Maybe it's a demographic thing. Maybe I'm too young. Maybe I'm too male. Or maybe I'm just not sophisticated enough to understand her contribution to society. Maybe our culture is one embroidered tea cozy away from collapse.
Maybe Stewart is the only thing holding us together.
Maybe this makes me a shallow person, but every time I see her smug her Botox-sculpted face on TV, my sphincter tightens up, and I have an urge to clean my room. Stewart has become our national mother figure - a shrill, domineering mommy dearest, drawn from our collective nightmares.
There's something fundamentally creepy about this woman so I hope you will forgive me for laughing at her pain. Here are the allegations for those of you who haven't been following the story: Martha was invested in a company called ImClone, an aggressive biotechnology firm. ImClone developed a revolutionary cancer treatment - a pill that makes chemotherapy more effective.
They submitted their creation to the FDA, and the day before their application was denied, Stewart sold her stock in the company, avoiding a significant financial loss. This looks suspicious, a textbook case of insider trading. Allegedly, one of Martha's friends called her the day before the announcement and urged her to bail out of the company. Many of Stewart's friends bailed as well.
Now the matter is under investigation, and Martha's reputation is already starting to suffer. At first, Martha feigned ignorance, hiding behind her apron. But Stewart is not some naïve housewife. She was a stockbroker for three years, so she'll have a hard time claiming ignorance when this goes to court.
Maybe these allegations are false. Maybe Stewart just got lucky, the same way Hillary Clinton "got lucky" in the futures market. However this pans out, the giggling has already begun. I don't know why it's so easy to hate Stewart. There's something primal about it, something fundamentally American about hating people who make money telling the rest of us how to live.
We hate her because we suspect, under all that marketing, Martha Stewart is somehow better than us. She makes women feel inferior because she has time to do all those things women wish they could do. The modern mother of two doesn't have time to monogram her potholders. She barely has time to get the pizza boxes off the floor.
Stewart is proof we still have gender roles in this country.
Feminist posturing aside, men are still expected to play sports and fix toilets, and women are still expected to wear dresses and crochet placemats.
I'm glad to see women embracing traditional roles, but I resent the kind of world Stewart represents - a world where the placement of your forks matters more than the content of your character.
It troubles me to see harried soccer moms emulating this woman. There's an element of masochism in it - guilty career women torturing themselves because they don't have time to knit sweaters anymore.
Supermodels make women feel bad about their bodies. Martha Stewart makes them feel bad about their lives.
I think Martha will survive this little crisis, and if things go badly, well, I'm sure she'll have the cutest cell in prison.
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