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Category: Movies

But The Animal Companions Are Doin’ It For Themselves

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(click to embiggen)

Via Sociological Images, where the wise commenters note that the three most recent princesses are excluded. Pocahontas, Mulan and Giselle — and upcoming princess Tiana — are redeemed despite their character assets (which are debatable once Disneyfied) in part because of their ever present animal companions?

I’ve watched my share of Disney movies, but I’ve never trained a critical eye on this animal companion business. From now on, whenever I need to do something really important, like ace a job interview or make a great impression at the next conference, I’m going to look to my housebears for some magical! cat! action!

The least they could do is dress me for the office Christmas party.

Audacity indeed.

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I very much want to see Precious. I have heard nothing but good things. Push is an incredible book and it sounds like the film does it justice. And I absolutely love Gabby Sidibe, who plays the lead role.

What I don’t love is the media narrative about the film and about Sidibe. Luckily, she seems like she can handle it, and has been critical of attempts to cast her as the ugly duckling turned swan: “They try to paint the picture that I was this downtrodden, ugly girl who was unpopular in school and in life, and then I got this role and now I’m awesome,” says the actress. “But the truth is that I’ve been awesome, and then I got this role.”

Gabby Sidibe is also fat, and that’s something that the media, and even the director of Precious, can’t seem to get over. From the NYMag article:

[Precious director Lee] Daniels, who saw hundreds of audition tapes from across the country (350-pound actresses don’t grow on trees), was blown away by Sidibe. “She is unequivocally comfortable in her body, in a very bizarre way. Either she’s in a state of denial or she’s so elevated that she’s on another level,” he says. “I had no doubt in my mind that she had four or five boyfriends, easily.”

Ah, yes, her weight. When Sidibe was 11 years old, an aunt offered to pay for a cruise if she lost 50 pounds. Friends and family continue to pressure her about it. “I still hear it from people who don’t know that they’re pretty close to hurting my feelings,” she says, “people who care about me, like this one friend. I was eating a light potato chip, and she eyeballed me like I was the most disgusting thing she’d ever seen. She says, ‘Every time you want to put something disgusting in your mouth, think of the designers who won’t make a dress for you because you’re fat.’ ”

But at some point, says Sidibe, “I learned to love myself, because I sleep with myself every night and I wake up with myself every morning, and if I don’t like myself, there’s no reason to even live the life. I love the way I look. I’m fine with it. And if my body changes, I’ll be fine with that.

God bless this girl.

But perhaps the biggest offender I’ve seen so far is the New York Times Magazine. The Magazine article isn’t just incredulous at Gabby’s fatness, but also totally weirded out by the fact that this movie was made mostly by black people. Some of them are even fat black people, like Mo’nique, whose every bite seemed to be chronicled in the story. And some of them are even gay black people, like Lee Daniels, whose gayness is proven via a comment about Vivienne Westwood (but about gangsters, so, still black).

It’s sad, but I’m dreading the release of the film, just because I don’t want to read the reviews.

Polanski Defend-a-Thon, Part 2

[Trigger Warning]

Melissa has Part 1 (which disappointingly includes Whoopi Goldberg, who draws a line between “rape” and “rape-rape,” and leaves me wondering what the difference is — and if there’s also rape-rape-rape, and how many “rape”s we have to string together before we decide someone did something wrong).

Add to the list:

Ann Applebaum, whose piece is, in my opinion, one of the most egregious. First, she calls what happened between Polanski and his victim “statutory rape.” Well, yes, since the girl was 13 — but she was also drugged and anally raped after she said no. That is, to borrow from Whoopi Goldberg, “rape-rape,” and would have been no matter what the victim’s age. But, Applebaum reminds us, Polanski is a victim too!

He did commit a crime, but he has paid for the crime in many, many ways: In notoriety, in lawyers’ fees, in professional stigma. He could not return to Los Angeles to receive his recent Oscar. He cannot visit Hollywood to direct or cast a film.

Lawyers’ fees are not how you “pay” for a crime. Not being able to come to LA to receive an Oscar is not “paying” for a crime. And I’m pretty sure there’s not a whole lot of professional stigma going on when you receive the highest award in your profession (even in exile), and an audience of your peers stands up and applaud you.

Disappointingly, Katrina vandenHeuvel, editor of the Nation, agrees with Applebaum.

Richard Cohen also stands up for Polanski, basically arguing that the dude did a bad thing, but shouldn’t be punished — unless punishment means that Richard Cohen gets to punch him in the face.

Patrick Goldstein says Polanski is being “hounded” by LA County prosecutors and compares him to Jean Valjean:

We live in an age that is so thoroughly post-modern that you can find an obvious literary antecedent for nearly every seamy media storyline. The same goes for the Polanski case, which is full of echoes of “Les Miserables,” the classic Victor Hugo novel about Jean Valjean, an ex-con trying to turn his life around who is being obsessively tracked and hunted down by the Parisian police inspector Javert.

Hugo’s story is a tragedy, as is the life story of Polanski, who was a fugitive as a boy and is now a fugitive as an old man. Whether the L.A. County district attorney office has its way or not, it is not a story that can have a happy ending. I think Polanski has already paid a horrible, soul-wrenching price for the infamy surrounding his actions. The real tragedy is that he will always, till his death, be snubbed and stalked and confronted by people who think the price he has already paid isn’t enough.

…and I want to quit life.

Goodbye Goodbye

My last day as a guest blogger!  I want to thank the Feministe regulars for sharing your corner of the interwebs with me.  Thank you to the readers who read my posts, and especially thank you to those of you who posted thoughtful responses to them.

Like many guest bloggers before me, I leave you with many thoughts un-posted.  I have a half dozen half finished posts on my hard drive, posts on subjects ranging from Arabic hip hop to Zionism, veganism to 9/11.  Etc.  I’m gonna mash a few thoughts into this goodbye post.

First, I really want to talk a little bit about  Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine while I’m here.  I specifically want to talk about being a Jew who does anti-occupation activism and opposes Zionism.

When I say “Zionism” I am referring to a nationalist ideology holding that Jews have a right to a Jewish-majority nation state/”homeland” in historic Palestine.  Although over time there has been much debate about the definition of “Zionism”, I am using the meaning that carries currency currently on the global political stage.  Some Jews have more personal definitions of Zionism that are different; some may have nothing to do with nation states and refer instead to an important religious/spiritual connection to the land; I may not share such sentiments (I feel that Brooklyn and the Lower East side are enough of a homeland for me), but I certainly don’t object to them.  Such definitions are not being referred to when most people across the globe express objections to Zionism.

Along with anti-Zionists in general, I do not question the right of Jews to live in historic Palestine.  Jews have always lived there, often in peace with their neighbors.  There’s no problem there.  The problem is with the belief that Jews have more of a right to be there than anyone else, and that the “right” of a state with an artificially maintained Jewish majority to exist trumps the rights of all the people in the region.   These beliefs are racist, though it’s taboo to say that in most public spheres here in the United States.  Since the ’67 war (when the IDF proved itself to be very useful as military muscle), we’ve had a special relationship with Israel, supplying their military with an unprecedented amount of aid.  The US government also has a long history of supporting Jewish migration to historic Palestine, at least in part as an alternative to a feared massive arrival of Jews on our shores.

The US stands apart from world opinion in our official, unyielding support of Zionism and our active participation in the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Jewish politics.  I’m old enough to remember being appalled in 2001 when reps from the US and Israel walked out of the UN World Conference against Racism rather than discuss the relationship between Zionism and racism, slandering participants from every other country as anti-Semites.  Similar dynamics played out when the US pulled out of participating  in this years conference because Israel’s crimes were on the table.   This should raise red flags for those of us committed to fighting racism.  It is US and Israeli exceptionalism.

I view anti-Zionism as a logical piece of a broader anti-imperialist, anti-oppressive politic.  Of course I abhor anti-Semitism, but I am also disgusted at Jews (and fundamentalist Christians, and assorted other pro-Zionist factions) who exploit the historic persecution of Jews for their own political ends.  It in no way diminishes the horror of the Nazi Holocaust to suggest that the expulsion and murder of Palestinians in 1948 does nothing to honor its victims.  It is not anti-Jewish to resist Jewish colonialism.  The refugee crisis and ongoing oppression of those living in the Palestinian territories are not going away soon, and no amount of righteous anger at Hamas will shift the balance of power in the situation.  Those of us in the US-Jewish and not–are directly implicated, as our tax dollars fund the ongoing occupation.

The number of Jews who identify as anti- or non-Zionist is growing.  A 2006 study sponsored by The Andrea and Charles Bronfman philanthropies found that among non-Orthodox Jews under 35, only 54% are comfortable with the idea of a Jewish state. (as opposed to 81% of those 65 and older. ) Last year saw the launch of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network as well as an increasing amount of Jewish organizing against the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine within a specifically anti-Zionist framework. In 2008, I participated in the nation-wide No Time to Celebrate: Jews Remember the Nakba campaign, which sought to counter celebrations of Israel’s 60th anniversary with events commemorating and spreading awareness of the correlating “Nakba” (or “Catastrophe”) of 1948 which resulted in the death or displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.   This is a shift-it’s often controversial enough to criticize Israel at all, let alone dispute Zionist ideology.  But this controversy comes not from some kind of Jewish “consensus” on the matter (there never has been any such thing) but from which factions hold institutional power and the lengths they’ll go to silence their opposition.

I also want to plug my new favorite movie, Slingshot Hip Hop, a documentary chronicling the emerging Palestinian hip hop scenes and movement.  It is particularly interesting from a feminist perspective, as the consciousness around the need for women’s voices in Palestinian hip hop displayed by both male and female musicians in the film puts to shame the gender analysis of most music scenes I’ve ever been around. Please, order it and watch it if you haven’t yet.  You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll probably learn things, you’ll be left both angry and inspired.

What else.

It’s a little early, but September 11 is next Friday and I won’t be blogging here then.  This year I hope to get tickets to the big Jay-Z 9/11 benefit concert thing at Madison Square Garden.  That would be nice.  Not that most years I do anything, other than reflect.  It’s still a date on the calendar that provokes a visceral response from me.  On the morning of September 11 2001 I was at work at a phone sex call center in Manhattan.  I was on a call when the first plane hit the tower and yes, caller, you really will always be very special to me.  On 9/11 I thought I was maybe gonna die at various points.  Not to be dramatic, I wasn’t near the towers. There were initially rumors reported on the news that there was a third plane headed towards New York, and I was near other famous NYC stuff that people speculated might be a target.  Obviously the third plane didn’t exist.  No one I knew was hurt or killed.  Some I knew lost friends and family.

It was a really, really fucked up day.

The thing everyone says about the city coming together was true, in my experience.  I was unlike anything I had experienced before or have experienced since.  From the women at my job banding together and helping one another through those early, awful hours to just about everyone I saw after wards.  Strangers talking to strangers, asking each other how we’re doing, offering whatever aid or comforts we could.  I don’t have the words to express the power of experiencing that this is what happened to my city when hit with a crisis of such proportion.  We didn’t know what to do but try to help one another.

And then Bush and Giuliani got on TV and told us we needed to shop and “smoke out” the terrorists.  And suddenly the horror was constant and everywhere.  Attacks on Mosques and random people perceived as being Arab and/or Muslim.  The looming war.  A lot of us started having anti-war strategy meetings, back when opposing the war on Afghanistan was a fringe wingnut thing to do.  Now the majority of the country opposes it.

And yet, we’re still there.  In fact we’re sending 14,000 additional combat troops, on top of the increasing number of contractors from firms like Blackwater (excuse me, I mean the re-branded “Xe Services LLC.”) We’re still in Iraq, too, despite the popularity of Obama’s anti-Iraq war platform.   The horror marches on.  I wish I could see an end.

And on that cheery note…I guess I’m out?  You can follow my pop culture critiques, short videos, vegan recipes and political griping at my blog.  Hope to see you around the internet.

The White Liberal “Feminism” of Tina Fey and Baby Mama

Last night I decided to watch Baby Mama while doing some not very mentally taxing work online.  Oh, my.  Was that movie worse than I expected or what?  It was so bad, in such an interesting, ugly bouquet of ways, that I feel the need to share my thoughts with you, both about this movie in particular and my ish with Tina Fey’s schtik in general.

The various characters played by Tina Fey on television and films form a more or less cohesive comic persona.  Fey was the head writer on SNL (where she co-chaired the Weekend Update segment) when she successfully pitched 30 Rock, a sitcom on which she plays Liz Lemon, the head writer of a comedic variety show.  The Lemon character is similar to the persona Fey adopted on Weekend Update, as well as to Kate Holbrook, the character she portrays in Baby Mama (which she didn’t write, but seems tailored specifically to her appeal.) In all of these Fey plays a version of a financially privileged woman in a powerful corporate position who is conventionally pretty, smart,  a bit awkward, and romantically challenged.

I’ll start by mentioning my own hesitancy to use one of my dwindling days as a Feministe blogger to criticize Fey.  Her success as a feminist(ish) comic and writer is notable.  She is skilled, talented, and often funny, and I feel kind of gross going at her on the internet—I don’t like the catfight vibe. Somehow, somewhere, I have a deep seated desire to support other women rather than tear them down.   All those years doing Riot Grrrl zines and talking about “Girl Love” really took.  That said, Fey should not be above criticism.  She has become a kind of feminist heroine, especially to middle to upper class nerdy white liberals, and while I share some of her fans’ appreciation, there are aspects of Fey’s comedy that I find constantly chafing.

Let’s start with her whorephobia and slut-shaming.  I can imagine that the kinds of  sexist pressures that Fey has probably faced as a conventionally attractive lady in showbiz include people trying to sex her up more, go the Maxim route, whatever.  I absolutely respect her choices regarding how she does or doesn’t actively present herself sexually.  However, her derogatory attitude towards women that she finds unacceptably slutty needs to be checked.

I watch 30 Rock occasionally, and enjoy it, though the Liz Lemon character’s anxiety around sluttier women makes me a bit uncomfortable.  It’s fine if I view Lemon as just another flawed character with her own set or quirks and neuroses (I certainly buy the anxiety,) but not if Lemon is meant to be the “sane”, neutral audience entry point into the world of the show, as if of course all self-respecting intelligent women wish to police the sexuality of others, wish they’d button up their shirts and put on some pants and view the fact that they sometimes don’t as a sign of stupidity, if not evolutionary failure.

Kate Holbrook in Baby Mama is a similarly wealthy, liberal professional who seems to view women who aren’t exactly like her in these respects as somewhat alien.  The classist “friendship” she develops with Amy Poehler’s character Angie Ostrowiski , a “white trash” woman who is contracted to carry a baby for her, contains this theme to a degree.  There are various comments throughout that further establish Fey as being on the proper side of sluttiness; “My avatar dresses like a whore!” she exclaims in befuddlement while playing a karaoke videogame.  Later, her love interest jokingly asks if she works as a prostitute at night, the humor lies in the outlandishness of such a notion– corporate women never do sex work on the side!

It’s harder to watch Fey’s characters exhibit slutphobia and not take it personally when she makes comments like this :

“I love to play strippers and to imitate them,” says Fey. “I love using that idea for comedy, but the idea of actually going there? I feel like we all need to be better than that. That industry needs to die, by all of us being a little bit better than that.”

what does it mean for Fey as a self-avowed feminist use a group of people (Women, I assume, in her imagination,) for their comedic possibilities while believing that they should cease to exist?  I don’t want to read too much into this quote in terms of the contempt Fey appears to feel towards strippers. Maybe she just sees them as victimized by an evil industry.  Paternalism is so much better than out and out malice, after all. The wording suggests that Fey engages with strippers—or at least the idea of strippers (as well as other inappropriately sexual women)—only as a subject of ridicule.  How is this feminist?

Here are some other things that I hated about Baby Mama:

-There is a recurring joke where Fey discusses the horrific possibility of having an intersexed baby.  Intersexed people themselves are the semi-mystical, thoroughly confusing and gross butt of the joke.  Ha ha ha ha.

-Fey’s character is the VP of a Whole Foods stand-in called Round Earth.  Steve Martin’s portrayal of the company’s capitalist hippie CEO is funny.  Less so is the subplot about Round Earth opening a massive flagship store in an abandoned warehouse that I think was supposed to be in West Philly (I was multitasking, if they clarified the neighborhood, I missed it.) The film reduces tensions between Round Earth and small local businesses and residents who feel invaded to some kind of irrational bias that can and will be overcome if we just listen to Tina Fey, caring corporate VP.  Gentrification is great when it’s companies with Liberal appeal doing it. Baby Mama throws a few softballs at Whole Foods through the Round Earth subplot (health food is gross!  Some yuppies are too obsessed with vitamins!), but at the end of the day the company triumphs as responsible and admirable and Good For The Community. The film creates a space for Liberals to scoff at Wal-Mart as Evil but embrace Whole Foods, in all it’s healthcare opposing union busting as a Good Corporation that’s just a little silly sometimes.

-Racism.  There are few roles for people of color in Baby Mama’s white world.  The biggest is that of Fey’s doorman, Oscar Priyan (played by Romany Malco), who assumes the role of the Magical Negro, receiving no character development but dispensing much sassy advice and support to the two white female protagonists with whom he never, ever has any sexual tension.  Towards the end I though perhaps Amy Poehler’s character would end up coupled with him—during a climactic spat Fey calls her white trash”  to which she replies “I deserve that” and Malco intones “no, you don’t”.  Wow, is Baby Mama actually going to develop the latent class-solidarity theme that cried out from under the cutsey scenes of Poehler and Malco asexually bonding? Given the predictable, formulaic trajectory of the entire movie (I spotted the films final “twist” the second Fey met Greg Kinnear), they should have gotten together—except for the Magical Negro law which forbids him from having any sex life, especially one involving a white lady.  Despite the existence of his own child, who we see in a birthday party montage over the closing credits.  It is actually Malco who gives the film it’s name—Fey explains that Poehler is her surrogate, to which he replies “oh, your baby mama.”  Fey tries to explain no, it’s different, she has no romantic relationship with Poehler, to which Malco replies (paraphrasing) “Relationships have nothing to do with it—she has the baby, you pay the bills.  Ask any black man in Philadelphia.”  HA HA HA shoot me.  That line might be a little less overwhelmingly less offensive if there were, I don’t know, any black female characters in the movie, but no.  The only woman of color I recall at all was a sexxxy Asian woman coupled with Tina Fey’s ex who is on screen soley to cause insult to the injury of Fey’s bruised ego.  I don’t think she got to say anything.

-It was directed semi-incompetently and never reconciled it’s balance between comedy and drama, slapstick and heartwarming, resulting in an agitating and tone-deaf eyeroller.  Strange edits and flat scenes abound.  Scenes go on too long.  It has its funny moments, but doesn’t cohere.  Even as an entertaining  piece of offensive, oppressive propaganda for white ladies’ liberation within liberal corporate capitalism.

Fey didn’t write Baby Mama, but she chose it as her start vehicle into the world of feature films.  It fits nicely into her oeuvre as a “feminist” icon, if feminism is only for rich white straight ladies doin’ it for themselves by climbing the corporate ladder with their exclusively abled bodies. (another recurring joke involved a woman with a speech impediment, btw LOL.)  Of course they have to climb over the bodies of everyone else—except their white male bosses, natch—to do it.  Woooo sisterhood!

Notes on Gore

I had about half a post written about  my sometime contentious relationship with veganism (I am vegan), PETA, food justice, and a whole mess of other stuff, but then Renee had to go make an excellent post about the frequent failings of PETA and too many other animal rights orgs and activists in recognizing the history of dehumanization of people of color.  The comments are still going strong, and I should probably wade through them before throwing my hat in the ring of related ish.

So instead I will finish up this post about  my special feelings towards Violent Movies.  Specifically, GORY movies.  I love them.  Sometimes.

There’s a lot of talk these days on my corners of teh  interwebz about Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarentino’s latest, an ahistorical revenge fantasy filled with Jews gorily killing Nazis.  Quentin Tarantino is not Jewish, so far as I know, nor is the fictional head of the Nazi-vanquishing title outfit played by Brad Pitt.  Brad Pitt is supposed to be part American Indian, however, which is why he and his Basterds like to scalp Nazis.  This all rings a little…problematic to me.  I’m also not here to defend the film (which I haven’t seen) or QT’s oeuvre, which is also problematic, to say the least.  I am just here to discuss the fact that I find the idea of Eli Roth beating the bloody hell out of a Nazi with a baseball bat to be rather appealing. I’m planning to go see the thing–get a large popcorn and soda and (hopefully) enjoy the hell outta some air conditioning for a few hours. Setting Nazis on fire?  Sounds good to me.  As my internet friend Sabotabby wrote:

It’s a movie that has Brad Pitt killing a bunch of Nazis in brutal and historically improbable ways. Either you read that and go “DUDE, AWESOME” or you don’t. I think you know by now which camp I fall into.

I got into a brief discussion about “torture porn” with another internet friend earlier today, prompted by a discussion of said film.  He said that it was “torture porn” and thus vile. He thought torture, and thus “torture porn”, was inexcusable.  I think that torture is inexcusable. “Torture porn” is a made-up nongenre that links together often very disperit films based upon the vague idea that they eroticize or sensationalize or just depict graphic acts of torture (or other gory violence) for the audiences viewing pleasure.  Everything from Hostel to Saw III (et al) to Funny Games has been widely referred to as “torture porn”, despite their widely varying intents and treatments of violence.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Back to my defense of Inglourious Basterds against charges of evilness by virtue of being “torture porn”.

Revenge fantasies that involve oppressed people torturing their  oppressors are all fine and well, So far as I’m concerned.  They can be cathartic, they can be healing, they can be a lot of fun (at least for those of us who can distinguish between fantasy entertainment and reality, which hopefully those of us who are grown-ups can.)   Even besides the oppressed/oppressor context—fictional graphic violence can be can be cathartic and otherwise enjoyable for a variety of people for a variety of reasons.  I don’t think I’m so special a snowflake that my love of gore is wacky and subversive whereas all those other (probably dude) people are just sick. Fuck that.

I hope that most of us at Feministe are in a s/m sexually fantasies are not bad (0r good) in and of themselves.  Violent movies of the thrill-ride/cathartic horror variety are a similar thing.  If I hadn’t loaned my copy of Men Women and Chainsaws out and never gotten it back, I could look up some pertinent quotes.    One thing I know from doing phone sex and talking to countless cis straight-identified men watching (non-torture) porn is that the subject of identification in a given text (or film) may not be the one the author(director) intended or that a critic might expect.  We know what they say about making assumptions,  don’t we?  So I won’t judge anyone for liking “torture porn” or any other maligned violent genre in and of itself.

People across a lot of different demographics like violent movies.  Not just teenage boys, or grown men who think like the stupider of them as marketers have historically led us to believe.  I’ve been fascinated by gore ever since I used to sneak peeks at the boxes in the horror section of the video store when I was a little kid.  I’d have nightmares.  I wondered what could possibly happen in these terrifying, anything goes, sometimes X-Rated (Wizard of Gore!) monstrosities.  When I was older and actually started watching “real”, adult, horror I was sorely disappointed in how…crappy and boring most of it is. But I do enjoy a good, creative bloodbath, and I don’t think the art of depicting (fictional) violence is anything to sneeze at.

So, It annoys me time and time again to read stuff like the following, from Entertainment Weekly’s cover story on the Watchmen movie:

Snyder hopes the female fans he gained from 300 (and Gerard Butler’s abs) will watch Watchmen, too, though it’s hard to imagine that they’ll be buzzing about this film in the same way. ”I think its human themes appeal to all,” says Malin Akerman, whose character Silk Spectre is a knowing commentary on the obligatory superteam-sexpot heroine. ”But I do think men will have a much easier time swallowing all the violence.”

Hi. I’m a woman. I want more violence, pls, and I don’t give a fuck about Gerald Butler or his abs.

I was thrilled a couple months later when my friends at Entertainment Weekly (I‘ve been a subscriber for, like, over a decade.  They’re my friends.) ran an article about how OMG, we were all wrong!  the horror movie audience is generally actually slightly more female than male (just like the population overall is slightly more female than male, but lets not push things!)  Of course the article had to posit theories as to why this bizarre fact could be. Including that it (wait for it) gives them an excuse to cuddle with their boyfriends.  I’m fucking barfing right now,  No, I am, really.  I just did it again.  Also, can we just note that it’s a cliché as old as cinema itself that dudes like scary movies cuz they give them a chance to squeeze the hand of their ladydates.  But these are DIFFERENT, GENDERED grabby motivations, cuz dudes are just cuddling cuz they wanna score.

In any event, I’m excited for the main subject of the above-mentioned EW article, Diablo Cody’s Jennifer’s Body.  It is supposedly gory,  it’s both written and directed by women (a rarity in mainstream of the genre, or in Hollywood at all,) and it’s named after my favorite song on Hole’s classic Live Through This album.  So: I’m going.  I have this almost charitable project going of trying to make one-sided peace with Diablo Cody, who wrote the thing.  I want to support women in the film industry, I especially want to support current/former sex workers in the film industry who have written popular books, especially since one day I would like to be them. I want to be able to forgive her for subtitling her memoir Candy Girl “A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper”–implication being that all those uneducated trashy stereotypes are “likely”.  Unlike a witty blogstress such as herself who seems in interviews to have been more engaged with her work as an anthropology project than as a job.   I hope that all those reader reviews I’ve seen on Amazon about how patronizing she is when discussing her coworkers, how above other sex workers she posits herself as being are inaccurate…because while I thought Juno was extremely overrated, I would love to have this movie actually be good! I wanna get behind the ex-stripper with the Oscar! I’m not hating!

But I am digressing.

I know I’m not the only one here who appreciates some splatter.  Why do we like it? Why do you like it?  And even more interesting, why do some people find it upsetting that we do?

Disabled Character: Able-Bodied (Emaciated) Actresses Only, Please

Laurie and Debbie say:
Cross Blogged on Body Impolitic

We had our attention brought to this casting call for Stargate: Universe, a Stargate franchise TV show due to debut in October of this year as a movie, and then a regular TV show on the Syfy channel.

[ELEANOR PERRY] (35-40) and quite attractive. A brilliant scientist who happens to be a quadriplegic. Affected since childhood, her disability has rendered her body physically useless. However, after being brought on board the Destiny as the only person who may be able to save the ship and her crew from certain annihilation, she is given temporary powers that enable her to walk again and to finally experience intimacy.sptv050769..Strong guest lead. NAMES PREFERRED. ACTRESS MUST BE PHYSICALLY THIN. (THINK CALISTA FLOCKHART).

How do we hate this? Let us count the ways:

1) Do you have any idea how much most disabled people hate the oh-so-familiar story where a disabled character (always in a wheelchair) gets to *drum roll* WALK AGAIN? To take that one apart a little bit, at least two things are wrong with this story.

It plays into the endlessly repeated cultural conviction that walking and being vertical are somehow essentially more fully human than sitting. This is why disabled children are often kept in painful and awkward braces much longer than they should be, and why it’s been necessary to create wheelchairs that bring people up to “eye level,” (whose eye level was that?). It’s so hard to be taken seriously if you’re not vertical.

It also plays into the able-bodied person’s myth that the only interesting story about disability is the one in which it is cured or magically redeemed in some way. This is a thing of our time and place–150 years ago, the only story about disability was about romantic wasting away. Our culture desperately tries to believe that if you take care of yourself, you will live a really long time and never get sick. Seeing disabled people makes us afraid that we might not live fit and forever. Wheelchairs and the people in them become the bogeyman, the goblin who will be you if you don’t watch your health. To fight the cultural fears, we build myths about people who “walk again.”

The “finally experience intimacy” line from the casting call is the clincher for this myth. Apparently, whoever wrote this believes that disabled people can’t “experience intimacy,” which wouldn’t be true even if the phrase was about love, friendship, deep connection, or true confessions. We all know that those three words aren’t about any of those things: they’re about sex. Of course, disabled people can’t/don’t have sex. Because we’re so afraid of what it’s like to be them, we don’t look at or imagine their bodies. When we have to talk to them, we look relentlessly above the neck, which is one reason we’re more comfortable when they’re at eye level.

News flash! People in wheelchairs have sex. People on respirators have sex. Sometimes they have great sex. And what’s more, they can have sex without being fetishized for their disability.

2) If you’re a disabled actor, the “walk again” story has an even nastier angle. It means that the studios “have to” cast able-bodied actors and actresses to play disabled people. They can’t be expected to cast someone who is quadriplegic, or has spina bifida, if the role requires that the character eventually get up and walk. This saves the director and the actors having to deal with all those scary, messy real disabled people. It saves the writers from having to learn anything about real disability. It is yet another factor in keeping disabled people unemployed. (In the last fifteen years or so, the disability activist community has done a great deal of work to get disabled actors into disabled roles, and we’ve seen somewhat fewer “God saved him! He can walk!” plots as a result. It’s not enough. Google Images has only five images for “disabled actresses.”)

3) Wonder why she has to be so thin? Callista Flockhart thin? We can tell you. It’s because if she has any weight on her at all, viewers can say her disability is her fault. People believe that unhealthy behavior, weight, and disability are inextricably linked. People look at a fat person in a wheelchair and think, “That person must not have taken care of herself.” But a thin person in a wheelchair is exempt from blame. She’s a victim, not a bum.

Here’s the casting call we’d like to see:

[ELEANOR PERRY] (35-40) and quite sexy. A brilliant quadriplegic scientist, who has used a wheelchair since childhood. She needs help with basic cleanliness and dressing tasks. Her scientific ability makes her the only person who may be able to save the ship and her crew from certain annihilation. She’s an excellent flirt, and will have an affair with at least one crew member during her tenure on the show. sptv050769..Strong guest lead. NAMES PREFERRED. ACTRESS MUST BE A WHEELCHAIR USER.

Thanks to Lynn Kendall for the pointer.

The Line: A New Doc About Consent

[Trigger warning]

THE LINE trailer from Nancy Schwartzman on Vimeo.

I met Nancy Schwartzman, the director of and a principal in the new short documentary The Line, last year when she was looking for resources about consent in the sex industry as possibilities for inclusion in her documentary. I was really taken with her project, which is not just a documentary about sexual boundaries and the line of consent, but also an autobiographical project about a date rape she experienced, the reactions of her friends, and the eventual (on hidden camera and included in the film) confrontation of her rapist. When I taught my intro to human sexuality course at Rutgers University at Newark last fall, I asked her to be a guest, screen her film, and talk with my students about consent. It was pretty amazing and intense, in a way that I wasn’t entirely equipped to deal with (as an aside, the biggest thing I’ve learned about teaching a sexuality course at the college level is that it is crucial to provide resources and potential avenues of support for students for whom difficult stuff comes up).

My classes at Rutgers tend to be pretty gender balanced, racially and ethnically very mixed, and not at all the gender studies crowd – my students take the class because it fulfills an undergraduate science requirement. This means that the class is generally heterosexual and cisgendered (and has a lot of trouble tangling with the concept of cis), but they’re also eager to discuss sexuality in depth, in ways that most of them have never had the opportunity and invitation to do.

Nancy handled the screening and conversation afterwards with grace and aplomb, and we really dug into the idea of consent and crossing the line, and we especially talked about men and responsibility. We talked about the idea of enthusiastic consent, which Heather Corinna writes about so well in her piece on Scarleteen, How You Guys Can Prevent Rape. Here’s my most favorite snippet from Heather’s piece:

When someone wants to, really wants to, have sex with us, we’ll know because that person will be taking a very active role, will be saying — if not yelling! — “Yes!” or “Please!” or “Do me NOW!” We may know because that person is the one initiating sex, at least as often as we are. (If you’re going to say that younger women just aren’t like that yet, know that isn’t always true. Some are, but those who aren’t likely aren’t because things are either moving too fast, or they really just aren’t ready for or that interested in sex with you yet.) We’ll know because it will feel like something we are absolutely doing together, that couldn’t happen if the other person wasn’t just as engaged as we are (imagine trying to dance with someone else when they’re just standing there or not really paying attention: same goes with sex). We’ll know because our partners will absolutely not “just be lying there.”

I was really interested in what the conversation and film brought up for men, and several of the men in the class spoke articulately and honestly about how it made them feel and what it made them question. However, the really great stuff came in the form of response papers. Here is a snippet from a response paper that one of my straight cismale students wrote:

I found this documentary to be interesting because of the way it made me think about all of my past sexual experiences. Did I ever cross that line? Was I ever too pushy with a girl? Did a girl ever do something she didn’t want to with me, just to get it over with? Have I ever made a girl feel uncomfortable being alone with me? Questions like this will make a man rethink everything he has done with a woman. This documentary touches on a subject that today still hasn’t clearly been established. There are so many unanswered questions regarding that line, and these types of questions make it difficult for a woman to come forward and allow our judicial system to do what it was created for. Regardless of what the situation may be, I believe the man is more responsible for knowing where exactly that line begins, and where it ends.

If you want to have Nancy bring The Line to your school or community center, you should check out her website and drop her a note. It is a really great tool for moving conversations about consent forward, and Nancy is just amazing – and brave for sharing her own story in such an intense way. She’s working on a curriculum to teach with the film and has lots of thoughts provoking activities that she’s created with high school and college students in mind. You can also be a fan of the film on Facebook and find out where she’s screening it next.

En Lucha, In Gerangl: On Edens and Utopias

The Garden by Scott Hamilton Kennedy
(Black Valley Films)

At Home In Utopia by Michal Goldman
(Filmmakers Collaborative)

Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s The Garden opens with aerial shots of South Central Farm, the 14-acre community garden founded by Latin@ immigrants and other citizens of Los Angeles; against the backdrop of gray warehouses and the L.A. skyline, we see a rectangle of green, bursting with nopales, corn, vegetables, herbs, and trees. South Central Farm has been compared to Eden probably a million times – hell, the allusion is right there in the title of the documentary – but it’s with good reason. To see land being used in a healthy, loving way in an urban environment really does feel like a return to Eden.

By now, the story of South Central Farm is (or should be) legendary among American activists. The land was originally supposed to be used for a garbage incinerator – a move that would be rightly horrifying in wealthy parts of town, but seems to be considered only natural in poor and working class neighborhoods – but, after Concerned Citizens of South Central L.A. successfully fought it, and after the 1992 L.A. Riots galvanized the citizens of South Central to revitalize their community space, it was transformed into a cooperative collection of garden plots. It was more than just a place to grow food; SCF grew into a tight-knit community, a haven amidst the blight of L.A. But racism and greed ensure that good things never last, and SCF was destroyed in 2006.

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