Because of my love of Tina Fey and her alter ego Liz Lemon, I bought her recent book Bossypants. In it, I found a best friend. Someone who I look up to, trust, relate to, and enjoy seeing the mirror of myself in and the windows into someone else's viewpoints. Tina Fey is my best friend in the Barnes and Noble bathroom.
The part of the book that took Fey from "feminist I admire" to "one-sided best friend" was the chapter where she discusses her struggle with the way people judged her for working and mom-ing, her struggles with deciding whether or not to try for another baby, and her struggles with being judged for not breastfeeding. While I've made opposite choices from her, I wrestled with those same decisions many, many nights. And even though she made opposite decisions than I did, I don't damn her for those decisions, I applaud her for them. They are impossible dilemmas, and no decision is "right" or even "best". I'm thrilled they are working out for her, and I mourn the sacrifices she has to make to make those decisions just like I am thrilled my own decisions worked out for me and mourn the sacrifices I've had to make to make the decisions I have. If anything, I am grateful to Tina Fey for showing me that if I had made different decisions that I've made, things would have turned out okay, and I still would have had to make sacrifices and neither decision was best or worst, they just are.
That is why when the show she created, produces, writes and stars in referred to stay at home moms as part of the "idiots" group picketing NBC it hurt. A lot. I know it shouldn't, she doesn't know me, we aren't really friends, and she was probably, justifiably, lashing out at all of the stay at home moms that judge her for not staying home with her kids. Which is her right to do. But it hurt that someone I look up to and someone I trust, would judge me so harshly. I didn't judge her for it. This is the woman who helped make Mean Girls a reality, whose celebrity gave merit and legitimacy to Queen Bees and Wannabes through Mean Girls. So it feels like more than just venting, it is engaging in the very mommy-wars, anti-feminist, girl-on-girl fighting she has made a career of fighting. I am now a little less likely to trust her recommendations, I don't hold her up on such a high pedestal. And she hurt my feelings.
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