I was happy to hear that Obama has nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, but I find it difficult to believe that his announcement of his choice today, the day that the California Supreme Court issued their Prop 8 ruling, was a coincidence. Californians remember Obama’s tepid lack of endorsement for Prop 8 with bitterness, as it was so thin his position was used to encourage yes on 8 voters, and continues to be trotted out by homophobes, such as Miss California, as justification for their hateful views. I didn’t see Obama field any questions about Prop 8 today, and presidential media attention seemed focused distinctly on Sotomayor, and her great story of uplift, Obama and his own wonderful story polished once again in Sotomayor’s reflected glow. (Ah, how wonderfully just and democratic America is, if you work hard, and marry the oppoiste sex!). But then again, I did spend most of the day taking pictures of same-sex couples weeping over their marriage licenses and interfaith clregy being arrested for civil disobedience, so I may have missed the questions about why Obama is such a PAMF on gay rights.
A Pro-Gay Rights Minister Offers Married Couple Comfort
Interfaith Clergy Arrested at Prop 8 Protest
So I”l say it myself: I know you know better than to think that this is right, Barack Obama, and today I am ashamed that you are my president.
The return of leggings, asymmetrical haircuts, and the donning of the keffiyeh as fashion and not Palestinian solidarity—ah, the 1980s are back and show no signs of abating (at least on this side of the pond in London’s East End and Topshop). I won’t be caught dead revisiting my ’80s hairdo (a juicy jheri curl for the early 80s, if you must know), but 1980s music is the music of my youth and I refuse to forsake it.
But, then, forsaking is entirely different from revisiting some tunes, singing along, and then <<screeech of brake>> WTF?!
Herewith, a 1980s pre-feminist awareness trip down memory lane. Or more like a tiptoe down creepy Memory Alley.
Oingo Boingo, “Little Girls”
In all honesty, I’d never blocked out this song by Oingo Boingo. It’s (gross) meaning was clear and Danny Elfman’s nauseating leer skitters through my brain like a crab whenever I encounter someone with that certain…erm…pedo-vibe. I think Oingo Boingo was supposed to be punk, but their consistent presence on MTV would indicate that they were merely trying to provoke-for-profit.
Grown women dressed as schoolgirls had a history in Britain before Britney’s “Hit Me Baby One More Time.” “School Disco” is an unfortunate, persistent theme night for parties and bars.
Rick Springfield, “Don’t Talk to Strangers”
This one may seem like the ultimate betrayal to anyone who knew me as a teen when I inserted Rick’s last name into mine with some clever parentheses (“Spring(field)er”—postmodern at 13!) and had a football jersey printed with “Springfied” on the back in Rick’s favorite color (purple, duh).
However, the fatted calf must be slain. Upon reflection, most of Rick’s songs have a stalker edge to them, but “Don’t Talk to Strangers” wins hands down. The admonishment not to talk to strangers shifts from urgings to preserve one’s sexy ladyness for the ex-boyfriend mooching around the shadows to menacing invitations to bed en Francais. The stalker element is in full force in the video.
The end of the video’s police cars and flashing lights would seem to indicate that either a) Rick committed a crime against fashion with all those ring-pull zippers on his jumpsuit (!) or b) Stalker Rick killed Effette French Girlfriend Stealer. Whatever the case, while my teen self might’ve boasted that, “Rick so fine I creamed my jeans,” older feminist self says, “Teen self, your language is foul, you don’t even know what “creamed your jeans” means, and you’re pining for a reprobate.”
While we’re on stalker songs, and before I get overwhelmed with the urge to hear Synchronicity, The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” is surely a picking-through-your-garbage, steal-your-password-and-check-your-email ode to relationship dysfunction. And, yet, it gets played at weddings and included on many a mellow love songs station playlist.
My final ’80s ick also involves Sting. I’m pretty sure this was in his hot, rising star phase and not his competing with Bono for the crown of thorns self-righteousness bid. In the Dennis Potter television play, Brimstone & Treacle, Sting plays a young man who ingratiates himself with a couple whose daughter lies on the sofa, having been paralyzed in a hit-and-run accident. The parents, exhausted from caring for their invalid daughter, let this seemingly charming man into their lives and he soon rapes their paralyzed daughter. Ick. Double ick. The BBC banned the Potter TV version in 1976, but somehow the 1982 film with Sting made its way to Michigan on VHS.
Sting’s character, Martin, has got all kinds of sinister overtones and breaking of the fourth wall that lead the audience to believe that he’s the devil incarnate. Nonetheless, to my chagrin, I recall whole packs of us Michigan girls watching the film and oohing and ahhing over Sting’s “strong” performance and thespian creds. Did we just ignore the rape? Were were turned on by it? Disturbed by it? Diary excavation must ensue.
On the one hand, there’s a lot of be ashamed of about the 1980s, such as sartorial choices like legwarmers and Units. And, yes, there’re probably many more examples of music that was sexist, homophobic, and racist. But rather than being a misery guts about it I wanted to remind myself, when I question young sisters’ sanity for enjoying music that degrades them, that I know from whence they came. With any luck, they’ll find feminism or feminism will find them, and they’ll create their own beats to dance to.
Secondly, I am tired of the silent conversation we are having about race, class, gender and Michelle Obama. I’ve been traveling a good deal lately and have overheard more than my fair share of these conversations in cramped airplanes and somewhat less cramped airport bars. They go a little something like this: “…and how about that Michelle Obama. She is just so (a pause to search for the right word)…classy.”
Now, I’m a big Michelle Obama fan too. I love her style and her arms. But I don’t love how the the word “classy” is silently standing in for a a host of other words often used to describe the type of Black woman that Michelle Obama is not i.e. the term used with alarming frequency at the moment: ghetto. In short, Michelle Obama is not a “ghetto chick” (or any other equally derogatory term used to describe poor, Black women) and that’s why so many ladies (and men) –white and Black–love her.
It is the casual illustration of this hierarchy of Black femininity that put me into my momentary rage. Sykes is a comedian. Her jokes, like those of Stephen Colbert, who provided an expert performance at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner during the Bush Administration years, are open to criticism. But to say that she has no class is to critique her performance as a particular type of Black woman. To dismiss her in this way is to say that the loud, aggressive, (lesbian) Sykes is somehow less of a respectable woman than the reserved, resilient, and appropriately ladylike Michelle Obama. It is to say that Michelle Obama is “good” and Wanda Sykes is “ghetto.”
Ha! I found Farai Chideya. Okay, she wasn’t lost, but since wack-ass NPR cancelled the only show featuring black folks, the former host is doing her thing hither and yon. She was guest host for WYNC’s Takeaway and had an interesting discussion on books that people lie about reading.
Tolstoy’s War & Peace came up a lot. Why? Because it’s the thicketst book people can think of? Is the advent of the e-reader going to change the terms of the books we lie about reading if we don’t have a physical text as our prop?
More importantly to this blog: hit us up in the comments with the feminist book you’ve lied about reading. Go on, you naughty mix, fess up!
4everuppity: Is it a lie if everyone just assumes you’ve read it? Or if you can’t remember reading it, but swear you must have because you had to take qualifying exams on it? Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.
Donald Trump, typically unintentionally hilarious at a press conference this morning, announced that this is the 21st century now, and Prejean is free to show her boobs. How forward thinking of him.
Don’t be so prudish, people. Unless you are talking about gay sex. Then by all means, shrivel up into a small mean ball of hatred.
Prejean followed Trump, claiming that she was under fire for exercising her right to free speech.
Should we be surprised that she doesn’t know what free speech means? That it doesn’t mean that you can say whatever you want wherever you want with no consequences?
I guess they don’t teach with that level of nuance at the Orange County christian college she attends. Though she seems to be well prepared to attend Regent Law School.
If you haven’t seen Wanda Sykes at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner take a moment and check it out. The only disappointment: no riffs on Obama’s weak public stance on gay marriage.
I saw the Star Trek movie last night. Don’t worry–I’m not planning on disclosing any spoilers, unless you count the information that there are two women in a cast of about 20 central characters, and neither of them does anything even slightly beyond the bounds of gender-stereotyped behavior: in the high-tech future as imaged by Star Trek, girls are good at nurturing and languages and boys are good at fighting and science, and while men are captaining space ships, women are usually having babies. Actually, that did pretty much spoil the movie for me, all the glowing reviews out there notwithstanding. Sure, I realize the movie has to work with the template of the original series, which was hardly feminist. But isn’t that part of the point of nostalgia trips like Mad Men and Swingtown? They make it safe again to represent a world where men go to work and women chat as they push their carts around the grocery store.
The retrograde gender politics of Star Trek, combined with the equally retrograde (and totally terrible) Wolverine, which I saw last weekend, started me wondering, what happened to the female action hero in the last decade? The 1980s and 1990s brought us Ripley, Sarah Connor, and Trinity–not to mention Xena and Buffy. Now, from the Bourne series to Spiderman to Batman, we seem to have gone right back to the realm of Big Strong Men and the Little Women Who Love Them–women whose role is roughly indistinguishable from that of Fay Wray: squeal, get rescued and/or die. Although the ass-kicking female hero survives on TV, particularly in SF vehicles like Battlestar Gallactica, her presence in the movies seems to have reached almost zero.
I could write an entire post about how sad this is, and how much I miss the rough-and-ready women of the 1990s, but, the fact of the matter is, the all-too-easy erasure of these women has lead me to wonder, did they really make a difference in the first place? Did the presence of female action heroes signal anything beyond an increased ability on the part of feminists to enjoy a mainstream Hollywood movie? Obviously, it’s better to have empowered rather than disempowered female heroes; I would never argue otherwise. But the total prominence of the female action hero in the 1980s and 1990s, followed by her total erasure in the last ten years, makes her look like just another fad–something that was fun in the 1990s, like grunge, raves and Seinfeld. And if we could just consume her and then throw her away, like every other female type in the media, maybe she wasn’t all that tough in the first place.
When I was thinking about this blog post, I kept being reminded of a passage from The Feminist Memoir Project collection, in which Barbara Smith critiques a feminism that protests a film about Larry Flint but remains silent about the real-life torture of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima by the NYPD. The connection is the overvaluing of the media as a source of either uplift (Yay, Buffy!) or oppression (Boo, Star Trek!). So much of feminism, particularly in the blogosphere, is media critique–and on this blog, I am probably the biggest offender. I’m not saying thinking and writing about culture is pointless; if it is, I’ve wasted the last twelve years of my life, not to mention $74,000 in student loans. But the erasure of the female action hero without so much as a blip is a good reminder that changes in culture are meaningless if they’re not accompanied by changes in our material status–and that both can be undone in a heartbeat.
I was fiddling through the shelves of the cooking section in a large bookstore that regularly sends me coupons, looking for cookbooks with calorie counts, when I came across the Hungry Girl phenomenon for the first time.
I am aware that this opening sentence is disturbingly revelatory, so I suppose I should just throw privacy to the winds now and come out with the whole story of why I set myself up to lay hands on a cookbook by a woman who calls herself girl, and has a cookbook of 200 recipes that are under 200 calories, which are made with ingredients like low-calorie tortillas and fat-free Velveeta.
For over a decade, I had an autoimmune disease that caused the lining of a particular part of my intestines to shred, which made eating anything other than bread painful. Then I had surgery in 2007, to take the shredded part out, which effectively cured the illness, for the time being anyway. In celebration, I ate and ate—anything from carrots to french fries, though I erred on the side of frits, washed down with beer: Belgian, preferably.
The results weren’t as bad as you might think, because I was also reveling in exercise after being basically bed-ridden for a few months. Still, I packed on a solid extra 15 pounds over the next year, and lost half by mostly skipping my newly beloved greased-up potatoes, then realized I would never lose the other half if I did not count and moderate my daily intake of calories for a few weeks (a diet, I believe this is typically called).
I have two great cookbooks with nutritional information (The Working Cook and The Whole Foods Cookbook). I wanted to buy a third, which I how I ended up in the bookstore, coupon and Velveeta-based cookbook in hand, horrified with myself, then horrified with my horror.
The only people I dislike more that the organic-food privileged people who populate the Bay Area and fust over which boxed cereal to feed their broods are the botoxed, unnaturally thin women of Los Angeles, who I imagine have processed cheese quesadilla delivered to their doorsteps on a regular basis. Was living in California for five years finally catching up with me?
I hate ideology, especially when it interferes so with basic pleasures: book browsing, cooking, eating, a body that finally works as it should.
Rather than buying a cookbook, I played around with a few recipes of my own, like Mark Bittman, a good New Yorker who thinks that a broiler is deserving of the name “kitchen appliance,” always says that you should. I came up with a few nice ones; here is my favorite:
Lazy Strawberry Parfait
Zest a lemon into a bowl; set aside. Slice 1 pint of strawberries and combine with the juice of 1/3 of the lemon, a tiny dash of vanilla, and a few tsp. of sugar in another bowl; set aside. Squeeze the rest of the lemon into the bowl with the zest, then add a small container (about 1.5 cups) of fresh ricotta and mix with 3 tbs. of sugar. Let the strawberries and the ricotta mixture sit for an hour, then divide the berry mixture into four bowls and top with the ricotta mix. Sprinkle each bowl with toasted almonds, crushed amaretti cookies, or both, and eat right away.
As a graduate of a same-sex college, where I took too many women’s studies classes to count, I will admit that these courses have their faults. I was often the student in the back of the room squirming in discomfort at statements that lacked intellectual rigor. Any challenges to the party line felt unwelcome. (This led to a rebellious period where I read everything that Camille Paglia had ever written, while scribbling affirmatory, self-justifying exclamation points in the margins.) There was indeed extremist religious fervor in some of the feminist theories we studied — but, uh, that was also true in my seminar on world religions. And, as any college graduate knows, the truth is that any discipline can be inappropriately politicized or politically correct.
Is it just me, or does this little bit of token-woman personal history (‘I’m not like those other loser feminists! I’m rigorous!) shed some light on the frequent tendency of Salon’s Broadsheet to slide from actual feminist analysis toward Redbook magazine territory–not to mention Salon’s otherwise inexplicable desire to continue giving the asinine and obsolete Paglia a platform? While Clark-Flory casts her women’s studies critique as a kind of youthful rebellion, she uses much the same approach in the article itself: by demonstrating that she can see the point of the lawsuit, even as she celebrates its defeat, she disidentifies with those who would simply echo the feminist party line, casting herself as more thoughtful and measured. It’s a classic liberal move, one that associates any firm political positions with ‘extremist religious fervor.’ In fact, it echoes the logic of the lawsuit in question, which uses the principles of ‘balance’ to insist that if we have women’s studies, which attacks men, it’s only fair that we have men studies, to defend them. Actually, the point of feminism is not to ‘balance’ misogyny with feminism, but to eradicate the former, even if it means not always giving the Roy Den Hollander’s of the world a ‘fair’ hearing. Maybe if Clark-Flory hadn’t been so busy reading Paglia she would have learned this in her women’s studies class.
Across the Pond: A Feminist Blog 
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