The View: Where marriage is a trivial pursuit
Marriage and sex counselors? Who you gonna call? (photo courtesy blog.camera.org)
In just two minutes, Whoopi, Joy, Sherri and Elizabeth manage to trivialize, minimize, debase and insult marriage and sex.
We all know that dumb-downed TV almost always ups the ratings, so to hell with helping viewers who might be trying to better understand how to improve their marriage and sex life. Let’s just feed them some sound byte quickies.
Not sure it's a good read. Unless you're a desperate housewife.
If you want to hear a decent discussion on the new book, The Secret Lives of Wives: Women share what it really takes to stay married, DON’T watch this two-minute clip (below) from The View. Not sure the book is much better. But if you want to hear married women lower the bar for how to keep the “spice” in marriage, then watch it. Maybe you’ll get mad or feel sick. You certainly won’t learn anything.
Joy says: “ … flirt with a guy at the office … to get yourself juiced up, ya’ know what I mean” (no, I don’t). “… and then go home and do it with your husband …” Then she asks, “What’s wrong with that?” Do you fecken’ believe it (DYFBI)?
Elizabeth: The smartest thing she says is, “I don’t know.” She should have stopped there. But no, she keeps yakking, talking of “romantic moments.” She says, “Those moments are basically dead until our kids are in college or high school.” So, if I understand her (not easy), she’s saying we should put the most fundamental and needed aspects of our marriage –affection, attention, companionship, sex – on hold for 12-18 years. She goes on to say (speaking of her marriage and to her husband), “If we’ve got three minutes, let’s go.” She adds, “You just need a minute here, a minute there, seven minutes there …” Yikes! Sounds like love, sex and marriage in the “quickie lane.”
Sherri then chimes in and says, “ … when we went to a marriage counselor he advised that we make a date to have sex.” Yeah, that’s really helpful, insights from people who have consulted a marriage counselor. If you need a marriage counselor, you really shouldn’t be talking about marriage on national TV. Unless of course, it’s a joke and you don’t take it seriously. Actually, it sounds like these ladies think marriage and sex is a joke. Or a fantasy you bring home from the office. Or a two-minute drill, like in football. Or an 18 year ordeal. Thank god they stopped talking after two minutes.
“People are the worst”
Coming 2026
My personal history is the stuff they write books about. And that's what I am doing. The working title, "Chains of My Father: Marry White."
"The ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds." - Barack Obama
This perspicacious line from the Prologue of Barack Obama's "Dream from My Father" wrenched my aspiration into action. I started writing, furiously. Unlike Obama's perspective, my pain had been for the opposite reason: I was not seen by whites as a "tragic mulatto," rather I lived every day of my childhood hoping whites were not "searching my eyes for some telltale sign" that I WAS mulatto. This is my story.
It's historical fiction because I cannot find enough records to substantiate all facets of the story. I've combed the genealogy, traveled to my father and grandmothers' birthplace, walked the graveyards, searched the churches and ... well, all the facts aren't there. I have written three books based on the genealogy of other families but my ancestors emerged from a journey that left too few records – slavery.
My paternal, great grandmother was a "freed slave." My grandmother, Amelia, was born to a mixed race slave named Mary (we do not know her last name) and a white, French plantation owner, the Count de Poullain, in Grenada, West Indies. Amelia was raised in the "Big House" and in adulthood, in an attempt to escape her black heritage disowned her mother, telling her, "Get out and never come back." Amelia, as a mother of twelve children, enshrined into the family commandments, "Marry white." Many did, including my father. My mother was a lovely, white, Anglo-Saxon protestant born in England. They met in Canada where my dad studied and became a doctor.
It has taken five generations for the descendants of Mary to free themselves from the stigma of their black heritage but today my children embrace it. Unfortunately, the past 250 years have been a wasteland of bigotry, racism and bullying. But, on closer look, we see not only the brutality, fear, violence, and murder but also the self-respect, dignity, love, kindness, perseverance and indomitable spirit.
As of the spring of 2025, the depth of historic perspective and the sweeping inspiration of oppressed people has created a two-volume duology of which I have only arrived at the middle of the 19th century. 1840 is the year my great grandfather was born, the beginning of Volume II, and he's pushing me to make sure our story is published by the summer of 2026.
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