Courtesy of newyorktimes.com
Some friends invited me to see the movie Ocean’s 8. The actresses are great, but I could care less about females stepping into men’s worn-out roles. Liberated women can do better. The last Ocean’s movie I saw starred the Rat Pack: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr., with Angie Dickinson as a sidebar. Shirley MacLaine’s cameo appearance gave the film an added sparkle, but, mainly, it was an all boys’ romp. Putting actresses in those spots doesn’t change the narrative.
During the days of the earlier movie, my thoughts about women’s liberation didn’t turn to fantasy. Should I rejoice, now, 58 years later, that women can pretend to be macho? What’s wrong with women being women? Heaven’s knows their lives are challenged enough without adding the burden of becoming jewel thieves. Frankly, I’m guessing women are too clever to swallow that flawed notion of heroism, anyway.
For a start, women are smarter about retail than men. Ask a women what she’d rather steal, gold bullion or a diamond necklace of the same value, and a man might suppose she’d go for the glitter. I’m confident she wouldn’t. She’d go for the gold. A woman knows a fancy cut diamond of a good size would be hard to sell. She also knows the difference between wholesale and retail prices. A stolen bauble would like get 10 cents on the dollar in the underground market. (“Take My Diamond, Please,” by James Tarmy, Bloomberg Businessweek, June 11, 2018, pg. 82). That’s because hot gems have few buyers, and the go-between takes a chunk of the money. If the thief doesn’t like the arrangement, where does she go to complain?
Because a women knows her retail, she’s canny about value. Unlike a gem, one gold bar can’t be distinguished from another. That makes it easier to spend. Which brings me to another reason why I won’t see the movie. It’s a macho fantasy. Men might imagine diamonds are a girl’s best friend. A woman knows the words are just lyrics to a song.
