Ishtar, "Gloria Steinem" and Me

In the months before and after a strange "dream" I had, about people around my bed, (see "An Encounter?" in the present book), I had left college and gone on to "other things." One of those "things" was an interest in Gloria Steinem, at that time already a famous feminist woman journalist and founder and editor of the then-new Ms. Magazine.

I first saw her on tv during the early '70s, during those days of Spiro Agnew's "radiclibs." She was active in the Democratic National Committee and she founded the National Women's Political Caucus at that time. I began to see her on the Today show and other programs on tv. Then I subscribed to Newsweek and again saw her picture on the covers of it and McCall's, which I'd also been glancing at as my interest in the new political activity called "the women's movement" began to take shape. Out of college, at least for the time, being, I was toying with the idea of being either a writer or an accountant (quite a difference in fields, but at that age, I didn't see the big difference).

Moved by the many examples of injustice given in that women's magazine, I became determined to be a good feminist. Having read that male cultural dominance was illlustrated by male control of the educational establishment and the fact that males always got the "higher degrees"--and incomes--while women did not, I decided to stop going to college. Only by taking action in my own life, I decided, could I help women at all. As a result, I kept my income down and limited my work options, supposedly something a feminist woman would love me for--or in spite of.

I began to write to Ms. and even subscribed to it to help it get started. Back in those days, Ms. was available both by mass-subscription and on the newstand. I began to see it in the supermarket and at the shopping center.

One of the first things I'd noticed about Gloria were her "pilot's glasses," big, bug-eyed wire-frame glasses shaded in blue that she wore as sunglasses. In the center of the glasses' frames, immediately above her nose, was a golden ring. These had stood out in my mind at that time because I'd recently gotten a pair of such glasses, before I'd seen hers. During my last semester at Arkansas College, (now Lyon College) in Batesville, I'd decided to change my look and had gotten the eye doctor to get me the new frames. Mine weren't tinted, however. They gave me a wild playboy look that didn't really match my personality. However, I continued to wear them for some years, despite a comment made to me about them by one of my female professors, who was in a pattern I was to see all too often, herself married to a relatively wealthy man, even as she criticized me as to whether I was a knowledgeable feminist. A few months after leaving college, I saw Steinem on tv and in magazines, wearing the glasses.

Since then, I've speculated as to why I felt a need to buy such glasses. What was I really trying to express or convey? Some secret memory of some big-eyed alien that I'd "encountered," in an incident I'd remembered as a dream? (See "An 'Encounter'?"). Could this have been what I was subconsciously trying to express: something too traumatic to admit to, consciously? If so, I may have bought those wild glasses to express that. And when I saw Gloria in them, perhaps the combination of her "midwest" accent combined with the glasses and the "big eyes" of my "visitor" ala Whitley Strieber in Communion, may have contributed to my interest in her. Strieber says that his "female" alien visitor had such an accent and such eyes. (Ancient Sumerian art seems to depict big-eyed "people", but it isn't clear: are these aliens or just people with glasses on? Either way, conventional explanations don't apply. Interestingly, it's been noted that the Assyrians, descendants of the Sumerians, knew how to grind crystal lenses. Eric Von Daniken notes this in Chariots of the Gods.)

Strieber also notes, however, that his "visitor" seems to be possibly thousands of years old. Not willingly accepting the idea of an alien visitation as the only explanation for his experiences, he speculates in his book that there may be still other unknown phenomena that we don't yet understand that explain it. He said it's possible, for example, that Jungian psychology and its concepts about the phenomenon of the archetype may offer a possible explanation, as our subconscious minds engage in many levels of deep activity. Perhaps, indeed, the phenomenon of archetypes, if they exist, does explain all of it. He recalls his main visitor as "female" and feels she might be the Ishtar of ancient mythology. Indeed, this is a compelling argument, since even from a Jungian perspective, Ishtar goes so far back as to seem to reveal some archetypal image elements. She is always portrayed, even on the most ancient of sculptures, as having large eyes.

If that is the case, perhaps my attraction to Steinem, along with the other unusual circumstances and emotions I was to experience pertaining to her, was a reflection of a similar archetypal Jungian or "visitor" experience. Certainly, Steinem's glasses exerted an unusual effect on me.

In any case, in addition to Steinem's glasses, I was attracted, inexplicably, to her accent. The sound of her voice seemed compelling, appealing to me. I was drawn to an interest in her that I couldn't readily explain and didn't really feel comfortable about. I felt a need to be associated with her in some way, as if this would validate me as a person.

Years later, after my breakdown, I was to get an opportunity to get Gloria's autograph when she visited Little Rock. I hadn't been much of a feminist activist in the intervening years, though I had originally gotten off to a pretty good start. I even joined the NOW for awhile. But in the months immediately preceding my nervous breakdown, she was to be a very important figure in my life.

Without understanding it, her writing and the writing, editing and opinions of those closest to her at Ms., including the man in her life, Stanley Pottinger, became of paramount importance to me, as I tried to explain to myself a gap in my memory, a need to understand something that had been said to me, a fear of a certain situation that I couldn't readily visualize or identify.

One day, I came in from a trip out to deliver furniture with Tim, and Gloria's picture was there on the dinner table, alongside the "Ms. No-stars." With her was a man whom I was to know later was Stan Pottinger. I was also to learn that Pottinger's family had important connections with the Roosevelt Administration.

I immediately felt a sense of suspicion for the man that I couldn't rationally justify, but which was very real. I also may have felt a twinge of jealousy, since I'm not sure the "woman" with the Midwestern accent I was attracted to didn't represent the "alien abduction experience" or its Jungian (or whatever) equivalent. If the latter is the case, it would explain a number of other emotions that I was to begin to experience over the next few weeks and months.

The photograph in question, the one that had stimulated my suspicion and possibly jealousy, had appeared in the early spring issue of Ms. I had then written a harshly critical and sarcastic letter to the magazine and Ms. Steinem, trying to vent my feelings about how the photograph made me feel. (I suppose I was also a bit embarassed to have others know I subscribed to a magazine normally considered a "woman's" magazine and which I'd discovered that others did know when I'd seen the magazine laying there on the dinner table in front of several people, page open.)

Well, in the weeks subsequent to that letter, I began to read the articles in Ms. with a sensitized eye, trying to see if some response was about to be made about what I'd written. I looked for a response, since I didn't get one in the mail. This all began, I believe, around January or February of 1973. But by the end of the Spring and the beginning of the Summer, I was in full blown panic or paranoia or obsessive disorder--whatever terminology would be best-utilized in describing it.

I became concerned that the "people" were somehow becoming defensive, that they were watching me in order to avenge themselves on me by making similar sarcastic statements about me, about my own "hypocrisy" (which was one of the things I'd accused them of). On my birthday, events came to a head.

On the night of my birthday, my sister Amy had arranged for me to have a date--my first date--with a young woman she knew from high school. Linda was her name. It was only in friendship and Linda wasn't interested in me romantically. I took her to see the movie Deliverance, then took her home. Memories about that evening were to become part of an obsessive pattern for me, however, over the next few weeks, leading to my nervous breakdown. (See "A Nervous Breakdown," and "An 'Encounter?'" in the present book.)

While driving up to the theater, I'd seen a car parked alongside the curb that had someone in it that looked suspiciously like Gloria Steinem. Now, I believe this woman may have been Loni Anderson. (Just as it's also possible that a "man in black" whom I will describe in a moment, may have been Burt Reynolds: the two were involved during that time, and, intriguingly, interested in northern Arkansas, as was to be revealed in the making of the television show "Evening Shade;" the "man in black I will describe looked remarkably similar to Burt Reynolds.) In any case, she looked like some kind of a celebrity: impossibly beautiful, blonde, tanned, flashy--the gorgeous goddess look that ordinary women, especially in Batesville, didn't affect. I became intensely uncomfortable, feeling as if it were possible I was being, or had been, watched.

As various articles appeared in Ms. over the next few weeks, I'd read them closely, searching for clues to questions that kept going through my mind. I kept trying to understand what it was that I was trying to recall, to relate to, to understand, about the trip home after that date, about that evening in general. Had words been said that I couldn't comprehend? Had something been communicated that was over my head? Who had been watching me, and why?

Who was the "man in black" that I saw standing in front of a parked car just down the street from my parents home a short while later? The man appeared there one evening toward five o'clock, standing, leaning against the front of his car. He didn't move. He just seemed to stand there, staring at our house. This was after I'd written my critical letter, had my date with Linda and had begun to be concerned about the opinions of the people at Ms. in response to my letter. This, like the "dream" a few months earlier, occurred while everyone else but me was gone. It fit in with my general feeling that something in my recollection wasn't quite "right," that something in my environment was or had been "off."

My mother was finally home the following night and I began to describe my mounting feelings of anxiety to her. I told her about the letters and the man in black. I went out to see if the man might be there again that evening. He wasn't. Again, I began to feel as if I needed to "remember" something, or that something had been said that I didn't fully understand. I felt an increasing sense of isolation and anxiety, a feeling of having been violated, watched, observed.

I kept thinking about those people around my bed, but at the time, I thought this was just an image to deal with my increasing anxiety over having alienated or angered the people at Ms. On a trip to Wynn, Arkansas with my mother, shortly afterward, I bought a "self-help psychology" book primarily for the picture that was on its cover: it had a group of people in a circle, looking down at the viewer of the cover. The reader, in looking at the cover, looks upward at them. I couldn't escape a deep feeling of anxiety and stress every time I looked at that picture, a stress far beyond the mere anxious feelings that I ordinarily would have experienced as a result of my concerns about "meeting someone" to date or an inability to remember some small detail.

I also kept wanting to hear from "Ms. Steinem," at least, the image of her that I held in my mind: an image, I now see, that may have resembled that held by Streiber for his "alien." I couldn't put it out of my mind, at times: it seemed to just stay there, in some corner of my mind. A wasp. A woman. Eyes. Being watched. Something being said that I didn't remember well and was concerned because I also couldn't understand it well.

This was to culminate in my nervous breakdown. And, for awhile, after I'd relocated, etc., to help me cope, I'd forgotten about Gloria Steinem. After a few more years, however, I came back to re-examine her.

I learned from the cover jacket of Nora Ephron's book Crazy Salad that Steinem is an alcoholic, like my late brother. I also learned, from a write-up in Cosmopolitan that the man she is involved with, has been for years--probably was, at the time of the photograph with the "Ms. No-stars" was Stanley Pottinger.

Then further things became clear. In Barbara Honneggar's book October Surprise, I learned that Pottinger was the "go-between" for the Reagan-Bush campaign and its "moles" in the Carter Administration during the Iranian hostage crisis. It could even be that Pottinger was instrumental in the downfall of Jimmy Carter. What makes this doubly likely is that, like George Bush's relationship with Barbara, he was in a "sensitive" position vis a vis the women's movement and its political allies. If he knew Steinem's weaknesses, perhaps he could have exploited them, as well.

It could be, in fact, that the Pottinger-Steinem relationship could explain many of the gaps in the "October Surprise" scenario. It may even help explain the frequent failures the women's movement encountered under Steinem's leadership. Indeed, it might be argued that the effects of her starting her own "wing" of the women's movement, the National Women's Political Caucus, may have helped to factionalize the movement and to cause confusion in its ranks. In her biography of Marilyn Monroe (128-35), Steinem virtually discards any theory suggesting Marilyn's murder, despite powerful data from the Giancanas in their book Double Cross which does support such a conclusion. In Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, (78-86), she successfully attacked Senator Eugene McCarthy, of the 1968 Presidential campaign, as being virtually a "fake" antiwar spokesman: too staid and conservative in dress, rhetoric and manner, was he, to be a truly "liberated" male, and suggesting that former Joe McCarthy ally Robert Kennedy was more "genuine" as a liberal. However, she then turned around and continued her relationship with Pottinger, whom Honneggar's data would suggest is just this side of a 007-would-be. (120-8).

My attraction to Steinem and her total lack of a response in kind, I found to be best described in a song by Gordon Lightfoot, "If You Could Read My Mind:"

And if you'll read between the lines

you'll know that I'm

just tryin' to understand the feelings that you lack.*

I never thought I could feel this way,

and I've got to say that I just don't get it

I don't know where we went wrong,

but the feelin's gone and I just can't get it back.

*(My italics--mcs).

I was almost mystical and morose, that I could be thus attracted to this woman, with no response in kind, not even an acknowledgment that there should be a response in kind. I experienced a feeling of alienation, from myself, from others, as a result. How could someone care so much for someone, with no response? I've experienced parallel emotions at other times, as well. A romantic, fantasy attraction that seems almost electrical in nature, as my eyes make contact with my beloved. From my end, it was love. But there was never love, never anything, from her end.

I had developed crushes for women before, at a younger age, also without any reciprocation. I simply lost the ability to relate to the gender. I could no longer feel any respect, couldn't find it in me to fake it that I liked people who had so little feeling for their fellow human beings. Perhaps sometimes women genuinely care about men. But I have come to the conclusion that most of the time, if not all of the time, they do not.

I base this on the total lack of response I have gotten from women for my feelings for them. When all that ever occurs is my loving a woman, with her not caring at all how I feel or feeling the same way about me, no matter how powerfully I "emote" for her, I simply cannot relate to, cannot identifiy with, that person, after awhile. They become, for me, much more sick, emotionally, than the "mental patients" I encountered in the State Hospital during my breakdown and afterward. They're not all there, though this is probably culturally induced.

I think it is this feeling of alienation from the gender for their total lack of simple human reciprocal emotions--not even the "compassion" that Germaine Greer wrote about in The Female Eunuch--that has caused me to become alienated from women.

Other people have often asked me, "Don't you ever get lonely? Don't you ever want a woman in your life?" These questions, however, are not for me to answer. They must be answered by this other gender of people, for whom normal human emotional responses simply are not available, at least most of the time. It is the knowledge that they can't come up with that answerthat keeps me from being lonely. I know that, not having the company of persons who lack such simple human emotional capacity, is not to lack much in company.

I find, today, that my relationship with Lynn is based, in part, on this feeling of alienation from the female of my species as a whole. I simply feel that Lynn, as a supposed "mental patient" at least has an excuse for the abusive and unfeeling way she speaks to me sometimes. She has severe depression and other personality "disorders." Those disorders, however, also allow her to occasionally look back on something she has said to me, to have some concept that I might be hurt, and to apologize. This ability to see herself for what she is, unlike most other women, has given her a perspective that most of the self-styled "normal" ones lack.

She does have a tendency to over-apologize and I've told her that. But at least she does acknowledge that I do have feelings, something the self-styled normal and feminist women, after that first couple of years of talking about the importance of acknowledging the male's feelings (now long forgotten) don't have time for.

I, as a low-income male in our culture, waited in line for hours to get Steinem's autograph in Little Rock in 1987, in a situation in which she acted as if she had no idea who I was--which she probably didn't. She also indicated no interest in getting to know me, personally, in this situation, either, just as she had never responded to my letters. (This, even though I'd told her I was one of the few males to ever subscribe to Ms.) And she certainly has never responded in kind to the emotions I'd felt for her, in those days of my desperate emotional crisis when I'd needed her so.

I could blow this off to the fact that she's busy, but I know the real reason: like most of the self-styled radical feminists of the '70s, (and like most women, most times, would like to be), she's a snob, a do-nothing snob who has contributed absolutely nothing to the advancement of her gender, but has merely ridden on the coattails of her sisters in the street, as they've fought the hard fights really required to attain equality for women. And her "boyfriend" Pottinger, in betraying the Carter Administration during the Iran hostage crisis, and thereby causing its defeat, may have done women far more harm than good. It turns out that my suspicions about him were well-founded.

Take, for example, the snooty little woman doctor at Hermann Hospital, whose husband makes far more money than she and who was offended that I, as a low-level employee, even spoke to her. The self-righteous, bigoted female supervisor she reported me to herself sleeps with a good money making accountant even while thinking of herself as the latest model in advanced feminist, instead of the Victorian prude and hypocrite that she is. These women, (and, in spite of my affection for and heartfelt attraction to her, I suspect Gloria is among their number), didn't get their positions by hard work but by sleeping with wealthy men. I don't regard them, now, as feminists at all.

I'm tired of the self-styling and the hypocrisy, tiired of such hypocritical women. Indeed, it may be that I am now leary of all "normal" women in our culture. They are enculturated, I believe now, into talking out of one side of their mouths and living on the other, when it comes to women's issues. I'm tired of "in my face" feminists who give supposed feminist reasons for avoiding me, and whom I then see sleeping with men who are way out on my political Right and far above me on the income scale.

I'm a member of the Society of Professional Journalists. I try to retain my objectivity, neutral perspective and unemotional tone in writing on social topics. But I'm also a male in our now somewhat confusing culture and I'm tired of constantly being compared to some big, strong man on some male stripper stage by women who don't pass muster as feminists, themselves, to begin with. (Indeed, could this be why the "big strong man" image is upon us in this way? Precisely because such "feminists" aren't really feminists?) I didn't endorse and support the ERA because I wanted to be valued for my strength.

I don't want to hear any more from such hypocrites; and, looking around at the book stores, just lately, I see that I'm not. Yet the "women's movement" of ordinary women, the ones who have to work for a living, make advances and stand up for their rights, continues. While I suspect that most of them are themselves little "Gloria Steinems" under the skin, with that same total lack of simple human emotional capacity described above, at least I don't have to listen to them rant about it.

Sometimes, at this point in my own rant, I feel a twinge of intense anger and hurt in behalf of my late brother, the alcoholic who died, cold and alone and broke, out on the street, after having been married twice. Though I usually think highly of his ex-wives and though I know he abused them, on a couple of occasions, does this really justify his literally freezing to death, in the self-induced death of the guilt ridden alcoholic male in our culture. He had failed to hold his career together, so his wives divorced him. In a way, it almost seems he was little to them but a money machine. I wonder.

Such enculturation to be hypocritical is, of course, ultimately, probably, a product of males, who, after all, have set the norms in our culture. I suspect I've been a little too hard on Gloria and on women in general, here. I have had some painful experiences that may be mostly my responsibility. I waited in line for her autograph, obviously, because I wanted it. Shortly after getting her autograph, I learned the identity of the man in the picture with her and the Ms. No-stars years before: the March issue of Cosmopolitan for 1984, which I didn't see or read until shortly after this autograph signing, revealed that she'd been involved with Stanley Pottinger. And, indeed, I reflected back that I'd heard her name mentioned in a news report in connection with Pottinger, something about his being her "new Beau." But somehow that hadn't stuck at the time, as the article in Cosmopolitan did now. I believe that it was the final break for me, in a series of heartbreaks that are difficult to share with the reader. It was the final disillusionment, for me. The faint hopes I'd built, all those years ago in that house in Batesville, when I'd first noticed that Gloria was single and available, were finally officially dashed.

I have a great deal of feeling still in me for Gloria, regardless of its source or its realism. She's been through a lot. On top of having recurring back pain, she's been through alcoholism and the struggles and pain it brings, as had Tim. On top of that, she's had to deal with cancer, a gruelling experience for any human being. The truth is, in fact, that I've often fantasized about being her biographer. Given what I've been through over her--perhaps what I could claim she's put me through--maybe I'll be somewhere in line for that job, someday. But in any case, whether she's archetype or not, in terms of the emotional stress I experienced on account of her acquaintance, she may as well have been one.

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Works cited:

Barthel, Joan. "The Glorious Triumph of Gloria Steinem," Cosmopolitan. March, 1984. 220+

Ephron, Nora. Crazy Salad. New York: 1985

Giancanna, Sam and Chuck. Double Cross. New York: Warner,1992. 311-321

Honneggar, Barbara. October Surprise. New York: Tudor, 1989. 120-8

Parry, Robert. The October Surprise X-files. Arlington, VA: Media Consortium, 1996. Parry makes numerous references to newly-discovered documents that reveal a Stanley Pottinger tie to the "October Surprise" allegations. See for example 85-6: "Plus the "proof" of Hashemi's presence in Connecticut on July 27, 1980, consisted of phone records...one from Republican lawyer Stanley Pottinger to Hashemi's house and one back to Pottinger...I [also] found a classified summary of the FBI bugging. According to that summary, the bugs revealed Cyrus Hashemi deeply enmeshed with Pottinger in plans for military shipments to Iran in fall 1980. Cyrus Hashemi was also tied up in business schemes with Bill Casey's close friend, John Shaheen...But beyond that, the secret FBI summary showed Hashemi receiving a $3 million offshore deposit, arranged by a Houston lawyer...Harrel Tillman [who] also told me that in 1980, that Casey, Bush or anyone else associated with the 1980 GOP campaign did anything to undercut President Carter's Iranian hostage talks in 1980..." See also Parry, 98-101, "FBI-Hashemi Wiretaps", a copy of the original FBI wiretaps revealing much of the Pottinger-Hashemi conversations and their coded nature. Casey had apparently disappeared on October 19, 1980 to participate in a secret discussion in Europe. The new documents show Pottinger in conversation with Iranian go-between Hashemi on 9/24, 10/21, 10/22, and 11/19/80. Also, according to one excerpt from a Pottinger statement on the tapes, Pottinger said to Hashemi: "9/23/80: SP and CH: go to Owen at State [Department], we put together a plan. SP says that they should not tell all the good information [to the U.S. State Department] because it's a knockout." In other words, here, at a highly-suspicious time, when indications are that numerous lawyers and persons with ties to Hashemi were at least discussing illegal arms sales to Iran to defeat Carter politically, here is Gloria Steinem's Republican lawyer man-friend Pottinger telling folks to keep information from the US State Department about a "plan" because "it's a knockout." Clearly, for all her rhetoric in behalf of feminist issues, Steinem's personal life may have helped lead to the victory of a Presidential ticket in 1980 that most women have come to regard as anti-feminist. Steinem and other self-styled "feminist leaders" seem to follow the philosophy similar to that recommended by actress Lee Grant in an article that appeared in Ms. in the '70s: sleep with "Mr. Wrong," because it makes for good sex via "friction", etc. However, this data suggests there may be very important practical problems with that philosophy, not the least of which is espionage and sabotage of the cause. But, given the high-altitude, high-income crowd Grant runs with and the dizzy nature of jet journalist Steinem's lifestyle, perhaps those effects were never significant to them, or to their glossy mag cohorts, anyway.

Steinem, Gloria. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. New York: Holt, Reinhart, Winston, 1983. 78-86.

--------. with George Barris. Marilyn. New York: Henry Holt,1986. 128-35.

Strieber, Whitley. Communion: A True Story. New York: Wilson and Neff, 1987.

Von Daniken, Eric. Chariots of the Gods? New York: 1970. Illustration 10 caption.

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