Heather Thomas based her new novel “Trophies” on Hollywood trophy wives - who, she says “get a bad rap, and there’s a lot of misconceptions about them. But really, there isn’t a hospital wing or a library in this city that wasn’t the result of some trophy wife’s efforts.”

Here is an excerpt from the mediabistro blog GalleyCat:

Thomas readily admits that she and her fellow philanthropist/activists are held up for ridicule, dismissed as intellectual lightweights, sometimes even by the ostensible political allies who come courting the money they control. “If you’re a wealthy second wife,” Thomas says, “you’re like a poster child for schadenfreude…

“But as a feminist, I don’t think we should attack other women. I’ve never met a bimbo trophy wife. I think women label other women because we’ve been socialized to compete with one another—but when we stop attacking each other, we’ll realize how powerful we are.”

It’s a subject she cares passionately about, and her argument about contemporary political activism is peppered with references to Leonard Shlain’s theories about the different ways men and women process information, which lead her to believe that YouTube and other elements of digital multimedia are reestablishing a feminizing influence over the Internet after an early period of text-heavy conservatism.

For Thomas, it can’t come fast enough. “It’s not even patriarachial anymore,” she says of the current political situation. “It’s just fascism.” To combat those forces, she says, the “ladies’ groups” others so readily mock are “the only people who have the time, the money, and the will,” and she plans to continue her fundraising efforts in the months leading up to this fall’s presidential election.

From A New, Literary Spotlight for Heather Thomas, mediabistro blog GalleyCat.

Leonard Shlain has noted that “one pernicious effect of literacy has gone largely unnoticed: writing subliminally fosters a patriarchal outlook. Writing of any kind, but especially its alphabetic form, diminishes feminine values and with them, women’s power in the culture. …

“I propose that a holistic, simultaneous, synthetic, and concrete view of the world are the essential characteristics of a feminine outlook; linear, sequential, reductionist, and abstract thinking defines the masculine. Although these represent opposite perceptual modes, every individual is generously endowed with all the features of both.”

From his book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image.

05.10.08 |
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