Watching: Spiritualized - Hey Jane

(TW for violence and transphobia)

Spiritualized video for the song "Hey Jane" is a mini-movie of sorts, staring drag performer James Ross (who performs under the name Tyra Sanchez and is best known as the second season winner of RuPaul's Drag Race) as a single trans woman making ends meet while trying to raise two kids. It's a gritty video that illustrates the violence trans people -- in particular trans people of color -- often face.

From a purely artistic standpoint, it's incredibly effective, but when does that cross that line into sensationalism? Thoughts?

Links & Bits: 3/30/12

Lindy West writes about the whitewashing of The Hunger Games. 
TW for racism (the comments)


For The Awl, Choire Sicha talks about The Joys of Blocking People.
This story made the rounds of the blogosphere this week, with a lot of nodding and yes-ing and fist-pumping the thrill of the block. Maybe I'm showing my age, but blocking indiscriminately makes me more than a little uncomfortable. I don't think I've ever been blocked -- not that I know of. I have been unfriended/unfollowed enough times to spend the good part of an afternoon digging through my own posts wondering what I said that was so heinous (or boring) to be given the electronic equivalent of a good ol' shunning. The only person I've ever blocked myself was a friend of someone who considered herself my online nemesis, and a mom blogger who turned out to be a very vocal tea party supporter -- which is completely understandable.

Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God turns 75.

Adrienne Rich, R.I.P.

poets.org

Poet, essayist, and feminist icon Adrienne Rich has died from complications resulting from rheumatoid arthritis. She was 82-years-old:

She came of age during the social upheavals of the 1960s and '70s and was best known as an advocate of women's rights, which she wrote about in both her poetry and prose. But she also wrote passionate antiwar poetry and took up the causes of the marginalized and underprivileged. (source )

I first encountered Rich as a poet in a dude-centric 20th century American literature class over a decade ago. It wasn't until I started my self-styled "feminist education" (my small school did not offer a formal feminist studies class) that I began to see her work as fundamental to the feminist ideology I was trying to absorb. On her blog, Tiger Beatdown's Sady Doyle said of Rich's essay, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision":

If you’ve ever done feminist cultural criticism, if you’ve ever read it, if you’ve ever written on a feminist blog, if you’ve ever considered that “entering an old text from a new direction” or knowing the writing of the past (or of the present) “not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us” might be essential to you — and it is; despite all the jokes about feminists complaining about sitcoms on Tumblr, it still is and always has been — take a moment, read this (poorly transcribed) essay, and consider who we’ve lost, if only for a moment.

Despite all the praise and tributes that are rolling in this morning, I think it's irresponsible not to mention Rich's association* with Janice Raymond, whose book, The Transsexual Empire, remains one of the most polemic -- and transphobic -- works of the second-wave feminist era. Raymond cites Rich in the acknowledgements section of her book:

“Adrienne Rich has been a very special friend and critic. She has read the manuscript through all of its stages and provided resources, creative criticism, and constant encouragement. Her work, and her recognition of my work, have meant a great deal to me in the process of this writing.” (source )

To further confuse things, I learned via a commenter on Feministe's tribute to Rich that she's also thanked in Leslie Feinberg's Transgender Warriors.  So here's the question I ask: at what point do someone's faults outweigh her achievements? And is ardent praise irresponsible in light the deeply woven transphobia of second-wave feminists? I think you can have both: acknowledging the problematic and giving praise when it's justified.

* I've found no other evidence of transphobia, except for Raymond's citing. I haven't -- nor do I have the time to -- comb through the entirety of Rich's own work, but I think it's still important enough to note.

Pretty Boys and Metal's Misogyny

I found this Paris Review story  on Axl Rose's early days on writer Sarah Jaffe's blog . As someone who spent her early teens in the 80s listening to the most painted of metal bands, this one-paragraph excerpt stood out:

"It’s the shots of him at eighteen that move me, though. He isn’t pretty yet, he hasn’t begun to think of himself as a rock star. He’s a boy-man, with a trace of fear in his pugnacious stare. I can’t remember what he’d done, that time. Stolen another kid’s bike, I think. Or destroyed another kid’s bike. When I first saw his hair, I understood something Dana had told me hours before, at a bar: that when they were children, Axl was Raggedy Ann in the Christmas parade. Looking longer, a person could understand something else, too, about the Midwestern darkness in his voice."

Jaffe added:

"Thinking about pretty and men being pretty and how much of anyone’s prettiness is a decision they made. The most beautiful boys I’ve ever been with didn’t really know it (there was one who did but that is another story) and there was something else about them other than pure good looks, even though dark hair hanging in warm eyes, broad shoulders, big hands, the line of a jaw or a cheekbone, all those are undeniable. 

But looking at this photo, reading this description—how much of Axl Rose’s prettiness was a choice he made to leave that Midwestern boy behind and pour himself into skintight pants, tease his hair and his voice to unimaginable heights and become that guy on the poster I had on my wall in middle school."

I can't pretend to know Axl's motivations for fashioning his image out of teased hair and tight pants, aside from its being the style of the day for rock bands, though in the young mug shot, Axl looks no different from any of the shaggy-haired, lower-middle/upper-lower class Midwestern boys with whom I went to school -- a lot of them fans of his music. I will comment on how some of those bands -- Guns n' Rose included --  produced some of the most blatantly sexist music while championing essentially a feminine look. I grew up with this music, even when I wasn't actively listening to it, because it was the soundtrack to a certain subset of teenagers who had no access to the alternative, literally and metaphorically.

I'm not going to turn this into an "indie" is, or was, better because I eventually found my way toward it -- lord knows I hate the pitting of music fans against each other. In fact, I think indie rock in the 80s and 90s was just as hostile environment to women as commercial hard rock, but I find little about metal that's praise-worthy, even in a nostalgic sense. Axl's "prettiness" doesn't negate his misogyny, and I have a hard time trying to find any empathy -- for him as a misunderstood kid or his fans.

Worst States or Worst-Governed States?

"Setting up some kind of system where there are “crappy” states and “awesome” states doesn’t seem too helpful. I wonder if it allows people in “awesome” states to be complacent about the problems in their own backyards, while alienating people in the “crappy” states. People in “crappy” states might be complacent about their problems, too, thinking that their state is just “crappy” and nothing can be done about it. Or they might think the best move on their part is to flee to an “awesome” state, further depleting their state of people who can actually be a positive force for change." -- Commenter Anna from Feministe's "Arizona is officially the worst state in the union now, right?" 

I saw this comment last week and wanted to highlight this, but I forget to include it in Friday's links. This encapsulates everything that's wrong with the feminist/activist/progressive bog world's reporting on laws, particularly in the American south and midwest, that deny rights and power to marginalized groups. It's one of the biggest reasons why I rarely comment anymore. Classism is overlooked, expected, or even encouraged in supposedly liberal circles, and it alienated readers from parts of the country that are poorer, rural, and more conservative.

Finding Your Roots

I'm a big fan of Henry Louis Gates's books, Faces of America and In Search of Our Roots, so I'm pretty excited about his new PBS show, Finding Your Roots , which picks up where the popular NBC ancestry show, Who Do You Think You Are? Actually Gates's show is far superior, going outside the realm of celebrity (though he does feature quite a few celebrities, along with some lesser known politicians and thinkers) and using DNA research, a valuable tool when records are scarce.

Marilyn vs Jackie? Can I have another option?

Back when I part of another women's online community, the Jackie vs Marilyn question came up. I never really understood this bizarre parlor game. Which one are you: the sexy siren, or the competent but plain "girl next door?" Both figures are pretty tragic. (If I had to choose the pop culture archetype I most identify with, I think I'm a Dorothy Zbornak -- minus the annoying ex-husband.) It also baffles me that a group of otherwise smart women would buy into the "bad girl, good girl" stereotype that not only reduces women to  something less than three-dimensional, but pits us against each other. Wasn't feminism supposed to take care of that?

TV Tropes also calls this the Betty and Veronica (or Ginger and Mary-Ann) trope, but it's pretty explicit in its intention:

"Betty" is the sweet, reliable, everyday Girl Next Door type (if done wrong, this can mean: 'kinda dull'), whilst "Veronica" is more alluring, exotic and edgy, but has a more 'troublesome' or 'dangerous' personality (which could mean 'kinda slutty'). This translates to their physical appearances; "Betty" will usually be more plain (or at least as close as Hollywood gets), whilst "Veronica" will be Ms. Fanservice in all her glory. As a rule, one will be blond and the other dark or red haired.

And unfortunately, it works. The Betty/Veronica, Ginger/Mary-Ann, Jackie/Marilyn trope is deeply woven into pop culture, from books to music to movies. Sometimes the genders are flipped, making the "Archie" female, and the Betty/Veronica dynamic male (think My So-Called life with Jordan as Veronica -- sexy, mysterious, hard-to-get -- and Brian as Betty -- sweet, safe boy next door.), but it's ultimately a lazy plot device.

Shelving: Rereading Women by Sandra M. Gilbert

I really wanted to like this books. Feminist criticism, whether in music, literature, or even mainstream pop culture, remains marginalized, but Gilbert's book just left me with more questions than answers, primarily, what place does academia have in feminism? (Not the other way around.)

Though most of the essays in Rereading Women date from the 80s to the late 90s, in the introduction she writes on becoming a feminist in the 50s and 60s, and touches on the rift between second and third wave feminists:

"Students and interviewers often ask such questions, eagerly wondering, 'How did you...?' 'Why did you...?' and 'When did you...?' Many of them, participants in the Riot Grrrl Revolution that's part of what's now known as Third Wave feminism, have some stereotypical ideas about those of us who rose to consciousness as the Second Wave crested and flung new ideas all over the world."

I wish I didn't have to, because I've more than once written about riot grrrls insularity, but isn't pretty stereotypical, too, of older feminists to lump younger ones into easily defined categories? If every woman born after 1970 who identifies as a feminist is, by default, a "riot grrrl" feminism,  then I want a different word to describe what I am. This is a huge pet peeve of mine.

She also disagrees with Jessica Valenti, who in her book, Full Frontal Feminism says, "When I started coming home from grad school with ideas and theories that I couldn't talk to [my mother] about, academic feminism ceased to be truly useful to me. I think feminism should be accessible to everybody. no matter what your education level. And while high theory is pretty fucking cool, it's not something everybody is going to related to."

Exactly, which is the biggest problem I had with this book. Working-class and women of color were given nary a footnote. Trans and gay women are nowhere to be seen. While its a pretty powerful thing to have a feminist literary canon, it's becomes nullified by its exclusion -- in essence, it's no better than the patriarchal one before it.

Links & Bits: 3/23/12

A menarche party? I think I'll pass.
In situations like this, I try to imagine what I'd do if I had a daughter myself, seeing that my own adolescence happened more than two decades ago. Okay, first off, I have a real problem with the identifying feature of womanhood bleeding every month (or pregnancy, for that matter). You're a woman if you identify as such.

Is this a joke?
I have to second what a few of the commenters already said: this veers a little too closely to appropriating the experience of actual biracial, or multi-ethnic people. (The author doesn't identify as a biracial person.) I don't like telling people their experiences aren't valid (and lord knows I've had to answer the "What are you?" question more than once in my life), but this post makes me a extremely uncomfortable.

A Feminism 101 Guide

This is probably old news to most people, but as the new faces enter the feminist blog world -- as bloggers or as part of its commentariat -- there's always a request or two for some basic, feminism 101. This site  is a good place to start.

Puck Bunnies

Tumblr.com

I live in a big sports town. It's hard not to get a least a little twinge of excitement when one of ours wins brings home the big prize in their sport, and another seems poised to (or, at least, go further in the playoffs than they have in a long time.) That being said, I don't write about being a sports fan, or rather, being a woman and sports fan. I think you can imagine how it would go.

The pro-sports world is one of the last bastions of overt, acceptable, misogyny, but I hadn't heard this particular insult until I saw it crawl across my feed via a post from fuckyeahfeminists:

Puck Bunnies.

From Sports Illustrated : "Hockey fans come in all shapes and sizes, buy few are as passionate as the league’s female fans (aka - Puck Bunnies). Whether it’s proposing to a player through the boards or painting their stomachs with the name of their favorite team, these ladies are not shy about expressing their devotion. In this gallery, SI pays tribute to the NHL’s Puck Bunnies."

I'm not going to get into a debate that pits "real" fans against "groupies," but the SI slideshow is painting with to wide a brushstroke. Another thing? Why is finding a player attractive anathema to being a "real" fan? Emma Harger for Yahoo Sports writes:

"No. Not every female hockey fan identifies herself as a "puck bunny." In fact, most of the women I know explicitly hate the term because that's the first insult men throw at women when the man's goal is to tell the woman that she doesn't belong in his clubhouse. It's a phrase that's used to imply shame for women having healthy, normal thoughts about men. 

Meanwhile, men are free to think this way about women of every stripe, including athletes. Remember Hope Solo, the goalkeeper for the U.S. women's national soccer team? Just search for her name and one of the first suggestions is "hope solo hot." It has millions of results. No one ever scolds a male soccer fan for saying he finds Solo attractive and talented. But as soon as a woman says that a male athlete's looks, in addition to his talent, are satisfactory to her, to many men that means she's only in it for the sex."

I see some definite parallels between this and how female music fans are treated: you can't be serious; you're just a groupie. If you admit to even a ounce of attractive to a musician, well obviously you're only in it for the sex. This has, literally, come out of the mouths -- and pens -- of men who drool over the looks of artists like Nico Case or Jenny Lewis, and some of those men are still well- respected critics.

Affixing labels to female fans is just, as Harger says, another way that the professional sports world tells women they don't belong -- and if they do, they're only there because of the hotness of the players. They're not real fans.

Margaret Cho on "Queer"

last.fm

This is more than a few months old, but Margaret Cho's piece for the Huffington Post simply titled "Queer" came across my Tumblr dashboard the other day and I wanted to link it here because it clears up a lot of myths about what it means to be queer:

"Often people are curious about the fact that I am married to a man but call myself queer. It's because I have had sex with more than one person, and I had unmarried sex quite a few times, and roughly half the people have been men and the other half have been women, and then there were a few people in between those genders who identified in differing ways, so it's up to me to define myself, too, and so that would be queer. It's the most fitting description, short and concise, and really to-the-point. I don't know why it's a difficult concept to understand. Most of the people I know have had sex with more than one person, and many have sex outside marriage. I just happen to have had it with people all along the gender scale."

Ellen Willis on Dylan

(A version of this was posted to my Tumblr)

"Many people hate Bob Dylan because they hate being fooled. Illusion is fine, if quarantined and diagnosed as mild; otherwise it is potentially humiliating (is he laughing at me? Conning me out of my money?) Some still discount Dylan as merely a popular culture hero (how can a teenage idol be a serious artist -- at most, perhaps a serious demagogue.) But the most tempting answer -- forget his public presence, listen to his songs -- won't do for Dylan has exploited his image as a vehicle for artist statement."

Willis said this more than thirty years ago, but what's really telling is that you could easily sub a number of artists for Dylan and it still rings true. (Madonna? No stranger to demagoguery. Gaga? Well, people discount her as a mere "pop" star, too.)

Also interesting is that Dylan, when viewed with enough historical distance, was once a "teen pop idol." Even when I think of the Dylan of my parents' generation, I don't see him as a pop star, only as a "serious" artists. It goes to show how much someone's narrative can change throughout their career given a few twists of fate. (Pun intended.)

Women and Music Writing, 2012

One of the first blogging gigs I had was writing about music for a site dedicated to promoting women's blogs. Finding other women writing about music was a challenge, not because they didn't exist, but because many of them wrote as part of a larger group blog, or as part of the feminist blogging community, but not necessarily as music bloggers. The latter is pretty important: some of the most vital music and entertainment writing comes from within the feminist blog world.

As traditional music blogs become less important in discovering new music, where does this leave the handful of female-penned blogs? Blogs by definition have a short shelf life. This one is already two years old, and I've transitioned from writing exclusively about music to writing a more generalized entertainment blog, but through a feminist lens. Some of that is a function of age: do I want to be a forty-year-old music blogger? I wish I could unequivocally say, "Sure, why not?" but with few examples to model myself after, I don't have the hubris to be "that old lady who wrote four posts about Lana Del Rey last month." (Truth: I already am that old lady.)

I think not having enough examples is an important point: there aren't enough well-known women music critics, period. Off the top of my head? Ellen Willis, who was one of the best when it came to viewing music through a feminist's, and through fan's eyes,  Tricia Rose, who's written some really great books about hip-hop and culture, and Ann Powers who currently works for NPR and the LA Times. If you asked me to name "canonical" music critics, it would be an overwhelmingly male canon with obvious offenders: Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Simon Reynolds, and Robert Christgau.

So what do we do to change the boy's club mentality in music criticism? For one thing, encourage women and girls to think critically. It's often taken for granted that women do think critically, particularly in a male-dominated arena like music writing. It's easy for self-doubt to sink in, especially when one well-respected Rolling Stone writer said in his book, "The archetypal girl fan doesn't have to worry about whether music is cool or valid or authentic. It it makes her dance or she gets hot, she screams. [...] Boys do not scream, so we get threatened." What's that supposed to mean? We don't have to tax our brains worry whether music is valid or not as long as we shake our asses? It's the ultimate backhanded compliment, and speaks volumes about the gender essentialism in music criticism, even among the most well-intentioned writers.

Most importantly, I think we need women writing about women -- as artists and as fans. I hate the idea that a fan's viewpoint is considered less worthy than a professional critic's. Aren't most critics at their core fans? And why would I want to read someone who wasn't?

Required Reading: Susan Sontag's "Notes On Camp"

"I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost strongly offended by it" -- Susan Sontag

I spent a good chunk of my adulthood knowing of Susan Sontag's "Notes On Camp," from her collection of  essays, Against Interpretation  (and being a fan of quite a few campy things myself) before I actually read it. Consider this my notes on "Notes on Camp."

Unlike a lot of individual essays, it's aged pretty well, though what most people would consider camp these days (Ab Fab, John Waters movies, etc.) obviously didn't exist when it was originally published in 1964, and the examples Sontag gives (Wilde, Genet) seem too canonical to be considered camp now.

It's impossible to talk about camp without talking about taste, and who gets to define it. She says, "Camp taste us by its nature possible only is affluent societies, in societies or circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affluence." Think of the cult surrounding the documentary on Jackie Kennedy's reclusive aunt and cousin, Grey Gardens -- a movie that does nothing but turn me into a humorless feminist ranting about the romanticization of mental illness, particularly mental illness in women, but it's a criticism that isn't without merit. Camp often deals in appropriation.

She goes on to say, "The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement. Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed a good taste or a bad taste. The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating." I once had an online acquaintance whose "bad taste" seemed so entirely crafted and curated that there was nothing charming about it. I wonder what Sontag would have thought of today's hipsters and their ironic (though not in the dictionary sense) "bad" taste?

Links & Bits: 3/16/12

I have to agree with Jill on this one. Persuading the FCC to boot Limbaugh off the air  is opening a huge, huge can of worms.

I'm obsessed with The A.V. Club's Drag Race recaps.

Rich from fourfour wrote about his Twitter encounter with an ANTM judge.

From The Childless by Choice Project: Do Our Favorite Toys Suggest an Inclination Toward Voluntary Childlessness?  Interesting. I never played "mommy," but neither did any of my friends, and some of those girls did eventually grow up to become mothers.

First Rule of Being a Good Ally: Know When To Listen

This is 101-level stuff, but particularly at ostensibly feminist sites like Jezebel, it happens quite frequently: if you truly consider yourself an ally, you might want to sit back and listen before commenting

The somewhat sensational headline,"Drag Queen on Gay Marriage: ‘I Just Don’t Want It to be Called Marriage ,' devoid of any nuance, doesn't really help. It largely went unnoticed, but commenter erinhorakova  explained why a member of the gay community would not be in favor of marriage. It's a difficult thing to parse, especially when the right has such a stranglehold on what the definition of  marriage should be, and who's entitled to it, but there is a faction of the gay community opposed to it:

"Within the queer community--perhaps more so a decade ago than today--there's been a lot of debate about whether gay marriage subordinates the energies and culture of the gay community into a heterosexual paradigm: whether effectively, in order for homosexual desire to be accepted by heteronormative societies, it must be channeled into forms that closely mimic stereotypical/acceptable/safe expressions of heterosexual desire. Thus a gay-marriage-skeptical argument wouldn't necessarily be predicated on whether or not the gay community felt they were deserving of the same rights as straight couples in a relationship. It would be more about preservation of a unique and perhaps valuable culture, and about expanding the possibilities 'acceptable' of sexual relationships for everyone, doing something beyond stuffing gay people into nuclear family paradigms. Fundamentally, there was concern was about whether, in an understandable quest for acceptance, the gay community was cheerfully seeking its own abnegation, out of a misplaced desire to become the norm rather than for the norm to accept them as they were."

Activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of That's Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation  and Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity , elaborates in an NPR interview from a few years back: 

"If we take a look at the focus, you know, this narrow focus on marriage, right, what we're told is that this is going to give us housing and health care and the right to stay in this country and tax breaks and the right to visit our, you know, the people we love in the hospital. 

But, really, it's only giving that right to people who are willing to conform to this narrow notion of a long-term monogamous partnership sanctioned by the state, which really doesn't relate to the majority of people's lives -straight, gay, queer or otherwise."

I don't mean to make this an arguement for or against gay marriage, or marriage in general -- personally, I think it should be recogmized at the federal level -- but with a few of the largely straight commenters chalking it up to "self-loathing" or whatever, I think a possible explanation was needed.

Shakesville's Personhood Amendment for Women

In response to the deluge of anti-abortion rhetoric, and general exclusion of women in talks about their own health and bodies, the bloggers at Shakesville are proposing a "personhood amendment for women," and they just launched it at change.org : 

"A person identifying as a woman and/or having a uterus shall retain all of the full, basic, and fundamental rights of a US citizen as guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Congress and the States shall make no law that infringes upon a person's life, including but not limited to access to life-saving or life-improving healthcare, and/or medicines and procedures deemed necessary or beneficial by a medical professional and/or by the person having the uterus, procurement of which shall not by denied in and of itself by the presence of a uterus. Congress and the States shall make no law that infringes upon a person's liberty, including but not limited to autonomy over hir own body and the ability to make decisions regarding hir own healthcare. Congress and the States shall make no law that interferes with a person's pursuit of happiness, including but not limited to access to a full spectrum of reproductive options, freedom from forcible reproduction, and the ability to make decisions regarding family planning and family resources."

Sign the petition here .

Earworm of the Day: Aimee Mann - That's Just What You Are

I've been wanting to do an Aimee Mann earworm ever since her guest appearance on Portlandia brought her back onto my radar:



To be honest, I sort of hated Portlandia at first, but I had to admit that, yes, I do know people exactly like that: over-privileged, educated, nouveau-hippie types who seemed to exist in a perpetual early-90s time warp. It's also one of the primary reasons the whitewashed 90s-nostalgia craze makes me want to pull my hair out at times.

Women and Online Safety

I picked up Lori Andrews's I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did, somewhat serendipitously the same afternoon I spent reading one woman's unnerving story of her rapist finding her online. I've written before about the benefits of anonymity online, especially for women, who are particularly targeted and even threatened. It's a good read for those of us tethered to our Facebook or Twitter accounts.

I'm not always careful. I've said enough here that I probably could never run for office (at least not in my home state). It's a hard line to straddle for bloggers -- trying to maintain enough transparency that one's credibility isn't questioned, but not so much that everything is there for the picking. I rarely, if at all, write about my family, to the point that in the past I've had people ask -- nay, demand -- to know more about my life, like it's something their owed simply because they read my blog. I find it interesting that the policies regarding internet transparency were drafted by those with the least to lose.

Another interesting statistic, via the book: younger people are more likely to better guard their personal info than those over forty. Ouch. But also we grew up in an era where the internet was a much smaller, more niche thing, where it never felt like the whole world was watching.

17 percent

This was the figure I heard on Up With Chris Hayes yesterday. Only 17 percent of US senators and 16.8 percent of the House members are women. The numbers among academics, law, and business stack professionals up similarly, according to Leslie Bennet's article in The Daily Beast, Women and the Leadership Gap :

"From politics and business to academia, law and religion, the allocation of power remains stunningly lopsided. “Over half of college graduates but less than a quarter of full professors and a fifth of college presidents are female,” reported Deborah Rhode and Barbara Kellerman in their book Women and Leadership. 'In management, women account for about a third of M.B.A. classes, but only 2 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs, 6 percent of top earners, 8 percent of top leadership positions, and 16 percent of board directors and corporate officers. In law, women constitute about half of new entrants to the profession, but less than a fifth of law firm partners, federal judges, law school deans, and Fortune 500 general counsels. Half the students in divinity school are women, but they account for only 3 percent of the pastors of large congregations in protestant churches that have been ordaining women for decades.'"

The entertainment industry doesn't fair much better:

"Among this year’s Academy Award nominations, 98 percent were given to movies directed by men, 84 percent went to movies written by men, and 70 percent to movies starring men. In the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as elsewhere in American society, the important decisions continue to be made by men: 77 percent of Oscar voters are male."

Why bring this up now when for years any reasonable person could conclude that yes, there is a definite lack of parity in leadership positions across the board, from politics to making movies?  Watching a roomful of older, white men discuss contraception, some of them not even knowing how it works, brought a lot of this stuff back into the open. Plus there's a myth, particularly among younger people, that feminism, when viewed with enough historical distance, solved all that, right? Wrong.

The Right to Write: Gender and Class

"I was trying to get away from the received idea that women always write about 'experience' -- the compass of what they know -- while men write wide and bold -- the big canvas, the experiment form. Henry James misunderstood Jane Austen's comment that she wrote on small pieces of ivory -- e.e. tiny observant minutiae. Much of the same was said of Emily Dickenson and Virginia Woolf. Those things made me angry. In any case why could there not be experience and experiment? Why could there not be the observed and the imagined? Why should a woman be limited to anything of anybody? Why should a woman not be ambitions for literature? Ambitious for herself?" -- Jeanette Winterson from her new memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

I've been paying a lot of attention lately to what writers say about their craft -- specifically how men's and women's writing is perceived by readers and critics alike. Somewhere I have jotted down a fragment of an old Andrea Dworkin quote where she said something to the effect of "I write like a man." What does that even mean? Opinionated and ambitious? Ambitious in the artistic or in the commercial sense? Or both? Because I don't see being rooted in the minutiae of daily life anathema to ambition or experimentation. I think a lot of it is perception -- men's writing is seen as tackling BIG THEMES simply because that's what we expect men to do. Women are supposed to remain close to home; ergo, so does their writing.

As much as I'm enjoying Jeanette Winterson's new book, I can't make any of it resonate with me. Intellectually, I know that I don't have be singing a chorus of "me toos" for a book to have value, but the only thing I've ever read about the act of writing that made any sense was this from Gloria Anzaldua:

"Who gave us permission to perform the act of writing? Why does writing seem so unnatural for me? I'll do anything  to postpone it -- empty the trash, answer the telephone. The voice recurs in me who am I, a poor chicanita from sticks, to think I could write?"

Writing wasn't something people in my family did. It was frivolous. It certainly wasn't work. Work was something you came home from tired and with dirty hands. A number of feminists claim to have found their voice through writing, but some of those same women criticize others for not having the best writing skills when they do attempt to put pen to paper. (Or fingertips to keyboard.) Feminism to me will always be tied to class, and I see this happening a lot of feminist blogs. Are we so afraid to criticize each other's words that we instead criticize each other's process? Is that somehow "safer," more acceptable?

Recently on her Tumblr*, Sady from Tiger Beatdown wrote of women's fear of offending others and how it stifles their writing. I agree, but I think it's painting with some pretty broad brush to assume that's the only thing stifling women's voices. I don't fear offending people, but I do fear being seen as less sophisticated or even less intelligent than my peers because I didn't go to a "good" school or that I live in a conservative part of the country. These things cut across gender lines and tend to get a little lost in the discourse on women and writing.

*her personal blog, which I don't feel comfortable linking to

Links & Bits: 3/3/12

Adrienne K. from Native Appropriations  weighs in on ANTM's Pocahontas controversy.

Thanu Yakupitiyage discusses  M.I.A.'s "Bad Girls" video.

Quote of the week goes to Melissa McEwan: "America's rightwing now fully believes that if you're not a straight white cis man who espouses conservative views, you're suspect."

It won't be out for a few months, but here's a peak at the title track from Rufus Wainwright's new album, Out of the Game:

Woman as Genre

It's not the first time I've said this, and surely it won't be the last, but as much as I try to keep the narrative of this blog free of reductive statements like, "Here's another aspect of the music industry where women are underrepresented or marginalized," it's an unavoidable fact.

The Guardian's Charlotte Richards Andrews echos what a lot of women who love and write about music for a living have been saying for years: women themselves are not a genre.

"When virtuoso female guitarists appear on the rock radar, they tend to gain the spotlight in the lulls between dominant, malecentric scenes (Britpop, grunge, glam rock), celebrated in isolation as brief, intermittent flashes of brilliance that flare up between the wider, collective scenes. When these women are innovative enough to operate successfully outside a zeitgeist, and gain an audience without the legitimacy and safety of a wider scene, they are seen as ancillary to rock's larger, holistic pantheon. They are rounded up for "women in rock" trend pieces where "gender is genre", a rock press narrative that creates a separate, and implicitly lesser, form of rock. [...] Creating a separate (slow) lane for women, where rock matriarchs, however hallowed, are women's only forebears, keeps rock divided. It divorces female musicians from their privileged forefathers, denies them their artistic lineage, and creates a system where women with electric guitars can only be as good as the women that came before them, celebrated on pedestals but never shoulder to shoulder with favoured male peers. If rock learned to celebrate more than one image as authentic and valuable, maybe that old death bell wouldn't ring quite so regularly."

Recently Rolling Stone published its "100 Greatest Guitarists " in rock and barely a handful of women made the cut. Looking at the lists artists who voted for their peers -- barely a handful of women made the cut. It's easy to draw parallels with the Vida report showing the lack of parity in literary and political magazines. If women can't be seen as peers -- or only as the peers of other women -- their contributions to music will never be held in the same regard as men's.

Game Change

Dave Holmes posted something on his Tumblr  yesterday that I wish were included in every of Rush Limbaugh's calling Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute. It's forcing the debate on his terms:

"You know what’s the most horrible thing about this story that is horrible in every way? That we are somehow arguing as though Sandra Fluke’s testimony were about taxpayers subsidizing her own sexual activity. In reality, she was talking about a private health-care plan and pointing out that hormonal birth control has uses and benefits that supersede contraception and are useful even to those who are celibate."

Jill from Feministe  also weighed in on the overall tenor of this -- I don't even know if we should be calling it a debate, because there's nothing really to debate. I haven't said much about it because politics really isn't my beat and I don't always convey anger effectively online (oh but believe me, I am livid that men are, again, at the center this discussion).

"There’s a lot to be said about the language here and how this all played out, and we can get into meta feminist discussions about how “slut” and “prostitute” shouldn’t be insults. But the world isn’t a feminist blog. So while the right response is obviously not, “But she’s not a slut or a prostitute!,” it’s still pretty damn fair to go after Rush on this one and demand that his sponsors quit enabling his bigotry. He hasn’t actually apologized (yes yes I realize it’s being reported that he has, but read his actual words and tell me that’s anywhere in the universe of a real apology), and there’s no reason to believe that someone who has made an entire career out of misogyny and racism would issue an actual apology." (emphasis mine)

I bolded that sentence because it's something that's easy to forget when you're operating within the parameters of the feminist blogosphere. So yes, going after Rush's sponsors is the best thing to do -- or maybe the only thing to do in this context. I mean, it's 2012, I'm almost forty years old, and I can't believe I'm writing a post about a man who thinks the birth control pill is something a woman takes each time she has sex.

Shelving: Kinfolks by Lisa Alther

"This raises the question of which is more dominant -- one's cultural heritage of one's genetic heritage. [...] But what happens when one's cultural heritage and generic heritage don't match? What happens when there are several heritages?" -- Lisa Alther

I picked up Lisa Alther's Kinfolks  a couple years ago when I was digging through my maternal grandfather's family history. I had little knowledge of it beyond his grandmother, of whom I have exactly two pictures, and the standard line I'd been given since childhood, "We're French and Native American." There are several métis lines on his mother's side, along with some Sephardic jewry, but his father's mostly disappear into Appalachia. I grew up with the rumors of some of his ancestors being "black dutch " or Roma (the latter of which I have no evidence at all -- though they did move around a lot). I first saw the word "melungeon" in Bill Bryson's book, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America, and it has haunted me since. (Though what I mostly remember of the book is Bryson trying to peek through the windows of some unsuspecting family trying to catch a glimpse of these elusive melungeons. I stopped reading after that.)

Wikipedia defines Melungeon as: "a term traditionally applied to one of a number of "tri-racial isolate" groups of the Southeastern United States, mainly in the Cumberland Gap area of central Appalachia, which includes portions of East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and East Kentucky. Tri-racial describes populations thought to be of mixed European, sub-Saharan African, and Native American ancestry." (Daisy explains it in further detail talking about her own family, but a lot of questions remain.)

Are my grandfather's ancestors melungeon? Most likely not, though some of their names appear on lists of common melungeon surnames. What I liked about Alther's book is in the end, she doesn't have it all figured out either, even after interviewing family members, meeting a new cousin who's done extensive research on melungeons, a trip to Turkey (some researches claim a Turkish component to Melungeon DNA, though it hasn't been proven) and even DNA testing. Kinfolks is part memoir, and part speculative history, though by no means does it pretend to be historically accurate. (I think this is important to remember and one of the primary criticisms I read when looking at a few reviews before writing my own.) It's a great read for anyone who's ever fallen down the genealogical rabbit hole -- a hobby that always borders on self-indulgence. It's easy to romanticize one's distant ancestors, and she does little of it while maintaing a sense of wonder, and often befuddlement. I also like the way she exploits the parallels in her own life, moving from place to place, never really fitting in anywhere, and her ancestors'.

I wish she'd write an updated or revised version. DNA has gotten more advanced in the five years since the book was published, and that she'd further address the question in the quote "What happens when one's genetic and cultural identity doesn't match?" because I see so much of my family in Kinfolks, and have a lot of the same unanswered questions.

Earworm of the Day: Mariza - Cavaleiro Monge

Mariza is a Portuguese and African singer in the fado tradition, a genre that can be traced to early 19th century Portugal and characterized by "mournful tunes and lyrics, often about the sea or the life of the poor, and infused with a characteristic sentiment of resignation, fatefulness and melancholia (loosely captured by the word "saudade", or longing)." (source)

She has a wonderfully emotive voice, but is also known for theatrical stage shows. Of a London performance back in May of last year, The Guardian's Robin Denselow said:

"Fado includes dance pieces along with pained ballads, and she treated both styles with the same declamatory intensity. It worked well for many of the songs, but she would have been helped by greater variety and quieter passages, as with the changes of mood, and dramatic silences, in her partly unaccompanied treatment of the pained Amália Rodrigues song, Ai, Esta Pena De Mim. At the end she really did return to basics, performing without a microphone and then walking out to sing in the audience. A standing ovation was guaranteed, but she would have sounded even more impressive if fewer of the songs had been tackled full tilt."

"Rush Limbaugh doesn't know how birth control works."

Watch this video from Friday night's Rachel Maddow show. Hilarious. Sad, but hilarious:

"I think that Rush Limbaugh thinks you take a birth control pill to avoid getting pregnant each time you have sex, so the more times you have sex the more birth control pills you need." (source)

I'm going to echo what a lot of people having been saying: assuming Rush does know how birth control works, he's banking on the fact that probably a chunk of his audience doesn't. Generally, I don't give Limbaugh's rage the time of day, but this is pretty poignant considering the current political climate and the ongoing war on birth control and women's bodies, an issue that in 2012, shouldn't be an "issue."

Women writers are still vastly underrepresented

Via Tiny Cat Pants

Vida, an online magazine dedicated to women in literature, released its report on the lack of parity in political and literary magazines. Not shockingly, men still make up the majority of bylines. Alyssa Rosenberg's post breaks the numbers down:

Of articles published by The Atlantic in 2011, 64 were by women and 184 were by men. In the Boston Review, the ratio was 60 to 131; in Harper’s, 13 to 65; in the London Review of Books 30 to 186; in The New Republic, 50 to 118; in the New York Review of Books a truly embarrassing 19 to 133; the New Yorker published 165 stories by women to 459 by men; and the New York Times Book Review printed 273 articles by women to 520 by men. The Nation, ostensibly a progressive publication, published 118 articles by women and 293 by men. Granta’s the only publication that’s close to parity—in fact, it published slightly more pieces by women than by men, 34 to 30. Perhaps some of these other publications should ask how Granta finds women, a task that appears so phenomenally daunting to the rest of the publishing world that it suggests that women, rather than man, are the most dangerous game.

You think by now magazines would get the memo that, hey, they women are vastly underrepresented, especially given that these are largely literary magazines and women actually outread men.  It's also important to note, as Jennifer Weiner does here, that men overwhelmingly fill editors positions, too, and change isn't likely to happen unless it happens from the top down.

But even before that can happen, women's writing needs to be seen as worthwhile and important. Look at how easily books written by women, about women's lives, as easily dismissed as "chick lit," while someone like Jonathan Franzen can stay close to home and hearth and be heralded for writing about the human condition.

Links & Bits: 3/2/12

I thought the difference between second-wave and third-wave feminists was the realization that feminism has done a poor job addressing the needs of all women, not just middle-class white ones. I'm wrong. It's Madonna.

Silverwane talks about being openly atheist.

It's women's history month. All month.

Davy Jones, R.I.P.

I'm cashing in my cool chips. I'm a huge Monkees fan. Yes, I know they were never a "real" band, and I really only saw them second fan via Nickelodeon's repeated airings. I'm a card-carrying member of the Monkees fan club (really!) and their 1986 reunion tour was my first concert (and apparently I'm not the only one ). Weird Al, whom at the time I found vaguely disturbing, opened. For those keeping score, Mike Nesmith, the one conspicuously absent from the reunion tours, is my "intellectual" favorite, while Peter Tork is my "sentimental" favorite. Needless to say, I'm incredibly sorry to hear that Davy Jones, the cute one who played the tambourine and won Marcia Brady's heart,  died yesterday of a heart attack at age 66:

Jones was born in Manchester, England and started acting as a child. In 1964 he had the misfortune of appearing in the cast of Oliver! on the same episode where the Beatles made their debut. The next year he was cast in The Monkees, a comedy show/band inspired by the success of the Beatles. They were an instant hit in the ratings and the record shops, scoring massive singles with "Last Train To Clarksville," "I'm A Believer," "Stepping Stone" and "Pleasant Valley Sunday." Jones – who played tambourine in the band – was the lead vocalist on the classics "Daydream Believer" and "I Wanna Be Free." At the peak of their popularity in 1967 they sold more albums than the Beatles. (Rolling Stone)

To be honest, I'm a little surprised by the outpouring of grief from women in their thirties and early forties. The Monkees were part of my mother's generation, and, I thought, my dirty little secret when everyone else was into Madonna or Bon Jovi. But then I remembered how often they were on TV in the mid-to-late eighties, an era didn't really have a lot of boy bands or teen idols. Of course we channeled them from another era. R.I.P. Davy.