Randy Girls – adolescent females love Ayn Rand – wonder why?
In “Present for the Sweet Sixteen,” published in 1999, poet Daphne Gottlieb writes of a twenty-one-year-old friend who gives her “thigh-high fish-net stockings and a paperback copy of The Fountainhead,” a gift she perceives as “a recipe for a pin-up with velvet panties and an iron fist.” Presumably, the stockings are the ingredient responsible for the “pin-up” aspect, while the novel, written by that doyenne of self-reliance, Ayn Rand, is crucial to developing the “iron fist” (though Rand, whose counterintuitive fixation on girly baubles and frills is a less well-known aspect of her personality, most likely would have enjoyed wearing velvet panties herself, or at least gifted them to one of her famously glamorous heroines). The poem ends with Gottlieb, at age twenty-nine, looking back at the gift and its giver with a desire to inflict humiliation, and perhaps even violence, on them both: “It’s OK by me if Ayn Rand could only get Atlas to shrug,” she writes, invoking the title of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, now being made into a movie starring Angelina Jolie, “but right now he’s cleaning my floor/and when he’s done I’m coming for you.”
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