Denise and Women’s Lib

For most of my growing up I was one of the tallest kids. I was taller than most of my peers and it was a feeling that I came to find comfort with. I liked being able to look over the tops of their heads. It did not make me feel superior, only comfortable. I grew to a height of 6’2” -- which is only middling tall, but tall enough to edge out most of the people I meet. To this day, I don’t like dealing with taller people. Maybe it’s because parents and authority figures were always tall. Maybe that’s just psychobabble. Taller people make me feel small, and “small” is not a feeling that I enjoy.

But there was always somebody who was taller. There always is somebody who is taller, or smarter, or faster, or prettier, or more handsome. If you are person who is strongly bothered by that then you might develop a passion for improving whatever you feel your deficit to be. If it doesn’t bother you too much, then you just get on with your life and note that despite what the history books say, we are not all created equal. And, that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Some people never do accept not being the best at something. They develop passion. That passion drives them to run faster, or read more, or practice harder and longer than everybody else. For some, this passion gets spent too early and they flame out on soccer, or football, and are washed up by the time they get out of high school. Some develop wasted passions on watching cartoons on TV or playing video games. There is no point to improving talents that have no social value. Some choose more carefully and are propelled to great accomplishments. These people are wonderful assets to our culture. The rest of us, who just stop short of becoming the best, enjoy the talents of those who are.

Passion alone doesn’t always rise up to meet the challenge. You can have a lot of passion for height or beauty, but that is not going to make you taller. It might make you stand up straighter, or project a certain indefinable radiance, but it will not make you taller or more beautiful than God intended, or genetics allowed.

Before I developed these great theories on passion and height, there was Denise. Denise was the tallest person in my kindergarten and first grade classes. (By the time I got to the second grade Bruce had taken the honor.) I realized that no matter what I did, I was not going to be taller than Denise. There was also some other natural stratification going on. I noticed that there were some kids that were better at spelling, or better at dodge ball. I was not the king of “Four Square”, Scott was. Some kids got placed in a higher reading group than I did. There were differences in all the kids around me that seemed insurmountable. I was not going to be the tallest person in my class. I was not the smartest. I was not the best finger painter, or the best with clay. I was pretty good with all those things, just not the best. Even a few girls were better at some things than I was. Marilyn could spell better. Terry Richardson was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. For good or ill, I learned that I could live with not being the best...or the tallest. It was Denise’s fault.

It was also Denise’s fault that I could never reconcile the idea that women somehow were not equal in the workplace. The 1970’s gave rise to the women’s movement which promoted Bra Burning and the de-sexing of women in society. (This did not work by the way. Lycra spandex was invented about the same time and women just got sexier and sexier. The woman that thought that bra burning was a good idea to express how women should be unfettered by their own secondary sexual characteristics was obviously not aware of the impact that unrestrained breasts have on the American male.) I felt that there were some obvious jobs that most women should not do -- like garbage collection where sheer physical strength is an obvious asset – but, there were some women who were certainly strong enough and if their passion led them to garbage collection then, that was all right with me. I had the same feelings about women in business. They could certainly do the math. There was nothing inherently different in their decision making ability that was somehow inferior to the way males approached the same problem. They did just as well in my college classes as I did. There was no reason that I could see that women couldn’t do the same job. So what was all the noise about? I think it has to do with small, noisy men whose passions couldn’t overcome their height. Maybe they never had a Denise in their class. I regret not being able to make more sense of it. I also regret that there was not a Denise in everyone’s kindergarten class. I have no regrets about Terry Richardson.