The Naked and the Brain-Dead November 15, 2002
First rule of punditry: when you start taking editorial cues from your two-year-old child, it's time for a long vacation. Or at least a nap.
Exhibit A: Mistress Malkin's latest exercise in celebrity navel-ring-gazing.
The synopsis: While shopping with her daughter, Mistress Malkin spies an issue of Rolling Stone sporting a nude Christina Aguilera on the cover. Mistress Malkin thinks Aguilera is a skank. Mistress Malkin thinks lots of teenage girls are skanks. Mistress Malkin blames radical feminism for this widespread skankitude.
Now, let's take a closer look.
"Aguilera's privates are strategically hidden behind a guitar," Mistress Malkin exclaims in the essay's second paragraph. "[H]er backside is tastelessly, tritely, exposed."
Apparently, Mistress Malkin views the world through a pair of ass-tinted glasses: see for yourself exactly how "exposed" Aguilera's backside is in the photograph Mistress Malkin is describing.
It also sounds like Mistress Malkin gets that top-secret MTV channel, MTV-X. Because it's only available to A-List conservative pundits like Mistress Malkin and Bill O'Reilly, I've never actually seen it, but it sounds pretty good. While the standard version of Aguilera's new "Dirrty" video features about as much skin as an episode of WWE Smackdown! and the sort of narcissistic air-humping that inevitably leads to, well, even more narcissistic air-humping, Mistress Malkin describes the version she apparently viewed as "hardcore."
Or maybe she's just lying. The true mark of power, of course, is to insist that 2 + 2 = 5 and make people believe it.
In any case, Christina does not measure up to Mistress Malkin's stern standards, and that makes Mistress Malkin very, very angry. As she verbally abuses the naughty young singer, calling her "sordid" and "pathetic" and "foul-mouthed" and "ridiculous," Mistress Malkin's desire for control is palpable. She wants to dictate exactly who Christina fucks. She wants to decide how Christina dresses. She wants to regulate how Christina expresses herself. She yearns to give the skanky little vixen a good old-fashioned spanking on her tastelessly, tritely, exposed backside and turn her back into "the young woman who once sweetly warbled the theme song to the Disney movie, Mulan."
But as Mistress Malkin works herself into a buttoned-down, pent-up lather repeating Christina's dirty lyrics and quoting the New York Post's reports of Christina's naughty lesbian-lite shenanigans, it's pretty clear what's going on here: Miss Aguilera, wily sexual predator that she is, is topping from the bottom, forcing Mistress Malkin to write about lap dances and fondling buxom stripper-breasts...
And when she induces Mistress Malkin to write "F***" twice in the span of two sentences, Mistress Malkin almost melts down completely. But then, as if to regain some semblance of control, the flustered conservatrix blurts out another lie, this time describing a Christina quote as "apropos of nothing" when, if you read the article it comes from, it's clearly apropos of something - an earlier Rolling Stone about Jennifer Love Hewitt.
For the next two paragraphs, a flushed and disoriented Mistress Malkin stumbles through some odd non-sequiturs about Christina's skin color. While it seems that Christina is somewhat confused about her own racial identity ("I guess we have to have one white person in it," she says in the Rolling Stone article, about a dancer auditioning for her video), Mistress Malkin exaggerates Christina's whiteness just as much as Christina exaggerates her non-whiteness. "Flava lover Aguilera herself is paler than vanilla ice cream when not slathered in coffee-colored, self-tanning lotion," taunts Malkin, and one is left to wonder: is the phrase "coffee-colored" a subtle dig at Christina's not particularly visible Hispanic heritage? A boasting reference to Mistress Malkin's own gorgeous, naturally coffee-colored hue? Or both?
After that bit of weirdness, things get even weirder. Mistress Malkin writes:
"I don't see anything wrong with being comfortable with my own skin," Aguilera snaps defensively, as she strikes another gangsta pose and shows off her ridiculous body piercings - which Rolling Stone has painstakingly diagrammed for the masses.
Why is this weird? Because that quote doesn't actually appear in either the the online version of the article, or in the print version.
It does appear in an AP article, however, but Malkin never cites it as a source - instead, she makes it sound as if it appears in the Rolling Stone article that she's reading at the newsstand. Also, there's nothing in either article about Christina striking any sort of "gangsta pose" while discussing her piercings. It's possible, of course, that Mistress Malkin is using the phrase in a metaphorical sense rather than to describe an actual physical pose, but are body-piercings generally associated with gangsta fashion? In the universe I inhabit (which I realize may not be the surreal realm Mistress Malkin presides over), they have their roots in punk and goth fashion...
Also, it's worth pointing out that while Mistress Malkin assesses quotes that don't actually appear in the Rolling Stone article, she fails to mention why Christina gets what Mistress Malkin dismisses as "ridiculous body-piercings": because, Christina says, they make her "feel a little more strong or empowered."
Even more importantly, Malkin fails to cite the relatively lengthy section of the article that details Christina's troubled relationship with her father, who apparently used to physically abuse Christina's mom, and on at least one occasion, Christina herself.
Instead, Mistress Malkin simply writes the following:
As I am returning the trashy magazine to the newsstand rack, my toddler chirps in again: "Mama, where's her shirt?" I answer: "Her mama forgot to tell her to put one on."
Did you get that? Mistress Malkin returned the magazine to the newsstand rack! That means that while she was standing there reading the article, she was presumably taking notes on it, because there are several Christina quotes in Mistress Malkin's piece that she records with complete accuracy. I'm not quite sure why I think this is so funny, but every time I picture Mistress Malkin at the newsstand line, reading the Rolling Stone article and taking notes on it and keeping her two-year-old daughter in tow, I get a good laugh...
Alas, this passage also offers a distressing glimpse at Mistress Malkin's conception of motherhood: indoctrinate your children with your values so forcefully that they will continue to do exactly what you tell them to do, even if they turn into 21-year-old multimillionaire divas.
And finally: what about Dad? While Mistress Malkin chastises Christina's mom for her adult daughter's decisions, she has no stern words for Mr. Aguilera...
Now, when she moves on to admonishing not just Christina but all the dirty young vixens "hanging out at the mall with their thong straps glittering out in the open, their hip-huggers succumbing perilously to the forces of gravity, their noses and eyebrows and tongues marred with metal, and their faces plastered with red light district makeup," Mistress Malkin does briefly succumb to the forces of parity and give a quick finger-wag to the "dadas" as well as the moms.
But she abandons that tack pretty quickly, in order to dress down the dressed-down harlots directly:
Gutter talk is for vagrants, not for young ladies who want respect from the world. Promiscuity isn't a sign of maturity. It's a sign of self-loathing. Being "comfortable in your own skin" doesn't require having to bare every last inch of it in public.
There it is in a nutshell: the core philosophy underlying Mistress Malkin's School for Young Ladies, and it makes you wonder if the anti-American pundit truly understands why we're spending billions of dollars to battle Islamist terrorists who believe that suicide is foreplay and dead virgins are preferable to actual women: it's not to curtail free speech, or to teach young ladies that enjoying sex means hating yourself, or to trade in hip-huggers for burkas. Indeed, nubile 21-year olds who love sex and swear like a longshoreman with Tourettes syndrome are one of the many things that makes this country great. And Mistress Malkin's attempts to suggest otherwise simply mark her as a meddling, blue-nosed traitor, a petty Bin Laden determined to make America a little less free. |