Lucky White Girl

You've gotta hear this!

Oh wow there is the most incredible story on NPR right now about transgender children!  They explore two cases of very young children, both biologically male, who strongly believe they are really females.  Each set of parents have completely different responses to this: the first boy/girl's parents take him/her to a therapist who bans girl things and pretty much forces them to make the child "learn to be comfortable with being a boy" saying it's like a black child who wants to be white it's the product of dysfunction.   The second boy/girl's parents let the child be the person she feels she is.  They take her to buy her first dress and let her start kindergarten as a girl.  They say they don't want to repeat the mistakes of years ago when homosexuality was viewed as a dysfunction and therapists encouraged patients to repress it.

It was such a powerful story I'm still crying as I'm typing this.   If you haven't read the novel Middlesex yet, you should! My god it's good!

Bob Herbert speaks of the big pink elephant

Check out Bob Herbert's column this morning.  No bones about it: we live in a msyogynistic society, he says, and that needs to be a major issue in 2008.  Kudos, Mr. Herbert, brave man!

Technology and feminism: progress or regression?

I just had to sigh over this story in the NY Times today.  I didn't even know there was demand for things like this!  Women getting plastic surgery just because they'd had a baby???!  You've got to be kidding!  I was blissfully unaware.  At least the author of the article seems to have a good head on her shoulders.  She explains the history of the situation with a subtle tone of refreshing indignation:

In 1970, “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” the seminal guide to women’s health, described the cosmetic changes that can happen during and after pregnancy simply as phenomena. But now narrowing beauty norms are recasting the transformations of motherhood as stigma.

These unforgiving standards are the offspring of pop culture and technology, a union that treats biological changes as if they were as optional as hair color. Gossip magazines excoriate celebrity moms who don’t immediately lose their “baby weight.” Even Cookie, a luxury parenting magazine, recently ran an article that described postpregnancy breasts as “the ultimate indignity” and promoted implant surgery; a photo of droopy water-filled balloons accompanied the article.

And hits the nail right on the head with this:

Many women struggle with the impact of aging and pregnancy on their bodies. But the marketing of the “mommy makeover” seeks to pathologize the postpartum body, characterizing pregnancy and childbirth as maladies with disfiguring aftereffects that can be repaired with the help of scalpels and cannulae.

It made me think of the impact of technology on beauty standards.  I mean wouldn't you have thought that things were getting better since the feminist revolution began?  That first we got the right to vote and dismissed silly notions such as women being feeble-minded and then we got around to challenging sex roles and gender stereotypes.  But despite all that is it really true that the one area we have been unable to change in our society is impossible beauty standards? 

In Gainesville, probably half the women --including me most of the time-- don't shave their body hair.  It has ceased to become anything particularly revolutionary; it just seems normal to me.  Of course there will be a little tuft of hair under the arms ---that's just natural.  In fact, here if you do shave, you might feel a little naked in some crowds and there might be a certain amount of social pressure to go au naturel. 

Most places, however, aren't like Gainesville.  I shaved in order to go to my job interview in DC for example, and I shaved when I was in Miami and in sometimes when I was in Latin America so I understand that for most women in North America to be considered beautiful and attractive necessarily means having the smooth hairless body of a prepubescent girl.  But I didn't realize just how much technology can push the envelope.  If a post-pregnancy body is a deformity, what's next?  Can we shrink our bones so that we are the exact hieght of the average twelve year old?

How ironic.  Mature women wanting to look like 12 year olds and 12 year olds wanting to look like mature women!  And our society sees absolutely no contradiction in that at all!  Amazing.  Simply amazing.

All About Bette Davis and the ugly truth about women and ageing

You know, sometimes I talk about movies on this blog and I even have an on-going (much-neglected) list of what will eventually be my 100 Great Films but it's pretty rare that I pick a film and talk about it in length.  All About Eve is one that is so good and so important I think it merits just that sort of post.  All About Eve is a scathingly accurate and unromantic picture of how women in the West were viewed in the mid-20th century (and sometimes stil are by certain people).

Bette Davis plays a 40 year old aging star named Margo Channing.  Eve, played by Anne Baxter, is an ardent young fan who manages to slip herself into Margo's life and becomes her personal assistant.  The first time you watch the film all your attention is on Eve who seems so loyal and dedicated to Margo it's almost creepy (i.e. What's she really up to, eh?) 

But the second time you watch it you notice just how complex and fascinating Margo's character is.  Horrified of being upstaged by her young understudy, Margo is haughty and proud but also insecure and vulnerable.  Don't be quick to dislike her because of her vanity and obsession with youth.  She knows that the impossible is what's expected of women in the world she lives in and her despair at ever being able to live up those expectations of perfect, age-less beauty is very real and very poignant.

The problem with Margo is pretty well summed up by an accusation slung at her by Lloyd, the playwrite in whose play she stars in: "There comes a time that the piano realizes that it has not written the concerto,".  And that's the harsh, ugly reality of women in the 50s, especially women in film and theater: they were pianos on which the writers, directors and producers played and as one aged and got a few nicks and scratches on it, they could be replaced with newer, younger versions.  Margo's pain is the pain of someone realizing how disposable she is in such a world.

In the film, Margo eventually gives up and retires from the theater world to play the wife role to her man, but ironically in real life for Bette Davis, it was the opposite.  She had something in common with Margo; in 1950 people thought she, too, was all washed up as an actress.  Until she made this film and her career did a 180.  From that point on, she became the commanding screen presence she's remembered for today.

So is this honest portrayal of 1950s sexism enough to say that All About Eve is a feminist flick?  I think so.  The older women in the film are very conscious of their getting the short end of the stick and they don't accept the adage to "age gracefully", quietly exiting stage right as the next line of to-be-objectified women rises up front and center to replace them.  They are angry that their worth in a society so obsessed with youth and beauty has gone down simply because they've gotten older.  Never is Margo's talent as an actress put into doubt.  It's all about the packaging.  And it's not just actresses that have to/had to live with this.  Margo's best friend, Karen, a housewife, also has the youth/beauty standard to live up to.  When her playwrite husband (the same one that lobbed the "you're just the piano" jab at Margo above) tells her that her cynicism is "something [she's] acquired since [she] left Radcliffe!" she retorts "The cynicism you refer to, I acquired the day I discovered I was different from little boys!"

This is a very harsh film that is uncomfortable at times to watch, especially if you're a woman and you wish things were more different from that era instead of just slightly different.  For all the misty-eyed romanticism we see of the 1950s, this is a film filled with painful truth and accuracy and that, for me, makes it one of the best.

On language and society

The survey project is on hold until I get more frequent access to internet service.  In the meantime here are some thoughts on language and society because my friend Paul V sent me a link to this page about gender-neutral language and asked what I thought about it. 

I think that it's interesting because language is not a static thing (and thank goodness we don't have a regulatory body for the English language like I hear they have in France for French because then it'd really be a radical concept to conceive of language as something immensely democratic).  Language seems to be the ultimate democratic movement.  It is truly of the people and by the people.  It's always in flux and it reflects the society which created it.  Which makes sense until you think about how language shapes thought as well --as any good constructivist will tell you.  And then you get to realize that if society creates language then language equally creates society as well; they are mutually constitutive.  So it's a chicken and egg argument.

Which leads to the short answer: I think we will have a gender-neutral language when we have a gender-neutral society and vice versa.

So is it "worth it" to try to promote the use of gender neutral terms?  Honestly I don't really know.  I think it can't hurt.  I do it in some situations.  I say "they" a lot for a non-specific unknown person, even if that person is singular and not plural.  Technically it's currently incorrect grammatically but it didn't used to be a few hundred years ago.  (I learned that in a linguistics class and I'll try to get a citation for it soon).  That one change solves like 99% of everyday non-gender-neutral language I've found.  Letter carrier instead of mailman is another one I've used.

When I most run into non-gender-neutral language is in church.  They sing the doxology in the Mennonite church I go to.  I say "Creator, Son and Holy Ghost" instead of "Father, Son and Holy Ghost" in the last line.  And I change the Hail Mary slightly when I pray the rosary (yes, I do that sometimes): Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you; blessed are you AND ALL women and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus".  I think the orthodox version says blessed are you AMONG women.

My linguistics professor used to talk about prescriptive grammarians versus descriptive grammarians, the latter being those who describe the way people talk and the former being those who try to get people to talk a certain way.  She said prescriptive grammarians are kinda out of vogue right now and haven't been very successful in getting the unruly masses to "talk right".  Language evolves naturally; it's really hard to direct it.  With that in mind, I might argue that putting one's efforts into creating a feminist society is just as if not more useful than trying to get people to talk a certain way or use feminist or gender-neutral words.  But it's also nice to help things along a bit if you can.  But that's just my opinion.

Five men.

What a country!  Only in the USA can five men dictate medical decisions for an entire nation.  Five men.  The personal morals of those five men --not medical science, not my own discretion-- but just the conscience of those five men now limit my medical options if --god forbid-- it ever became necessary to preserve my health for me to have this particular abortion procedure.  Five fucking men. 

Excuse me if I'm a little resentful of this.  For some facts about the procedure the men have banned read this post.  It's tone of outrage captures my feelings perfectly.

Read Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent (with Justices Stevens, Souter and Breyer joining). (thanks to Bitch PhD for the link).  It's excellent.

This is a huge step backwards for women in this country.

Happy International Women's Day!

In 1909 a declaration by the Socialist Party of America established the first International Women's Day; it spread rapidly around the world.  Imagine, if you can, more than a million people marching in the streets in four major European cities demanding and end to 19th century discrimination against women. During the first World War, the holiday became a rallying point for the antiwar sentiment in various countries and in 1917 Russian women took to the streets in such numbers to protest their country's involvement in the war and demand suffrage for women and ended up being the first stage of the revolution! 

You can find a listing of events in cities around the world on the official IWD website and a more detailed timeline of the history of today on the UN's website.  Happy feministing!

Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945)

Last night I saw a Hitchcock film I hadn't seen before.  (I'm gradually working my way through all of his films.  I've seen all the really famous ones but eventually I'd like to see everything he made.  UF had a DVD of three short films he made in the 1920s but my DVD player broke --and they won't let me check stuff out anymore since I graduated-- so I have to rely on what the public library has on videocassette).  Anyway last night I saw Spellbound from 1945.  It has Ingrid Bergman and a young Gregory Peck who often looked like Anthony Perkins in Psycho. 

It's a pretty decent movie.  Anything with Ingrid Bergman in it is pretty decent and in this one she plays a psychiatrist who falls in love with a man who has amnesia and thinks he may have killed someone.  It's not a typical Hitchcock movie.  Psychoanalysis, though not new, I guess was new to popular consciousness in the 1940s and so Freudian psychology of guilt complexes and phobias plays a major role in the film.

And unsurprisingly there's a lot of sexism in the story.  Being a doctor doesn't mean Bergman's character --Dr. Peterson-- gets a reprieve from male chavinism.  In the first five minutes she has to deal with a severely mysogynistic patient (an attractive woman who claims she hates men while doting on them incessently and is extremely antagonistic towards her female therapist) and some pretty indiscreet sexual harrassment from her colleagues: "Women make the best psychoanalysts until they fall in love. After that they make the best patients" (Dr. Brulov) and "We both know that the mind of a woman in love is operating on the lowest level of intellect" (the same).  Bergman's character is an interesting example of how it's possible for a woman to be a doctor but only by renouncing those traits associated with femininity and femaleness and taking on the traits associated with masculinity and maleness.  For example Dr. Peterson's character is portrayed as cold and frigid when she rejects the unwanted advances of her colleague.  It's like "hugging a textbook" he says when he grabs her.  She's a great doctor and a good looker but they all agree she needs a man.  She only becomes a "real" woman when she stops acting like a doctor and starts acting like a mother/lover (well I told you it had a lot of Freudian psychology!) to this attractive but disturbed stranger.

None of this means I didn't like the movie.  I loved it.  I thought it was fascinating, although not necessarily for all the reasons Hitchcock intended.  I think the portrayal of Dr. Peterson is very interesting.  I think the portrayal of psychoanalysis in the movie is very interesting.  I think the movie's  portrayals of both of those things says a lot more about early 20th century views of women and early 20th century views of psychoanalysis than it says about either of those subjects directly.  So yes, I recommend this movie to any film lover, any Hitchcock lover and anyone just interested in popular perceptions of women and/or psychology.
 

Proud supporter of the pro-choice license plate

www.licensetochoose.org

Reframing the Duke rape case

The headline of this editorial wouldn't have caught my eye if I had seen it on Znet but a friend forwarded it to me because he knew I was interested in the Duke rape case so I took the time to read the thing.  Wow.  Very thought provoking.  Basically this is a sociologist who was asked to provide commentary on a CNN program about racism and race issues surrounding the Duke Lacrosse team rape case.  I think the second half of the article is the most interesting so I excerpted it here.  The first half talks about her experience on the show.  The second half examines media portrayals of this and other stories and it is so good I want to post it here so more people will see it:

"The case is framed as a "race" issue, which for producers meant that blacks are out for revenge for past misdeeds by whites. Jumping on this bandwagon, so the story goes, was the District Attorney Mike Nifong, who was trying to curry favor with the black community in a re-election year. The consensus on the show was that if anyone is guilty here, it is the lying, immoral black stripper and the amoral, politically motivated DA. The victims here are the upstanding white men who have now had their reputations tarnished first by a stripper and then by gullible fools who believed her. And of course, within the framing of the show, I appeared as not just a gullible fool, but even worse, a gullible fool with a feminist agenda.

My anger at the way the media humanized these men as victims and dehumanized the woman as the perpetrator of a lie clearly stood out from the rest of the show. And this was, I am now convinced, the producer's goal. I was set up in the show to be an example of the problem -- white liberal elites who have taken political correctness too far. I was not brought on as a researcher or activist but as an example of how feminists "rush to judgment" in order to further their man-hating propaganda.

Virtually every email I have received blasts me as a conniving feminist who didn't even bother to know the facts of the case. These men -- yes, they all were from men -- explained to me that the facts show without question that nothing happened that night, which I would have known if I were not so busy trying to further my feminist agenda.

This is truly an example of how mass media construct reality. The so-called "facts" of the case have mainly been planted by the defense as a way to spin the case. The prosecution can't reveal all their evidence by law, but we do know, as law professor Wendy Murphy has pointed out, enough evidence was presented that "police, forensic experts, prosecutors, and a grand jury comprised of citizens, all agreed that charges should be brought." The truth is that we actually have access to very little evidence about that night, yet every man who has emailed me is convinced that all the facts are out there and only a feminist fool would believe otherwise. This is because the "facts," or lack of, speak for themselves and tell their own story in a society where racist and sexist ideology is internalized by a good percentage of the population and subsequently writ large onto a black woman's body. Let's not forget that this woman was bought and sold in the white male marketplace of sexual entertainment.

This obsessive focus on the woman is not particular to this case; routinely the media focus on the women victims, with a certain prurient interest. Instead, we should put some of the focus back on the men in this case, as we know much about their behavior that night that is not under dispute. They saw the hiring of two black women to strip as a legitimate form of male entertainment. They didn't see the commodifying and sexualizing of black women's bodies as problematic in a country that has a long and ugly history of racism.

One of the team buddies, Ryan McFadyen, sent out an email on the night of the event where he wrote "ive decided to have some strippers over and all are welcome …. I plan on killing the bitches as they walk in and proceed to cut their skin off while cumming in my duke spandex." Later that night, 911 got a call from a black college student out walking with her friends who was called "nigger" as she walked past the team's house. And to top it all, not one lacrosse player has come forward to express any regret at that night's events or offered any apology for being part of a drunken strip party that humiliated and degraded two black women.

It would seem to me that all of this undisputed information would make for a compelling CNN program. On such a show, I would be happy to share these emails calling me a bitch, whore, and cunt. That wouldn't be a rush to judgment, but instead an acknowledgement of what women know -- any one of us could be the next victim turned celebrity whore."