220: Testosterone
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Well, from WBEZChicago, it was this American live from our glass, and I'll say right here at the top today's show is a rerun, one of our favorite episodes we've ever broadcast. We haven't rerun this in years. It was first broadcast 15 years ago, and the way the show originally opened is that to explain what we were doing on the show and why we were doing it the way we were doing it. I was joined in the studio by one of our producers at the time, Alex Bloomberg. Hello, Ira. Alex? Yes. What's the reason for this week's show? Well, I've been thinking about that, and for me, the reason for today's program goes back to a book I read when I was 15 called The Women's Room. Maybe people listening will remember The Women's Room. It was sort of a seminal feminist novel from the '70s, and I first came across the women's room when I was digging through my parents' bookshelves looking for porn, you know, books with naughty parts in them, you know, like, fear of flying, and so I picked it up and I read it. Because the word "women" was in the title, in lipstick, probably, or maybe not, yes. It's incredibly polemical. It describes basically a group of women sort of going from the '50s through the '60s, and they sort of all suffer at the hands of the various men in their lives, and, you know, there's constantly, you know, there's like, you know, women are slowly being driven crazy by their husbands' incessant criticism, or they're being called ugly after they get mastectomies, or they're being stifled by their husband's emotional shallowness. And I notice you happen to have brought into the studio with you today a copy of The Women's Room. Yeah, well, I recently reread it just to see, for example, I sort of bookmarked a couple of these things. You know, on page 198, the narrator comes in and she says, you know, "You think I hate men? I guess I do." And then a little bit further down she says, "My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew, just released from Dachau, I watched the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach, and I looked briefly and walk on. I don't even need to shrug. I simply don't care." And then a little bit later, "My hatred is learned from experience. That is not prejudice. I wish it were prejudice. Then, perhaps, I could unlearn it." It's not very much pornographic about that. It's an incredibly strange thing to read this book at that age because at that age, I felt like, you know, there's one other woman who sort of comes into play at this point and that's the, I probably shouldn't say her name, let's just call her, you know, let's just call her Kelly. And she was in eighth grade with me and she sat two rows away from me and I remember one time sitting in a homeroom with her and seeing her button down shirt was open a little bit
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