al OPINION Friday, January 23, 1981 Pag e 4 The Michigan Daily A phony bill of For those gnomes among you who prefer reading books, be informed that an auburn- haired lynx named Tanya Roberts is TV's latest recruit to be a Charlie's Angel. Though per co-worker sleuths have lately been drop- ping as fast as the show's ratings, Ms. Ioberts is Amazonesque proof that ABC's now- venerable sire of the television jiggle shows is not about to alter its honored bump-and-grind tradition. Our new., star seems unlikely to threaten Sarah Bernhardt or even Farrah Fawcett as a Coming Apart By Christopher Potter Tanya is the idiot box's newest earth mother-a manufactured, pre-packaged recep- tacle for the American male's darkest back-to- the-womb yearnings. No less is she the newest sanctioned ideal for the American female: Even now her visage adorns the covers and in- nards of a dozen glamour magazines. She leers haughtily out at her covetous readers, ministering the ancient beauty catechism: "Just apply a touch of my eye shadow, a smidgen of my makeup, a dab of my cream, fif- teen minutes of my exercises-and you can look just like me!" Untold numbers of women will follow her ad- vice. And wind up hating themselves because, sweat and strain though they might, they still won't look like Tanya Roberts. What a mean little tyranny it all is. As if women didn't face enough adversity in their daily struggles against prejudice on the job, in the home, on the street-they must also do bat- tle with a pre-conceived societal absolutism which says if you're not born beautiful you're doomed to limp through life with two strikes against you. IT IS A CRUEL and bogus philosophy, yet women fall for it by the millions. Taking their cue from deep-rooted Madison Avenue stereotypes, they perpetuate with religious zeal a masochistic denial of themselves. Most women do not possess perfect noses, alabaster skin, mountainous breasts, and veinless legs-yet they're forced to despise their bodies for being normal. It is a tyranny of the majority against itself, a women's war upon women. It pushes a value system which equates cellulite thighs with having three eyes or eleven toes. Behind every self-improvement ad in the beauty mags shrieks the same subliminal harangue: "You're ugly! You're goods disgusting! Why don't you do something about it?" It's an albatross men aren't forced to bear. Members of my sex might wish to emulate Robert Redford or George Brett, even mold themselves into comparable physical con- dition; but we aren't compelled to become our idols. Not so for the suffering female: All the media agree that if she doesn't look like Cheryl Tiegs, then she's a dog. NO AMERICAN social doctrine is more war- ped, more out of touch with true human feelings. Those thimble-brained TV vixens we males are expected to pant and howl for have as much to do with the realities of love and the the women we hunger for as do Harlequin romances. It's no mystery that imperfect screen beauties like Bette Davis and Katherine Hepburn captivated audiences year after year, that their contemporary successors like Jill Clayburgh and Goldie Hawn endure, while Farrah and Bo fade like the morning mist. In- telligence is sexy. Reality is sexy. The most wonderful girl I ever loved had a bent nose, weak chin, and beady eyes; she was also radiant, inquisitive, gloriously sexy. She didn't subscribe to the prescribed notions of beauty because she knew she didn't have to; she was content in her own physicality and could spot affection a mile away. Yet the ministries of taste continue to offer up a phony, sadistic bill of goods and we all keep buying it. The sooner we reject their hyperbole, the sooner we can then shed our own self-dictated, self-denying falsehoods. For all we know, Tanya Roberts may have a worse sex life than any of us. thespian overachiever: She performs her physical feats of crime-busting derring-do like a spastic running backwards over a cliff, wears a perpetual "er, what's my next line?" per- plexity across her lovely countenance, delivers her seven-word speeches with a huffing, wheezing exertion that suggests a lifetime war r of attrition with asthma and adenoids. BU'T OH, SHE is so beautiful: A dark,. tawny mane brushing against high, Viking cheekbones; blue eyes translucent enough to make Casanova weep; perfect se; half- opened mouth revealing choppers o t of an or- thodonist's master sculpture; long, lanky legs; hourglass waist; free-slung breasts of such epicurean accessibility as to satisfy a million wet dreams a night. Christopher Potter is a Daily staff writer. His column appears every Friday. m Edited and managed by students at The.University of Michigan Vol. XCI, No. 97 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Editorials represent a majority opinion of the Daily's Editorial Board A local horror show T WAS A HORROR show, all right, w~ but it was not at all "horrorshow." Wednesday night, hundreds of %filmgoers flocked to Angell Hall to see .Stanley Kubrick's 1971 masterpiece of ultra-violence, A Clockwork Orange. :mss they watched nightmarish scenes of :four young hoodlums raping, kicking, "slashing, and beating helpless victims, those audience members may well shave taken refuge from the 'unimaginable violence on the screen by assuring themselves that no real danger was near; that it was, after all, only a movie. But only yards away from the haven ,of Auditorium A, a very real scene of -brutality was occurring in the Michigan Union. At 7:45 p.m., about the time a character in the movie was smashing the skull of a woman with a large piece of sculpture, two men were actually bludgeoning a woman about the head in a music practice room in the Union. The woman managed to break free from her assailants, who, according to HiKEE FTRMA bX I HEMHA1 EEJIN1 police, may have been trying to rape her. Witnesses reported that she was beaten on the head with a piano bench; a large pool of blood in the hallway was testimony to the wounds she received. The coincidence of this assault and the screening of the movie is not, in fact, especially unusual. One might just as easily point to the thousands of rapes occurring across the country at the precisie moment when Alex-the vicious, detached, eerily unrepentent star of A Clockwork Orange-rapes a woman after crippling her husband. What should make us pause to think is the message of the movie as it relates to reality. A Clockwork Orange plays with our sensibilities, almost persuading us to feel sorry for Alex and his ruthless partners by separating them from their deeds. As Alex beams, coining a cult phrase, violence is "horrorshow"-really great. In the real world of assaults in music practice rooms, there is no such moral confusion. ~' /~ / 7/4/7z~ 7/s J- The Department of the Interior may well be the least "visible" office in Washington-a complex bureaucracy whose respon- sibilities are fully understood by only a few Americans. But as the initial controversy over the appointment of new In- terior Secretary James Watt demonstrates, the Department's policies today have consequences as far-reaching as those of the more glamorous Departments of State and Justice. It has become absolutely vital to the American West, and is increasingly so for the entire nation. WATT