Media & Media Literacy – Page 18

Is White Really the Combination of All Colors?

This “family feud” has been mentioned in blog post after blog post, so I’ll keep the history short. Big “feminist” site Jezebel posts about female comedy writers not being represented in the staffing of The Daily Show. Big “feminist” site XX Factor posts about how hypocritical it is for Jezebel to post something controversial to stir up page views and therefore ad revenue, as XX Factor uses their controversial article to stir up page views and therefore ad revenue. Other less commercial blogs such as this one write about the feud. Then! The female employees of The Daily Show put out an open letter insisting that Jon Stewart isn’t sexist. Cue the (admittedly hilarious) response to that letter and the background chatter regarding new TDS female correspondent Olivia Munn and how she gets half naked sometimes, hates fat people (she does come off as pretty fatphobic) and isn’t funny. Ad infinitum.

I’m not going to critique any of the above-referenced articles, nor am I going to offer an opinion of whether or not Olivia Munn is qualified to be on The Daily Show. What I am going to talk about is the fact that I’m tired of middle to upper class white cissexual Internet feminist all-stars dominating the debate over what is acceptable in feminism and what isn’t. I’m not saying these women aren’t talented writers; they are. But I want to see myself (not literally, although of course that would be nice — a chick’s gotta eat) and other marginalized feminists represented in the feminist all-star constellation. I want to read articles in WaPo and Slate and Salon and the NY Times by marginalized women dealing with issues that actually affect us, and don’t involve pot meeting kettle. I want to see articles on the big woman-oriented blogs that deal with intersectionality, that talk about deeper issues, and that inspire me to think and take action other than reaching for the Tylenol.

Tangentially, but also related in a way, I want to raise a concern I’ve had for a while about the name of the Slate woman-oriented blog “XX Factor”. Titling your blog after a set of chromosomes that not every woman has and not every man does not have is, to me, extremely transphobic and also ignores intersex folks with varying sets of chromosomes (because it ain’t just XX or XY). It completely erases trans women as women, and it is really appalling to me. Why should I take a woman-oriented blog seriously that clearly doesn’t understand or apparently doesn’t care about intersectionality or exclusion of certain women? Cutesy names don’t make up for erasure of identities.

Examples like the one given in the above paragraph are what I mean when I say we need representation of marginalized women on the big, ostensibly feminist, woman-oriented blogs like Jezebel, Salon’s Broadsheet, and Slate’s XX Factor (well with them, we need a name change as well). The discourse is controlled by women for whom sexism against white cis women seems to be their main focus. We need to stop looking to these white middle/upper class cissexual feminist role models for instructions on how to interpret feminism or on how to apply feminist principles to media critique. We need prominent marginalized women who have more than paid their feminist/womanist dues to offer a fresh and very much needed perspective.

What’s interesting to me about these large woman-oriented sites is that when you look closely, they’re actually not explicitly feminist. That’s why I keep referring to them as “woman-oriented” or “ostensibly feminist”. Writing articles that appeal to women does not mean that they’re feminist articles. For example, Jezebel’s tagline is “Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for Women. Without Airbrushing.” XX Factor’s tagline is simply “What Women Really Think.” Salon’s Broadsheet just doesn’t say anything, as far as I can tell. Basically, these sites can simply fall back on the fact that they never said they were feminist. So maybe we shouldn’t be expecting representative feminist content from these blogs. When questionable content pops up on these sites, like Hanna Rosin’s critique of Al Gore’s accuser (which, to be fair, she did later follow up with a sort-of “I was wrong” post) on XX Factor, or the Emily Gould anti-Jezebel article, also on XX Factor, what standard can you hold them to? Emily Gould is a woman, and she wrote what she “Really Thinks”. I guess that’s all you can ask for when they’re not specifically identifying themselves as a feminist site. These sites are simply woman-oriented. Not all women are feminists.

Marginalized feminists/womanists need to have the door unlocked so we can finally kick it down and get some actual representation alongside the current white cis feminist all-stars. Unfortunately, those same white cis feminists are holding the keys to the door. The only way we’re going to get that door unlocked is to continue to point out the lack of meaningful diversity among the feminist gatekeepers and insist that our voices be heard. We need to make it their problem. We need to “show our color”.

Quick Hit: Child Rapist Polanski Freed in Switzerland

Swiss authorities have denied a U.S. extradition request for child rapist Roman Polanski and freed him from house arrest. Polanski has been a fugitive from justice for 32 years, after pleading guilty to statutory rape and skipping the country while awaiting sentencing.

Sadly, there’s nothing unusual in itself about a child rapist getting away with his crimes – the difference here is that the media deems the situation worthy of coverage.

Child rapists who recently skipped free that weren’t breaking news:

Last week in Barbados, a man charged with the rape of a 9 year-old girl went free after ten years with no trial.

Also last week, a man charged with sexual offenses against a 13 yr old girl in Trinidad & Tobago was ordered to stay away from her. Not go to jail, just stay away.

A pedophile priest who has allegations of serial child rape in four countries, including the United States, has yet to face charges for any of them. He’s living in Stockton, CA, working as priest, and living next to a children’s skating park.

So no, we won’t be discussing these or the hundreds more children denied justice, for varying reasons, this news cycle. It’s all Rosemary’s Baby and “but 13 is old enough to consent to sex with a famous movie director.”

The Polanski case is to rape apologists as standing water is to mosquitos. (Here’s a big flyswatter, courtesy Amanda Hess, with a point by point refutation of the most common Polanski defenses.) News outlets and blogs feel the need to gin up page views by debating the definition of rape, or it’s status as a crime in certain situations, or the believability of survivors, or whether extraordinary talent – whether it be in the arts or sports – negates one’s status as a rapist. In almost all cases, these conversations do nothing but prop up and propagate a rape culture – and those who initiate them in the mainstream media and on the internet should be held accountable for doing so. If you see this type of behavior, post it in the comments, tweet about it, write a letter to the station – one injustice should not breed hundreds more.

When Feminists Attack Other Feminists for Page Views

Yesterday, Slate’s Emily Gould dropped this post accusing Jezebel of playing on women’s insecurities to pimp them out to advertisers and masking said tactic in the guise of feminism. If the post itself weren’t a mess of contradictions and hypocrisy, the fact that she used the oldest trick in the online feminist playbook – trashing another feminist or feminist blog to ostensibly protect the movement but really just trying to gin up inner circle controversy to get more hits on Google – would be enough to make many of us call bullshit.

But the post is a bizarre sort of mess, built primarily on the claim that Jezebel writer Irin Carmon’s fairly nuanced and well reported look at gender discrimination in the writing and on-air department of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show is not, in fact, feminist journalism at all. According to Gould, Carmon’s post, especially her query as to whether Olivia Munn got her new Daily Show gig less because of her comic chops and more because of her large male fan base, is part of a regular pattern by the feminist blogs to incite “what the writers claim is righteously indignant rage but which is actually just petty jealousy, cleverly marketed as feminism.”

Wait a minute. Since when is it not feminist to ask why a show has only had two consistent on-air female correspondents in seven years and can’t seem to keep women on the writing staff? Aren’t we still for gender equality in the workplace? Since when is it not responsible journalism to track down people who’ve worked inside what’s been repeatedly reported as a “boy’s club” and ask them if, in fact, the reports are true? And since when is it not ok to ask why certain women with certain qualities get hired while others do not and why women are held to a different standard than men in applying for the same job? If feminism isn’t about rooting out and exposing the nitty gritty of sexism, I’m confused about what we’ve been doing all this time.

No matter, though, because attacking Carmon’s post is just a jumping off point to get Gould to her main argument: feminist blogs, en masse but especially, especially Jezebel, are guilty of applying a faux-feminist bent to the glossy magazines’ tactic of playing on women’s insecurities to get high traffic and, therefore, advertisers. The insecurity in the Daily Show piece was about Olivia Munn as an example of what feminist women evidently fear most, a woman who “dares to seem to want to sexually attract men” – an offensive, contradictory assertion based at once on tired stereotypes of feminists as scared of or opposed to sex and women as catfighting bitches so threatened by one another as sexual rivals they fail to focus on the important things.

Yet even posts on what most would agree are important things, like body image and beauty standards, are suspect in Gould’s eyes. There is probably a bit of truth here: all feminist bloggers know these topics are sure to stir up the commenters and most post something at some point or another that simply bemoans the existence of beauty standards and the stars who meet them without saying much about how to change those standards or mitigate their impact on women.

Yet, it’s possible these particular posts get lots of page views and comment action because banging up against beauty ideals is a very tangible experience of sexism that most women face every single day in varying forms. The impulse to read and talk about this experience online is less a manifestation of insecurities than a desire to have the experience of oppression validated by a sympathetic sisterhood. That isn’t about advertising but about the very necessity of feminist community – we know we’re not crazy or alone because our sisters feel the same way and together maybe we can do something about it.

Which is exactly why Gould’s solution to this supposedly disastrous problem with the feminist blogosphere is so bizarre (emphasis mine):

It’s certainly important to have honest, open conversations about the issues that reliably rake in comments and page views—rape, underage sexuality, and the cruel tyranny of the impossible beauty standards promoted by most advertisers and magazines (except the ones canny enough to use gently lit, slightly rounder, older, or more ethnic examples of “true beauty”). But it may just be that it’s not possible to have these conversations online.

Congratulations, Ms. Gould. You’ve managed to suggest putting yourself out of a job while also uttering one of the most absurd, out of touch sentences on the internet as of late – and I assure you, that’s not an overstatement for page views.

For many in my generation, the internet feminist community serves the same purpose as consciousness raising groups of the 1970’s. Feminist (and womanist, gender justice, mujerista and women’s liberationist and the many subsets of these) blogs are where we get angry over shared grievances, organize against said inequalities, and build and strengthen our feminist community. Disagreements that break out in the comment threads over everything from what’s offensive and what can be reclaimed to the very meaning of the term ‘feminism’ serve the same purpose as heated debates in women’s studies classes: to sharpen our critique and analysis and build on the shared knowledge and ideology of varying expressions of varying feminisms. The difference is that, while the playing field is nowhere near as equal as it should and must be, the participants in the conversation don’t have to pony up $30,000 a year or even leave their apartments to join in.

This unique opportunity to build a movement in such a space is why the most disturbing aspect of Gould’s piece is how she seems to see herself – and the feminist bloggers who write for outlets large enough to concern herself with bashing – as the arbitrators of what’s “feminist” and important and commenters and writers on smaller sites as mere puppets to be led around at will. Not only does this adherence to hierarchy reek of hypocrisy from those purportedly trying to abolish it’s twin brother, patriarchy, it excises those most in need of community and support from the conversation. Since many, though certainly not all, of the women considered online feminist celebs are white and educated and often heterosexual and living in the big cities, it’s not hard to see exactly which voices are being marginalized in their dismissal as part of the big group of lemmings.

If you think the existing posts on body image are doing little more than making women feel worse, a point that can definitely be made, take a page from the fat acceptance blogs and ask readers to submit pictures of what they consider beautiful or be a little bit vulnerable and talk about a personal experience with body hatred and what helped you out. It’s obvious young women need and want to talk about it, so why not be a part of the solution?

I, for one, would take a thousand of these posts over one more from a well positioned feminist deciding for all of us that attacking another well positioned woman or blog is the most important feminist issue of the day.

Obama, the first female president?

Someone is wrong on the internet!

Cartoon via XKCD

You may have read this terrible op-ed by Kathleen Parker, a Washington Post opinion columnist, published a couple of days ago. It was burning up my Twitter feed all day. In it, Kathleen Parker argues that Barack Obama is our first female president. Yes, that is what she said. And she proceeds to make a terrible case that can be summed up as such: Obama is a terrible president because he is not manly enough. He is acting like a woman, and losing political points because of it.

I was annoyed enough that I couldn’t even formulate a coherent response for two days. Fortunately, some bloggers I know and love, such as Rachel Sklar and Mary C. Curtis, did a pretty good job of vocalizing why this column was so disgusting.

Now, I will try to add something of my own.

Parker’s case for Obama being “female” is as follows: he has a testosterone shortage, he “displays many tropes of femaleness,” and that he is like all women, who “tend to be coalition builders rather than mavericks (with the occasional rogue exception). While men seek ways to measure themselves against others, for reasons requiring no elaboration, women form circles and talk it out.” She also adds that Obama is “is a chatterbox who makes Alan Alda look like Genghis Khan,” and that his speech on the oil spill “featured 13 percent passive-voice constructions.”

I think the reason I didn’t write about this before was just because I didn’t know where to start. I mean: there are so many problems! Kathleen Parker would say that this is because I am a female who is passive and meek and likes to “talk it out” rather than issue a straight-up takedown of someone. So now I will try to list just all the big glaring things she is WRONG about:

1) The overarching message that being a president is a role reserved only for men

2) The notion that there are a strict set of traits that are inherently female and inherently male

3) The idea that stepping out of traditional gender roles always has negative consequences

4) That Kathleen Parker is given a platform from which to broadcast her opinions, something few people are given, and she chooses to use it perpetuating 1950s-style gender stereotypes that we should have done away with by 2010

5) The minor aside that this is a poorly written piece filled with bad metaphors, hollow statements, very little research, broad generalizations, and almost no facts.

7) Her admission of the fact that, yes, women are often faced with sexism when running for political office, and her attitude that women should just man up if they want to make it in politics. Perhaps the only decent sentence in this entire piece is as follows:

Women, inarguably, still are punished for failing to adhere to gender norms by acting “too masculine” or “not feminine enough.”

But Parker then proceeds to ruin it by talking about how the only way to be a good politician is to be more “masculine.”

What mystifies me is that presumably serious publications such as the Washington Post give people like Kathleen Parker a platform from which to voice this kind of terrible crap, and then PEOPLE BELIEVE THEM. I have already seen plenty of white dudes read this and chuckle and scratch their heads as if actually considering it seriously. It is because of stuff like this that women continue to face struggles in being elected to office: at every possible opportunity, people like Kathleen Parker question whether women can make effective political leaders and posit that political leadership requires inherently “masculine” traits. She makes broad generalizations about how all women act, and then claims that these “feminine” traits are negative and are not suited for politics. Those damn females! They talk so much and they use passive voice constructions! Clearly this is why they cannot be president!

As an aside, Parker was recently offered a gig co-hosting a new CNN show with none other than the disgraced criminal and former governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer. This is where I shake my head and wonder what is going on with our media.

How men and women pitch stories

The Awl ran a piece today about inquiries they get for submission, noting the difference between emails they receive from men and from women:

The emails from men are pretty direct. The emails from women are often kind of… apologetic!

Inquiry letter from a man:

“Do you take pitches? Should I just write something and send it? Do I have to tickle the balls? I want to write for the awl, dammit.”

Inquiry letter from a woman:

“As an long-time admirer of your site (and non-too-frequent registered commenter), I’ve been too shy to pitch as I’ve never felt like my work measured up to your fine standards.”

Inquiry letter from a man:

“Can you offer a word of advice regarding how submissions work, desired timetables, what you like the pitches to look like, and so forth?”

Inquiry letter from a woman:

“I’m sure I’m going about this all wrong, but I couldn’t find any sort of submission area on the site. What I’m wondering is, how does one go about becoming a contributor to The Awl?”

Reading the differences between these pitches, they sound almost as if they’ve been exaggerated for effect – but I’ve already heard a few editors echo that this looks exactly pitches they receive. A friend of mine was talking about this last week and noted that women often start pitching to less prestigious publications thinking that they can’t aim for the top, while men often shoot for top publications first and then work their way down if they don’t get their first pitch accepted.

As a freelance writer, I do my fair share of pitching to various editors. Pitching is easily my least favorite part of the process – you want to get every single thing right and then you imagine how the editor will react to it and then fine-tune it again, before you finally send and hope they don’t reject the idea that you’re so excited about. I’d like to say I don’t fall into the trap of self-conscious, apologetic, overly cautious pitches, but I have definitely done it. And I’ve seen some of my female writer friends do it as well. Not that there’s anything wrong with politeness, but part of getting published is about how well you can sell yourself and your story to editors, right? So why the self-deprecation?

And this contributes to an overall larger problem for women in the media. Women are already less likely to pitch stories, and according to the Op-Ed Project, men make up 80% or more of newspaper op-ed pages; 84% of Sunday talk show guests; 85% of Hollywood producers; 85% of bestselling authors on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list; and 83% of Congress.

There are some terrific groups dedicated to combating this problem – such as The Op Ed Project, the Women’s Media Center, Women, Action & The Media, and others; but despite the discussion around this issue it sometimes still seems like there’s still a lot of room for improvement. For me, reading the pitches highlighted by The Awl and noting the staggering difference in their tone and their ask was a big wakeup call – are women writers doing enough to promote themselves and their work? And are we doing our part to help other women journalists get published as well?

Team Weigel.

Washington Post journalist Dave Weigel resigned today, after Fishbowl DC and Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller published a series of comments that they deemed unprofessional, partisan and inappropriate, all of which Weigel made on a private listserve.

Now, we all know that supposedly “private” lists often aren’t. So what did Weigel say that was so terrible? [Warning: Racist, sexist, homophobic and ableist language ahead!] Was it something like, “Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?” or “Look, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it.” or “They’re 12 percent of the population. Who the hell cares?” or “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back”?

No, those were all Rush Limbaugh, who Weigel criticized on the list.

Did he refer to gays as “the pederast proletariat”? After a Catholic priest criticized anti-Semitism did he respond with “If U.S. Jewry takes the clucking appeasement of the Catholic cardinalate as indicative of our submission, it is mistaken. When Cardinal O’Connor of New York seeks to soothe the always irate Elie Wiesel by reassuring him ‘there are many Catholics who are anti-Semitic’…he speaks for himself. Be not afraid, Your Eminence; just step aside, there are bishops and priests ready to assume the role of defender of the faith”? Did he say that women are not equipped by nature to succeed in the competitive world of Western capitalism? Did he demonize illegal immigrants?

No, that was Pat Buchanan, who Weigel also criticized on the list.

So what did Dave Weigel do on this private listserve that was so terrible? He made an (admittedly tasteless) joke about Rush Limbaugh’s heart failing. He wrote, about covering the Tea Party, “Honestly, it’s been tough to find fresh angles sometimes–how many times can I report that these [tea party] activists are joyfully signing up with the agenda of discredited right-winger X and discredited right-wing group Y?” He said that the motives behind some Tea Partiers and conservatives were racist and premised on maintaining white privilege. He pointed out that “There’s also the fact that neither the pundits, nor possibly the Republicans, will be punished for their crazy outbursts of racism. Newt Gingrich is an amoral blowhard who resigned in disgrace, and Pat Buchanan is an anti-Semite who was drummed out of the movement by William F. Buckley. Both are now polluting my inbox and TV with their bellowing and minority-bashing. They’re never going to go away or be deprived of their soapboxes.” He said about conservative blow-hard Matt Drudge that “It’s really a disgrace that an amoral shut-in like Drudge maintains the influence he does on the news cycle while gay-baiting, lying, and flubbing facts to this degree.” He pointed out that the mainstream media suffers from “this need to give equal/extra time to ‘real American’ views, no matter how fucking moronic, which just so happen to be the views of the conglomerates that run the media and/or buy up ads.” He said Glenn Beck was racist. He was satisfied and laughing when a right-wing operative who made a career of harassment, intimidation and law-breaking was finally caught breaking into Senator Mary Landrieu’s office. He used the term “ratfuck.”

Someone fetch Republicans the smelling salts.

Now, look. I’m not going to defend all of the language used. I’m not going to defend the sentiments behind all of it — words like “moron” are problematic for reasons we’ve discussed multiple times on this blog, and I’m also not a big fan of hoping that someone dies, no matter how terrible they are. The listserve was specifically created for off-the-record conversations among journalists, and while it’s particularly shitty and unethical that someone leaked these emails, it’s also the reality that things you write online are rarely entirely private. I also understand that Weigel was covering conservatives, and so the argument is that he clearly holds some animus towards them and therefore should be relieved of his duties.

But, all of that said: Why is this a scandal or an issue, exactly? Sure, a lot of what Weigel said isn’t nice. At least some of it is stuff that, had it been left in a comment at Feministe, we would have called out for the language/hoping-people-die stuff. But that’s not what most people are taking issue with here. Rather, the problem seems to be that Weigel had the nerve to use the word “racist” to describe someone who tells a caller he assumes to be black to “take the bone out of your nose and call me back.” The problem seems to be that he had the nerve to use the word “racist” to describe someone like Glenn Beck, who relies on racist dog-whistles to frighten his audience into thinking that President Obama is a “thug” who hates “white culture.” The problem seems to be that he pointed out the fact that the media hones in on right-wing extremists and gives them airtime, because advertisers have an interest in certain positions and so they pony up for O’Reilly and Beck.

What Weigel was doing over that private list was criticizing mainstream media and their presentation of politics. He wasn’t forming some nefarious plot to use his Washington Post column to sneak in a liberal agenda. He wasn’t launching racist attacks on his opponents. Instead, he was calling the right out on their racism, sexism and anti-Semitism. He was calling the mainstream media out on their over-reliance on extreme views to fit the narratives that sell ads. He was questioning the loudest voices, and challenging, even in a private forum, powerful organizations.

He had opinions. Newspaper columnists who write about politics tend to have those.

I mean, Tucker Carlson was one of the people who published Weigel’s emails. TUCKER CARLSON. Not exactly an emblem of journalistic ethics, talent, fairness or objectivity. A dick who is hurting America, if you will. That’s the guy who is pulling the Journalistic Integrity card here? And we’re taking it seriously?

I don’t know Dave Weigel personally. I was not on JournoList. I follow Dave on Twitter, and that’s about the extent of my knowledge of him as a person. But I read his writing — and while I’m a lot more left-leaning than he is (despite all of this coverage, he comes across as a moderate, socially liberal libertarian), I’ve always found him to be fair, to engage in debate in good faith, and to lack the kind of dogmatism that often accompanies the work that political writers do. I don’t always agree with him, but he seems like one of the good ones. He seems like he takes his journalistic obligations seriously. He seems like he treats his ideological opponents fairly (a view that is bolstered, I think, by the numbers of right-of-center writers coming to his defense today). It strikes me as fundamentally unfair that the JournoList comments, which are hardly beyond the pale, led to his resignation. It strikes me as frighteningly poisonous to an open and engaged press to shut out Dave Weigel for (privately even!) calling out racism from white people, while people like Glenn Beck can run around disseminating enormous amounts of misinformation, calling Hillary Clinton a “stereotypical bitch,” promoting racist and anti-Semitic literature and and calling the President a racist mostly because the President is black.

Journalists have opinions. They will have opinions about their beats. Is it a problem to have a super-dogmatic partisan covering certain topics? Sure. But Weigel is a left-ish libertarian. His comments were about specific (and specifically horrific) right-wing commentators, and particularly problematic media practices. For once in my life I actually agree with Ross Douthat, who writes:

The more important point is that no journalistic standard was violated by firing off intemperate e-mails to what’s supposed to be a private e-mail list. Maybe Weigel should have known better than to trust the people on JournoList, and I can certainly understand why once the e-mails were leaked, his ability to cover the conservative movement would be compromised, and a parting of the ways with The Post might seem necessary. But if hitting “send” on pungent e-mails that you assume will be kept private is a breach of journalistic ethics, then there isn’t an ethical journalist in the English-speaking world.

Dave Weigel is a very talented journalist. I have no doubt that he’ll go on to do great things, and that this will hardly be a career-ender. But it’s shameful of the Washington Post, and it’s a shameful commentary on the state of American media.

Good luck, Dave. Don’t let the ratfuckers get you down.

Not a Fish, Not Yet A Human

So one time, Chloe at Feministing posted about Disney’s The Little Mermaid, calling it “a feminist’s worst nightmare,” because it’s literally the story of a woman who gives up her voice to get a man, which: sort of true, but also no, because in a universe where you can VERY EASILY read the moral of Beauty and the Beast as being “if you love your abusive boyfriend enough, he will change for you,” The Little Mermaid is second-worst, at best.

Then Feministe’s own Sady posted about this at her now-defunct Tumblr, but her contribution to the conversation is still up at mine; the two points she made most salient to this post were 1) Ariel’s giving up her voice is clearly framed by the movie as a bad thing, as her voice is her most desirable characteristic, the thing Eric fell in love with to begin with, the thing Ursula the sea witch uses to lure him away, and the thing she needs to regain before they can finally be together; and 2) that Ariel always wanted to go to the shore and Eric was more than anything a catalyst for that transition. A catalyst in the shape of a dude, yes, but a thing Sady and I, apparently, along with people I have met and possibly other people, also, have in common is that sometimes things just happen like that. Are dude-catalysts overrepresented in our stories, reinforcing the notion that for a girl, a dude is the bestest catalyst of them all? Yes. But it is, in fact, a story that sometimes plays out that way in the real world.

Possibly it mostly plays out in the world of the very young, which led me to the babbling over there that eventually in my head became what will hopefully be less babbling-y over here (…off to a GREAT START, I am), which is that in my reading, The Little Mermaid is fundamentally a story of childhood and adolescence.

Now: I am not interested, here, in trying to reclaim The Little Mermaid as a feminist classic, because I… am never interested, really, in trying to stamp something definitively with Feminist or Not Feminist. There are fucked-up things going on in every Disney movie ever, and The Little Mermaid is no exception. There is (as Chloe points to) the good-sweet-young-pretty-girl vs. evil-vicious-old-ugly-woman dichotomy, played out pretty blatantly, which I can recognize as fucked up even if I also delight in Ursula’s gleefully malicious machinations and that marvelous cackle. There’s Sebastian the helper crab’s accent, which to most people I’ve met reads most closely to Jamaican and is at the least pretty clearly supposed to be Of The Exotic Hot Lands Of The Caribbean, which is… gross, and kiiiinda racist. There’s the fact that Eric, who frankly has the personality of a Ken doll, saves Ariel from her distress at the end in a disappointingly mundane way (he rams a ship into Ursula. really? REALLY? She’s become this like giant ball of evil magic fury and all it takes is a little poke with some wood? …oh, I get it now). All of these things are worth discussion; I have discussed them myself in various situations in the past!

But right now, I want to focus on The Little Mermaid as a – still poignant to me – story of the painful liminal zone between childhood an adulthood.

Ariel is, to my knowledge, the only Disney heroine for whom we are ever given an explicit age; as she tells her father, defiantly, in one of the most accurate representations of teenager-parent quarreling I have ever seen, “I’m sixteen years old, I’m not a child!” He responds with the classically parental, “Don’t you take that tone of voice with me,” followed by “As long as you live under my ocean, you obey my rules.” which, FULL DISCLOSURE: that line is, by a wiiiide margin, the most frequently quoted line in my house as I was growing up, which QUITE POSSIBLY colors my own relationship to the movie, because: my teenage self was shut down many a time with it. Like, minimum once a month.

My response to hearing it from my mother was, usually, pretty much along the lines of Ariel’s: pout angrily and storm off in a huff to my ~~cool undersea cave~~ room to cry on my ~~rock~~ bed and complain to my ~~charming animal companions~~ friends about how unfair everything was, and also how “I just don’t see things the way [s]he does.” Then she sings one of the best things ever written about being a young girl:

Today, in confusing media messages!

NY Daily News: Being obese can lead to less sex – and poorer sexual health: study

Sociological Images: roundup of pro-anorexia t-shirts.

(That NY Daily News study raised a whole boatload of issues, like how obese women have a harder time finding partners but obese men don’t, which, you know, hello double standards. Still though, can we talk about how, much like how women are presented with a virgin/whore definition of their sexuality, our society has so skewed what our weight/bodies should look like that we’re left with this really weird dichotomy of obese vs anorexic? Like, show a little cellulite on the thighs and all of the sudden you’re on the cover of US Weekly with a big red circle around your jiggly parts. Start a new diet or exercise routine? You’re on the cover again, only with SCARY SKINNY written in big red letters across your hip bones. Not that real life is like an actual issue US Weekly or anything but I get so sick of this obsession with weight that we can all fall into, especially when you know in 20/30/40/50 years you’re going look at pictures of yourself now and be like “Damn I looked so good! What was I worried about? Why was I not naked all of the time!?”)

(Also, to be clear, I’ve got no hate for the NY Daily News. My first journalism teacher was also an editor there. But you can’t deny they’ve been providing a wealth of material lately.)

Bikinis and Bridesmaids and Blubber, Oh My!

As a member of the Order of Fat Curmudgeonly Feminist Hermits, there are few months that I view with more trepidation than June. Not only am I deluged with invitations to social events I dread attending, but I’m also deeply immersed in the advertising that surrounds such social events.

I am referring, of course, to pool parties and weddings.

You’d think that I’d be fans of both of these events because they involve many of my favourite things, like water, free food, dancing, and opportunities to observe drunk people in their natural habitat. However, there’s a big elephant in the room at these events. The elephant in the room being, naturally, the lack of elephants in the room; if you plan on attending a pool party or being the guest of honour at a wedding, you had better be as svelte as possible.

Expect lots of extroverted, neurotic babies coming soon.

Who read NY Daily News this weekend? Did you see that article? One called “Extroverted men, neurotic women are the most fertile combination: study“?

If you’re anything like me (Jewish, New Yorker, and yes, neurotic) you glanced at this and were like “Really? Then how am I not pregnant already?”

But then you actually *read* the article instead of just skimming the headline, and realized the following:

First of all, the study took place in Senegal, where, as the Daily News points out, “residents practice polygamy and typically don’t believe in birth control [can we can a reliable confirmation?].” Still, the Daily News goes on to extrapolate:

“But whether in Senegal or America, extroverted men tend to make more money and presumably have more sex. And more frequent sex leads to more babies.”

And

“So why do neurotic women make more babies? They tend to have “attachment anxiety” and so are very motivated to have sex with their husbands, according to [study author Prof. Virpi Lummaa of Sheffield University in the U.K.].”

Which, wait, what? As for the money thing, I have dated a fair number of extroverted men. Most of them were broke. Their extroverted personalities may have been what attracted me to them in the first place, but it was that and not, you know, their earning potential that drew me in.

And as a slightly neurotic woman myself, I resent the idea that “attachment anxiety” would be driving me to have more sex. Is it the neurosis or my gender that’s preventing me from having sex because, let’s say, I want to, and not because I am anxious? You weigh in!

(I’m not even go down the road of how, depending on your neurosis, you could actually be *less* inclined to have sex, or at least unprotected sex, for health concerns/germs… That’s a whole other topic.)

Questions I would have liked to know the answers to (Which to my knowledge the study didn’t answer, but look for yourself to be sure!): Are extroverted men and/or neurotic women actually using birth control less often? Or are they just more fertile? Are they really having more sex? Or just more babies? And what does this mean for me exactly — be extra careful if I date someone with a boisterous personality? Are the results different for neurotic men and extroverted women? Also how, exactly, did they define neurotic?

I guess in the end, the lesson is this: don’t depend on the New York Daily News for reliable medical information, and if you don’t want to get pregnant, use birth control. But you knew that already.

Photo is mine, of my adorable nephew. Yes, this post may have been an elaborate excuse to post a photo of him. What?