Inequality is especially marked in political life. Despite the high profile of a few female leaders — including Ms. Gandhi and the president of India, Pratibha Patil — fewer than 11 percent of members of Parliament are women.
By contrast, the panchayats stand as bastions of female representation. Academic studies suggest that the quotas have not benefited upper castes at the expense of more impoverished groups. Women are as likely as men to come from lower castes to serve on the panchayats.
And the quota seems to be benefiting both sexes in more tangible ways. One study, by Esther Duflo, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that panchayats led by women provided more public services, from wells to roads, over all.
April 28, 2010
Quotas In India’s Panchayats
February 1, 2010
11
I have not been blogging much lately, and so, in the style of the blog 11 Points, here are 11 things that I have been spending my time on lately, and enjoying immensely. All highly recommended:
1. Gail Collins. The New York Times was long overdue for a female columnist who wasn’t Maureen Dowd, and Gail Collins is more than the Times deserves: tart, smart, funny and perceptive, her takes on the issues of the day are both informative and cathartic. I just checked out one of her books, America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, but have only read the first chapter so far. I’ll let you know how it is. Also, in addition to her columns, Collins’s conversations with David Brooks are a treat. I have to confess, in the past, I have occasionally liked David Brooks, but he’s been heinous lately, and as his tenure at the Times goes on, he contradicts himself ever more blatantly. I dearly love a good journo fight, and Matt Taibbi (an occasional guilty pleasure for me, I’ll admit – his reportage may be spotty, but sometimes you just need a good, unapologetic rant) has lately been picking Brooks’s columns up in his teeth and shaking them back and forth until their necks snap.
2. The public library. I like to write in my books, dogear them, and read them in the shower, so for years, I insisted on buying books and keeping them in piles along my baseboards. But I don’t make that kind of money these days, and have finally learned to make good use of the public library. Yes, the inability to write in the books is a serious handicap, but otherwise, I am a total library convert. There’s a small branch near my house, and I can order whatever I want through the system to be delivered there, and they notify me by email when my holds are ready. Best of all, you can renew your books on the computer, and as long as nobody puts a hold on them, you can renew them indefinitely (I’ve renewed one 12 times already). And all for not one red cent (not counting city taxes). Beat that, Kindle.
3. Susan Schorn’s McSweeney’s column. I go back and forth on McSweeney’s, and particularly on their columnists. Some are good, some are boring, many have long outlived their original gimmick, good for only a post or two, but weirdly extended. But one of their new columns, Susan Schorn’s meditations on martial arts, self-defense, anger, weakness, and related topics, is fantastic – and not just because I’m into karate lately. I agree with Schorn about everything, and wish she lived next door to me, so that I could bother her all the time (and all of her other humor pieces are great, too). Speaking of karate:
4. Shotokan karate. I have been training at a local dojo since August (I’m currently a yellow belt), and I am obsessed. Fantastic exercise, and a wonderful outlet for pent-up aggression, karate is sport, art form, self-defense training and a study in focus and discipline, all in one. I try to make three classes a week, and, while I still couldn’t beat up a four-year-old, my kiai has deepened from Chihuahua to Rottweiler.
5. Jezebel and The Awl. I am putting these together, because my enjoyment of them is similar. For some reason, when Jezebel debuted, I immediately decided that I didn’t care for it. I can’t remember what about it offended me, because I’ve really been enjoying it lately. In addition to the progressive and feminist news alerts, there are hearty round-ups of celebrity gossip. And while I am not interested enough in celebrity garbage to actually read up on it, I must admit, do I want to know when Brad and Angie finally break it off, or when Lindsay Lohan ODs in a club bathroom, or when somebody has a major weight reversal? Yes! Yes, okay? I do want to know that! I admit it! But I don’t need to know the deets – I just want a headline and a photo, and that’s what Jezebel delivers. Now, The Awl, helmed by former Gawker editor, Choire Sicha (aka the only person who ever wrote for Gawker that I actually liked), is a hilarious, well-written chronicle of all things that would particularly interest…well, Brooklyn dwelling, underemployed pseudo-writers like moi. Plus, it is one of those lovely, rare blogs in which the commenters expand on (and often outshine) the posts. Kinder than Gawker and sharper than The Gothamist, The Awl fits just right. If I could only read one blog, this would probably be it.
6. Amanda Palmer. The former Dresdan Doll has an awesome solo album. Plus, she’s engaged to Neil Gaiman, and showed up at The Golden Globes with her boobs and her pit hair out. She’s a fucking badass.
7. Small, well-done, original blogs. Tiring of sprawling, massive, constantly updating blogs, I have lately been discovering small, creative, focused sites that do one thing and do it well. Edith Zimmerman writes hilarious very short stories. Tom Oatmeal (who I found through EZ) makes milk come out my nose. And firmuhment is continually brilliant and original – scanned documents that inspire essays, short stories, and humor. I’m not sure if firmuhment is a single author deal or a team effort, but every post has obviously had a lot of work put into it, and I appreciate that.
8. Firefox’s new skins. I spent the lion’s share of my day staring at my browser, so anything that makes it more visually appealing makes me happy. Firefox’s new skins are a small adjustment that, surprisingly, makes a big difference. Currently, I’m enjoying Spring II. Goes well with my igoogle theme.
9. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I resisted getting into this back in high school when everyone was super into it, and haven’t gotten into it since, because I didn’t want to consume seven seasons of TV. But my coworker has them all on DVD. Uncle, okay? I’m through six seasons already, and ready to register as an official member of the Joss Whedon fanbase. In addition to the overall awesomeness of the series, I enjoy identifying basic karate moves in the fight choreography.
10. My new phone. After three shameful years of hitchhiking on my parents’ family plan, I finally ponied up and got my own phone plan, and a phone with a full keyboard and a camera. And man, it makes a huge difference! I no longer wince at the sound of a text message arriving: it doesn’t take me a year to peck out a response anymore, and my phone looks cool and is really fun to use. And yesterday, when my brunch coffee came in a giant bowl with no handle, I was able to document it quickly and easily, no forethought required.
11. My rabbit, Thomasina. Thomasina is so freaking adorable!! And I love having a pet! This was a good move. She’s my little pal, and she does hilarious things and entertains me, and she’s cuddly and fun. Right now, for example, I am trying to write, and she is collapsing her little grass hut on top of her head, and making eyes at the rabbit she thinks lives in my closet mirror! OMG, she’s a gas. I won’t work at all today.
October 28, 2009
I’ve Been Reading: Wetlands
Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands is a novel about a girl and her asshole. No, really – exhaustively and all the way through, this novel centers on 18-year-old Helen Memel’s butchered asshole. Having nicked something major during her regular and highly involved shaving routine, Helen is lying in a hospital bed “with my skirt hiked up and my underpants pulled down, ass toward the door.” But she’s not embarrassed about that, or anything else. While she lies there in recovery, Helen ruminates obsessively on her favorite themes – her body, its byproducts and the fun she can have with them. All of this is shockingly explicit, but if you ask yourself why it’s shocking, being (as it is) so utterly everyday and banal a subject (essentially, a long version of ‘everybody poops’), you get closer to Roche’s ultimate purpose.
Wetlands is essentially a protest novel. Helen is merely particularly interested in her body; Roche, on the other hand, is furious that Helen’s interests and comfort with herself could be as rare and shocking as they (to many) are. True, all bodily functions are hidden, but some are more hidden than others – specifically, women’s. Roche’s target here is the sanitized woman: society’s obsession with hair removal, its primitive taboos about menstruation and vaginal cleanliness, its commercial tendency to tiptoe around women’s genitalia with cutesy, pink crap, as though vaginas themselves are an inside joke.
Undoubtedly, bodily secretions are nothing to be ashamed of; whether or not they are interesting is another question altogether. As Helen prods, picks at and wipes herself continuously, the book becomes tedious. Other people’s fluids, like their dreams and their college photo albums, are ultimately of no interest to anyone but themselves. Helen also has family drama and a new love interest, and she is scared and alone and putting on a brave face, but these plot points were clearly thought up after Roche settled on her theme. They feel tacked on, and the ending takes a leap into the surreal that is entirely unjustified by the chapters leading up to it.
Which isn’t to say Wetlands doesn’t have something to offer. Helen is an endearing and original character. And as a feminist howl, the book succeeds – Roche’s point is certainly a valid one that needs to be made more often. Still, she probably could have made it just as well in a ten-page short story.
August 27, 2009
I’ve Been Reading: Winner of the National Book Award
Shit, I had some vague idea I might write this book one day, but it seems Jincy Willett has beaten me to the punch (and undoubtedly done a better job of it than I would have).
Winner of the National Book Award concerns twin sisters, Dorcas and Abigail Mather. Dorcas is all brain, and Abigail is all appetite: while Dorcas grows up, tart and intelligent, a librarian who loves bird watching and heavy drinking, and is always armed with a witty comeback, Abigail feeds constantly on attention, sex and food, growing plump and slick, and popular with husbands all across their small Rhode Island town. As Dorcas describes them in their girlhood:
‘When I was twelve, and An American Tragedy was my favorite summer book, my sister thrilled to Forever Amber, especially the scene where Amber, trying to rekindle the passion of Bruce Carleton, her first rapist, appears at the King’s Ball in a beaded gown that makes her breasts stand out “like full pointed globes.” I had to call Abigail “Amber” all that summer. She had been “Scarlett” the previous spring. Already Abigail was coming down in the world.’
The novel opens with Dorcas holed up in her library as a hurricane bears down on Rhode Island. With no way to avoid it, she sits down to read her sister’s recently published autobiographical memoir, about how she killed her husband. Abigail is currently in a women’s penitentiary, awaiting her trial.
The novel proceeds within this frame – Dorcas reminisces back through the sisters’ shared history as she disgustedly reads her sister’s memoir. The memoir is co-written by Hilda DeVilbiss, who Abigail met on her postal route years ago. Hilda is married to Guy, a whiny, infantile, self-aggrandizing intellectual, the satisfaction of whose various needs is Hilda’s mission in life. When Guy demands he meet Abigail, the sisters become unenthusiastic friends of the couple, who soon introduce them to Conrad Lowe, Guy’s college roommate. Conrad is a type-perfect misogynist, sadistic and manipulative – in the same way that Dorcas is all intellect and Abigail is all appetite, Conrad is also more type than individual. He seizes on Dorcas as a contradiction in terms, the world’s only “honorable woman,” and marries Abigail in order to better fuck with the sisters. Dorcas tries to stay close to her sister and shield her somewhat from Conrad’s abuse, without becoming involved with him on any level. This proves an impossibility, of course, and the three are drawn into endless warfare that ends in Abigail’s imprisonment.
Through exaggerating and focusing on each of her character’s primary motivations, Willett perfectly elucidates the conflict between men and women, and women and women. The Mather sisters seem to me to be two aspects of the same person – I don’t think I’m reading too much into the novel to say that they represent the liberated woman’s struggle to satisfy her romantic and sexual needs without compromising her dignity and autonomy. As Dorcas explains to Conrad:
“Abigail and I divided up the world. Sacred and profane. Spiritual and physical. Mind and body.”
Abigail is pure id: immediately upon entering puberty, she revels in being gang raped. When she meets Conrad, she is nearly 200 pounds, an enthusiastic eater who has never dieted. She is naked, unexamined need, unembarrassed, never shy. While Abigail has slept with nearly every man in town, she has never been in love with any of them personally; of course, she falls hard for Conrad, and, to Dorcas’s horror, becomes meek and compliant in the face of his abuse. The scene in which Abigail pines for Conrad, who meanwhile calls Dorcas up for a date, seems to me to be symbolic of a woman wrestling with her own irrational desire: Abigail keens on the sofa like a dog in heat, while Dorcas panics at her sister’s brute, out of control need. She slaps Abigail across the face and douses her with a giant pot of cold water. At Abigail’s begging insistence, Dorcas agrees to have dinner with the hateful Conrad. At dinner, she tells him he’s a bad person, and is to stay away from them, but when she wakes in the morning, he is in Abigail’s bed.
Conrad seizes on Abigail’s weight as her Achilles’ heel, and Abigail develops anorexia and dwindles down to nothing. Meanwhile, Conrad works on Dorcas by manipulating her into frequent bouts of heavy drinking with him, flattering her intelligence and uniqueness. Dorcas is unwillingly susceptible to suggestions that she is mythically superior; this is her weak spot.
Perhaps I am reading too much in, however, when I say they also seem to personify the two factions of feminism currently holding each other in uneasy alliance. Dorcas and Abigail love, but do not really like one another. Dorcas says of her sister:
I know Abigail better than anyone else in the world, and if I were asked to explain this or that particular thing, I could probably give a fairly accurate account of her motivations. I can report that duty has never played an even minor part in her decisions; that she is moved solely by the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain; that she derives pleasure from an astonishing variety of sources, and pain from astonishingly few; and so on. I can even predict her behavior, with a respectable success rate.
But I don’t understand her at all. To understand you have to do more than predict and explain. You must feel some degree of empathy. I have a greater understanding of cats and internal combustion engines and Iranians than I do of my twin sister, Abigail.
Both sisters are powerful, but Abigail’s power stems from fully embracing her sexual role, and Dorcas’s from rejecting it outright. While Dorcas is disgusted by Abigail’s appetites (Dorcas: “My sister has great power, but no dignity.”), she respects her sister’s ferocity and is shocked when Abigail becomes a doormat at Conrad’s hand. The indignity of sex having always been insupportable to Dorcas, she is now witnessing the greater humiliation of love, which is entirely beyond her. Dorcas cannot bear to be treated like a thing, as if she would be of some practical use to another person. When Conrad Lowe admires her legs, she says of the experience:
To be judged desirable, to have any part of my body found desirable, was insupportable to me. Somehow he had known immediately what course of action would be the most vicious. . . . I saw myself for the first time as a thing, a thing in someone else’s mind. Of course I had always acknowledged my body, the fact of my visibility, but I had not been a thing really, because I had been of no use. . . . “
Abigail, on the other hand, prefers at all times to be treated as a thing, to be seen as a practical means to an end, but she takes deep offense at being treated like an idea, romanticized or mythologized, turned into something theoretical that she is not. Dorcas tries to help Abigail figure out why Hilda’s initial introduction of her to Guy had offended her so:
Dorcas: “Because…you were being treated like a thing.”
“I like being treated like a thing.”
“Nothing degrades you, does it?”
“Yes! She degraded me . . . She treated me like an idea! That’s it. She treated me like an idea. Can you imagine the nerve?”
Guy serves as foil to Conrad Lowe; Guy’s demonstrative feminism is a thin cover for his inability to look directly at any woman. Whereas Conrad sees women primarily as disgusting and inferior bodies (a former gynecologist, he says of his former career: “Women fall apart like they’re made in Taiwan. The whole female works is a model for planned obsolescence. They get lumps, rashes, discharges, gross smells. They bleed. Or they don’t bleed. Whichever, they worry about it. Their insides fall out, like the udder on a cow.”), Guy (an artist, who mostly sculpts his wife’s vagina in endless series) sees only his own imaginings:
I had never known Guy to remark on any woman’s physical aspect. With Guy there was always the pretense that we were pure spirit, pure intellect and “sexuality,” and our bodies were incidental, negligible, beside the point.
Conrad uses this gap in his friend’s understanding to humiliate him in company:
They would talk about women, about oneself, as though women were nothing but ambulatory body parts, the container of the thing contained, the part for the whole. They would tell repugnant jokes with horrid imagery, comparing us to carnivorous plants, dead carp, snails. At such times Conrad Lowe would eventually extract from Guy some explicit hateful remark, some punchline of his own, and then he would abandon Guy, slip out form under him like a retracted gangplank. Lowe’s face would transmogrify, the contagiously filthy-minded young man would disappear, and in its place would be this bemused adult with an ironic face, staring at his old chum in mild wonder. And there would be poor Guy, the focus of shocked attention, and the echo of his own obscenity ringing in everyone’s ears like cookware spilling from a closet.
Conrad Lowe is pure hate, a patriarchal symbol referred to repeatedly as “the dominant male.” He is determined to drive a wedge between the sisters, to destroy them both and bend them to his will. Dorcas describes him on first meeting him:
The man was obviously a sadist, a manipulator. I despised him instantly. He inspired in me an absurd crusading zeal.
It was the oddest, most unhinging thing. I hated him, gladly. It was as though I had waited all my life to do battle with this terrible man, and the unhinging aspect of my emotion was the gratitude, the bridal joy.
At first, it seems clear that Abigail is the more vulnerable of the two, but in the end, Dorcas proves no less susceptible to Conrad’s hatred. Perhaps more nefarious (and realistic) than his overt abusiveness is Conrad’s ability to thoroughly occupy nearly all of both sisters’ time and attention over years. Dorcas speaks of her peace of mind and serenity whenever she is briefly apart from Abigail and Conrad; toward the novel’s end, the couple manages to pressure her into actually moving into their house, and while Dorcas tries repeatedly to distance herself and reclaim her own life, she is inevitably drawn back in. She can’t even take a day trip to a park without them inviting themselves along, and when she tries to hike of by herself for a minute, and they follow her, she screams:
‘”What are you people? Twelve? Five? Stupid? . . . Leave me alone! For pity’s sake!”‘
Oh, lest I forget to mention: Winner of the National Book Award is really funny. Hilarious, in fact, and much more broad and subtle than my chosen excerpts make it seem (the few reviews of the book I’ve been able to find do not even mention the themes I’ve focused on here). It’s also an ugly book, really, but it’s an ugliness nobody ever nails with total accuracy. There are two possibilities here: either I am reading way too much into this novel, and it is simply a very clever and entertaining satire, or I am correct in suspecting that Willett has done something brilliant and subversive here. Either way, I’m quite sure Willett at least knows exactly what she is doing.
July 19, 2009
Holy Crap, a Female Gondolier!
Venice has its first ever female gondolier!
Way back in college, when I visited Venice during my summer abroad in Italy, I asked my gondolier if there were any women gondoliers, and he laughed at me, and explained that, though there are often women who try out to be gondoliers, it’s not really a job they can do, because it takes so much upper body strength to shunt the gondolas under the bridges and so forth, and none of them are ever able to pass the tests. Since then, I’ve frequently made jokes about being an aspiring gondolier – I don’t know why, but the conversation just stuck in my head.
Way to go, Boscolo! This makes me really happy. (Even though Venice is sinking, so it’ll soon be a moot point anyway.)
July 7, 2009
I’ve Been Reading: Don’t Get Too Comfortable
Attention, male writers: unless you particularly plan to alienate your readership, try not to cram a bunch of pointless derogatory comments about women into the first ten pages of your book, unless that’s really what you’re all about. I’ve noticed this with a number of books lately – I’ll get all alienated in the first chapter, and decide not to read the rest, and then keep going only to find the entire rest of the book totally devoid of casual misogyny. It’s so weird! I noticed this in Lost Cosmonaut, and now here in David Rakoff’s book of humorous essays, Don’t Get Too Comfortable. In the first essay, “Love It or Leave It,” about applying for citizenship during the latter Bush administration, on page 2, we have:
After twenty-two years, it seemed a little bit coy to still be playing the Canadian card. I felt like the butt of the joke about the proper lady who, when asked if she would have sex with a strange man for a million dollars, allows that yes she would do it. But when asked if she would do the same thing for a can of Schlitz and a plastic sleeve of beer nuts, reels back with an affronted, ‘What do you think I am?’ to which the response is, ‘Madam, we have already established what you are. Now we’re just quibbling about the price.’
On page 7, Barbara Bush the Younger is described (to absolutely no point whatsoever) as “W’s liquor-swilling, Girl Gone Wild, human ashtray of a daughter.” Particularly gratuitous, as Rakoff’s real beef is with Barbara, Sr. (page 8: “Stupid fucking cow.”).
Admittedly, on page 8, we do have a derogatory physical description of a man: “The hairy-knuckled, pinkie-ringed lawyer for a Vietnamese fellow behind me….” No mention of the man’s genitals, of course, or sexual appeal or lack thereof, but still, not exactly a flattering comment. But then on page 9, we’re back to women, describing a “Russian woman in her early forties” who has the misfortune to be standing on line nearby:
She wears painted-on acid-wash jeans, white stilettos, and a tight blouse of sheer leopard-print fabric. The sleeves are designed as a series of irregular tatters clinging to her arms, as if she’s just come from tearing the hide off the back of an actual leopard. A really slutty leopard.
It’s safe to assume that leopard was also female.
But here on page 9, we also have our first woman appear without being described physically, or with any tossed-off, irrelevant sexual slurs attached to her person. This is Agent Morales, who interviews Rakoff for citizenship. Then, by page 11, we’re on to Rakoff’s friend, Sarah (who, based on her introduction as “a self-described civics nerd,” I’m assuming is Sarah Vowell), and nobody describes their friends as pointless and/or distasteful vaginas, so we’re in the clear.
And that’s it, for the rest of the book’s 222 pages: no more offensive comments about women, at least not that reached out of the pages and slapped me, like these first ones. In fact, I really enjoyed the book after page 10. The essays were tart, well-written, observant and entertaining. Why the packed in slurs up front?
So, the moral here is: writers and editors (whether male, female, gay, straight or other): when you have your manuscript all ready for publishing, go through at least the first twenty pages or so, with an eye to how you describe or comment on any women mentioned, as contrasted with how you describe or comment on any men. If you note that every, single woman you bring up is described as a slut, a bitch, a stupid bimbo, a nag, or has been physically detailed for no specific reason (ugly, fat, wart-faced, saggy-boobed, clothes too tight, past her prime, sex on legs, etc.), and that every man is described in terms of his personality traits and actions, then think about whether or not you genuinely want half the population to toss you and your book right out at that point. Because not all readers are as patient as I am. A lot of women won’t make it to page 11. And I’d like to think some men wouldn’t either.
I really don’t direct the above rant particularly at David Rakoff. His is only the most recent book I’ve read to follow this off-putting pattern. But really, Don’t Get Too Comfortable is great otherwise. Rakoff is a sharp and articulate social satirist, and his targets aren’t the easy ones. If there is a unifying theme to these essays, I would say it is what we desire and what we buy, and why, and what we tell ourselves about it, with occasional diversions into the weird and often unpleasant things people like to do for fun. He has drawn a bead on class hypocrisy, and conspicuous consumption. He covers foodies, high fashion, fasting, plastic surgery, cryogenics and Puppetry of the Penis. He goes along on a Playboy shoot, attends a midnight scavenger hunt in Manhattan, forages for edible plants in Prospect Park and works as a pool boy at an upscale resort. He waits outside the Today Show, visits Martha Stewart’s crafts department, and shadows the director of the mystifying Log Cabin Republicans.
Fun stuff, all. With the above-mentioned caveat, I’d recommend it.
May 31, 2009
On Animal Rights
My current position on this is, I eat meat and probably always will, and I don’t feel much compunction about it, but I don’t approve of needless cruelty and suffering for animals raised for consumption. While I don’t make much effort to curtail my consumption of animal products, neither would I go to bat for it – if meat were unavailable, I wouldn’t eat it. Those of us lucky folk in the developed world have an abundance of food these days, and all questions of the historical food chain aside, we don’t need to eat animals to survive anymore. Food is not that important and I don’t see meat-eating as somehow essential to my character or inheritance. So, if humane conditions on farms, and in dairies and slaughterhouses and so forth, led to less available and pricier meat, I would think it a worthwhile sacrifice. I would love to know that any animal-derived product I bought had never been the cause of pain and misery to any living creature at any stage of its growth, manufacture and transport – and hell, let’s extend that wish to all clothing, electronics, home furnishings and so forth – and if that guarantee meant that instead of piles of affordable goods to choose from, I had a smaller selection of pricier items, I’d happily make the trade-off and quit inadvertently subsidizing and profiting from exploitation and suffering. I just don’t want to have to work at it.
The more we learn about the evolution of our species, the more difficult it becomes to draw a firm and absolute line between humans and other animals. Apparently, the latest word is we’re closer to dogs than chimps, which may go some little way toward explaining why we treat dogs like they’re people:
The marketing folks of the pet industry, in fact, use the term “humanization” to explain their good fortune. The pet owners driving the growth, many of them baby-boom empty-nesters, aren’t satisfied with shopping for their pets as animals. They’ve promoted them to junior humans, entitled to the same concern for health and happiness and company. Nearly half of pet owners in one survey say their animal sleeps in their bedroom (which probably explains the boom in the grooming business) and the most popular names for pets—Max, Chloe, Bella—sound a lot more like babies than the Spots and Fidos of yesteryear.
While the pet industry may be recession proof, we do not apparently ascribe the same importance to zoos, which have in fact declined in society’s estimation, at the same time as house pets have risen:
A lot of people wonder how much the current economic downtown resembles that of the Great Depression. One big difference comes in the support of zoos. In the ’30s, the institutions received significant support from Roosevelt’s Works Projects Administration. Artists created advertisements encouraging the public to visit zoos, and new buildings and exhibits sprung up in zoos across the country. St. Paul’s Como Park Zoo, for example, came out of the Depression with a bear grotto, monkey island, barn, and main building, thanks to the WPA.
Now, however, any allocation of funds to struggling zoos is immediately decried as wasteful spending. (I’m not saying I disagree.) And apparently, we haven’t been doing such a hot job of tracking and protecting endangered species, either.
Some feminists have long drawn parallels between mankind’s entitled disregard for animal welfare, and man’s viewing of women as an obligated sex class – both cases involve one group defining itself by its ownership of and right to use another group. Typically, these arguments are attempts by animal rights activists to persuade women of the importance of respecting all life as autonomous; PETA, on the other hand, offensively uses images of degraded women to market their animal rights agenda to men. (To me, the first is a stretch; the latter, an outrage.) Here’s Twisty on this:
The parallels between the myth of the happy hooker and the myth of the self-sacrificing meat animal are legion. . . . Both represent the privileged class’s celebration of itself and its contempt for anything it happens to debase in the course of its daily pillages. And the myths about oppressed individuals choosing to serve the vulgar interests of their oppressors have been created to allow the dominant culture’s beneficiaries to sleep at night.
Actually, these comparisons predate feminism:
A distinguished philosopher, Thomas Taylor, reacted to Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 call for “the rights of woman” by writing a mocking call for “the rights of brutes.” To him, it seemed as absurd that women should have rights as that animals should have rights.
(from the Kristof article discussed below)
Really, though, we all use animals to serve our purposes, even if that only involves misinterpreting canine affection as familial love, which, while not likely to cause any duress to the animal in question, might be nauseating to other humans.
But despite the many persuasive arguments for prioritizing the ethical treatment of animals, I can’t seem to work up much steam over animal rights. I know that worthy causes need not compete with each other, and that the way we treat animals is part and parcel of our overall attitude toward (and stewardship of) life on this planet, and so animal welfare is an integrated part of everything else in our long march toward a more advanced society. But at the same time, I care more about starving babies and enslaved women than tortured pigs and cows. (And by “care about”, I of course mean “think, read and blog about.” Not “donate to” or “campaign on behalf of.”)
Luckily, while my capacity for caring may be limited, no wee chicken is beyond the reach of the sheltering arms of my favorite journalist, Humanitarian Hero-at-large, Nicholas Kristof, who recently took a break from his usual coverage of the abuse, poverty and disease of unfortunate humans to pen a column on animal welfare:
One of the historical election landmarks last year had nothing to do with race or the presidency. Rather, it had to do with pigs and chickens — and with overarching ideas about the limits of human dominion over other species. I’m referring to the stunning passage in California, by nearly a 2-to-1 majority, of an animal rights ballot initiative that will ban factory farms from keeping calves, pregnant hogs or egg-laying hens in tiny pens or cages in which they can’t stretch out or turn around. It was an element of a broad push in Europe and America alike to grant increasing legal protections to animals.
Let’s hope there’s more of this, and that “guilt-free” food will come to mean something more significant than “low-calorie”.
May 16, 2009
Chick Lit
Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers sounds right on:
She has insisted that themes central to women’s lives — marriage, motherhood, the tension between family and individual aspirations — constitute subject matter as “serious” and significant as traditionally masculine motifs like war and travel. Yet she rejects the preference of many feminist literary scholars for emphasizing “culture importance rather than aesthetic distinction,” and she doesn’t hesitate to describe some of the writers discussed in “A Jury of Her Peers” as artistically limited, if historically interesting.
She also offers an interesting explanation as to why there were great female authors in 19th century England, but not so much in America.
I think that books by, about and concerning women are certainly unfairly trivialized, but I also think that, in service to some mistaken idea of diversity, insignificant works do tend to be dredged up to represent women’s voices during historical periods when women were mostly silenced. Historical revisionism is no help to feminism – if women were uneducated and unliberated, and so unable to write literature or compose music, or do anything other than work, breed and die, we shouldn’t pretend it wasn’t so.
I did feel alienated all through school by reading novel after novel that portrayed women as clingy, irrational, two-dimensional fools – either virgins who sucked the lifeblood out of the protagonist, or predatory ho-bags who first enticed and then suffocated him. I think teachers understand how tiresome this is and want to provide a brief respite, and, while that is important, the solution is not to elevate something substandard just to provide an alternate point of view, because that further convinces those already convinced that all points of view other than theirs are substandard.
May 16, 2009
Oscars, Outrages, Etc.
Another Oscars ceremony has come and gone. I haven’t seen many of the movies, other than Vicki Christina, which I was happy Penelope Cruz won Best Supporting for her work in, because she was awesome; and WALL-E, which was great. And I was glad Winslet won, because, although I’m sure The Reader is just as bad as everyone says it is, she is one of my favorite actors and I think she’s a great role model for young women.
I have not seen Slumdog Millionaire, but everyone seems to have a strong opinion about it. Most of the people I know who’ve seen it really loved it, and I’m sure it’s great and all, but of course, like anything involving depictions of the “real” India by non-Indians and/or of the lives of the “real” poor by the wealthy, many people have their quarrels with the authenticity of it.
Again, I haven’t seen it, but I’m sure I’d probably agree with this post, which discusses the fact that the celebrated salvation from desperate poverty has to come from without, a financial deus ex machina, and that the female lead is a helpless battered woman who can do nothing for herself until some other man falls in love with her and saves her. In how many movies do we see this? And how many of these female characters are Asian? You’d almost think men have an unrealistic porny fantasy about “rescuing” battered, dependent, passive beauties from developing countries. Undoubtedly, these bruised and delicate flowers would know how to appreciate a good, loving master husband, unlike spoiled, bitchy feminists with their own money and their self-sufficiency.
Of course, being that the male lead in this particular movie is a young man from the Mumbai slums, I’m digressing a bit. Ahem. Where were we?
Oh, yes. Slumdog. Still, people are happy that the movie won because it’s so long been the boring standard that in America, any movie about people other than white Americans are niche films . . . unless, that is, they primarily focus on the way in which people other than white Americans affect white Americans. Which brings me to Gran Torino. Apparently, conservatives are pissed that Gran Torino didn’t get recognized and Milk did. Since, you know, Milk is about the rights of a group of people conservatives haven’t yet adjusted their prejudice about, and Gran Torino is about an old white dude and how he feels about some Vietnamese people he has to deal with. Now, a movie about Vietnamese gangs would be of no interest to these same people. That would be a niche film, of interest only to Vietnamese gangs and the liberals who care about them. But a movie about how an old white dude is affected by Vietnamese gangs…now that’s a movie that “everyone” can relate to! Especially when the old white dude is a Christian With Faith, and uses his Legal Gun of Righteousness to save the Vietnamese folk what can’t save themselves, and teaches them how to be more like old white dudes, before he finally drops dead in an oh-so-subtle crucifixion pose (which, so far as I can tell from the Wikipedia entry, is what happens in Gran Torino – I haven’t seen it, or Milk).
I have a very good friend, who is much smarter and more socially conscious than I am, and who has the irritating habit of ruining everything for me by pointing out a totally obvious bit of ridiculousness in some area of the culture that I’d been to thick to spot myself, and it was she who alerted me to this obnoxious habit of Hollywood being more interested in the ways in which racism and prejudice affects old white dudes than in the lives of black people, or immigrants, or anybody else. Now that she’s pointed it out, I see it everywhere. We’ve had Monster’s Ball, Crash, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, so on and so forth, and (as she put it) is it really so endlessly fascinating how old white bigots learn to open their minds? Isn’t there ever going to be a day when we can stop talking primarily to them and making movies about their experiences and trying to understand them and teach them to be better . . . and instead just ignore them until they go away? Are old white bigots really so relevant anymore? Isn’t it time to move on from all that?
Which is what I say in response to this post, in which James Bowman says:
Though in principle it is a good thing to seek a break with the past and the hardened positions on both sides, those positions are the result of the Penn-like tactic of characterizing those on the other side not just as wrong or mistaken but as reactionary in the commie sense – that is, as barriers to inevitable progress who must be removed. If you’re one of the barriers, you may be excused for finding that a somewhat chilling prospect. You have been identified as being, in practice if not in name, evil – that is beyond the bounds of decency and not to be recognized as legitimate in your views by anyone who is decent.
But see, that’s the thing: opponents of gay rights are barriers to inevitable progress who must be removed. Because there are actual gay families who are actually very much affected by conservatives’ slow, resistant refusal to see them as legitimate, and these families need not carefully consider those people who still oppose their rights. They need not try to see it from their side, or come to a compromise, or “respect” their point of view. Gay people simply want to live their lives the way they see fit without going a-begging to people who disapprove of them on every level.
Gay people will get equal rights eventually. And frankly, if that idea chaps your ass for some reason, you should probably get used to being the bad guy.
That said, I’m no fan of Sean Penn. I think he’s a good actor and enjoy his movies, but, as with most celebrities, I assume he an unintelligent, self-absorbed, entitled asshat, and I have absolutely no desire to know him as a person. And also, didn’t Sean Penn beat up Madonna a few times? Celebrity or no, any man who hits his wife should be in jail or in traction, but not in the spotlight, so I’m disappointed to see positive buzz about Penn on one of my favorite feminist sites. And the idea that anyone ever arrested for domestic assault could righteously preach to others about morality…well, only a celebrity would have the balls for that.
May 16, 2009
On Teen Sex, Single Moms and Shame
Recently, Bristol Palin went on national television, and said two highly controversial and shocking things: that it’s better to have a baby when you’re not an unemployed and single teenager who has yet to graduate high school, and that teenagers often have sex with each other. Then her mom came on and explained that, while young women do get knocked up from time to time, if they have good, loving families and financial means (like all decent people are supposed to have), it’s not too big of a tragedy.
Well. That clears that up. Teenagers shouldn’t be having sex, so we shouldn’t educate them or provide contraception, because that would be acknowledging that they’re having sex. But hey, we all realize that really, they’re having sex. But that’s ok, because if they do get pregnant, those who come from loving, well-off families will be just fine! And those who do not come from loving, well-off families, well . . . they should have had loving, well-off families. Or not had sex.
Rebecca Traister puts it better:
To Sarah Palin and Van Susteren’s minds, the real story here was not about cautioning other teens, or preventing teen pregnancies, it was about how to deal with them once they’d — inevitably, it seems — happened. In Van Susteren’s words, about “how important it is for families to pitch in.” The Alaska governor, pausing for a moment of generous reflection, said, “I don’t know how other families do it. If they kind of assume that the young parent is going to make it on their own, or assume that government would take care of the young parent and child. That’s not government’s role. This is a role for families to pitch in and help.”
So the bigger message here, as spun by Greta Van Susteren and Sarah Palin, is that abstinence is a naive peg on which to hang our contraceptive hopes, but that when our daughters reproduce before they finish high school, we need to move beyond it — not to discussions of birth control and abortion, but to the fact that the Palins are an unusually big, helpful, supportive group, and that other less fortunate young mothers should go out and get multigenerational families to help them out because it’s not the government’s responsibility.
Also, Lindsey Beyerstein points out the hypocrisy of the difference in coverage of Bristol Palin and Nadya Suleman:
I’m so sick of hearing disgruntled conservatives railing against “welfare mothers.” If they really value motherhood and childbearing as much as they say, they’ll happily pay for social services to support those families.
Of course, the very same politicians and pundits who score political points off welfare mothers had a field day ranting about birth control in the stimulus–a proposal that would have saved $200 million in healthcare costs alone over the next five years by making it easier for states to cover birth control for the same poor women are currently eligible for pregnancy care under Medicaid. (Since the federal government already matches state Medicaid contraception spending 9-1, the provision would have been a net stimulus for participating states.)
On a related note, the Atlantic bloggers have been having an interesting back-and-forth about shame. Here, Ta-Nehisi Coates takes issue with the “70% of black children are born out of wedlock” statistic:
To summarize–there is no data to show that the black “illegitimacy” figure of 70 percent has been caused by unmarried black women having more kids than they did in the past. In fact, the trend is the exact opposite. What is clear is that the behavior of married black women has changed, to the point that married black women are actually having less kids than married white women.
Megan McArdle thinks shame has its uses:
It is true that people who are ashamed often do not behave well. But they often behave badly precisely because they are trying to deflect their shame. People do a lot of things to avoid being shamed. Why do small towns have lower rates of crime, and lesser antisocial behaviors like cutting people off in traffic or queue jumping, than big cities? Are people in small towns more inherently virtuous? Or are they afraid of what the neighbors will think?
. . . When people make bad choices, a culture of shame and stigma can make their lot in life worse, not better. . . . [H]uman beings what they are, social stigmas are usually effective precisely because they create suffering, and exclusion, and cautionary tales. Therefore it’s not quite right to say, as Rod does, that lifting the stigma on unwed childbearing involved “false compassion.” The compassion involved was and is real, and so are its beneficiaries. Many lives really were improved as American society became more tolerant of unwed motherhood – just as many lives were improved when divorce became easier to obtain, and bad marriages easier to walk away from, and so on.
But many other lives were not. And so the battle between social conservatism and social liberalism at the moment isn’t a battle between competing utopias, but a battle over which tragic choice is worse: The choice to stigmatize, which can damage and even ruin lives, or the choice to destigmatize, which can damage and ruin countless lives as well.
Andrew Sullivan notes the difficulty of destigmatizing:
But what if, in fact, there is no actual “choice” to destigmatize? What if the cruelty of some social norms – such as the way in which illegitimate children were once treated – leads to a gradual and irreversible social change? The real choice today in many areas is whether to re-stigmatize – and that is a very hard thing to do in a diverse, free and changing society. . . . Surely the more reasonable option is simply not to encourage socially disadvantageous behavior (as welfare once did), and to create a model of successful family structure that others might emulate. Obama’s marriage and family are probably much more effective in this than a lecture about abstinence from Rick Santorum.
Two things about shaming: first of all, anyone who feels they have enough moral authority to confidently shame other people probably has no self-awareness and should not be the person responsible for determining which behaviors are to be stigmatized and which rewarded. I mean, really, who the hell does anybody think they are?
And second, damn near all of the shaming I see in our society (and now I think about it, in most others, now and throughout history) is directed at victims. Often, people shame to reassure themselves they couldn’t possibly fall prey to poverty, disease, abuse, crime, etc., because they’re not stupid or careless or immoral like this or that victim.
(And speaking of situations in which the victim is always thoroughly shamed and blamed, I appreciated this article, which boldly declares that rapists are rapists, even if they’re also stars.)
December 8, 2008
I Need a Drink
The feminist blogosphere is all abuzz over a stupid NY Magazine article clearly published in order to set the feminist blogosphere all abuzz. Apparently, Alex Morris believes feminism has driven women to drink.
Now, don’t that beat all? The very first thing those damn liberated women of olden times did upon receiving the permission to vote was usher in prohibition/destroy the country. Now, 90 years later, they can’t stop hitting the sauce!
Freaking women. Either they’re drunks or prudes or whores or virgins or mothers or businesswomen or feminists or lesbians. But one thing’s for sure: they’re always up to something! If only they’d all pick one, good, amenable identity and conform to it en masse, it sure would make it easier to dismiss them all as individuals. But they just can’t seem to get on the same page.
The thing that pisses me off most about this article. . . is that drinking is a serious problem for young women and men. But instead of serious, nuanced media coverage on what to do about the drinking culture among American youth, we get article after article hawing about the consequences of equality. . . . Seriously – it’s tired. Not to mention incredibly sexist : the underlying message is that gender equality is bad for women.
So if folks are actually concerned about young women and drinking, how about we talk about the consumer culture that markets liquor (something Morris touches on before quickly returning back to feminism) or how drinking is being used to blame women who are raped?
No joke. How many articles have their been lately about the increasing problem of binge-drinking and date rape on college campuses, and how many of these articles have arrived at the conclusion that the problem is…women being there? Yeah, maybe the problem is women being out and about, and drinking and carrying on like they’re real, live, young people. Or maybe – just maybe – the problem is men who rape women!
And as long as I’m taking the bait, check out this other asshole I ran across:
Forget what feminists, hippies, and liberals have told you in the last half century. They are all lies based on political ideology and conviction, not on science. Contrary to what they may have told you, it is very unlikely that money, promotions, the corner office, social status, and political power will make women happy. Similarly, it is very unlikely that quitting their jobs, dropping out of the rat race, and becoming stay-at-home dads to spend all their times with their children will make men happy.Money, promotions, the corner office, social status, and political power are what make men happy (as long as they win, of course, but then dropping out is by definition a defeat). Spending time with their children is what makes women happy.
You know, Satoshi Kanazawa, I think I know why you’re clearly so unhappy. You may think that you’re meant to be an evolutionary psychologist and author, but you’re lying to yourself and denying your true nature. You are actually evolutionarily designed to run fast, wrangle heavy stuff, and catch and strangle small creatures, and the sooner you admit that to yourself, the sooner you can become a truly satisfied man. I encourage you to quit all this thinking and writing that’s making you so miserable and unfulfilled, and realize your true potential as a welder/firefighter/rabbit-wringer.
October 8, 2008
Anything You Can’t Do, I Can Do Easy
Can you still make it from scratch in America? That’s the question that Adam Shepard asked himself in college. On graduation, he took a train to Charleston, South Carolina and started out with nothing but $25 and a backpack. A year later, he had a car, and apartment, and $2500 in the bank. How he did it — and what he learned along the way — is the story of his new book, Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream.
See, the thing is, though, the book really ought to be called “Me; $25; a firm grasp of the English language; a good understanding of appropriate business and social etiquette; a clever brain and healthy and attractive white body [assuming the cover illustration is meant to depict the author]; the self-possession that comes of having been raised by a family that loved me, paid attention to me, and was able to provide for me; the social skills that come from having been brought up in a safe community where I enjoyed a stable support network of friends and family, and a safe and decent school with adequate funding; the freedom of being unaccompanied by any dependent children or ill or disabled relatives; the confidence that comes from knowing if my little low-stakes gambit here fails miserably I can just go back to my nice home; a college degree[!!!]; and the Search for the American Dream, which I have already extensively benefited from, and everybody who meets me immediately knows it, even if I am dressed in a potato sack and boasting proudly of how I have temporarily elected to live like the poor folk do in hopes of scoring a book deal.”
But then, that’s a lot to fit on a book jacket.
–
Also, apparently old people don’t particularly like being talked to like they’re babies, even when they’ve totally lost their minds:
“The main task for a person with Alzheimer’s is to maintain a sense of self or personhood,” Dr. Williams said. “If you know you’re losing your cognitive abilities and trying to maintain your personhood, and someone talks to you like a baby, it’s upsetting to you.”
(via Feministing)
I understand that. I absolutely hate being talked to like I’m a baby. A lot of men like to talk to attractive young women like they’re babies – I seriously can’t count the number of times when some older man I barely know has explained to me (affectionately) that I am such a sweet, sensitive young person. What he clearly means is, ‘You’re pretty, but I know it’s inappropriate for me to be attracted to you, so I’m going to treat you like you’re my precious little daughter.’ Which, besides being presumptuous and offensive, is even more amazing in light of the fact that I am cranky, standoffish and self-absorbed, especially upon first acquaintance. That’s maybe a little hard on myself, but at any rate, I could not possibly be mistaken for a cuddly, approachable people-pleaser…except by men who are bound and determined to believe that all pretty women come prepackaged with Disney princess personalities.
At any rate, if actually becoming cranky old people won’t save us all from being cooed at and patted like we’re puppies, what the hell will? I hope I don’t get dementia, because I’ve already decided that if I make it to my 80s and don’t have anything more I really want to accomplish, I’m going to spend the rest of my days trying every possible kind of super hard-core drug. That will be my Earthly reward for a life full of self-denial and jogging, and I sure hope Alzheimer’s doesn’t rob me of the opportunity, or I’m gonna be pissed.
–
Two funny things:
First of all, I think this is my favorite liveblogging of a debate thus far…
…and Chuck Klosterman’s A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century is hilarious, if long (via Kottke).
September 20, 2008
Kaley Cuoco Is the Most Depressing Person Alive
So, I recently joined the YMCA in my neighborhood. As it’s been over two years since I belonged to a gym and had regular access to weights, I’ve entirely forgotten my old regimen. So, I bought a few women’s exercise-type magazines to find a couple of routines. I usually steer clear of women’s magazines because they tend to make me both angry and depressed, and these were no exception.
I seem to recall reading Shape several years ago, and it was 95% about actual exercise, and the models were all ripped. Not anymore. Now, it’s 95% hideously overpriced clothes, and interviews with lying celebrities (“I mostly care about being happy and healthy, and my kids!”), and advice on how not to eat, or do anything much but spend insane amounts on worthless crap. And only 40 pages in (or 3 pages in, if you don’t count advertisements), there is an interview with Kaley Cuoco. Apparently, she is an actor on a sitcom, The Big Bang Theory. I’d never heard of her or the show. She’s 22-years-old, and this is what she has to say:
I go to [spinning] class three times a week, without fail. I always get there early so I can sit in the front of the studio, and I’m ready to go as soon as the instructor comes in.*
And:
…right now I can’t get enough of the 6-inch vegetarian whole-wheat sandwich from Subway. I pick one up after my Spin class . . . It’s my default meal; I know exactly how many calories are in it – 260 – and I never have to think about what to order.*
And worst of all:
Diet cola is my absolute favorite drink in the world; I used to drink four cans a day. But to help me cut down, I’ve turned it into a treat. Now, instead of having dessert, I’ll have a can of diet soda. Putting a limit on how often I can drink it has helped me appreciate it more.*
Oh my God, Kaley! I want to kill myself! You are the saddest girl in the whole world!
Seriously, I myself am far more ascetic in most respects than your average person could bear to be, and I often find my own self depressing in some ways. But even I want to kidnap this girl and make her go on some insane sky-diving, Fleet-Week-cruising, cocaine-snorting adventure in irresponsible hedonism. What’s the point of being rich and famous if your best idea of an awesome time is go to spin class and then eat a Subway sandwich and drink a can of Diet Coke?
Jeez.
–
These quotes taken from Shape’s October 2008 issue (Vol. 28, No. 2); I don’t really know what the procedure is for footnoting in a blog post. Please don’t sue me, Shape. Oh, and also – your magazine blows.
September 18, 2008
Okay. I’m Going to Take a Deep Breath, and . . . Palin.
I have been so gobsmacked by this whole Palin thing that I’ve been completely unable to write anything about it; all I can do is splutter. I have many objections to Palin, but I suppose that if I am to articulate the one, basic thing that has so deeply angered me about the way in which she was presented to the American people, it’s the massively insulting suggestion that women who were excited about the idea of a Hillary Clinton presidency might be anything other than utterly dismayed by the idea of a Sarah Palin vice presidency (and very possibly, presidency).
I personally define feminism quite broadly, and while some readers of this blog will disagree, I think it is entirely possible for a person to be both a political conservative and a feminist (although I’m unlikely to agree with such a person on the particulars of women’s rights). And these people may very well be thrilled with Sarah Palin (although frankly, I think even they ought to see she is a poor candidate), because she represents (I guess?) their values and their interests. But she does not represent the values or interests of Hillary Clinton supporters, and she does not represent the values or interests of liberal feminists.
Feminism holds that what is between a person’s legs ought not to overrule, or in any way reflect on what is between a person’s ears. Clearly, Sarah Palin has a neoconservative ideology firmly lodged between her ears, and my opinion about that is not the more favorable because of what she has between her legs.
As for the rest of what’s wrong with Palin, here’s what a lot of much smarter people than me have to say (sorry for the very lengthy quotes, but I don’t think anybody really clicks on the links):
. . . Palin, who went back to work when Trig was three days old, gets nothing but praise from Phyllis Schlafly, James Dobson and the folks at National Review, who usually blame all the ills of modern America on those neurotic, harried, selfish, frustrated, child-neglecting, husband-castrating working mothers. Even stranger, her five-months-pregnant 17-year-old, Bristol, gets nothing but compassion and respect from Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and others who have spent their careers slut-shaming teens for having sex–and blaming their parents for letting it happen.
If there were an Olympics for hypocrisy, the Republican Party would have more gold medals than Michael Phelps. And Palin would be wearing quite a few of them. It takes chutzpah for a mother to thrust her pregnant teen into the world’s harshest spotlight and then demand the world respect the girl’s privacy. But then it takes chutzpah to support criminalizing abortion and then praise Bristol’s “decision” to have the baby. The right to decide, and privacy, after all, are two of the things Palin wants to deny every other woman, and every other family, in America.
We’ve been shanghaied. This is sick. We need to slap the face of our bad frat-boy date and walk home from this drive-in movie. Sarah Palin may put out to be popular, but the rest of America’s women don’t need to do the same.
If not, what the hell? John McCain should go the whole Hugh Hefner route and have eight V.P.s that all look exactly like Sarah Palin.
It’s McCain’s world, girls: You’d just live in it.
. . . Bill Kristol was claiming McCain would pick Palin — and that would prove that Republicans are “much more open to strong women.” Frankly, that’s bullshit. Republicans are more open to a certain type of woman — one who is strongly against things like equal pay, universal health care, and reproductive freedom. In other words, the party is pro-woman-candidates, as long as they enact anti-woman policies.
In this “Handmaid’s Tale”-inflected universe, in which femininity is worshipped but females will be denied rights, CNBC pundit Donny Deutsch tells us that we’re witnessing “a new creation … of the feminist ideal,” the feminism being so ideal because instead of being voiced by hairy old bats with unattractive ideas about intellect and economy and politics and power, it’s now embodied by a woman who, according to Deutsch, does what Hillary Clinton did not: “put a skirt on.” “I want her watching my kids,” says Deutsch. “I want her laying next to me in bed.”
Welcome to 2008, the year a tough, wonky woman won a primary (lots of them, actually), an inspiring black man secured his party’s nomination for the presidency, and a television talking head felt free to opine that a woman is qualified for executive office because he wants to bed her and have her watch his kids! Stop the election; I want to get off.
Latoya at Feministe compares Palin to Rice:
You can hate someone’s policies and still defend them from ad hominem arguments. I hate when people say that Condoleezza Rice is a sellout and that she isn’t black. That’s a ridiculous assertion to make. However, that does not make Condoleezza Rice a civil rights leader just because she is black and in a position of power.
I hate when people say Sarah Palin is not a woman, or she is a tool of the patriarchy, or any of the other non policy related attacks I’ve seen leveled at her from all kinds of places. But that doesn’t mean you need to start sipping the “this is a victory for women” kool aid. It isn’t. Sarah Palin does not magically become a champion for all women, everywhere, just because she happens to be a woman in a position of power.
Courtney Martin in The American Prospect:
And, in perhaps the most offensive display of her “wimp factor” agenda, she attempted to discredit community organizing by feminizing it. She sarcastically told conventioneering Republicans (along with millions of Americans watching on television), “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.” It was an eerie echo of what oblivious men in positions of traditional power have been saying for centuries: that the work of community building — whether it be child-rearing, elder-caring, teaching, nursing, social work, or, yes, community organizing — isn’t really work at all. That, despite being the backbone of our economy and the heart of our civic life, it doesn’t count because it doesn’t involve power suits and bottom lines. What makes this ridicule of community-building even more ironic is that the GOP is simultaneously glorifying Palin’s role as caregiver of her own sprawling family.
(via Feministing)
Jessica at Feministing, on the various MSM journalists who leapt to praise Palin’s feminism:
Take Wall Street Journal reporter Naomi Schaefer Riley, who writes that progressives should rest easy about Palin’s candidacy because “most American evangelicals have wholeheartedly embraced the idea of women in the workplace.” A radical feminist sentiment if there ever was one! But perhaps one should take Riley with a grain of salt, considering she’s the same reporter who wrote that murdered NY college student Imette St. Guillen should have known better than to be out drinking at 3am. Victim-blamers aren’t exactly bastions of feminist thought.
Similarly, Bitch Ph.D. responds to the WSJ article on why feminists hate Palin:
[The argument] isn’t that Sarah Palin is “too good at having it all.” It’s that Sarah Palin has the same needs other women do, but that she refuses to support policies that would supply them to women who, unlike herself, don’t have large extended families, husbands with good-paying flexible work, jobs of their own that pay well and require very few hours, and lots and lots of money to pay for help if and when those other things aren’t enough.
On the other side, Camille Paglia, bless her, is predictably cuckoo for Palin:
Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.
So, okay, feminists (always excepting Paglia) aren’t wild for her on women’s issues. But what about the rest of her positions?
Well, there are the scandals. That whole Troopergate thing:
We rely on elected officials not to use the power of their office to pursue personal agendas or vendettas. It’s called an abuse of power. There is ample evidence that Palin used her power as governor to get her ex-brother-in-law fired. When his boss refused to fire him, she fired his boss. She first denied Monegan’s claims of pressure to fire Wooten and then had to amend her story when evidence proved otherwise. The available evidence now suggests that she 1) tried to have an ex-relative fired from his job for personal reasons, something that was clearly inappropriate, and perhaps illegal, though possibly understandable in human terms, 2) fired a state official for not himself acting inappropriately by firing the relative, 3) lied to the public about what happened and 4) continues to lie about what happened.
…and the rape kit stuff:
First, the story breaks that under Palin’s watch, Wasilla women who went to the police saying that they had been sexually assaulted by a man, were charged for the rape kit. In case anyone doesn’t know, a rape kit is an exam done for the purpose of collecting and preserving evidence–it’s not a medical procedure. And yet, despite the fact that it’s similar to collecting fingerprints, taking photos of a crime scene, or doing ballistics analysis, the city of Wasilla insisted on charging women, or their insurance companies, for the kit, rather than using city funds. As of today, neither McCain, Palin, nor anyone on either of their staff teams has commented on this story. What’s the problem-too ridiculous to dignify with a response? Hardly, especially when the former Governor, Tony Knowles, has acknowledged that Wasilla was the only town in Alaska doing it. Prompting the state legislature to pass a law forbidding them from doing so.
Juan Cole, on Palin’s religion:
The most noxious belief that Palin shares with Muslim fundamentalists is her conviction that faith is not a private affair of individuals but rather a moral imperative that believers should import into statecraft wherever they have the opportunity to do so. That is the point of her pledge to shape the judiciary. Such a theocratic impulse is incompatible with the Founding Fathers’ commitment to tolerance and democracy, which is why they forbade the government to “establish” or officially support any particular religion or denomination.
Well, and but here’s Christopher Hitchens:
She has inarticulately said that her gubernatorial work would be hampered “if the people of Alaska’s heart isn’t right with god.” Her local shout-and-holler tabernacle apparently believes that Jews can be converted to Jesus and homosexuals can be “cured.” I cannot wait to see Obama and Biden explain how this isn’t the case or how it’s much worse than, and quite different from, Obama’s own raving and ranting pastor in Chicago or Biden’s lifelong allegiance to the most anti-”choice” church on the planet. The difference, if there is one, is that Palin is probably sincere whereas the Democratic team is almost certainly hypocritical. The same is true of the boring contest over who can be the most populist, and of the positively sinister race to see who can be the most demagogically anti-Washington. With this kind of immaturity right across both tickets, it’s insulting to be asked to decide on the basis of experience, let alone “readiness.”
As to the actual issues, there are no pithy quotes to extract, plus she hasn’t done that much yet:
Many liberals are concerned about picking on Palin the person as opposed to attacking Palin the politician. One of the problems with Palin is that her executive resume is so thin there isn’t a whole lot to critique.
…but if you’re interested, here’s a summary of Palin’s views at Firedoglake, which comes to the conclusion that:
Underneath her attractive and youthful exterior, Sarah Palin is no different from the old white guys running the Republican Party. She doesn’t care about good government, she doesn’t believe in science, she wants everyone to live in accordance with her Old Testament Christian values. Basically, she’s Tom Coburn with boobs.
And finally, and most substantively, Lindsay Beyerstein summarizes an in-depth NYT article on everything Palin.
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In conclusion, I cannot get excited about a woman who plans to use the power she has attained to make it more difficult for other women to follow in her footsteps. Beyond women’s rights (which is certainly a significant enough issue to stand all on its own, half the population being women and all), I am of course uninterested in a candidate who fully intends to take this country further in a direction which I believe is bad for all of us.
At the end of the day, I guess that’s all I really need to say.
(If you haven’t already seen the Fey & Poehler SNL bit, click here and watch it nowrightnow.)
August 21, 2008
Bodies In Motion
It’s the grand reinstatement of Feminist Thursday!
First of all, let me just say I finally found a beer I can drink in good conscience. I’m less thrilled to say that it’s Fosters, as Fosters isn’t that good or widely available, and generally comes in giant oilcans that I’d rather not admit I can drink by carrying around with me. But regardless, I’m tickled pink with them for this, and happy that at long last, here’s a beer company that doesn’t feel it can afford to alienate half the population. (Although, none of the above is really true, as Fosters advertising is just as offensive to women as all the other beer ads.)
Also, the Olympics have been going on; they’ve provided all manner of things for everybody to get pissed off about, and feminists are not left out:
First of all, are the uniforms too sexy? I don’t know, actually. While I do understand the point here, and while it’s certainly not okay for female athletes to be treated like objects. . . on the other hand, the skimpiness of women’s Olympic uniforms doesn’t really make me angry. Athletes are walking representations of what bodies can look like and what bodies can do, and you know, of course people are going to ogle them. What really upsets me is when men like (or are encouraged to like) ogling undernourished, undeveloped, weak, hairless, diminished women – listless, helpless waifs who closely resemble (or are) prepubescent girls, and whose “sexiness” lies entirely in their powerlessness. Frankly, I think the ogling of Olympian bodies is a huge step in the right direction. If only all young girls could think the best way to be sexy is to look like you can fling your date across a parking lot.
Finally, All Them are upset about this, which, yes, it’s bad, but it’s not like it’s an outrage particular to China. In the U.S., ability completely takes a backseat to attractiveness across the entertainment industry. Okay, so China was more blatant about it, choosing a pretty girl to lip-sync to a less-attractive girl’s singing. But in the U.S., we would have just had the pretty girl sing with her own crappy voice – the less-attractive good singer wouldn’t have gotten the job in any event. What isn’t a beauty pageant, really? America has absolutely no tolerance for the uglies – even off-camera civilians here are expected to look like movie stars.
In other (non-Olympics related) news, the UK courts decided that women who were raped while drunk deserve less compensation than those who were raped in all sobriety. Of course, there was a huge public outcry and the decision was reversed. I can’t comment on this any better than these two posts do (one and two), so everyone should just read them.
On a lighter note, how did I not know Hedy Lamarr was so cool? Apparently, she co-invented a torpedo-guiding device. She also said this:
“Any girl can be glamorous,” she said. “All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.”
Holla!
July 24, 2008
Flicks and Lit For Boys and Girls
Bitch Ph.D. explains The Bechdel Rule:
The rule is that movies should have 1) at least two women, 2) who talk to each other, 3) about something other than a man.
. . . Few movies pass the Bechdel test–most of the dialogue happens between men, or between men and one woman. Most movies who have extended conversations between women tend to be under the umbrella of “chick flicks,” or the newly-minted term, “RomComs.” But even those movies don’t pass the Bechdel test; not only are the conversations about men, the movies are driven by what men do or don’t do, what they want or don’t want, even when all the principal characters are women.
Movies, yes, and television, and this rule should also really be applied to plays. I mean, it is just incredible how few women are in anything, and how little they do when they’re there. What they mostly do is (a) be all about the men in the thing, and (b) be the one to blame for everything that goes wrong. Women are almost always the “out” for why there’s a problem – it’s the mom’s fault because she tries to smother everyone because she’s timid, controlling and Puritanical. Or, it’s the girlfriend’s fault because she tries to smother her boyfriend because she’s controlling, domineering, bitchy and usually whorish. Or whatever. When the question is, what’s wrong with this swell male protagonist’s life, the answer is almost always a hysterical, shrewish, controlling woman.
The amazing thing is, you can point this out to men who write or do comedy, and they’ll agree with you and talk about how they are very careful not to do that, and really enjoy writing strong, sympathetic female characters, and then you read their stuff…and the women are all hysterical, shrewish, controlling bitches (I’m sure that the writers of Everybody Loves Raymond fully believe that the characters of Deborah and Marie are sympathetic, whereas to me, that show is a perfect example, among many, of women being horrid, unreasonable, humorless nags for no reason).
Obviously, until women start writing everything, we’re going to be stuck playing unreasonable, stupid, evil bitches on the one hand, or boring, sweet, ever-affectionate straight-men on the other.
I’ve been watching DVDs of ‘It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’ lately (which is hilarious), and I just watched a special features short where the cast was talking about casting Kaitlin Olson as Sweet D, and what they mostly talk about is how these three guys had written this show, and all the one female character did in it was be like, ‘You guys!’ all the time. And they didn’t like that, and Olson wouldn’t take the part if it was like that. It took them awhile to convince her to take the job. On her final audition, she read a hilarious scene and decided to do it, because she had so much fun at that audition. Except, she found out at the bar later that the scene was actually between two of the male characters – they were all like, ‘oh, well, yeah, we didn’t have anything interesting written for Sweet D to audition you with, so we had you read a guy part. But you won’t be doing that in the actual show.’
Eventually, however, they did make an effort to write that part in a more comedic way – in large part, I’m sure, because it’s obvious Olson is not at all afraid to say what she thinks about things, and she seems to flat out refuse to be pushed into a boring, supporting role, which is awesome. She’s one of my heroes now.
Women are used to being interested in movies, books, plays and so forth that are by men, starring men and all about men. I love all kinds of culture that’s aimed at men and meant to appeal to them. All women can get into dude-flicks or dude-lit (oops, there’s no equivalent condescending term to use), and even patiently overlook the blatant misogyny it almost always contains. But just hint to a guy that he try watching, reading or enjoying anything at all that is written by, staring and/or primarily about women (whether it’s truly silly and superficial on its own merits, or merely automatically dismissed as silly just because it’s concerned with women), and he’ll immediately dismiss it on all levels and call you a fool for liking it yourself.
Because women are niche. Even though we constitute the majority of the population.
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Oh, and while I’m on this subject Estelle Getty has died. Here’s Feministe on Golden Girls:
Where else have you seen a popular sitcom (or any show) that revolves around women who actually kind of look like average women, who aren’t young and fabulous and beautiful, who have interests other than finding male companionship, who put their female friendships first, and who have sex after menopause? More to the point, where can you find a TV show or movie that revolves around women like that, and those women aren’t the butt of the joke?
It’s certainly a rarity, and Golden Girls remains a bright spot in TV history. Estelle Getty was a class act.
July 17, 2008
How Are Things In Your Country?
In the U.S., Bush wants health care programs receiving federal aid to sign certificates promising they won’t refuse to hire health care workers who won’t provide or discuss abortion and/or birth control and other forms of contraception.
Meanwhile, birth control isn’t something McCain really cares to discuss. He’d rather keep it light, I guess.
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A pregnant illegal immigrant gave birth under custody, and then had her baby taken from her, because of local charges on driving without a license:
Weikal said the sheriff’s office knew the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency planned to release Villegas on her own recognizance because of the pregnancy, but she had to stay in jail until she had seen a judge on the local charges.
Villegas’ attorney, Elliott Ozment, said Villegas was still in jail awaiting a hearing on the driving charge when she went into labor on the night of July 5. She was taken to Nashville General Hospital at Meharry, where she was handcuffed to the bed by her right wrist and left ankle until shortly before the birth.
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Indian sanitation workers were invited to walk the catwalk by the UN:
Today Sharanya at the Indian feminist blog Ultra Violet has a post about a recent UN conference in which Indian sanitation workers walked the runway alongside professional models at a charity fashion show. (Sanitation workers, also called scavengers, are usually Dalit women whose job it is to remove the human and animal excrement from the homes of higher-class Indians.)
What a treat.
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This is amazing: some very young children in Yemen are standing up for themselves against the grown men their families have sold them off to:
Together, the two girls’ stories have helped spur a movement to put an end to child marriage, which is increasingly seen as a crucial part of the cycle of poverty in Yemen and other third world countries. Pulled out of school and forced to have children before their bodies are ready, many rural Yemeni women end up illiterate and with serious health problems. Their babies are often stunted, too.
The average age of marriage in Yemen’s rural areas is 12 to 13, a recent study by Sana University researchers found. The country, at the southern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.
(via Feministe)
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And we complain about taking our shoes off:
NPR covered a story about security in Baghdad’s Green Zone, which centered specifically on one woman’s protest against the type of body scanning used: it doesn’t see hair or clothing, but sees the body, (I’m assuming metal) jewelry, and any prospective weapons. The body is rendered essentially naked (pictured here; picture from NPR).
Farah al-Jaberi’s objections (which are shared by other female workers) are mainly to male guards seeing their bodies through the scanner, and the worry that “images of their bodies can be saved and viewed by anyone later.”
(There’s an image at the link of what the scans look like.)
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And, as always, to “rape” is not to “have sex with” – and the media should respect the distinction.
July 10, 2008
Media To Women: You’re Not Having Sex Right
Slate has a long article summarizing all the various reasons why the science behind various studies and books asserting inherent differences between the sexes is thin at best. The article covers familiar ground – a lot of it restates the Mark Liberman posts I’m always linking to over at Language Log – but hopefully, this will help to discredit some of the more oft-repeated (and baseless) claims:
Even on the most hotly contested questions—like whether women have better verbal skills, or are hard-wired for empathy, or have cognitive differences that limit their advancement in math and science—the case for large, innate disparities is messy and, for the most part, underwhelming. This is especially true when it comes to neural and hormonal claims, which tend to be controversial. These writers offer canny caveats about culture and its role in gender difference. But they tend to imply that if a difference has innate roots, it’s likely to be relatively fixed. And that’s not necessarily so. In crucial ways, the mind is malleable. Ultimately, the evangelists aren’t really daring to be politically incorrect. They’re peddling one-sidedness, sprinkled with scientific hyperbole.
And while we’re on the differences between men and women, a nice rant all about orgasms – having them, not having them, faking them and who’s to blame – in response to a totally stupid column by MSNBC’s Brian Alexander:
But the thing that pissed me off the most is how Alexander wants us to look at his “roughly one-third” of straight women always have an orgasm statistic and be impressed by it. Clearly, the language he uses around it tells us that he’s saying WOW! One whole third? What a big number – especially when so many women are sexually defective!
As everyone knows, women love jerks, who, it seems, get laid a lot more. Why might that be?
It’s not always a matter of bad boys wooing vulnerable women into bed and then leaving them; it’s often two people who are both interested in just sex picking each other and calling it a day. Of course, there are no doubt some women who are suckered in by narcissistic jerks; there are also some dudes who are suckered in by narcissistic jerks (just as a Nice Guy). But sex isn’t always a trick men play on women.
What? Women might have different criteria (like looks and availability) for a one-night stand than they do for an actual relationship? No way!
One of the (many) things that really pisses me off is when guys go on about how women don’t like them because they’re too nice. I realize that everybody has to tell themselves something to get over rejection that puts the blame on the rejector and off themselves – women do the same thing (“I’m too intimidating/smart/successful”) – but I hate hearing guys go on about how their whole trouble is they’re just too swell for their own good. You know what? Usually “too nice” really means “unattractive and obnoxious.”
Hey, did you hear anything about these girls who had a pregnancy pact? And then, did you hear about how they actually didn’t?:
In short, the actual news item isn’t TODAY’S TEENS ARE SO IRRESPONSIBLE OMG. Rather, it is PREGNANT WOMEN REALLY WANT TO DO THE BEST THING FOR THEMSELVES AND THEIR CHILDREN, EVEN WHEN THEY THEMSELVES ARE PRACTICALLY CHILDREN, AND IF YOU REMOVE THE STIGMA AND GIVE THEM SOME ACTUAL FUCKING SUPPORT IT HELPS A LOT. But that doesn’t fit in a headline, and it doesn’t give people an opportunity to feel morally superior.
Apparently, the problem is knocked-up teenagers aren’t being mocked and derided sufficiently anymore:
When the same girl shows up at the school clinic for five pregnancy tests in one month, shouldn’t somebody be mocking her for it? In fact, isn’t promoting shame through mockery our civic duty?
(via Feministing)
Just…wow.
More on keeping daughters in line:
“Authorities allege that Rashid killed his daughter because he feared that her resistance to a recently arranged marriage would disgrace the Pakistani-American family.”
Sounds so simple right? He killed her because his “culture” made him. Not because he might be mentally ill or pathological. There is no denying that in basically every culture there is pressure put on women to act a certain way and especially with regard to marriage or the ownership of her sexuality. But the way that “honor” killing is discussed in the media you would think it is some normal cultural phenomena, when it is not. It is a sign of illness, culture gone awry and patriarchy at its most exaggerated.
Speaking of other cultures, here’s a few utterly sickening photo shoots in which black women are used as props for white models. Can we please, please, please just completely be done with the fashion industry now? Please?
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I didn’t mention Michelle Obama once! If you need your fix, Michelle Obama Watch is a new blog entirely devoted to the subject. (via Feministing)
July 7, 2008
FISA and American Girls, or, How the Obamas Disappointed Me This Week
Get disappointed by someone new, indeed. Everyone’s talking about Obama and FISA. TPM has a good summary of his statements on the matter, and how his position has changed:
Viewing his statements, it’s striking how forcefully he argued in the past that the choice between civil liberties and safety is a false one.
Let the disillusionment begin.
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Here, the women of Slate discuss the American Girls line of dolls. The general opinion seems to be that the dolls, while promoting consumerism, are at least an improvement on Barbies and other bubble-headed bimbo lines, what with the AG’s emphasis on historical context and self-sufficient and adventurous characters.
Well! Trust me to crap all over that! Frankly, I think anybody who buys their kid a $90 doll ought to be ashamed of themselves. If that’s too rigid an opinion, I’m sorry, but I can’t fathom how anyone could argue it’s a positive thing to purchase this hugely overpriced luxury line of dolls and doll-related items for their kid. I loved looking at the AG catalog when I was little – I wore holes in it. But even back then, I saved my breath about the possibility of actually getting one. My parents bought me all kinds of dolls and undoubtedly spoiled me toy-wise, but even if we had been billionaires, I doubt they’d have entertained the idea of spending $90 on such a thing.
To be fair, my opinion about the AG dolls is entirely colored by a specific episode in my childhood that left me with a very bad impression of both the dolls and the families who value them. I went to an elementary school in a hugely wealthy neighborhood, and in third grade, one of the most well-off girls in my class invited everyone to her birthday party. The party was at the Sequoyah Hills Country Club, and it was an American Girls doll party. Everyone was to bring their American Girls doll. This ignoring the fact that most kids did not, of course, own an American Girls doll. I brought my little baby doll that probably cost around $12, and I went with my best friend, who was one of two black kids in my grade. I mention this because at the time (and possibly still, for all I know) the Sequoyah Hills Country Club, in the grand tradition of country clubs everywhere, did not offer membership to black people. It was, however, staffed by them.
The party had big tables for the kids, and little tables for the dolls. The table settings matched – there were big dishes, and matching doll dishes. There was real-people food, and matching fake doll food. There were big-girl party favors, and matching tiny doll party favors. The girl hosting the party wore a sailor suit that matched her Samantha doll’s sailor suit. I wasn’t really friends with anybody at the party, other than my best friend. And I don’t remember much about it, other than that the (exclusively black) men in butler outfits waiting on us were required to go around and pour air tea for the dolls.
I shit you not.
You know, to each their own and all that, but personally, I don’t want to have anything to do with anybody who is even remotely a part of the world I observed that day. Because of this experience, the AG dolls have become a sort of symbol of extravagance and snobbery to me, and as a result, I don’t think much of them, or mothers who think they’re precious (I’m disappointed Michelle Obama is one of them). Samantha may be promoting a more positive message than Barbie, but it’s entirely possible the little girl who threw that party resembles nobody so much as Barbie in her adulthood. The “message” is lost (because the message is beside the point); the consumerism, however, finds its intended audience.
Massively overpriced consumer items have one purpose, and one purpose only – to create and encourage desire and greed (in part by establishing themselves as status symbols: the enjoyment of having a $90 doll depends upon other girls having $12 ones – how else do you know yours is worth $90?), and to profit from it. Period. I don’t care if the dolls are a line of miniature Susan B. Anthonys and Betty Friedans – there is nothing progressively feminist about encouraging your daughter’s desire for a ridiculously high-priced doll and its accompanying outfits, accessories and furnitures.
Rawr! My daughter will have a flour sack with a face drawn on it for a doll, and she’ll damn well like it!
