Ironing Shirts

I'm reading Bang's post about how her political debates with her bf could possibly lead to getting dumped, because conventional wisdom says no man wants to be shown up by his woman. I agree with the Bang's conclusion, that she still shouldn't stop debating, though for reasons more ideological than diversionary: it's in the core of my feminist beliefs that if the choice came down to keeping a man or selling myself short in any way to make him feel like his balls are bigger, I'd sooner dispense of the man.

But this run-of-the-mill (for me) reflection happens to coincide with a documentary I saw last night about Lana Turner, and I suddenly found myself thinking twice about my accepted feminist position. I never had much interest in Lana Turner - the movies that I've seen of hers (admittedly not many) are a little better than mediocre, and I've always sort of regarded her as a poor man's Marilyn Monroe, though with more acting versatility - but it turns out that her life was fairly interesting. Not only was Turner a bombshell, but she was also a bit of that "woman with balls" that I'd like to be: impulsive, headstrong, flamboyant, and unladylike (she apparently used to pass out "I Love Lana" bracelets to men at parties, which was very forward and racy at the time). Unfortunately, these were the very qualities that got her into trouble over and over again.

All told, Turner had seven husbands, and as the documentary describes it, she died at 74, still a romantic and a searcher, yearning for Mr. Right but ending up with only a string of Mr. Right Nows. She used to joke that she always wanted one husband and seven kids, not seven husbands and one kid...

OMG! I gasped. That could be me. It IS possible, even for a bombshell, to go through the whole of life without ever reaching the fairy tale ending. No matter how hard one hopes and tries.

Part of it is Turner's own fault - marrying on whims, picking bad boys, and when she finally gets the stable guy, spending all his trust fund money until he's driven away. But part of it was disturbingly close to home. Her first marriage didn't work out because her husband used to yell at her for not ironing his shirts. She would stand there, ironing this schmuck's shirt reluctantly, and it would dawn on her that she made like a billion times more money than this nobody.

I heartily concurred then; I, too, would have said, FUCK THAT NOISE.

But is that wrong-headed of me? Lana Turner was perhaps ahead of her time, or she simply could have been overly headstrong; in either case, look what it got her! One might argue that things could have been very different had she lived in a more liberated age; but ultimately, her unwillingness to bend and compromise brought her nothing but a lifetime of unhappiness, while a lot of insipid and frigid women had perfectly fulfilling marriages. It made me think that maybe being ideologically right and principled and assertive and self-respecting isn't everything. For better or for worse, this is the life we live in, and sometimes the only way to make it work is to play ball with everyone else.