Marilyn Minter | Making Waves: Modern Aphrodites #1-1 Anne of Carversville

It’s true that Maybelline’s new Popsticks campaign made me search for Marilyn Minter’ images just now. It’s a typical Anne, crazy-quilt route to taking a cleansing breath on the last three months, when I gave myself without conservation or limits to a new organization for women creating April 28 rallies all over America.

Walking Away from UniteWomen.org

Simmering inside me is something more relevant, a confrontation with myself and feminism which I embrace more fervently than ever. My furor over all the internal strife at UniteWomen.org has abated, and I woke up invigorated and ready to rumble.

I adore Marilyn Minter because her images are provocative, strong, raw examples of female sensuality and also beauty abuse — the conflict women experience on the road to authenticity and answers to the question: “Who am I?”

The cause I’ve devoted myself to over the last 90 days plans to construct an organizational structure more repressive and less representative then Komen was before the furor over Planned Parenthood. UniteWomen.org is dead and buried now in my heart, a funeral leaving me with spectacular new connections and relationships that envision a less-patriarchal way of channeling women’s talents.

My sense of self is renewed.  This woman Anne — battered and begrudged by other women who are looters of female souls, spirits, emotions and hard work in the name of women’s rights — woke up in such a positive dreamstate.

The incessant organizational battles are over, the closed group spies are gone. My little boat has sailed into harbor with the same calm I experienced sleeping in Ithaca. I am as invigorated and connected as I was dreaming vividly, moored in the Ionian sea.

This is just what the social conservatives what to happen — this conflict among women. But when an organization is as inept as UniteWomen.org and totally willing to squander its precious resources, it’s time to take a hike, just as Nancy Sinatra suggested decades ago in “These Boots Are Made for Walking”.

Marilyn Minter | climber 2005My experience with UniteWomen.org is that they are no different than the Catholic bishops. Karen Teegarden and her co-optimist Anita Doll Fiouris want to create another authoritarian, top-down command center that keeps women in line.

These so-called marketing experts had no plans for elections of leaders, even at a state level. The duo, with three other accomplices, would choose the state leaders. There would be no presentation of talents and portfolios, many of them well-known already.