Another middle-aged woman, rendered placid and blank. She can join the army of older women lawyer-commentators on COURT TV, as well as Holly Hunter, looking all wide-eyed and unemotional in the advertisements for her new TV show.
This chemically-induced placid expression on the faces of middle-aged women is now all over TV and movies. Older women can no longer frown in skepticism, suspicion, disapproval, or even in deep thought. And it is at precisely this stage of our lives that we are finally unafraid of registering these emotions, and feel we have earned the right to analyze and to draw our own conclusions. But those wrinkles, those frown lines, those lines that signal THINKING, are being paralyzed with botulism toxin, an actual poison.
Women's intellectual process and deep thinking, as well as any contrary emotions are simply unacceptable, particularly from older women who have been around long enough to know the score. Any sign of this must be exterminated, at least in our common culture.
At present, I am watching the Phil Spector murder trial on COURT TV, as Linda Kenney Baden, botoxed Hollywood defense lawyer, cross-examines middle-aged, un-botoxed civil servant Dr. Lynne Herold, criminalist. Baden looks unruffled and cool, her unlined and blank face like a department-store mannequin's, while Herold unavoidably looks aggravated (in comparison), as she furrows her menopausal brow, trying to think, remember and correctly answer a barrage of scientific questions. Will the jury think the prettier person with the unlined and unemotional face is the one to trust? Obviously, this is the intention of the Spector-defense team.
Middle-aged women who show emotion are being systematically censored from our public media-consciousness, just as we reach that age in which we are finally able to show our emotions without fear of censure.
