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May 19, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
32:45
May 19, 2015, Tuesday, Hour #3
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Everybody, great to have you here, friends, it's Rush Limbaugh and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
The telephone number if you want to be on the program 800 28282 and the email address, lrushbow at EIB net.com.
Why New York women wish they lived in the madmen era?
This is a story by Heather Robinson.
She's an independent journalista who lives at uh lives in Manhattan and has her own blog at her eponymous website.
The final episodes of Mad Men This Sunday heralds the end of a TV era.
The show's seven seasons.
Oh, this is just wonderful.
All right, fine.
Why couldn't you tell me this two minutes ago?
What a day this is.
This day is absolute you people have no clue.
It's because I refuse to bleed on the audience that you do not know how rotten a day this is.
All right, put that over there.
The show's seven seasons covered the turbulent decade from 1960 to 1970, dramatizing changing styles and social mores in the lives of madmen and women or professionals in the Madison Avenue advertising industry.
Now, for those who aren't regular watchers, a lot of the show's male characters spent their time chasing young women around the office, and a lot of the female characters spent their time trying to land or keep a husband.
Critics have consistently lauded the series, not just for its entertainment value, but also for exposing the dark underbelly of a prosperous conservative era.
Now come on.
Are you kidding me?
This is why the critics loved it, because it exposed the dark underbelly of a prosperous conservative era.
What it did, the reason it captivated people who lived through that era was simply it captured it correctly.
It was amazing.
The appliances in the kitchen, the cars, it captured attitudes as well.
Somebody wants to tell me the conservative that the 60s was a conservative era.
With all the Vietnam war protests and and well, anyway.
Let me keep going.
She then writes, I can't help but wonder if in some ways life wasn't easier back then, especially for single marriage-minded women.
New York City career women in their 30s and 40s told me this week that in some ways life seemed easier back then for single women, and love was easier to find during our Mother's Day than it is now.
Now I did a double take when I saw this because two things.
One, here we are once again judging real life by virtue of what we see on TV show.
And so the women, 30 and 40-year-old women today, they don't remember what was going on in the 60s.
They their only frame of reference is this show.
And now they're making judgments on, man, it really looked cool back then.
Oh, it's so much easier back then.
It wasn't.
It was just as hard then as it is now.
Everybody still had their traumas back then just like they have them now.
The sixties was the coming of age uh decade of the baby boom generation, the me generation.
Yeah, we had to invent some of our traumas because life really wasn't as hard as our parents and grandparents had been coming out of Great Depression and uh World War One and World War II.
But I I just I don't know.
I know a lot of people do it.
I just I find it fascinating.
People can watch a TV show and man, I wish I lived back then.
I understand the seduction of it.
But it still was a TV show.
Admittedly got a lot of things right.
Uh in in terms of visuals.
It played loose with some of the attitudes of the era, like every television show does.
I can't help but wonder if in some ways life wasn't easier back then, especially for single marriage-minded women.
New York City career women in their 30s and 40s said life seemed easier.
Melanie Notkin, cultural anthropologist, author of Otherhood, modern women finding a new kind of happiness.
Said the women she interviewed, no matter their race or ethnicity or cultural background, had similar concerns with dating.
Men didn't plan dates, they dressed down for dates, no longer chivalrous, and they watched madmen, and men were the way they always thought they were going to be and wish they were.
They dressed nicely, they were polite, they let women go first, they opened the doors.
They actually called them in advance.
Would you like to go on a date this week?
Do you like to go have dinner in a movie?
It wasn't a hookup, it wasn't happenstance, it was plotted, it was thought out, it was planned, there was care put into it.
This is what they think.
And the answer to this is this is pre-modern era feminism.
They had to beat that out of men, and they succeeded in beating all of this out of men by the time 1969-70 got around, and the show also depicted that.
The show depicted the modern era of the feminist movement in its own ways, and But yeah, it was that this was pre-feminism back when the and this is what women have today been told was old-fashioned and discriminatory and objectified women.
And it it it it narrow, uh narrowly viewed women.
It did not uh the era did not allow women to fully blossom and come into their own.
They were slaves of marriage and slaves of family and childrenhood and so forth.
It's just interesting to me that that uh here we're supposed to live in the greatest times for liberals.
I mean, the era of enlightenment where anything you want to do is fine, and the people who judge you are routinely ripped and criticized and silenced and shut up, so you can do whatever you want to do, and nobody's gonna condemn you.
And yet, life in the 60s looks better than all of this sexual freedom, nonjudgmental behavior characteristics that anybody can engage in.
Elisha 37 works in advertising today, lives downtown, says, yeah, it's like we've become this commodity today, where men can pick out what they want whenever they want.
No, that was the 60s.
When women were commodities.
That's what the feminizes told us.
What do you mean women today are commodities?
How did that happen?
I thought feminism was arousing success.
Here's a 37-year-old woman thinking she's a commodity today.
Ellie, 42 student on Manhattan's East Side, 42 and a student, what is that tell you, who used to work in publishing, said technology is supposed to bring people closer, but especially in the context of dating, it pushes people farther apart.
It used to be a guy had to call and leave a message, and you called him back and you made a date.
Now it's just texting that leads to nowhere.
I think there was more respect for marriage and family life during the 50s and early 60s, she added.
Wish I could travel backward to a simpler time.
What do you think of that, Snerdley?
I think there was more respect for marriage and family life during the 50s and early 60s.
I would have to agree with that, but the question then becomes well, who robbed us of it?
If there was more respect for marriage and family life during the 50s and early 60s, then who is responsible for dissolving that respect?
Who's responsible for blowing up the institution?
I'll tell you what, you know, here these women, this is the interesting thing.
Here are these women in this story looking at madmen and longing for it, and wishing for it.
Well, mad men in part was Ward and June Cleaver.
It was Ozzy and Harriet.
And yet you bring that up today, and the left will just start mocking you and laughing at you and making fun of you and telling you you can't go back and you can't go home, And that was never the reality anyway.
That was just fakery on TV.
Families were never that together.
They were never that happy.
They were never that wholesome.
That's what was wrong with TV back then.
It was all a myth.
It didn't reflect anything.
It was nothing more than propaganda.
And the totally screwed up, messed up definitions of marriage we have today and screwed up definitions of family today, that's what they tell you is normal.
That's what they tell you is the way it is and has been.
And back then you can't go back.
It wasn't simpler, you can't go back.
That was just a, you know, a crazy post-Eisenhower conservative era that wasn't real.
And besides, it was filled with all kinds of segregation, and it was all kinds of racism, bigotry and homophobia.
You can't go back.
And but here these women don't want to go back.
Just watching a television show.
Man.
And it's uh one more little excerpt here.
Is it possible that some of the wild enthusiasm for madmen among viewers stems from a yearning for the satisfaction and sexiness of traditional sex roles, including chivalry.
When I watch madmen, she says, I think, wouldn't it have been great to date a man who knows what he likes to drink, who pulls out the chair, who dresses up, is clean shaven, and at least wears a sport jacket?
It's sexy, said Melanie Notkin.
When I watch Mad Men, I think, wouldn't it have been great to date a man who knows?
Yearning for satisfaction, sexiness of traditional sex roles.
What are traditional sex roles?
You start throwing around terms like that today to your typical average agitated feminist.
You don't want to be around for the reaction to that.
Well, yeah, what are they?
We don't, we do know what they are.
What are they?
Men are the providers, men get up, go to work, women raise the kids, women keep the household together and all that.
And it's what these women are longing for.
That's what they're what they're saying they're looking for.
You know, this story proves in a way, it I don't know if it proves it, it illustrates something, that I have long suspected was one of the negative, very bad uh outcomes of militant feminism.
And it is that it totally screwed up human nature.
It totally made everybody question what they naturally felt like doing, who they naturally felt they were and thought they were.
It told and everybody ended up, or the people that bought into this all of a sudden had to start playing roles.
And the first thing you had to do was start uh figuring out what whoever wanted you to be and try to be it, based on the politics of the day.
Whereas back then you just, you know, you who you were and it worked or it didn't work.
Uh but at least the the natural habitat or the natural behavioral roles.
Um, while not universally accepted, of course, they were not automatically questioned and doubted and attacked until the late 60s, when this all intensified for all the reasons we've spent years discussing.
And then the conclusion of this piece, ultimately, most women want equality with men and value the increased legal protection from sexual harassment in the workplace of the type dramatized in madmen.
After hours, though, some of us do long for men who can treat us not only as equals to be respected, but as women to be desired and cherished.
Now, what does that tell you?
That tells me that a lot of women feel undesired and uncherished, even though they may have achieved equality.
They don't feel the love.
They don't feel the warmth, they don't feel the respect.
And that's what it all adds up to.
And they watch madmen.
And even though, even though all the secretaries are being chased around the office by these cads, the cads still respected them.
Anyway, you gotta take a break here, folks.
Sit tight, much more straight ahead the EIB network after this.
Half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.
This is John and uh sh Chagrin Falls, uh, Ohio.
Great to have you on the program.
Hello.
You touched a nerve with me today where you're broad brushing colleges, and I'm uh I'm a business graduate.
I've dealt with business people most of my life, engineers and chemists, and these people are not liberal mushheads, believe me.
So if you just aim it at liberal colleges and liberal programs, that's fine.
But the business grads that I've been associated with aren't liberals.
Um I'm having trouble remembering what it was I said specifically to set you off.
What was I talking about?
What did I say?
Well, you were talking about colleges and how they get how they just turn out these mush brain liberals, and I've heard it more than once, so it's not you know, it just all of a sudden today got it.
That's right.
It's a story I can't find because all of my email from this year has vanished from my from my server, and I can't find it.
And there's it was a it's actually there are two different versions of the same story, and it's written by uh college professors who are worried that students are not having their minds opened, they are having their minds closed, they are being told to conform rather than explore, didn't differentiate between business school.
This is undergrad.
Uh this is undergrad four-year schools, and it's about the over and look, there's no question this is happening.
I mean, Chris Rock, uh stand-up comedian, won't even play college campuses anymore because they're so uptight with political correctness, nothing is funny to them.
Everything offends them.
Well, that's being programmed.
That's how they're being taught.
And by the way, I know plenty of ultra-left-wing business people, and they give gobs of money to Barack Obama.
So just because they're bizgraduates doesn't mean they're going to be conservatives and and I'm not I'm not saying that.
I'm not saying that.
I'm just saying the people that I run into in my 35 years in business aren't liberals.
And they aren't necessarily the business owners, and maybe they're the liberals, but boy, the rank and file that I'm working with aren't.
Well, look, I mean, average is the law of average's common sense.
Uh you'd have to assume that there's going to be a segment of every category you come up with in every group of people.
True.
Uh be they college graduates or or members of a church, and or what have you.
Uh I'm I'm speaking for the most part in terms of trends and how education has been corrupted.
Um, beginning actually now in in grade school, maybe even earlier, all the way through high school into college, uh, the left is has has a stranglehold of education, and they use it uh not for education and mind expansion, but instead it's uh it's indoctrination into a specific point of view about an and not just that, it also includes learning how to hate people who do not think that way.
I don't mean just disagree or dislike, but learning how to hate them.
Now, business school grads, I mean, look at this guy Tom Steyer.
I don't know whether he went to business school or not, but he's one of the wealthiest Californians out there, and he believes everything that's been said or written about global warming, and he gives every dime he can to far left-wing causes.
There are all kinds of these guys out there.
Hollywood is all business people, look at them.
Silicon Valley, look at all the business leaders there.
Look at all the employees there, Silicon Valley all the way up to uh Microsoft and the Great Northwest, these people are not Reaganites.
They may live their lives that way, but they don't vote that way, they don't donate that way.
And they don't talk that way.
But I didn't mean to insult business graduates.
I don't mean to insult anybody.
That's not the point here.
I'm just categorizing.
I mean, we've got some things that we wish were different.
Have some things that we would uh would like to change.
And among those things for me, I would like to be able to get to people who do not understand how government's growing involvement in every aspect of life is not a good thing.
That it is destructive, that it's corrupting, and who knows whatever else.
I'd love to be able to get hold of people and tell them nobody is going to care about them as much as they will care about themselves.
There isn't a professor, there isn't a president, there isn't a political party that gives a rat's rear end about them compared to how much they're going to care about themselves.
I might get hold of a bunch of them and try to convince them of a bunch of things they've been taught that are not true and show them another way, which is what we do here day in and day out.
Okay, the NFL owners' meetings are in San Francisco.
Robert Kraft, the owner to Pats held a press conference speaking about the punishment the NFL has handed down over the deflate gate controversy.
And there was a uh story last night that the Patriots that Kraft and the Commissioner uh Roger Goodell were meeting behind closed doors in what looked like a bury the haggit kind of meeting.
This was the media speculation.
And lo and behold, Kraft came out and announced the following.
When the discipline came out, I felt it was way over the top as it was unreasonable and unprecedented, in my opinion.
Although I might disagree with what is decided, I do have respect for the commissioner and believe that he's doing what he perceives to be in the best interest of the full 32.
So in that spirit, I don't want to continue the rhetoric that's gone on for the last four months.
I'm gonna accept reluctantly what he has given to us and not continue this dialogue and rhetoric, and we won't appeal.
Well, now this is fascinating, but the caveat is that this does not include Tom Brady.
The latest on that is that Brady will continue his appeal of his four-game suspension.
But Mr. Kraft here has decided that not only is he not going to appeal, he is going to reluctantly not continue the dialogue and uh and rhetoric, and will not appeal, which is open to all kinds of speculation and conjecture as to as to uh what happened and what might be the results here.
I'll tell you what some people are going to think.
Say right now what some people are going to think.
Some people are going to think, you know what, the Patriots really are guilty.
What they try to do, Wells issues the report, and Goodell or Troy Venson comes down with the punishment, and in the Patriots immediately fire back with a document press conference that tries to dispel everything in the Wells report and all this other stuff in an attempt to intimidate Goodell.
And it obviously didn't work, and so now they're withdrawing after their effort has failed.
That's what some people are going to say has uh has happened here.
Uh the other thing that will be speculated is that Goodell, in his private meeting with Mr. Krabbt said, Look, Robert, I love you, man, but the best thing to do is just lick lick your wounds here and walk down away.
Otherwise, there's this other stuff over here that I can't guarantee won't come out.
That may go back to spike.
I'm just telling you what the players, I mean what the media is going to be speculating here is try to because nothing is allowed to be what it is.
Kraft has just said he's decided a commissioner is doing his uh best to serve the whole league, all 32 teams.
I may not like it, but I'm one of the 32, and I'm gonna side with the commissioner and what I believe is his best judgment.
Well, the media is not gonna accept that Because there's no story there.
So they'll have to start looking at other things, what really went on.
Then they'll start seeking information, the truth behind this statement.
Go find people that were there.
See if somebody will leak information to them.
If there are no such leaks, and if there is no substantiation theories, you print the theory anyway.
You print the speculation anyway, and you attribute it to an unnamed source that you never have to name because there isn't one.
You just attribute it to one.
That's how you get your theory out there.
A journalist will never say, here's what I what I think happened is they'll say speculation is rampant bet.
And that's how they interject their opinions in these things.
Now, moments after Kraft's announcement there, the NFL Players Association spokesman, George Atala, confirmed nothing has changed as far as Brady's punishment goes.
Brady is still still appealing, and the uh players association is still supporting that appeal.
So whatever went on behind closed doors, if it involved Brady also licking his wounds and walking the other way, he decided not to.
I don't know if it included that or if this was nothing more than the commissioner and the owner of the Patriots just discussing the Patriot side.
Now their penalty is the million dollar fine and the loss of two draft choices.
The Brady suspension, that would be the Brady phase of the punishment, and he's, as we just heard, opting to continue his appeal of his uh of his four games.
Now, with his owner having backed off and saying, we will accept what comes, that puts more pressure on Brady, wouldn't you think?
So we'll just have to uh just have to see here.
I I uh Well, yeah, I'll tell you what I think after I've thought about it a while.
Um I I do have a little bit of knowledge of these people.
And I I do know some of them well enough to be able to confidently convey to you what I think their character is.
In that sense, I would I would uh tend to think that Mr. Kraft is telling the truth here about all this.
He's an honorable man.
He really is.
Uh, and a and just a nice guy, nice he can be individual in person.
But I'm just warning you that this is that's too boring to accept crap's, yeah, you know what?
We looked at it, he's the best judgment he's doing.
Commissioner 32 teams, I'm 132, we don't want to make waves here.
Even though I'm reluctant, I'll take it and I'll walk away.
And the media is going to say, there's no fun in that.
What's what's fun in that?
They got to do something to entertain themselves while they continue to talk about this.
So the rampant theories will now circulate.
Now, here's this companion story to the women longing for the days of madmen by Wednesday Martin in the New York Times back on May 16th, three days ago.
She's a writer and researcher, social researcher in New York, the author of the forthcoming memoir, primates of Park Avenue.
When our family moved from the West Village to the Upper East Side in 2004, seeking proximity to Central Park, my in-laws and a good public school, that's what she wanted to be closer to.
I thought it unlikely that the neighborhood would hold any big surprises.
For many years I had immersed myself through interviews and reviews of the anthropological literature and participant observation and the lives of women from the Amazon basin to sororities at a Big Ten school.
I thought I knew from foreign.
Now remember, let me.
This is f this woman is saying, look, I thought I'd seen everything.
I have interviewed Amazon women from the Amazon basis.
I have interviewed slaves from the Amazon basis.
I have interviewed sorority chicks at Big Ten schools.
I thought I knew from foreign until she moved to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where she encountered women she had never encountered before.
Then I met the women I came to call the glams.
Glamorous stay at home moms.
Glam S A H M might pronounce it soms, but glam's, the glamorous stay at home moms of my new habitat.
My culture shock was immediate and comprehensive.
In a country where women now outpace men in college completion, continue to increase their participation in the labor force, make gains toward equal pay, it was a shock to discover that the most elite stratum of all is a glittering moneyed backwater.
A social researcher works where she lands and resists the notion that any group is inherently more or less worthy of study than another.
So I stuck to the facts.
The women I met mainly at playgrounds and playgroups and the nursery schools where I took my sons were mostly 30 somethings with advanced degrees from prestigious universities and business schools.
They were married to rich, powerful men, many of whom ran hedge or private equity funds.
They often had three or four kids under the age of ten.
They lived west of Lexington Avenue, north of 63rd Street, south of 94th Street, and they did not work outside the home.
And this was total strange to her.
This she had never encountered before.
She had never encountered women like this in all of her anthropological study.
No, instead they toiled in what the sociologist Sharon Hayes calls intensive mothering.
Exhaustively enriching their children's lives by virtually every measure, and then advocating for them anxiously and sometimes ruthlessly in the linked high stakes games of social jockeying and school admissions.
What is intense mother?
What must motherhood be to you if normal motherhood is called intense motherhood?
Intense mothering, exhaustively enriching their children's lives by virtually every measure, and then advocating for them anxiously and ruthlessly, getting them into schools and so forth.
Their self-care was no less zealous or competitive.
No ponytails or mom jeans here.
They exercised themselves to a razor's edge.
They wore expensive and exquisite outfits, to school drop off, and they looked a decade younger than they were.
Many ran their homes like CEOs.
It didn't take me long to realize that my background in anthropology might help me figure it all out, and that this elite tribe and its practices made for a fasting excuse.
It's a New York Times story here, folks, about the strangers that live on the Upper East Side.
The women, strangers.
I was never undercover.
I told the women I spent time with that I was writing a book about being a mother on the Upper East Side.
Many of them were eager to share their perspectives on what one described as our in many ways very weird world.
It was easy for me to fall into the belief, as I lived and lunched and mothered with more than one hundred of them.
For the better part of six years, all these wealthy, competent, beautiful women, many with irony, intelligence, and a sense of humor about their tribalism.
But as my inner anthropologist quickly realized, there was the undeniable fact of their cloistering from men.
There were alcohol fueled girls' nights out, women only lunches, trunk shows, and shopping for a cause events.
There were mommy coffees, women only dinners in lavish homes.
There were even some girlfriend only flyaway parties on private planes where everybody packed and wore outfits the same color.
Yes, it's easier and more fun, the women insisted, about the sex segregation to define their lives.
We prefer it, the men told me at a dinner party where husbands and wives sat at entirely different tables in entirely different rooms.
We prefer it.
Sex segregation, I was told, was a choice, but like choosing not to work.
It struck me as a state of affairs possibly giving clue to some deeper meaningful reality while masquerading as a simple preference.
And then there were the wife bonuses.
I was thunderstruck when I heard mention of a bonus over coffee.
Later I overheard someone who didn't work say she would buy a table At an event once her bonus was set.
A woman with a business degree but no job mentioned waiting for her year end to shop for clothing.
Further probing revealed the annual wife bonus was not uncommon.
A wife bonus, I was told, might be hammered out in a prenup or post-nup and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband's fund had done, but her own performance.
How well she managed the home budget, whether the kids got into a good school, the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks.
In turn, these bonuses were a ticket to a modicum of financial independence and participation in a social sphere where you don't just go to lunch, you buy a $10,000 table at the benefit luncheon a friend is hosting.
There's more, but I have to take a break, but you get the idea here.
Wait a minute now, wait.
Give it to me, give it to me.
This reporter for the New York Times writing about these Upper East Side moms.
Her husband is a hedge fund private equity guy.
They have two homes.
Upper East Side of Manhattan and Sag Harbor.
They are wealthy.
She's not.
I gotta finish this up tomorrow, folks, and we will do that.
Be back.
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