Lucky little girl. My old neighbour worked as a security guard at Knights games, and informed me that the pre-game cheerleading was, apart from an eventual loss of the team (an increasingly frequent event), the moment the stadium security feared the most.
"The boys get so worked up by it," she cringed. "They send them out there, with their little panties and fishnets, shaking their bums and spreading their legs in time to R&B songs. The crowd go wild, it just pumps them up to the point where they just go crazy. They throw their empty beer cans onto the field, and start fighting each other, it's weird. I had to help remove some guy that had ended up exposing himself."
"Exposing himself?" I asked, wanting her to tone down the picture I was now forming in my mind.
"Yep," she shrugged. "It's happened plenty of times, but this time I was the unlucky one who had to grab him. He just whipped it out, and started shaking it towards the girls on the field, yelling, 'Suck on this!'".
"What did he say when you tried to remove him?"
"Oh, he called me a fat, ugly whore," she laughed, in that way one laughs when one accepts the state of affairs, as most women in this town do. "It was a relief to do security for the Hi-5 concert, after that!"
She would later tell me about the lone, "suspicious looking" men who were seen at the Hi-5 show, and who were rumoured amongst security to be there perving at the young girls who attended. She laughed about that, too.
Upon her return to her hometown, Jennifer Hawkins would complete a victory lap at the Knights stadium from whence she came, and for a while, the insecurity of Newcastle almost turned on Hawkins, or at very least held a gun to her head, demanding she declare her "heritage" and return to cheerleading for the Knights (she cleverly stuck to "maybe", and of course, never did). That was the irony, at the end of it all. Granted, Hawkins was never one of those beauty queens who expressed aspirations outside the realm of pleasing the male gaze; but even so, it said so much to me that after a year traveling the globe, her own town cared nothing for any of the charity duties she had performed (albeit as a pretty face and a disclaimer to critics), and had no value in her potential to be anything other than what they saw as "making" her - standing in the middle of a footy field, while drunk yobbos held their dicks out, demanding she suck it. Hawkins was the topic of many conversations for many months in Newcastle pubs, and I can't recall any of them expressing any acknowledgment of her intellect. "Down to earth" was a grossly over-used line; but it all came back to a down to earth girl you'd like to have "flat on her back". I heard most of these conversations at the local, popular haunt, "The Great Northern" - a pub that demands it's young, blonde bar-maids to wear a uniform of ripped hotpants and bras, even in the middle of winter (another prized possession of the Newie boys is the girlfriend who is not only one of these bar-maids, but one who makes it to the annual "Girls of The Great Northern" calendar). I'm sure it was also the talk of the local club Hawkins declared her "favourite night-club in the world", Fanny's: a vile home to top 40, and jocks, and the annual "Miss Newcastle" contest, where young half-naked women are subjected to bum-pinching and animal sounds from the drunk onlookers who will end up bashing the shit out of each other on the street outside, come the night's end.
And I could go on for a long time, here, with a range of examples of the whoring of women as manifested and reflected in our culture. Most of us here know the drill. But I chose instead to isolate just one example and experience of mine that I have been a reluctant bystander to here in my hometown - the hometown that produced the supposedly most beautiful girl in all the world. The minute I followed the Trump VS O'Donnell story, my mind automatically came back to Newcastle's glory days of the Hawkins era, and those poor little girls in lycra and fishnets, and fuck-me boots, and a tonne of Maybeline (I thought of them, too, when I saw the campervan of American jocks in the Borat film, which elicited cheers from the young men in the theatre); who dreamed of a future glory for themselves, and who have had their oppression strengthened all the more because of what Miss Universe represents to this culture of men, and the message Hawkins gave them that they too could reach the highest pinacle of appeasing the power-driven libido of the smug, rich, old white man. In this all too real ideology in the core of our culture, the best women can get in this world is to be the beautiful posessions of the men who get everything. We talk of gender equality and the advances we have made (well, I certainly don't, but many do); but at the end of the day, this culture reveres (and has protected, for Rosie has now endured a media beat-up and may very well lose her job, which Trump also taunted her that he could assure - with his power and influence - would be lost) this vile man, who holds the golden crown of libidinal validation in his grubby hands, and flaunts a power to absolve the current poor little beauty queen for her sins, even though (as O' Donnell pointed out) his own sins hardly make him a "moral compass for America's youth". Even the law may protect him, as Trump has today assured Fox; "I'll have my hands in her (Rosie's) pockets, very soon,"
Because really, what is the difference between the young Jennifer Hawkins who shook her pom-poms in the air as a drunk Novacastrian male shouted, "Suck it", from the stands, and the Jennifer Hawkins who stood, tits out (see picture above), smiling her submissive Colgate grin (a pose she would hold for an entire year) as a bunch of rich, white old men (as O' Donnell observed in her blog) placed a crown upon her head? Isn't class the only difference - the difference between the crass grog-fueled misogyny of the footballers, and the cokehead men with suits who own the hotels where playbunnies and beauty queens will frolic in the suds of golden spas? It's where the term, "classy", comes from - did you realise that? It's a reference to the upper-class, of course, to their "air of dignity", etc. But what is dignity? It's just an aesthetic, a pose that suggests something that can defy the reality of what is happening; and so long as it shines with gold coins, we presume it must be too refined for such social problems as misogyny and (more importantly) the commercialising of the the male gaze by rich men who "own" beautiful women as commodities. Don't be fooled by the PR of the Miss Universe franchise - it's no charity event. It's a multi-million dollar network of business deals, and Trump and his partners make a fortune off their beauty. The new Miss America has been ridiculed, crucified, forced to tearily repent to Master Trump, and is now shipped off to rehab - all generating a wonderful round of publicity, which won't get her a cent as she's locked up in the drug clinic (the only difference between her and the rest of the competition's history being that she was caught). But Trump's using every spare chance - and now, ironically, the Rosie scandal, too - to promote his franchise, knowing very well that come the Miss Universe pagent, that young, publicly shamed beauty - his possession, his commodity - is going to make him an even bigger mint.
The cheerleader is owned by a male-dominated environment who will judge her, advance her, if she meets the demands of their gaze; the beauty queen has a legal contract abiding her to the million-making men of the business world, epitomised by no greater figure of contemporary Americana more than Trump: a man who sacked half of the Miss Universe team because they insisted in bringing other more intellectual qualities into the picture, when he thought all that was needed was "beautiful girls with a curtain behind them". Is one whore more or less free than the other? Or is one just wearing a designer dress? Whether the pimp has a can of beer in his hand, a rolls royce out the front of his tower, or a possie of homeboys (as O' Donnell's blog brought into the picture), a pimp is a pimp. A whore is a whore, and our culture glorifies it, still. That pisses Rosie off, and for that, I say, good on her for having the guts to say it. A smart woman uses her position in media to challenge the social ideology, and what happens? Trump savages her as a "loser... a dumb human being... she's a pig... she's just jealous because Miss America likes me instead of her", and the piece-de-resistance, threatens to send one of his rich, old white friends over to her house to "pick up" O'Donnell's girlfriend, stealing her from her beloved Rosie, luring her with the allure of the rich, white American male. "I suspect it wouldn't be hard," he sniggered. And then, there's the lawsuit. And is it because she called him a sexist pimp? Hell no, it's because she had the hide to suggest he isn't worth as much money as he thinks he is, and only stayed afloat because he was born into millions and inherited his father's fortune to pay off his debt.
"She says I'm not worth anything," he said, almost feigning hurt. "I'm worth a lot of money."
This is the power of Trump - hero, now even more than ever, to millions of men, worldwide. Comment threads across the internet were ablaze with Trump supporters, all bestowing respect upon the Pimp of all Pimps, and all labelling O'Donnell a dirty pig (using trump's own words, like the sheep they are - heaven forbid they think of anything themselves), and of course, referencing her sexuality as an invalidation of the subject of women's rights (what right does a dyke have to protect women against objectification of men?). One person told Rosie she could "lick my sack", and another exclaimed, "Rosie's a racist!" Even God came into it (should we really be surprised?), as the Christians hit Youtube casting their stones at O'Donnell for being a sinning mother who dare not speak of moral issues when she is herself bound to hell. There was the odd support for Rosie, too; but it was increasingly few and far between, and naturally, all from women (who were, themselves, then attacked by men for being neo-nazi dykes, etc, yawn, etc).
But there was one comment amongst the passionate rapid-fire insults that I felt, in it's horrifying simplicity (a phrasing that very few - least of all it's author - would understand), stood out, above all.
"Donald - you're The Man!"
Indeed.
And one of the responses from trump (there've been a couple now)...
