THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 26, 1995 TAG: 9503220036
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K3 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: HE SAID, SHE SAID
SOURCE: KERRY DOUGHERTY & DAVE ADDIS
LENGTH: Medium: 96 lines
DAVE SAID:
News item: Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, is outraged that the trendy Lillie Rubin dress stores may be forced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to hire male clerks.
Lillie Rubin, it seems, is one of the last of the old-style women's stores, where the clerks join the customer in the fitting room to make certain every tuck of taffeta is properly covering every tuft of taffy.
Heh-heh. Oh, Kerry, I gotta tell ya, this one is soo-o-o-o-o tempting. I just want to giggle and say, ``Well, y'all been demanding equal opportunity.''
I can just see you in that little cubicle, Kerry, waiting for a clerk to pass you a new spring frock. Then this big, hairy-knuckled hand comes through the curtain, with a heart-and-dagger tattoo above the wrist, and a Marlboro-flecked voice rumbles, ``Youse wanna try that in a 6 or an 8, lady?''
After all, we've spent millions overhauling aircraft carriers to accommodate women, so why shouldn't a retired senior master chief start a second career helping ladies jam themselves into Lycra jogging togs?
``If you'd jes' pull a little harder, lady, youse could haul yer keel inta that thing!''
These guys' working knowledge of power winches and tugboat-docking techniques could be downright handy in the back room of Lillie Rubin's.
OK, OK, that's it, Kerry. Last cheap shot. I promised you I'd only follow temptation but so far.
I never thought I'd find myself defending you and Kay Bailey Hutchison in the same breath, but the federal government has gone too far when it can reach into the dressing room and tell you that some strange guy has a right to fondle your foundations before you try them on.
It's one thing to enforce equal access to tax-funded institutions like the Navy or VMI; it's quite something else to require equal access to the brassiere-fitting station at the local dress shop. (Although it could open entire new career vistas to Bill Clinton, should he stumble in next year's election.)
There are times and places, Kerry, where issues of propriety should outweigh issues of diversity and equality. Even Bob Dylan, whose lyrics have championed every possible liberal cause, once wrote,
``The moral of this story,
the moral of this song,
is simply that one should never be
where one does not belong.''
And the boys don't belong in the back room of Lillie Rubin's dress shops.
KERRY SAYS:
Thanks, Dave. For once we're in agreement.
I'm getting sick and tired of these sensitive, '90s-style guys popping up in all the wrong places. Men don't belong in women's dress shops unless they're at the cash register, stroking a check.
And although I've never been to Lillie Rubin's I have just one word on this topic guaranteed to strike terror in the hearts of women: Loehmann's.
Anyone who has experienced the utter and complete humiliation of trying on bathing suits in Loehmann's stockyard that passes for a dressing room (bad enough without the toddler sons of customers marching up to examine your flawed anatomy at close range) will recoil in horror at the notion of grown men mincing around in there. We thought it couldn't get any worse.
There are other places men don't belong.
They don't belong in obstetricians' offices, either. I'm not kidding you, Dave, I've seen 'em sitting there, holding their pregnant significant other's hands, trying to look as if they're actually happy to be there. Then they march right into the examination room. I don't want to imagine what happens next.
Worse, guys have started showing up at baby showers. Some enlightened equality nuts have decided that co-ed baby showers are a wonderful thing, and the next thing you know you're blowing Saturday nights at baby showers, of all places.
Instead of a civilized little afternoon tea, with petit fours and champagne punch, the last shower I went to saw all the women trying to ooh and ahh over layette sets that were fogged in with cigar smoke from the guys' poker game over in one corner.
Who let these guys in, and what in the world does this have to do with equality?
For more than 200 years white men in America exercised a kind of affirmative action for themselves. So for the past 30 years the rest of us have been scrambling for those seats in the boardrooms, cockpits and state houses you all used to keep for yourselves. But equal opportunity is not about letting men work in women's dressing rooms.
But I digress, Dave. Maybe I'm stunned by finding myself not only agreeing with a troglodyte like you but also with a right-wing wacko like Hutchison.
Perhaps I should confess my worst nightmare: I pull back the flimsy curtain at T.J. Maxx and find Bob Packwood standing there with an armful of camisoles in my size.
Bring on the Contract with America. Where do I sign?
by CNB