Torn Down from This Pedestal

from the NY Times Sunday Book Review

[The judge] sent her home to change her clothes, instructed her husband to use a tighter rein and told reporters that it upset him to see "women tearing themselves down from this pedestal."

Unnecessarily upgrading a thing's status is "putting it on a pedestal." But to be toppled from a pedestal suggests the overthrow of a dictator, or the descent of a dignified thing into the vulgar fray that takes place on the ground.

It was a clever argument to subvert women's emancipation to suggest that the workaday world was always less rewarding than domestic life. Anyone who felt otherwise, then, was not just reversing the natural order but had a disgusting appetite for business transactions. The artist Renoir claimed that the only job women should perform is "making the world tolerable."

In reality, power is shared between pedestal-occupiers and groundlings. Take it from our good friend Foucault. Every one of us has a pedestal to climb, dismount, demolish, or turn sideways.