=My first cartoon crush=

When I was a child I thought like a child. And what I thought was that I had a vague, ill-defined crush on Betty Rubble, though I wouldn't have called it a crush at the time. Just a strange, oozy ticklish feeling whenever she appeared on screen. Later, when I came to understand these confused & confusing feelings better, I realized that what I really wanted was to *be* Betty Rubble. 

She was so cute & even as a child I knew that Wilma was something of a nag and a bitch, even if I wouldn't have known to use those terms. She was always on Fred for something or other, such a sensible, level-headed killjoy, a loafer wearing preppy type, she would have been, if they had shoes and slacks and women's polo shirts back in the Flintstone version of the Stone Age. She would have taken up golf and pressed Fred to join the local country club. She would have been a Republican.

Betty, I could instinctively tell, was the "fun" girl, the party girl, the kind of girl all the stone-age guys would have jumped on. The kind of girl I wanted to be. Her hair, her little blue dress, they just seemed so much sexier than plain-Jane Wilma's. Whenever the couples were together,  I was certain Fred preferred Betty to Wilma in spite of all his yabba-dabba-dooing. If they were ever alone together, the sexual tension was thick as a brontosaurus steak. 

That Fred and Barney were both such insufferable oafs prevented my fantasies from turning overtly sexual, which they otherwise might have even at that young age. Still, I felt the erotic undercurrent was always there. It's probably what made me confuse wanting to be Betty for wanting to be with Betty in the first place. There were no truly sexy cavemen around in Bedrock, no one to bop us on the head with a club and drag us off to a nearby cave by our slender ankles. Even when Stony Curtis made a guest appearance, it was played for farce. So, episode after episode, Betty and I had to sublimate our frustrated desires in each other's company, waiting for a real man to come and knock us off our feet. We were, as the saying goes, lipstick lesbians.

Much later, when they got around to making a live-action feature film of the Flintstones, it was with shock & disappointment that I learned that they cast Rosie O'Donnell in the role of Betty Rubble! It was sacrilege—a subverting of all that was right and true, a rewriting of history—and prehistory—to align itself with a contemporary political agenda! I can't help but believe the revisionary casting was done purposely and pointedly, out of some misguided political correctness to change what I rightly perceived, even as a child, as Betty's overtly feminine sexiness, a flirty, playful, kittenish eroticism that can not be allowed to persist in today's sexually enlightened and "liberated" society.

It won't work in the long run. No matter how hard they try, they'll never make Wilmas of us all. 

When all is said and done, guys will never be all that much more than cavemen and cavemen prefer Betty.

That's why it's just so much more fun to be Betty.