like, "the Cheeto was the staple crop of the Americas" or "the major unit of worldwide currency was the iPod" or "Oprah Winfrey was a cult leader" (though that last one might actually be true...); I mean the social scientists, and plain regular citizens, of just a century or so ahead. What will they think when they look down at the transition between the 20th and 21st century, from the vantage point of the 22nd?

Will we be cool and retro, with all the niftiest kids in school modding their implanted wetware supercomputers to work through antique laptops they picked up at a Salvation Army? (Plastikpunk?) Will little girls having tea parties pretend to be the graceful heroines of the Reality TV era, being whisked to glamorous parties in gowns that show only a discreet flash of labia and dancing with dreamy men in baseball caps named Spencer? Will great great grandfathers on fifteen flavors of life support start annoying lectures with "In my day, we didn't need bioinjectable osseaginous alloy; we got plastic surgery! And we liked it!"

I suppose I hope, if we're remembered at all, it will be with a feeling like you get when your mom says "Whatever." Well-intentioned, faintly embarrassing, but not so tin-eared that it's completely ridiculous. At least, that's how I feel most of the time, except for when I hope that our entire culture is written off as the most abortive experiment since Calvinism and the Green Party COMBINED and the whole of civilization spontaneously decides on a total hard drive wipe.

Shockingly enough, one of those moments was today.



I was driving home from my vacation in South Carolina, the details of which belong in another post I won't be writing because vacation posts are absolutely the most boring things in the universe. I went to the beach. I have a tan now. Fill in the details with your favorite anecdote of when you went on vacation, any time, ever. The important part was the driving home, when my mom picked up a stack of the free city newsmagazines you get at gas stations. Why she did this, I'm not entirely sure, unless it's because she really likes reading about sales she's missing and concerts she won't be able to go to, but whatever. My book is a doorstop and I didn't have the brainpower to concentrate on it, so I picked a few up and read them.

One was called "Skirt!". You think you can see where this is going. You're wrong. It's so, so much worse.

No, seriously, it is. You're thinking "oh, here's Sarah on another one of her rants about how the marketing-industrial complex exists to suck up women's earning power in an endless consumptive cycle of purchase/buyer's remorse/negative self-image/empowerment rhetoric which advocates purchase." You're thinking a few paragraphs about skin care, which emphatically state that Real Women don't need Botox to be sexy, right next to a 3 column ad for Oil of Olay. You're thinking about someone in a position of psychosocial authority, someone with a degree from a 4 year university, wasting 350 words on Red Is In For Fall!

Skirt! is all that, and so much more. I took a bullet for you guys; I read the entire thing, cover to cover, all 118 pages of it. I passed right through irate, furious, disgusted and into a fugue state where I found myself adopting the mindset of those 22nd century amateur sociologists. What, for example, would I glean from the cover text, which I present to you now, in its full, unedited glory?

"She wore her Yulan boots to knock down barriers and her mile-high heels to drive a spike in stereotypes. She worked for planetary peace in Earth Shoes and went to a nude-in wearing a smile and a pair of Kork-Ease. She joined the Peace Corps in a pageboy and came back in dreadlocks. She marched with Code Pink in Citizens of Humanity jeans and picketed G8 in a clown face. She's at home in a tutu or a tux, at a trunk show or a city hall smackdown. She votes with her purse (discount designer on eBay), runs in Pink Ribbon races (do these shorts make me look fast?), goes to bat for other women (she ain't heavy, she's a sister). Feminista/Fashionista - she's a walking contradiction working on a revolution. What will YOU wear to change the world?"

The features Skirt! magazine's July issue contains include:

1. Cover Your Head: A rumination from a former Mennonite on how nice it was wearing religious headscarves back in the good old days.

2. The Original Feminist: A woman reminisces about her grandmother, who apparently used to reuse aluminum foil, and also had a lot of jewelry, and eventually got Alzheimer's. It is never mentioned if her name was Gertrude Stein.

3. Real Women Play The Tuba: A woman is amazed that her daughter can play the tuba. No sensible reason is ever given for this.

4. Blue Tutu: A woman bitches about a girl at her daughter's preschool whose mother allows her to go to school wearing a blue tutu, and drops a lot of prominent children's designer names when describing how her own daughter is dressed. At the end, the administration at the preschool sends the blue tutu girl home. The woman is vindicated.

5. Nourish Me: A woman spends decades pretending to regard another woman as a friend, of whom she is profoundly jealous because the other woman is thinner than she is. In the end, her friend is revealed to be a miserable, unhappy bulimic. The woman is vindicated.

6. A Model Feminist: A woman dissects the tortured relationship between her liberated ideology and desire to be a fashion model. At the end of the essay, she finds inner peace after being described in an academic journal as "the hottest of the third-wave feminists." The facing page is a full-size headshot.

You are thinking I'm exaggerating, I'm sure. I am KEEPING this magazine, possibly under museum glass, as a morbid conversation piece, the way medieval natural philosophers used to keep tumors or mutated chicken embryos. Anyone who wants can come peruse its contents, wearing the proper archival gloves of course. I will only be making one alteration to it; I am cutting out one article title, which I will thumbtack somewhere around my desk in my new apartment. That title is "The Thinking Woman's Thong."

I am keeping Skirt! magazine so I always know what I am up against.

Not that this is The Enemy, in all its incarnate splendor or anything. I do recognize this is just a violently cynical and tasteless grab for advertising, probably put out by one of the Charleston newspaper presses to counterbalance falling circ figures. But these were real essayists writing here. Not huge ones; mostly a bunch of second-wave wannabes with an almost endearing set of look-I'm-irrelevant badges like "Lives in rural Oregon with her two cats, Susan and Anthony" and AOL e-mail addresses. But educated professionals nonetheless.

The Thinking Woman's Thong. For fuck's sake, The Thinking Woman's Thong. We shouldn't even let her procreate, let alone write. Or vote, for that matter, though I suppose it doesn't matter if she thinks she can vote with her purse. I wonder if she'll protest election results when her vote isn't counted. Maybe if she could just find the right shoes...

This is what 'The Personal Is Political' does if left unchecked. For those new to the flist, please, don't mistake this for the bitter diatribe of the fashion challenged. I LOVE clothes. I love shoes. I own entirely too many incarnations of both. But if someone ever intimated to me that my appreciation for a well coordinated outfit was a goddamn political statement, I'd punch them in the trachea.

Skirt! doesn't intimate. It declaims, loudly. It's like those neocon pundits who try to get their listeners proud of being ill-educated, or small minded. The difference is, when it's a neocon pundit they stay on Fox News. Thinking like this wants to permeate every aspect of your life, whether it belongs there or not.

Most of us probably have no problem with the idea that Bill O'Reilly most likely lives a very ordinary life. After he films his show, he probably goes home, plays golf, kisses some anonymous wife in a cardigan, polishes a sports car and eats steak. Whereas it's hard to picture Ann Coulter doing anything other than standing naked under a cistern filled with the blood of Mexican virgins who were killed while still wearing their Quincanera gowns, letting the fluid pool over her teeth and between the cold little eraser-like nipples, remembering what food once tasted like. That is because women are supposed to live their politics. They're supposed to shore up whatever issue they're arguing for or against with the primal experience of living in the world the high ideals and petty prejudices of men hath wrought. They're supposed to throw their disenfranchisement back into the face of the establishment, and they're supposed to use every aspect of their life to do it. Including their clothes. No, ESPECIALLY their clothes.

Why?

No, seriously, why? Men have done just fine for millennia defending positions on the podium or in the pulpit and living a life of complacent hypocrisy at home. How exactly? Well, they studied politics as a science, one which required a careful balance of adherence to intellectual principles and the flexibility to cope with unforeseen problems. It required an understanding of economics, philosophy, and law. It was, in short, a serious pursuit for serious people.

Do I think the political world was better then? Of course not; there weren't any women in it. But who the fuck said women couldn't be part of THAT world? Why didn't those first and second wave feminists tell young girls to read Descartes, to go to law school? Why did they tell them to burn their fucking BRAS instead?

So they'd have to buy new ones? Ones marketed to the woman too enlightened for her mother's bra? And while you're at it, honey, that blouse is just SCREAMING patriarchy? I'm sure it's not what they intended, but it's what happened. Instead of woman spread throughout the legal and political system in proportion to their population (or, here's a thought, in proportion to their attainment of a degree in a four year institution; we'd have 64 female senators and 36 men), we get about 5 token female political bigwigs and their fangirls, a bunch of rabid 60 year old women in corduroy who want to steal our zeitgeist out from under us. We get the opposute unbalance on city councils and school boards, and a lot of charming little statutes like fining parents who don't force their 17 year olds to skateboard in elbow pads. We get, in short, a nanny state, a political structure designed to risk resentment, favoritism, tyrrany by majority, inefficiency and greyness of the spirit in the name of safety and equality for all, whether they want it or not.

We get a sports bra society. It's boring, confining, redolent of stuff you're supposed to do even if it sucks, and absolutely not sexy at all. And, coincidentally, it makes you itch, just a little, just in some lizard part of your brain that remembers when you didn't worry about getting West Nile from swimming in the river. From the part of you that remembers being strong, and competitive, and unfair, and free. But that's okay. Feeling down? Have a Shopping Spree! Look, this cotton's organic...you like the environment, don't you? Buy....sleep....

Fuck that, and fuck you, Skirt! magazine. I learned to tie a tie tonight; great video service called VideoJug which just has informational videos to teach you things. I already knew how to do a half-Windsor on someone else's neck (long story; Catholic school, short class breaks, janitor's closet by my locker, okay maybe not that long), but now I can do a half, Full Windsor, and four-in-half on my own neck. When I go to school, I will get some ties. I will get the absolute coolest ties I can find; they will have awesome colors, be made of high quality silks and satins, and I will buy them in a men's shop, where they will be priced in accordance to their materials and construction and not who slapped their logo on the back. I will have absolutely no political agenda doing this, but I will enjoy the consternation of other women who see me looking awesome in my ties, as they try desperately to figure out What I'm Trying To Say. But I won't say anything, I'll just go home, and take off my tie, hanging it on a tie rack driven straight through my wall hanging of The Thinking Woman's Thong. I'll wear a tie in exactly the way a man wears one; as a sign that he is about serious business. That he is getting shit done. And I will.

And I will look way hotter than any man while doing it. That's feminism.

Eat that, future scientists.