Co-Authored by Ellen Offner, Principal, Offner Consulting, LLC, health care strategy and program development.
We never should've given the women the vote: you start with the vote and they want more. Equal access to education, equal jobs, and now they have the audacity to believe they can define beauty. Women's beauty has been men's purview for years and now, can you believe, older women with wrinkles with bumps and lumps are entering beauty contests and making one of the qualifications inner beauty and achievement as they did in the beauty contest for women of a certain age, "Never Too Old for a Tiara." This last bastion of male privilege must remain.
The Barbie doll is the only, and I repeat only, version of female beauty we want to entertain. I mean that's a fantasy. Who wants to deal with reality like a woman with the strength to overcome cancer? Who wants to think about cancer in the first place? All of the women with talent, compassion, and understanding. We want a blank slate on which we can write our own hopes and dreams.
First there were the famous calendar girls from Leeds, England, each one representing a month. Ten years after their original best-selling nude calendar, these Calendar Girls from Leeds, England, have released a second edition to raise money for leukemia research. Their first exhibition, which came about after Miss August's husband died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, inspired the film Calendar Girls.
In an era when the President-elect of the United States believes that "making America great again" translates into freedom for men to engage in locker-room talk and behavior with complete impunity, we see powerful older women presenting themselves as vigorous, beautiful representatives of the female population.
Women have the power to make America truly great again. Hillary Clinton, who captured 2.5 million more popular votes than her opponent, and is two years younger than her opponent, in regard to beauty, is a model for all women but perhaps especially for those of us with wrinkles, bulges, manmade knees, and hips with joints made of metal and plastic, as well as thinning hair and eyebrows. Mr. Trump alleged that Hillary lacked stamina while he accosted reluctant women while married to his statuesque Melania, a former model. Though Hillary outshone her opponent in the debates he carried the vote despite insulting almost every constituency in the country. Women are using a more subtle tactic. Competence. Whether you voted for Hillary or for Trump, collectively we want many of the same things. We women have something in common. We have power. Let's use it to ensure we get health care for our whole bodies including our vaginas, uteri and ovaries. (See what we mean you give those women an inch and they take a mile, mentioning the unmentionable. In scientific words (instead of locker room jargon), we all want help with our caregiving responsibilities, while we want men to assume their share of the work.
The genie is indeed out of the bottle: Women can and will make America great again, but of course we want to bring along our sons and our nephews and those of our husbands who have had the fortitude, should we say manliness, to love us and push us to greater and greater heights with their endorsement and support. Ladies of all political persuasions: Let's work together on what we agree on! We can truly make America great again if we band together to advance our common purposes.