In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Category: Popular Culture

Hey Baby Hey Baby Hey

So! In the Zeitgeist of the blogosphere, there is something making the rounds now. It is, apparently, a videogame, available to play on the Web for free, called “Hey Baby.” Jessica Wakeman describes it thus:

A new video game called “Hey Baby” lets a female avatar run around with a gun, shooting men who sexually harass her with the usual obnoxious crap, like “You know you want it!” and “I love you!” When she shoots her harassers, headstones rise from the ground with his catcall in place of his name.

I actually heard about this game a week or so ago, when another friend of mine (whose name you may recognize from my pop music post) wrote about it and tried valiantly to break it down for his mostly-male audience at a videogame site:

Okay: the game isn’t about mowing down men. It’s about male privilege and what male privilege feels like.

The game’s rubbish, of course. But the one thing it does well is show how what you may think is an innocuous compliment feels in the context of a woman’s life. You approaching a woman in the street and being what you think is politely flirty is a different thing when, down the street, someone’s suggested that maybe you’d like to suck my dick and you’re a fucking bitch if you don’t.

From her perspective, it’s a culture of harassment she has to either politely deal with or ignore.

From your perspective, you’re just showing how you feel.

That your passing desire means you get to derail a woman’s life whenever you feel like it is the absolute definition of male privilege.

If you’re a man, and you’ve acted like this, the woman you do it to, beneath the polite smile she has to offer, has probably fantasised about you dying.

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A Gauntlet Has Been Thrown!

Every now and then, I take a few precious minutes out of my extremely busy schedule as a Professional Humourless Feminist to listen to what I believe the kids refer to as ‘popular music’ or ‘pop music’ for short. I believe that this is part of what is known as ‘pop culture,’ something which less serious feminists seem to take extremely seriously, wasting their time on ‘critiques’ when there are Serious Things Going on.

Several months ago, my fellow Professional Humourless Feminist Annaham introduced me to a musical artist named Janelle Monae. I was reluctant at first to eject the compact disc of the World’s Greatest Military Marches that I usually loop on repeat, but I decided to give it a whirl.

As I listened, I felt a strange, uncomfortable, and distinctly unfamiliar sensation. I looked down to realise that my foot appeared to be making a strange twitching motion. I was powerless to control the peculiar feelings that swept over me, and I suddenly found myself pulled out of my chair as though by magnetism and careening around the living room. Explaining this alarming reaction to Annaham later, she explained that what had happened is known as a ‘Spontaneous Dance Party.’

I was initially so fearful of this turn of events that I threw the musical disc into the darkest corner of my desk drawers, but I found myself oddly compelled, and played it again one day to see if the Spontaneous Dance Party would recur. This was done in the interests of scientific inquiry, to determine whether or not the Dance Party was correlated with, or perhaps even caused by, this ‘pop music.’

After several weeks of controlled testing, I can confirm that this appears to be the case. I have submitted a writeup of my findings to the New England Journal of Medicine and am currently eagerly awaiting a response.

I bring this up, not with the intention of sharing my frivolous side activities that clearly distract me from Very Serious Feminist Things, but because I cannot allow my fellow guest blogger Sarah’s embarrassingly effuse praise of the musical artist Robyn to stand without comment.

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Cause you can’t handle me

more on the not-so-secret feminism of Robyn!

Once upon a time, one of my favorite feminist blogs was called Pop Feminist. Its author has since moved on to bigger things, but I refuse to call them better because I LOVED Pop Feminist. (I also love the lady behind it, who has become a friend because of blogging-mutual-love. The powers of the Internet, people!) Pop Feminist is gone, but her archives are here and you should peruse them for sheer awesomeness.

Anyway, she would regularly post Pop Feminist Dance Parties, putting up a song or a short playlist and inviting readers to have a solo dance party, on her. This post is definitely dedicated to her.

So, by possibly-not-popular demand, MORE ROBYN.


(lyrics below)

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How Come It’s Never Joss’ Fault? The Scapegoating of Female Creators in Pop Culture

I got into one of those discussions about Buffy the other day. You know, the one where you get all excited because you’re talking to a fellow fan and you want to bask in the greatness and talk about some of the terrific characterisation that went on, and then, well, they have to bring up the sixth season.

Now, don’t get me wrong. The sixth season was not one of the show’s finest moments, although it definitely had some episodes that I really loved. It featured The Trio, which is something we all could have done without, I suspect, and some particularly low points, plot and episode wise. I’m quite happy to shred the sixth season, to talk about the places I think it went wrong in quite lengthy detail. I mean, really. ‘Doublemeat Palace,’ anyone?

Or the fifth season. That’s another popular one to bring up in the kind of conversation I am talking about, if people can take some time out from trashing on the sixth season to refocus. Others are equal opportunity critics and will happily divide their time between both.

What this person wants to talk about is not characterisation, plot, embedded contexts in the show, but what a horrible person Marti Noxon is, and how she ruined everything, and how Joss never should have abandoned Buffy, leaving the show in the hands of a woman. How it’s obvious that Marti and other female creators involved in the show are to blame for everything that went wrong. They’re ‘working out their issues’ or they are just not capable of handling a big television show all on their lonesomes or Joss gave them too much leeway.

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What I See and What I Don’t

Found via Think Progress, a video of an Associated Press reporter diving in oiled Gulf waters and living to tell the tale.

I think that there are some really interesting things going on with this video, and they spark a lot of thoughts for me. I can’t help but think about the power of broadcast media here. The media is bringing us these horrific and grim images of oiled birds, satellite photos showing the oil spill from space, and now, these visions of an underwater nightmare with water so clotted with oil that it’s hard to find the surface. The media has also brought us so many iconic images that have spurred people into action or infuriation, not just in the case of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but in countless instances.

Photo and video reporting has ended wars and sparked riots and everything in between.

That iconic image by Kevin Carter of a starving Sudanese toddler being stalked by a vulture. Coffins from Iraq and Afghanistan. Photos from Little Rock, the Twin Towers, Vietnam, Hiroshima. Neda Agha-Soltan. Images have tremendous power and the widespread availability of really compelling, stark, and sometimes terrifying imagery has made many things that were once abstract seem more immediate. There’s also a problematic history when it comes to the way that places outside the United States are framed for viewers and readers here, what kinds of images we are shown; The Sudan is starving children and lions, India is saris and The Ganges, Brazil is bikinis and favelas.

Images motivate people to do things. They fire up deep rage, horror, compassion. If we were not looking at photos and videos of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it would seem more remote and distant, less like something that is actually happening. Instead we are confronted with them everywhere we turn.

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Fembots Have Feelings Too

Or, How I Learned To Stop Caring and Admit I Love Pop.

A guy I met recently was sort of surprised that he met me at a Hold Steady Show. “They’re such a guy band,” he said, and I sort of agreed. The show that I attended (with two very feminist girlfriends, I might add) was certainly packed with guys–and a certain type of guy, too, that wears a baseball cap and jeans somewhere between fitted and baggy, not Williamsburg-skinny.

Of course it’s sort of sexist to say that but it’s also TRUE. I also have always been into what the uber-rock-star (even if she has given up the mantle!) Silvana called Dude Music.

I was a punk. Well, first I was a goth, which is a little more femme a genre (the boys wear makeup! while they sing lyrics about girls dying! WAIT COME BACK). But I started listening to angry punk rock in high school. And not riot grrl, either. I didn’t really discover Sleater-Kinney and thus ladies who rocked harder than any guy until college. Nope, I was old school and loved the Dead Kennedys, plus I was from Boston and even though I moved South I kept up my Boston pride with those Boston street punk standards: Dropkick Murphys, etc.

I had an ironic Spice Girls sticker on my car in college. But my senior year in high school my best girlfriend and I bought a Spice Girls tape between us and used to drive around singing along. So I guess you could say that my pop love was always sort of there. But, you see, it was IRONIC! It was FUNNY that I had a Spice Girls sticker on my car! Because I was going to Serious Punk Rock Shows and wearing big boots (with short skirts) and getting stomped in the pit and getting angry when my male friends tried to “rescue” me.

The same with the ubiquitous 80s nights in college. Sure, we danced to Madonna. We loved Madonna. Because she was past her moment!

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Wednesday Fluff!

I’m really mesmerised and intrigued by Albania’s Eurovision entry. I keep coming back to this video because I think there are layers of interesting visual things going on here.

The artist is Juliana Pasha, and the song is ‘All About You.’

Description and lyrics below the cut.

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“Heroes” Just for One Day

“I never met a hero I didn’t like. But then, I never met a hero. But then, maybe I wasn’t looking for one.”

That’s a line from a Lester Bangs piece, I believe, actually, his epic interview with Lou Reed. Anyone who’s read Bangs knows that he loved Reed passionately, obsessively–and so his willingness to confront Reed, to basically fuck with him over the course of the interview, was pretty impressive, even if it was just a rock profile.

Lester Bangs met a lot of my heroes, but one of the things that made him great was that ongoing willingness to question people, even people he’d allowed care of all the hopes and dreams that we pin on the best rock songs.

Helen Thomas did that. Only she did it with people who make policy and decide who lives and dies.

I’m Jewish. Polish and Russian Jew, actually, on my father’s side, which in some people’s minds makes me not actually Jewish, but I went to Hebrew school and temple as a kid and recently fasted again on Yom Kippur just to see if I could do it. I eat bacon and have tattoos and don’t really believe in God per se, but being Jewish is an important part of my life–as important as being a woman, being American, and other things I can’t change.

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