'Strange--the way an image like this one yesterday--Gloria Steinem--brought me back to a wholly (and unholy) time in my life, a time when Gloria Steinem was parked somewhere close to the office of the Enemy, a time when I was somewhere just to the right, politically, of Barry Goldwater.
Gloria Steinem was not only a left-wing cheerleader, she was that side's leading scorer, a registered American snobby Easterner, whose good looks were immensely deceiving because she didn't think much about men--despised them actually, I thought, even though I don't remember ever concluding she was lesbian. What she was was impossible for me to understand--a woman with the standing of a beauty queen who refused to be what I figured a woman needed to have, needed to be.
She was (hold your nose!) a feminist, that's for sure, a woman who couldn't shoot down a man with a 30-06, not because she couldn't--she had the looks--but because she chose not to, all those good looks (look at those legs, that hair!) going to waste because to her, I couldn't help thinking, men were the root of all evil. I was the enemy.
In addition, she was the leading spokesperson (not spokeswoman) for abortion, which gave her an office just around the corner from the Anti-Christ. That hair and those aviator glasses yesterday brought me back to the far-right side of the political spectrum. I didn't keep track of where she went during the next decades, what causes she advocated through the years, although I can't imagine her advocating for anything to the right of what she held dear fifty years ago. It was not at all easy to imagine what she looked like at 92 years old because she was, she really was, a "looker."
It's exactly that kind of assessment she fought to control, to end, even as she came, to me at least, to embody it. She is partially responsible for my being able to understand how "looker" makes it sound as if I'm judging livestock, which, I suppose, I was.
I understand the accolades that came in for her yesterday. Every news show paid homage--celebrated her strength and courage while going through life on the far edge of liberalism.
When I saw the picture, what came back (I didn't ask!) was lots of fear and hate. Ms. Steinem carried the flag for American libs--that woman in that picture was the embodiment of everything I feared in early '60s politics, feared and despised.
She didn't teach me how to hate--I came by that on my own.
I stand in need of forgiveness, not for my political views but for remembering how easy it was for me to hate.
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