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Anna We Hardly Knew Ye
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Dear Anna,
I know I should hate you. I know there's something despicable about a woman who represented the worst of blonde bimbo gold-digger stereotypes.
It would be easy to accuse you of setting women's lib back by encouraging objectification of the worst kind, the kind that places all female worth in sex appeal and breast size.
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But in some ways you are an example of real feminine empowerment -- you got money and celebrity and power in the modern American tradition using whatever qualities you had at your disposal. The fact that you benefitted from your looks and your willingness to sell yourself every way you could doesn't take away from the reality that you got what you wanted.
I wouldn't have done it and I don't admire you for it, but I do respect the ambition of a woman who went from a job at Krispy Fried Chicken as an abandoned teenage mother to become a millionaire celebrity with her own reality TV show.
L.A. Federal Judge David Carter said your "illiteracy is striking," which makes the story even more remarkable.
There's something tragic about your tale -- a young mother who married too young doesn't get child support and ends up working at a strip club to pay the bills. When an old man started showering you with $2000 checks and told you not to go to work, who could blame you for accepting the pay-offs? When he proposed to you, "repeatedly" and promised security for you and your son, why did you become the villain for taking what every good mother wants for her child?
I think you might actually be the victim. It's almost an issue to be taken up in the name of gender rights: why do young women who marry rich old men get all the criticism? Nobody doubts that you married him for his money. But there's also no doubt that he married you for your youth and good looks. Your superficiality was balanced and you deserved each other. So why did you become the object of public scorn?
Someone joked that you were a threat to national security. I say you were a threat to national masculine insecurity. Men don't like the idea that women might use the power of their beautiful bodies to gain control of the only commodity the male gender really has: hard cash.
You scared them good.
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Paradoxically,
A Feminist
AP photo by Carlos Antonio Rios
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