1. JOURNALISM: This my be my favorite editorial I’ve read in quite some time. From Tim Krieder at the NYT, he writes about uncertainty of stating one’s opinions on the internet: “I felt like the explanatory caption beneath my name on-screen ought to be: PERSON IN WORLD.” This is basically exactly how I feel about everything.
2. STYLE: Ever wonder about Rihanna’s hairstylist? Who is this person? Where did he or she come from? NYMag has got you covered.
4. TELEVISION:How to make a good drama that wins lots of awards. Is there a formula for that? Perchance there is and it’s only 13 steps!
5. GEOGRAPHY: Highly difficult, highly addictive, Geoguessr is game where google streetview displays a picture and you try to guess where in the world it was taken. Good luck with Australia vs. Texas.
6. DEPRESSION: Blogger Allie Brosh is back after a long hiatus. This webcomic explains where she’s been, and also does a pretty excellent job at describing depression to those that are not depressed. Play close attention to the fish analogy.
Related Post:Sunday 101 – Dear Daughter, Colbert’s “homophobe” song, Lennon and Maisey
Related Post:Sunday 102 – Why lady looks matter, SCOTUS, Huma + Anthony, football tragedy
1. COLBERT: Did you hear Brad Paisley and LL Cool J’s song “Accidental Racist?” More importantly, have you seen Colbert’s rebuttal, “Oopsy Daisy Homophobe?”
6. LEAN: Man, this letter from a mom to her 8-year-old daughter just about breaks my heart. The girl asked her mother whether she loved work more than her kids and her mother responds pitch perfectly.
Related Post: Sunday 100 – Huma and Anthony, SCOTUS, Shulasmith, and more
Related Post:Sunday 99 – Cat politicians, Tavi, Rolling Rock, and Nick + Megan forever
I must admit, the first seven times someone emailed Dove’s ubiquitous new ad campaign, I got a little weepy and emotional. It hit all the right cords, all the soft, vulnerable spots that most women (and many men!) hold deep about their appearance. My nose is too big. My eyes are too far apart. My chin is too pointy. My forehead is too high. My X is too Y. It takes all those “toos” and flips them, revealing with a clever gimmick how much we underestimate our own beauty. Here, just watch, it’s easier than explaining it:
It’s good advertising. It’s memorable, it’s shareable, it makes you feel warm and fuzzy. I literally feel prettier simply by watching it. Maybe I should go buy some Dove products….
Hold up.
It’s a testament to how compelling this video is that I didn’t bother to put on my critical hat and unpack this bad boy a little. I was so distracted by the swelling music and the teary eyed attractive-but-not-too-attractive people that I forgot that the broader implications of this video are hella problematic.
1. Beauty is still #1 – As the participants in the video experiment articulate, how they feel about themselves as friends, employees, partners, as human beings is affected by how they feel about their looks. This might be true, in the technical sense that many people do feel this way, but it’s not okay. We attribute all sorts of “good” qualities to those that possess certain desirable traits, and all sorts of “bad” qualities to those that don’t. This campaign does nothing to undermine this correlation, but rather reinforces it. As one participant says, natural beauty “could not be more critical to your happiness.” Is that really the message we want to send when we’re pushing “Real Beauty?”
2. Only certain things are beautiful: Namely, anything thin. The positive descriptions of body parts are pretty narrow, “thin nose” and “thin chin” = good. Round face = bad. Freckles = bad. Forget the racial connotations (are thin noses the only good noses?), what we see reflected in the commentary is not that beauty standards should be widened, but that more people meet the arbitrary requirements than we think. Congratulations, you’ve made the cut! Should there be a cut? Well, no… but there is, and you made it (phew! you’re not one of the ugly ones), so bravo for you!
3. Speaking of race….: As Jazzy pointed out, people of color appear on screen a total of 10 seconds. Yeahhhhh, like that’s not reductionist. Do you remember the story about the black newscaster with close-cropped hair who got fired after responding to a viewer who told her to “wear a wig or grow more hair?” The idea that one certain thing–long, straight hair, for example–is objectively beautiful is preposterous. All you have to do is watch Jessica Simpson’s VH1 show The Price of Beauty to remember that what you think is beautiful isn’t necessarily the standard everywhere. Jeez, how arrogant can we get?
So where does that leave us? Where does that leave Dove? I’ve been skeptical of those folks for a while, ever since someone clued me in that their parent company, Unilever, is also the parent company of Axe (maker of body spray and terrible commercials).
The goal of this ad is not to change beauty standards. It is not to diminish the importance we place on beauty as a measure of woman’s worth. It is not to remind the universe that the way you look does not determine the kind of person you are or the value you add to the world. The goal of this ad is to make you buy more Dove products. Period.
Super excited to share with you all a new partnership I’m embarking on with the Nashville Scene. A collection of writerly ladies, like the always-fabulous Kim Green, will collaborate on a weekly column called Vodka Yonic. We’ll be tackling a wide variety of topics, both serious and less so, that are hopefully of interest to readers such as yourselves!
My first contribution ran last week and I must confess that I’m really proud of it. I’ve been meaning to write about Battlestar Galactica through a feminist lens, and this gave me the perfect opportunity. More broadly, this is a piece about what I think feminist television really is, and what we should be looking for in our media to indicate that it treats female characters equally and with respect. Hint: that doesn’t mean that the women are always the good guys. I hope you like it too!
1. GAYS: In the 2010 census, one county in the US reported 0 gay people. None. Zilch. Nada. Explore Franklin County with CNNand find out if the census is true. Hint: Doubtful.
2. SCOTUS: A little late to the game on this one, but Courtney Milan’s concise play-by-play of the Prop 8 Supreme Court case is the first time I actually think I know what’s going on. Sample truncated piece of dialogue: COOPER: But these people were injured. They didn’t want gay people to marry, and now look! Gays. Lesbians. Able to marry at will. It’s very injurious. They’re injured just thinking about it.
5. FOOTBALL: From Grantland, what would happen if an NFL player died on the field? 8 years ago, Al Lucas died during an Arena football game. Is that where we’re headed?
6. LOOKS: Why does it matter that the President called Kamala Harris good-looking? Amanda Hess at Slate knows why, and I couldn’t agree with her more.
Related Post:Sunday 99: Megan Mullally and Ron Swanson, Tavi Gevinson, Rolling Rock history and more
Related Post:Sunday 98: Chinese marriage market, George Saunders, Lena in Playboy and more
This week on Role/Reboot I wrote about the the term “role model.” I realized that, in my own head, I have a tendency to hold successful women to a higher standard, expecting them to be on “good behavior” and set the “right example” all the time, and for everyone. There are so many bad-behaving male celebrities, and we never talk abou them as being bad role models. I think in some ways it’s as simple as the fact that there are many more men in the limelight, and so the need for “role models” is not so dire.
We assume that women who seek fame or success should also be moral role models as well. We don’t hold men to that standard. Some of them just want to be rich and famous and don’t give two shits about who they influence along the way. I’m not suggesting that’s a great attitude, only that it’s one we accept from men. Maybe Rihanna just wants to be rich and famous? Being a “role model” has never seemed to be her priority, so we do keep trying to drape her in that mantle?
Remember the Bechdel Test? It’s that set of three rules that helps determine the presence of women in TV and movies? Rule 3 stipulates that two women must discuss something other than a man. Back when I wrote that overview, some hilarious internet denizen wrote back, “but women do mostly talk about men…” Hardee har har. Bro, I think you’ve been watching a little too much SATC.
Though his joke was clearly stupid, it did make me wonder how much of what I discuss with my girlfriends has to do with dating, men, sex, etc. We like data and graphs around here, so we did a little experiment. My best friend and I gchat much of the day most days. Although our gchats are in no way a comprehensive view of communication (lacking face-to-face, phone, text, and email), there’s no reason to think they aren’t a reasonable proxy for our typical patterns of communication.
I went through and tagged two weeks worth of gchats with their subject matter and the amount of time devoted to each item. Then, I graphed that as a ratio of the whole. Bottom line: Gentlemen, we hardly talked about you at all.
The idea for this post was a mishmash of a few strange things. I was watching Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a movie based on the David Foster Wallace novel about a female researcher interviewing a range of men about their relationships. It becomes this surreal series of monologues about gender roles and modern masculinity that is both appalling and engrossing at once. It also stars a ridiculous cast of dudes including Josh Charles, Chris Messina, Jim Krasinski, and Clarke Peters. Even the “good guys,” the ones who speak about women with tenderness, admiration, or respect, still had this strange veil of “othering” layered over everything they said. The way each fictional monologuer addressed the researcher revealed how many of them viewed women as this sort of alien other that needed to be addressed as they we are a different species.
Then, I was watching Battlestar Galactica (Spoiler Alert),and there’s this horrible scene where a captive female Cylon (the robotic-but-humanoid enemies of humans) is about to be raped by her human guards. When two men try to prevent the crime, they accidentally kill one of the rapists. During their trial, her defenders explain their behavior by saying, “But they were going to rape her!” only to be told by the commanding officer, “You can’t rape a Cylon.” The implication is very clear; despite having by all appearances complete agency and autonomy, the Cylon woman is deemed sub-human and treatment of her no longer has to abide by rules of human decency.
This is what I worry about when I see women dehumanized and objectified in the media. It creates the space for men to think of women as somehow fundamentally different than themselves, and consequently deserving of different treatment. Anyway, there’s more on that, plus some homemade graphs, in my essay.
I would like to attempt something. Consider it a belated New Year’s Resolution, or an ongoing project in self-improvement and continuing education. I’m a feminist. Duh. You’d have to have been skipping the content of this blog and only looking at the dazzling photos to have missed that (Unrelatedly: Sorry for all the stock photography, that’s not really my thing).
I took a bazillion gender studies classes in college. I’ve read a lot, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Ariel Levy, Betty Friedan to Andrea Dworkin, Alix Kates Shulman to Adrienne Rich. I am well versed in the theories of the various waves, and I know where I stand on most of the issues, give or take a few of the finer points. And, of course, I’m always looking to broaden/deepen/complicate my own understanding.
But if you’re going to publicly comment on media and gender, as I do, reading is not enough. Watching and listening has to be part of the education process, and this is where I’ve started to find some serious holes in my own mental map of gender studies and women’s history. While my formal education required that I go back and read the sacred texts, I don’t feel like I truly have a handle on other forms of influential media.
How have I never seen Thelma and Louise?
I recently watched an excellent documentary on the evolution of Wonder Woman (if it’s in your city, go see it), and how her character changed in both comic books and on screen to match the flavors of feminism (or backlash to feminism) over the decades. One reference included Thelma and Louise, and I realized that I’d never seen it. A few weeks ago, I watch the PBS documentary Makers about the history of the women’s movement (streaming online, go watch it right this second). It also featured clips from other television shows and movies that I’d missed along the way, like Murphy Brown and The Mary Tyler Moore show. Obviously, most of this content was before my time, but given that I take great pride in being media literate and well-versed in this particular history, it seems I have some catching up to do.
I spend a serious amount of time keeping up on what we’re talking about now, but I want to contextualize the present by rounding out my knowledge of the past. If Girls wouldn’t have been possible without Sex and the City, and Sex and the City wouldn’t have been possible without Golden Girls, then I need to have seen Golden Girls to really understand how far we’ve come? How does the groundwork laid by Murphy Brown add depth to the current conversation we’re having about Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” philosophy? How does Tina Fey follow in the tradition of Mary Tyler Moore, or not?
So, I need your help. If my goal were to fill out my understanding of “women in the media” over the last few decades, especially as it pertains to gender roles, feminism, sexism, etc., what do I need to go back and watch? I can’t watch everything, so what are the moments in media history that are influential, pot-stirring, game-changing? Here’s what I’ve got so far:
Thelma and Louise
Golden Girls
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
Murphy Brown
Nine to Five
Maude
What else? Post in the comments or tweet at me, @rosiesaysblog!
2. LENA: In this Playboy interview, Lena Dunham explains, among other things, why she’s pleased she doesn’t look like a supermodel.
3. JOURNALISM: Super fascinating look at the work of Bob Woodward. In researching his own Belushi biography, journalist Tanner Colby unravels the shoddy work of one of the most famous journalists of all time.
4. WRITERS: The relationship between writer (George Saunders) and editor (Andy Ward) is pulled apart in insane detail in this Slate interview. Jesus, these people are smaaaart.
