Surprisingly, it's not sexism at all. But the reason will astound you even more.
Indeed, compare Martha to Jill Barad and Linda Wachner. Who, you ask? Remember them, two disgraced former female CEOs who quite literally ran their companies into the ground while obscenely enriching themselves; publicly displaying crass personalities that make Martha look sainted by comparison. They've enjoyed their 15 minutes of notoriety, and have now completely disappeared from our sight, and mind, left to console themselves with the millions they looted from the companies they used to run. So, why then, the endless fascination with all things Martha?
Last Friday night, on the train home, at the start of the weekend, a half dozen middle-aged white guys, a mix of business, financial, and legal types, were discussing "l'affaire Martha" and enjoying her displeasure, as reflected in a picture in the NY Post, when one of the six, obviously mellowed by a few adult beverages, blurted out..."I can't stand that woman. She reminds me of my ex-wife."
BINGO!!! Out of the mouths of babes, as it were. Instantly, the veils of confusion lifted, the truth was revealed. While to those legions of her admirers who happily buy her sheets at middle America K-Marts, she is the personification of taste; to the overwhelming majority of at-least-once-formerly-married males in the northeast power corridor of the country, she reminds them all in some way of their ex-wives, and is thus the personification of evil incarnate.
And, in a blink of an eye, our little group was off on a wild ride of hyperbole and innuendo, scaling a mountain range of tangenital comparisons, with a healthy measure of character assassination added for good measure; as we contemplated what it was like to have been ( or, perhaps, still be?) married to assorted Martha types, We were off on our own version of acid flashbacks, memories of divorces, and ex-wives, long surpressed. And we had plenty of targets. the six of us have a collective total of 8 ex-wives, and 4 current ones.
"I can't stand those tightly clenched teeth of hers. My ex-wife never yelled either. she just looked like she was sucking on a lemon, whenever we argued."
"She never perspires, she's a cold fish. She probably never sweats, eving duing sex. My ex was like that. Martha probably has silent orgasms, then says, with a little smirk, 'That's nice.' Then she can't wait to make the bed."
We had LOTS of sexual imagery about Martha and assorted Martha type. Several of us assumed that she coaches hes partners during the act, exhorting with little yelps of 'That's a GOOD thing!!'There was another , albeit somewhat weak, analogy about Martha, sex, and making souffles, but he was kind of muttering to himself. "And the bathrooms. All this cutsey-pooh crapola all over the place. Man, I couldn't sit on the john for more than 10 seconds. it made me ill.... heck, I wasn't allowed to piss standing up, in case....do you have any idea how annoying that is?"
"And the kitchen, Mine was like a garden. Plants all over the place. And those friggin' ferns. I was raised to think that dirt belongs OUTSIDE the kitchen. Why ever bother to wash your hands before eating, then, ... tell me? I mean, come on...and we had drawers full, and bowls full, of all these stupid kitchen gadgets, every kind imaginable. We had SIX different kinds of garlic presses...and a complete set of those thingees to make 12 DIFFERENT sizes of melon balls.... heck, we had something designed to shave the hair off a kiwi. But when I wanted to find a church-key, I had to rummage around fro 10 minutes, dump everything out of three kitchen drawers. Or bite the bottle-cap off."
And watching the pictures of Martha and her lawyers and advisors, well, it's like watching your soon-to-be ex and her divorce lawyer, across from you at the conference table, determined to exact 250 pounds of flesh from your 180 pound body.
So there, in a nutshell, is why Martha is loathed. In the collective psyche of millons of men of a certain age, income bracket, and social strata, she's our worst nightmare.
I REALLY didn't need to read that ... gross
But she went cheap and took insider information.
She must now 'disgorge' her illegal profits (stick her finger down her throat and vomit the money up).
I don't really want to see this old woman in jail. It is not like she made war and bore arms against us, but she must 'disgorge' her illegal profits.
http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/2002/june/rwt_martha.htm
Yep, if she were a man, she would be as beloved as Donald Trump.
Not to mention her FOB and FOH status.
She treats people like dirt and is a crook.
You reap what you sow.
Or the even more obvious, because we have
heard of her before? She is a name, for
the celebrity-impaired.