The begrudgery driving the attacks on Martha Stewart are largely sexist, IMO. Americans don't begrudge men their financial success, only women.

The sexist backlash against Martha Stewart has been breathtakingly bizarre. Books have been written and movies made about her being ambitious and not a "properly feminine" nurturing personality.

Now, if you've ever run a business, you know it takes a great deal of ambition and blind faith in one's self to be successful against the odds, and that is just as true of a business which provides modest earnings as it is for a business which earns millions, so the accusation that Martha is ambitious is, in this day and age, simply bizarre.

The thing about her being a bitch/non-nurturing, well...the ball buster/bitch stereotype of businesswomen who have become multi-millionaires with high media profiles is the gold standard, isn't it?

In the US, while women are more visible in business than anywhere else in the world, these sexist stereotypes still exist, and as Martha Stewart has seen, they can be extremely nasty. It isn't that the mass media/conventional society wants to take her down a few pegs in terms of her status. No, that isn't good enough for a woman who independently established a highly successful and visible business empire. When Americans see a woman independently creating and sustaining her own business empire, they want to see her destroyed. Permanently. Utterly destroyed so she cannot possibly rise from the ashes and do it again. Women WILL NOT BE TOLERATED in our society as emperors of successful business empires.

What Martha Stewart is, as quite a few others in this day and age are, is a marketing genius. She saw that the middle class housewife (working or at-home) who had once been the target market for advertisers and lifestyle purveyors, were being ignored in favor of the Cosmo girl. So she saw a void and filled it, and made a lot of people, including herself, very wealthy as a result of it.

That is supposed to be the American dream. But we all know the American dream isn't one that women are supposed to realize, right?

I'm glad the judge established the line for the prosecution of this sort of case. With the dismissal of this charge, I'm guessing the prosecution's case will likely fall apart. The case never should have been brought to begin with, and when we compare this case to the truly serious and egregious securities fraud, accounting fraud, etc. that is going on all over the place in the US, this prosecution really does stink to high heaven.

The men at General Mills made billions hawking the Betty Crocker line to housewives. At least Martha Stewart is a real person, with a genuine interest in what she is selling to women, as opposed to men creating a fake image of a housewife, and exploiting it for themselves and their corporate interests.