Thanks for the shoutout to young girls, A.O. Scott, and their dearth of role models in film. But the fact is that some of your evidence is a bit off. Disney movies of the 40s and 50s were not, in fact, chock-full of plucky heroines. As a historical point no Disney movie of the 40s had any female heroine at all. And in the 50s, we had Cinderella, who needed an army of mice to sew a dress, Alice, who starts off her journey through the rabbit hole as a devotee of frivolity, and Sleeping Beauty, whom I have never heard accused of being the principal agent of her own salvation, so to speak.
I suppose it doesn’t really matter – my favourite fictional role model as a child, Anne Shirley, grew up to marry Gilbert and have seven or eight children and basically, it seems, give up on any notion of writing that she may have had when younger. And I loved her anyway, and do still, and it turned out all right, I think
The only reason I point this out is not to nitpick and criticize fiction for not conforming perfectly to some political ideal – in which case there would be no real point in telling stories at all, because they would be less about narrative than theme, and you can convey theme more quickly and efficiently and, in any event, clearly, in an essay.
But I guess I also take offense to this idea that anyone should be rewarded for female characters that merely demonstrate some mere spark of life in them. Sure, it’s rare enough – and “adult” writers are just as guilty of this as those who target children – and that might make it seem deserving of praise. It’s just irritating that it’s so expected that women will be dimensional and one-sided that it isn’t even deserving of comment in most critical comment on movies or books or television.
Moreover, that’s not enough, and we all know it, to encourage young women to go out there and, to borrow Scott’s notion, realistically aspire to be President. Not that anyone’s saying the responsibility for this lies solely with the arts. Even so, I doubt anyone would deny that the arts are important, that as a friend once said, they aren’t drivers of all the tiny little conversations we have that actually, in a gradual, slowly building sort of way, actually change your life.
(You know, I didn’t really intend this to be a feminist blog… and yet that’s mostly what I seem to think about lately.)
So, below is a comment that I wrote on Jezebel tonight that I’m rather proud of. A friend of mine who reads this site (and the old Tumblr) has commented to me on the apparent tenacity of the feminist theme that tends to run through my writing here. As someone who genuinely feels that her entire being was changed by a law school feminist theory class, taken at a critical juncture in my life, I suppose that’s to be expected.
For some reason it sometimes scares people, this preoccupation of mine, but really, my feminism isn’t so much about the man-bashing as it is about the women-listening. I wish it were easier to explain that to people. I’ve been reading Jezebel since the beginning since, to some extent, the site’s raison d’etre is women-listening. It isn’t feminist precisely, but it has become, for better or for worse, a flashpoint for some hyper-articulate smart women to talk about stuff that, well, I guess I thought women didn’t talk about outside of fem theory classes.
Anyway, my opportunity to articulate my view tonight came from a young man who’s been commenting on Jezebel for a little while now. I’ll call him “Dude.” He appears to be, um, very interested in female sexuality, and enjoys proffering evidence from his own, ahem, life to articulate his views on the subject. Today he got into a little bit of hot water from the women on Jez who were getting sick of his contributions, particularly after one comment in which he described all of the various BDSM sexual practices his “fiancée” (hey, maybe she exists, but it’s the internet, I’m skeptical) allegedly enjoyed in graphic detail. Mayhem ensued. Late in the evening, after thinking about this, I came up with the following.
I think there’s a legitimate objection to [Dude]’s comments here that has nothing to do with seniority or prudishness or views on sexuality or whether his views are relevant to the thread at all, and it’s this:
One of the things I prize so much about Jez is that, for whatever reason, it feels like a safe space for women to talk about their experiences, sexually or otherwise. And yeah, I use that term advisedly, knowing that some people don’t think they should have to play nice all the time around here, and they’re right to some extent. But it seems to me that even a lot of the fighting and screaming ‘round here happens exactly because people view it as a safe space, where they can say what they actually think behind some scrim imposed by the internet and not knowing people and anonymous commenter handles.
My feminist self wants to say that it’s because Jez allows us to do old-fashioned consciousness-raising, but I don’t want to apply labels to it if they make people uncomfortable. But consciousness-raising, that old relic, just means that women sit around and say what they actually think and talk about it. Which is what we do around here. There’s a big value to doing stuff like that in a culture that constantly talks at you but not with you. And it’s not just an intellectual one – it’s a cultural one.
So yeah, as a consequence, lots of people feel pretty strongly that Jez ought to remain a sort of safe space for the kinds of conversations that are had around here. And, with all due respect, [Dude], for a guy to come into this thread and others and start opining on female sexuality is not only presumptuous, but it also threatens the safety of the space for some people. This has absolutely nothing to do with the validity or non-validity of your views on anything at all. It has to do with granting women the authority and the right to discuss these things as they see them without feeling like you need to control the discussion, which is frankly what I see you trying to do here. That’s what I think makes you “creepy” – that you feel some odd need to come in here and dominate the discussion. I think the objection to your terminology even ties into this – that stark language isn’t necessarily the kind that lots of women here would use to describe their own experience, and so it feels, as someone said, better targeted to a Maxim audience than this one.
That’s not to say that people with penises can’t or shouldn’t comment on Jez. (There are a number of ones who do, and in a way that does not lead to threads like this.) It is to say, however, that it would be nice, and they would certainly get attacked less for it, if they recognized that this community is one in which they are guests, and welcome ones, but guests nonetheless.
/soapbox
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: hrc, media, obama, things I know nothing about
This primary season I have mostly kept my mouth shut. The fact is, I’m terrible at political predictions. I have absolutely no idea how the population of any constituency (other than that occupying my head) thinks or reasons. And since the currency of primary seasons is to talk about “electability” and the ideal characteristics of a President and other concepts upon which I have no consequent ability to opine, I say very little.
And yet. Man (no pun intended), is all this ex post facto self-flagellation (or, alternately, self-denial) over sexism in the media annoying. It’s nice to know that someone is even hearing the argument, I guess, because it certainly didn’t seem that way before. (And where are media navel-gazers when we actually need them? Storing up details for a post-mortem, I guess.)
You don’t have to be a Hillary fan to have been offended by this or this or any one of these. You don’t even have to dislike Obama to point out that he has a much better card to play to call people out on idiot remarks. Call Lou Dobbs a racist, and he feels compelled to respond even in light of all the evidence against him. Call Chris Matthews sexist, and… umm… silence.
This isn’t really about having a higher trump card, of course – it’s about having the same one. Henrik Hertzberg, writing in the New Yorker, appears to think that the fact that there are more women in political office than blacks ought to serve as some kind of palliative – which, of course, misses the point entirely. The reason that sexist remarks about women are wrong has nothing to do with some sort of idiotic Oppression Olympics. (I borrow the term from an astute commenter on Jezebel.) wrong because they’re sexist, and because they perpetuate a particular image of women which, even if not totally fatal – because after all, we have, like, what, three whole governors, right? – is unquestionably damaging.
Yeah yeah, I know, we bitches are always so angry.
So, as you may know, I have a Tumblr, but am planning to retire it, for the following reasons:
1. My Tumblr looks like everybody else’s Tumblr. And it even has the same title as a different (and, ahem, better-read) Tumblr. There doesn’t appear to be a way to rectify that.
2. If I had to pick between words and images, I’d choose words every time. But Tumblr is more designed for visual media. My Tumblr thus not only looks derivative, it also looks, well, bad. Because I am, aesthetically speaking, kind of deaf.
3. I had a moral crisis over whether I was, in fact, participating in a medium that was bringing the North American attention span even lower than that required by television. It was a bit hysterical and dramatic of me. But that’s me!
4. I began to wonder if having a Tumblr wasn’t somehow misrepresentative of me, given that (a) I do not live in Brooklyn; (b) I do not derive any income from writing on the internet; and (c) neither of these things is likely to materialize in the near future. Oh, and (d) I own a camera, but only rarely take any photographs with it.
5. Despite the “follow” feature, I have great difficulty believing that anyone reads Tumblrs seriously. Not that anyone’s going to read this seriously. But you never know.
6. And the requisite reason: Julia Allison has a Tumblr. Don’t worry, I won’t link to it. And if you don’t know who she is or why that should be a problem, I invite you to check out the link.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: everyday, soho, things I know nothing about
That’s why it’s so quiet in Soho today – soccer! I just heard a whole bar’s worth of people scream “Noooooooo!” in unison.
