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

Tag: Capitalism & Consumption

dangerous thinking

Okay, so I already got cracking with the sermonizing.  I had a lot of criticism in that post, and expressed a lot of doubt about our movements as they currently stand.  So what do I expect?  What am I asking for, other than hey, y’all, let’s all have feelings together, won’t that be swell, what that is of substance?  If I’m so sure things aren’t working, what’s my better suggestion?  How is vulnerability really going to change our movements and our world, other than to get us talking about all of our aches and pains?

I plan on being infuriating, and answering the question with a question.  No:  an exercise.  I think it’s time we go to class for a minute.  For this, I turn, as I often do, to one of the best teachers I will ever know for inspiration.  Two years ago, Alexis Pauline Gumbs published a piece called Wishful Thinking, one which I only let myself near every now and then because the first time I heard her read it I was in tears, and it is easy to get me there with her work ever since.  With her piece, she asks one of the hardest, scariest, most vulnerable questions of all:

Oh, come on, like I’m just going to say it.  It’s under the cut.  But I’ll tell you one thing in advance:  I think if feminism is an anti-sexism movement, it has already failed.

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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!

The East, the West and Sex: Author Richard Bernstein responds

Apparently Richard Bernstein read my non-review of his book and didn’t find it particularly flattering. You can read his comment here. He’s right that I haven’t read the book, and did draw most of my conclusions from various reviews (the Slate review specifically), and from my own experiences with men who have made similar arguments. I still don’t plan on reading the book, but I’ll direct you to a very good review by someone who has and leave it at that.

I’m being taken over by the fear

 

“I’ll take my clothes off and it will be shameless/ cos everyone knows that’s how you become famous.”

 Taking a side step away from specifically trans posts (cos y’all tiring me out already, and I have another week to go here), I want to talk about fear.  Recently Mark K-Punk had this to say about Lily Allen’s “The Fear.”

“All Allen can do is point to her own inertia and complicity but awareness can only reinforce the very condition she is talking about [. . .]  The verses are unsure whether they want to be satire or not, unsure whether they want to mock consumer-nihilism or celebrate it , unsure because – after all – what’s the alternative, where can all this mocked from? [. . .]  Celebrity culture and its critique are coterminous; the jeremiads about its superficiality as cliched and empty as the culture itself, both appearing on the same pages of LondonLite. Only the negative capability of the choruses, only the admission of The Fear, breaks out of this circuit.”

What gets left out of this perceptive critique is precisely how sexed this is, how fear is produced as an affect on/in/through female bodies.  What lies behind so much of our self-policing is fear. 

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Leaving Us Behind

What We Leave Behind by Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay
(Seven Stories Press)

Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis by Vandana Shiva
(South End Press)

Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay’s What We Leave Behind begins with a story about shit. It sounds snarky and unfair when I describe it that way, but that’s because shit occupies a rather maligned place in Western culture; the story itself is quite lovely. One of the authors (they intentionally avoid saying who writes which chapter, and although it’s often easy to tell, I’ll refrain from naming them individually), reluctant to “flush all those nutrients down the toilet,” goes outside of his house in the woods to contribute to the food chain by depositing his shit on the soil. If waste is something that’s no longer usable by anyone or anything, he explains, then the concept of “waste” doesn’t exist in nature, and sure enough, he soon sees slugs and bacteria breaking the piles down and plants growing in their places. However, he notices that when he’s prescribed antibiotics – which pass through a human’s system more or less intact – his poop starts to kill plants and soil life. “The soil in the two main spots where I relieved myself became bare,” he says. “[They] remained bare for the next two years.”

That casually terrifying observation sets the tone for the rest of the book. True to the title, What We Leave Behind is an exploration of what industrial civilization’s various endeavors – disposable products, plastics, mining, medicine, embalming and burial practices – leave behind, and the effects of capitalist priorities, “green” or otherwise, on the environment. Part I outlines each major form of pollution, from solid waste products to toxic gases, and for the most part, it’s as engrossing as it is important. The facts Jensen and McBay present should horrify you. The “Eastern Garbage Patch,” a floating island of garbage nearly the size of Africa, is only one of six six patches that cover 40% of the world’s oceans. The breast milk of women living across the Arctic, about as far from industrial civilization as one can get, contains levels of toxic chemicals that are “literally off the charts” because of wind and ocean currents. If facts like these don’t spur readers into action, then nothing will.

However.

Despite its many merits, this book is riddled with sexism and racism, empty and often bizarre rhetoric, and sheer White American Dude ego.

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Marrying for Money

There’s apparently a new book coming out called Smart Girls Marry Money: How Women Have Been Duped Into the Romantic Dream—And How They Are Paying For It, by Elizabeth Ford and Daniela Drake. The reviews actually make the book sound slightly less awful than the title, and it seems to have some vaguely feminist undertones:

In June, the prime month for weddings, it may seem heretical to suggest that romantic love is not the only requirement for a successful marriage. But that’s what the authors of a provocative new book advocate. In Smart Girls Marry Money,Elizabeth Ford, a news producer, and Daniela Drake, a physician, argue that despite the gains women have made in the last few decades, we still earn considerably less than men (especially if we are mothers). A husband’s paycheck is still critical. “We gals just haven’t come far enough or fast enough,” they say. “We know it’s important to take the long view of things, but as we’ve heard said, in the long view, we’ll all be dead.”

Then there’s divorce. Ford and Drake say that since women suffer economically much more than men when they get divorced, snagging a good provider is ultimately critical to an equitable settlement. And if current statistics hold, half of new couples are likely to eventually split up. Given that depressing reality, Ford and Drake say that a husband’s earning power is a more important indicator of a woman’s future happiness than his cute smile. “If the marriage crashes,” they write, “it’s the women who are exposed to an extremely high risk of poverty.” They urge their readers to look for a Mr. Right “who just happens to be Mr. Rich.”

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Because Regular Chocolate Bars Are Way Too Masculine

I don’t even know what to do with this one.

Fling is a new chocolate bar that’s aimed at women. You can tell, because the packaging is pink.  Also because the damn thing is called “fling,” indicating that there’s something thrilling and “naughty” about the chocolate bar — and no one considers it “naughty” when a dude eats a Snickers.  But a Fling only a little naughty — it just has 85 calories! (Which is also how you know it’s for women!)  That’s why they didn’t call it Affair.

Oh, and the marketing rather overtly references female masturbation, thus again indicating that it’s totally for ladies:

Wrapped in a shiny pink and sliver package, this delicate “chocolate finger” is intended for women. The word “finger” is an industry term for a long, slim confection, Mars spokesman Ryan Bowling says, but with ads that invite you to “Pleasure yourself” in pink lettering, consumers might come to other conclusions.

The tag line on the package is “Naughty, but not that naughty.” A TV spot starts with what looks like strangers having sex in a store dressing room. Currently the candy bar can be bought only California and online, but if all goes well, Mars is hoping women will be having Flings all across the country.

Consider my eyebrow officially and disapprovingly raised.

So: eating chocolate is bad because it makes you fat, and no woman wants to be fat, which is why she should get a Fling because it won’t make you fat, and because you know that for women, not eating chocolate is totally not an option.  Also, women like pink, which we already knew.  That’s why you have to make everything for them pink, so they’ll know when they’re supposed to buy something!  And lastly, women enjoy, um, “pleasuring themselves” with “fingers,” which isn’t exactly news but certainly interesting marketing.  And not at all patronizing!

Why don’t think just change the slogan to “skinny chicks masturbate with low-fat chocolate” and get it over with?  It might even add a bit of subtlety.

h/t mk Eagle

ETA: Sit down for this one: these things also sparkle thanks to some kind of colored, FDA approved glitter.  In the fucking chocolate bar.  Dear god help us all. (Thanks to Bunny Mazonas in the comments.)

Asher Roth, Hip Hop, and Rockism, Or Why Doesn’t My Kid Like Hip Hop?

Because Latoya and Jill polluted my wasting brain by posting about this last week, let’s go ahead and beat this Asher Roth topic into the ground.

And hell, why not? ASHER ROTH IS TEH SUXXOR. ASHER ROTH IS A ROBERT HERRICK REINCARNATE.

First off, Jay “Made Of Win” Smooth did a great interview with Dan Charnas on whiteness and hip hop discussing how Asher Roth presents himself as separate from hip hop culture (and black people) as a whole, how he articulates this by emphasizing his whiteness, and what it means in this context to market his whiteness as a novelty. One of the more telling things is how Roth colors conspicuous consumption as a “black thing” or a “black rapper thing” as though materialism and excess and bloat isn’t a part of the music world in general, or of status-seeking American culture at large. Another one of the more interesting facets of this whole Asher Roth deal is how Roth presents himself as a suburban alternative to all this oogy urban ghetto rap that white kids supposedly can’t relate to (but buy a whole lot of, considering they “can’t relate” to it), completely missing that gangster rap is not the entire genre, that alternatives have always existed, and that suburban angst is a relatively common topic in hip hop. Which raises additional questions, like something Smooth says, about “what it means to be an alternative, and who is or isn’t seeking an alternative.”

Meanwhile, everyone is all, newsflash: black people live in the suburbs. A lot of black rappers come from the friggin’ suburbs.

I don’t know about this Asher Roth kid. He lacks the Big Picture. Maybe his ignorance is his persona. You’d almost think he’s trolling his own industry, except generally someone smart enough to market that kind of persona doesn’t say things like this.

But whatever. I’ve been reading about him, sampling his music, and I still don’t understand what his experience brings to the table. Still, one of the reasons I’m fascinated by the discussion is that I’m having these ongoing conversations with my nieces and nephews, and now my own son, about why they don’t like rap, and one of the reasons it confounds me is that their primary reason appears to be a general ambivalence toward a largely Black culture.

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