Network TV has finally done what nothing else has done
before: it made me decide to grow up.
The epiphany happened last night while watching ABC’s show
Private Practice. And the moment of clarity? Realizing that I’m just not stupid enough to
watch this junk anymore.
The segment, titled “In
which Addison gets a showerhead,” was an exploration of various problems in “Lady Town.”
Lady Town,
in case you don’t know, is a cutesy euphemism for The Private Place Whose Name
Cannot Be Spoken. I trust it can be written, as long as I stick to medical terms.
We hear the expression, which will now become a part of the
national vocabulary, from a dignified older woman.
We know she’s dignified because she's old. Has gravitas, which means she's more than a size 2. Wears glasses, her hair is
tightly pulled back in a grandma bun, not a fashion model chignon, and she
wears a fierce expression that doesn’t qualify as an “ooooo, mama, that woman’s
FIERCE” hot kind of fierce but as an I
don’t put up with nonsense young man kind of fierce.
Anyway, when Dell, a surfer-guy--eye-candy--male-nurse--midwife,
attempts to perform a pelvic exam on Dignified Older Woman, she tells him he is
not welcome in that part of town on account of how he’s about 15 years old and
it’s past curfew or something.
None of the doctors, all fabulously attractive and deeply mentally
ill board-certified women physicians in their 40s, can bear to say the words “vulva”
or “masturbation,” preferring eyeball rolls and gestures pointing “down there.”
Which gets us back to the showerhead. Apparently, although Addison is famously promiscuous, which is okay and probably mandated in TV "medical" show circles, she’s
shocked, shocked I tell you, by the suggestion that a person “can scratch that
itch yourself” without borrowing a predictably unacceptable albeit available
man to do the job.
In case you haven’t seen the show, and I really don’t know
why you would want to, each week the ensemble cast of actors who should know
better get together to explore a theme in their impossibly posh clinic in Southern California.
There, four or five highly trained subspecialists will spend
untold hours visiting your house and resolving your dilemmas without ever using
unpleasant words such as “rape,” one of the problems last night in Lady Town.
Or without ever saying “you’re 13 and you need to talk to your mother about sex,”
another problem in Lady
Town.
Way to learn how not to be!
Like many American women, I’ve spent my life being trained by TV images and lady magazines. More, ostensibly the most grown up of these, exhorts us each month to Be
Fabulous Over 40, with the inevitable subtitle involving the word “sexy.” But
in my 50s, it’s slowly dawning:
It’s time to get over ourselves and DO
something fabulous. Mere sexual conquest seems so last decade. . .
