The Nicki Minaj/Taylor Swift Twitter drama was a missed opportunity for a conversation about intersectional feminism

This week, people briefly cared about an apparent “Twitter feud” between Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj. It was one of those stories that, thanks to the major players and the issues as stake, inspired both crafted think pieces and tabloid trash. The Daily Mail churned out one story after another describing how a dispute between the superstars had bloomed into a larger debate about race in the entertainment industry.

Only it was the opposite. What should have been a debate about the music industry’s obvious race problem was reduced to a trumped up catfight. It started when Minaj tweeted her frustration that her video for “Anaconda” wasn’t nominated for the video of the year VMA despite its massive cultural impact. She argued that the lack of nomination was evidence of the industry’s continual failure to recognize achievements from black women and curvy women.  

“If your video celebrates women with very slim bodies, you will be nominated for vid of the year.”

“I was a different “kind” of artist, Anaconda would be nominated for best choreo and vid of the year as well”

“When the “other girls drop a video that breaks records and impacts culture they get that nomination.”

She didn’t mention anyone by name. But Taylor Swift – being the whitest, skinniest and most successful female artist in the game right now, whose video “Bad Blood”, which WAS nominated, featured a battalion of mostly white, mostly skinny women – decided she was under attack. She shot back with this:

“@NICKIMINAJ I’ve done nothing but love & support you. It’s unlike you to pit women against each other. Maybe one of the men took your slot.”

The waters of celebrity drama thus chummed, people descended on the story with their TeamTaylor/TeamNicki hashtags, and no shortage of opinions.

A lot of Minaj supporters criticized Swift for egotistically making something that wasn’t really about her about her. And yes, that’s part of it. I’m sure Taylor Swift does have a huge ego. She wouldn’t have been able to become Taylor Swift if she didn’t and if you were the biggest pop star on the planet you’d have a huge ego too. The issue is not the ego. It’s the diamond-encrusted invisible knapsack that Swift has carried with her throughout her entire career. That dangerous ego/knapsack combo made her naively, sincerely misunderstand Minaj’s point about intersectional feminism.

Intersectional feminism is the idea that feminism (the concept that men and women should be equal) should not and for many people cannot be seen as a gender issue alone. Because sexism affects women differently based on their race, class, size, age and sexuality. Because the sexism experience by slim white able-bodied rich straight women is different from the sexism experienced by black women, big women, disabled women, poor women, queer women and so on. Women like Taylor Swift, should they choose to, have the luxury of pretending that feminism is just a matter of “women helping women” and nothing more. But that’s not reality. Pop music is a prime example of that.

“Anaconda” and “Bad Blood” both give us plenty of eye candy. They both take place in a batshit insane hyper-reality filled with scantily clad female bodies. The bodies in Bad Blood are mostly white and skinny. The bodies in "Anaconda" are mostly brown and curvy. When we see two willowy blondes in their skivvies boxing in "Bad Blood", it’s sexy. When we see Minaj playfully spanking another woman in "Anaconda", it’s sexy. Both videos were massive hits. Both broke records. But when it came to acknowledging the most culturally important videos of the year, only one was nominated. Suddenly one was an actual artistic achievement and the other a trashy guilty pleasure.*

As Minaj said “I’m not always confident. Just tired. Black women influence pop culture so much but are rarely rewarded for it.”

I’m not accusing Swift of doing anything intentionally malicious, only of reading Minaj’s tweets with privilege goggles on, seeing feminism only in its simplest and most universal form. Swift’s response got a lot of support, I assume for the same reason “All Lives Matter” caught on. White people want to show their non-racism without having to actually talk about race. So we pull away from the issue, taking all the scary particulars out of focus, and then throw a blanket of general acceptance over it so that we can walk away and not deal with it anymore. Basically we miss the point. Unfortunately as soon as Swift missed the point we lost all hope of a productive conversation and pulled up our chairs and waited for a chance to watch two powerful women tear each other to shreds. Katy Perry helped us along, by needlessly tweeting:

“Finding it ironic to parade the pit women against other women argument about as one unmeasurably capitalizes on the take down of a woman…”

Sure, she has a point, but it’s still dragging the conversation further away from the real issue. Further mangling Minaj’s statements about the industry disproportionately recognizing skinny white women into yet another dispute between two skinny white women. Swift put an end to it by admitting fault:

“I thought I was being called out. I missed the point, I misunderstood, then misspoke. I’m sorry, Nicki.”  

We all love a good celebrity mea culpa. But I feel like an opportunity was missed. In response to Swift’s initial retort, Minaj wrote: 

“Huh? U must not be reading my tweets. Didn’t say a word about u. I love u just as much. But you should speak on this @taylorswift13”

I think this was a way of imploring Swift to use her superpowers to address the problem of race in music. Letting a generation of twelve year old white girls know that intersectional feminism exists. Thus helping build a new generation of women who are more understanding, more open-minded, less afraid to talk about race and less inclined to throw a big blanket of “I’m not racist” over the issue and walk away.

That didn’t happen. Maybe next feud.  

*And I know some people are crying “BEYONCE” at this, but to say that Beyonce’s success proves that the music industry no longer has a race problem is right up there with “Obama is president therefor racism no longer exists”. In my opinion. And not to get all Kanye about it, but with the benefit of hindsight I think we can all agree that “Single Ladies” was a greater cultural achievement than whatever the hell video Taylor Swift won for in 2009. So even Beyonce is not immune to these problems.

Running (From Dinosaurs) in Heels

(contains spoilers) 

I liked Jurassic World. I went in expecting to be entertained and I was. Sure, it had plenty of ridiculous elements, but I figured they just came with the summer blockbuster territory. Chief among them: Claire’s heels. Claire, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, is in charge of overseeing the entire titular theme park. And as we’ve come to expect from women in positions of authority in action movies, she’s kind of a drag. Uptight, humorless, career-obsessed. A real icicle-in-the-mud. Of course she eventually melts under the influence of Chris Pratt’s warm heart and hot body. Of course she loosens up and finds her inner badass in time to save the park from a giant hybrid lizard monster on a killing spree. But before, during, and after all that happens the heels stay on, through hours of sprinting across mud and rocky terrain. The heels themselves are a plain conservative beige. In fact they’re very much like Claire: boring, but surprisingly resilient.

I noted the absurdity of the heels while watching the movie. So did Chris Pratt’s character, Owen, calling them “ridiculous” at one point. But honestly I didn’t think about it too much. It didn’t really bother me that her character was a blend of cold-hearted power player and damsel-in-distress. That she needed Owen to rescue her, and in doing so inform her that dinosaurs are animals, not attractions, and that her nephews are good kids that she should try to get to know better. I figured that retrograde gender roles were part of the tradition they were working out of, that it was just a silly movie after all, and honestly who cares. But then Jurassic World broke box office records on its opening weekend, and as the reviews flooded in it became clear that a lot of people cared about the rebooted franchise’s “woman problem.” At the center of the controversy: those heels.

Some laughed them off as standard popcorn flick improbabilia. Some raged against them as a metaphor for Hollywood’s ongoing negative associations and unrealistic expectations of women. Others defended them as a testament to the strength and toughness of the woman whose feet they were on.  Megan Garber puts all these perspectives in a cultural context in an article for the Atlantic.  

We can’t agree on how to feel about Claire’s heels because we never really decided how to feel about heels in general. Are they modern day foot-binding? Or symbols of power and stature? When a woman wears heels, is she demonstrating her financial independence, sexual autonomy, and high pain tolerance? Or succumbing to a male-dominated culture that wants her to flaunt her ass and slow down? It’s been over fifty years since the invention of the stiletto, and we still can’t decide whether high heels are friend or foe to the modern woman. Even Sex and the City – surely television’s greatest high heel evangelist – acknowledged their dark side. Carrie may have felt empowered and fabulous strutting through Manhattan in her sky-high Manolo’s, but her “addiction” to them left her borderline bankrupt. When she realized (after losing the financial support of one boyfriend) that her shoe collection had left her with no savings, she ran to another boyfriend for help. If it weren’t for all those shoes, she wouldn’t have needed the men at all.

As for Claire’s predicament – what were her alternatives? Could she have gone barefoot? Did she have a sensible pair of commuting sneakers stashed away in a locker somewhere? I was genuinely surprised when the movie ended without a Romancing the Stone homage in which Owen hacked off the spikes of Claire’s heels thus freeing her from her self-imposed handicap (although if they really wanted people applauding in the theaters, they would have had Claire do the hacking herself.) But let’s assume, on some level, that she kept them on by choice. Howard herself took this position, arguing that Claire was the kind of woman who insisted she walked better in heels than without them. Suppose those beige pumps did something to Claire’s psyche, making her feel ready to take on the day: to run a major theme park, give presentations to high-powered investors, and if need be go head-to-head with an escaped hybrid lizard monster. After all, this is the reason many women give for spending crazy amounts of money on impractical footwear: it makes them feel superhuman.

This is what it boils down to for me: are the heels the will of a fictional woman who just feels more competent and capable with them on? Or the will of a real-life male director who wants his female lead to stay vulnerable and fuckable no matter what? It all comes down to choice. This was the issue at Cannes this year when the film festival’s directors tried to enforce a bizarre policy that all women wear high heels on the red carpet. Most women wear high heels on red carpets anyway, and that’s fine. But something about being told that they have to changes the game completely. If battling a hybrid lizard monster in heels is just Claire doing Claire, that’s one thing. If her inhuman ability to do so is more about the studio’s failure to see women as actual humans, then yes, Jurassic World has a problem. 

The sexy transwoman's dilemma: redefining gender under the patriarchal gaze

The May/June 2015 issue of Bust magazine has a cover story on Laverne Cox, where the actress and activist further cements her status as one of today’s leading feminist voices. She said a lot of important stuff, but one thing stuck out to me: regarding a recent interaction with author bell hooks where hooks basically called her out for appealing to the traditional, patriarchy-approved standards of female beauty (the accompanying picture of Cox in a cleavage-bearing crop top, flowing skirt and mermaid-like blonde hair does a pretty good job of illustrating what hooks is referring to). Cox’s response was a bullseye that I’ve been orbiting (but not quite landing on) for years so I’m just going to write it out verbatim here: “If I’m embracing a patriarchal gaze with this presentation, it’s the way that I’ve found something that feels empowering. I’ve never been interested in being invisible and erased.”

Exactly. For years, I’ve watched the media (and many feminists) lash out at women who capitalize on their sexuality. When women who are known to be smart and accomplished pose for Maxim, or dress provocatively, or what have you. The message is always something along the lines of: “by appealing to the male gaze you are voluntarily un-empowering yourself. You’re bolstering unrealistic, narrow minded standards of beauty and reinforcing the notion that whatever else you might be good at, looking hot is the most important thing.” And these are valid arguments, but even the most convincing ones have never quite silenced the voice in the back of my head saying “she can do whatever the fuck she wants.” Patriarchy is all about controlling women. And to tell a woman “Doing this thing that you enjoy, that turns grown men into a puddle of drool at your feet, is regressive and counterproductive” is to control her empowerment. It says: sure, you can be empowered, but only in the ways that society deems productive and politically correct.

It’s a complicated issue for cis women, and for trans women infinitely more so. A trans woman’s very identity is political, whether she wants to engage with those politics or not. Not only are they fighting the uphill battle of fitting in to a rigidly cis-normative society, but once the world sees them as women, they are immediately thrust into the fiery core of feminist discourse. Case in point: Caitlyn Jenner.

Like Cox, Jenner also found it empowering to embrace the patriarchal gaze. Her Vanity Fair cover was as sexy and unapologetically glamorous as a 90s supermodel spread. She could have worn a Hillary Clinton pantsuit. She didn’t want to. After a life of being perceived as male, she wanted to have that thoroughly satisfying experience of going full va-va-voom. And in spite of the inevitable transphobic tweets, the Internet’s initial, overwhelming response was a collective “Yeah, I’d hit that.” And then the wave of affirmation for Caitlyn Jenner’s attractiveness receded into a more complicated conversation. Jon Stewart pointed this out on the Daily Show saying “Caitlyn, when you were a man, we could talk about your athleticism, your business acumen, but not you’re a woman and your looks are really the only thing we care about.” Cox also urged fans to look beyond the bustier, writing on her blog “Yes, Caitlyn looks amazing and is beautiful. But what I think is most beautiful about her is her heart and soul.” These observations highlight an uncomfortable question: if the only way we know how to tell a trans woman we accept and appreciate her as a woman is to tell her how hot she is, what does that say about our definition of womanhood?

Female sexuality has always inspired fear. In their myths, ancient Greeks equated death with feminine beauty, probably because those were the two things men knew they were ultimately powerless against. Typically, patriarchal societies have handled this problem by either robbing women of their sexuality completely, or by forcing them to be defined by it. Either it’s not part of who you are (virgin), or it’s all you are (whore). 21^st century America, at least as embodied by the entertainment industry, tends toward the latter approach. But as we continue to move towards true gender equality, more and more women, both cis and trans – are refusing to accept this. They’re acknowledging, celebrating, even flaunting their sexuality without forfeiting all of the other things that make them powerful and great. So I don’t see the reaction to Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover as a regression so much as a baby step. It’s OK to acknowledge that Cox and Jenner are beautiful women. So long as we don’t stop there. 

Should women always have to choose beautiful?

In 2004, toiletry giant Dove launched its breakthrough “Real Beauty” campaign which famously displayed *real* women in their underwear. As we all well know, “real” is marketing speak for “size four and above.” But cynicism aside, the ad made an impact. Seeing full figured women looking happy, radiant, and comfortable in their own skin was such a refreshing break from the scowls and thigh gaps of the fashion world that you almost forgot the whole thing was a ploy to sell soap.

Recent contributions to Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign are more elaborate than just a curvy beauty in her skivvies. The company’s body-positive message has veered into Psych 101 territory, exploring women’s deeply engrained instinct to put themselves down.

In the ad “Dove Real Beauty Sketches” women are asked to describe themselves to a forensic artist, who then draws them based on that description. They are then asked to describe each other to the same artist. The final images are shown side by side, revealing that in every case, women’s self-perceptions were far less conventionally pretty.

It’s a powerful ad with a clear message: you’ve been taught to invent and fixate on imperfections. Now that you see how warped your perspective is you can start appreciating your looks, and finally feel beautiful.

Dove conducts another “experiment” in their latest ad, called “Dove Chooses Beautiful”. In this one, women are given a choice between two doorways, one marked “beautiful” and the other “average”. You see where this is going. At first most of the women walk through the average one. But by the end of it, they come to their senses and switch. Because all women, once again, are beautiful.

Dove has been praised for its “Real Beauty” platform for years. But does all this body-positive thinking need a second look? On April 8 BuzzFeed published a lengthy critique of the ad suggesting just that.

In the article (which the site later removed, then restored) beauty editor Arabelle Sicardi points out that Dove sells beauty products and is very much part of the female-insecurity-fueled industry it criticizes. She also took issue with the requirement that all women think of themselves as “beautiful”. And while “feeling beautiful” could mean a lot of different things, it still keeps the emphasis on looks. After all, no one sees the need to comfort men that they are “handsome just the way there.” But women must find a way to identify as beautiful (even if it’s not really a priority for them).

Sicardi notes that the women in the ad might have described themselves as smart, funny, or otherwise above average. But these were the two options they were given. We support Dove for bringing some diversity of female beauty to the advertising landscape. But it’s important to consider what we’re saying when we say that all women should feel beautiful. 

The 21st Century Rebirth of True Crime

I started watching the Jinx because, like many others, I needed some true crime methadone to Serial’s heroin. I ended up getting pulled in, but not for the same reasons. Serial was engrossing because the people tangled up in its Dickensian yarn were likeable. Sarah Koenig is a smart, funny, relatable reporter who you can imagine being friends with. Adnan is easily sympathetic and even Jay –an early candidate for the villain of the story – comes across as a reasonable person when he finally shows up. The lack of obvious bad guy actually raises the stakes. Because someone has to be lying, but the more we know the harder it is to believe that any of the principle characters would mislead us. And the fact that (I’m assuming) the majority of listeners were rooting for Adnan the whole time gives this eerie undertone to everything. Was the case mishandled? Definitely. But he still might have done it. We all might be rooting for a murderer.

Fiction is storytelling without responsibility to facts. And facts have no responsibility to the conventions of fiction. In the case of Serial, the facts didn’t arrange themselves into a satisfying ending the way they would in a fictional crime series. Although an intriguing coda was added IRL when it was announced that Adnan had been granted another appeal, partly due to evidence that Koenig herself dug up. We’ll see what happens there.

In the meantime, Serial’s anticlimax left us salivating for more true crime, and HBO obliged with the docu-series “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst.”

The Jinx is different from Serial in a few important ways. Most obviously, it’s video not audio. Which is a different kind of storytelling. The images that we had to use our imaginations for in Serial are in the Jinx reenacted in ghostly, slow-motion heightened reality sequences accompanied by the requisite photographs and talking heads.

The backbone is the same. A storyteller (not a cop, a detective, or anyone involved in criminal justice of any kind) is given access to the primary suspect in a murder case, the details of which remain murky. The two players aren’t likeable the way their radio counterparts were. Director Andrew Jarecki comes across as a goateed Hollywood type because that’s what he is. And Robert Durst, with his nasal monotone and sunken black eyes, barely registers as human let alone sympathetic.

It’s easy to say that the circumstances of Robert Durst’s life are stranger than fiction. But somewhat more amazingly, they’re exactly as strange as fiction. Every detail of his story seems cribbed off of John Grisham. An eccentric, alienated man from a family of New York Billionaires. An unsolved disappearance of a beautiful young woman. Another woman with mob connections executed in her own home. Cross dressing. Dismemberment. All the lurid details that people expect from any paperback potboiler. Right down to the satisfying ending.

This is another place where the Jinx differs from Serial. It has an ending. A piece of evidence linking Durst to a killing for which he was previously acquitted surfaces, and Jarecki confronts him about it on camera. Durst denies everything and then proceeds to go to the bathroom WHILE STILL WEARING HIS MIC and mumble what sounds a whole lot like a confession to himself while taking a piss.

I watched the final episode the night that it aired. And like most television viewers I did so while also looking at other things on other screens. Before I made it to that crazy final scene, I saw that the top story on NYTimes.com was that Durst had confessed during the finale. This came several days after the news that he had been arrested in New Orleans for murder based (once again) on evidence discovered not by professional detectives but by filmmakers.  

The narrative arc of Serial bends in Adnan’s favor. Koenig and her colleagues are journalists, and they attempt objectivity. They make compelling arguments against him. But really it’s clear that she thinks/hopes he’s innocent and we do too. Now he’s getting another appeal. Similarly, you don’t have to watch more than the opening credits of the Jinx to know that in spite of the apparent chumminess between Jarecki and Durst, the producers of the show are pretty fucking sure he’s guilty. Now he’s behind bars again.

“True Crime” as a genre has been around for hundreds of years, and it’s easy to see the appeal. The whodunit/police procedural is a foolproof storytelling mechanism, and if it actually happened – if these rapists and murderers and dismembering billionaires actually walk among us – that just adds spice. It makes us feel a little more in danger, which we like. But this genre means something different in the internet age. Citizens are becoming citizen journalists and journalists are acting like detectives, so it’s only natural that the world of Twitter/Reddit/et al be overrun with budding citizen detectives. We saw it after the Boston bombings. We saw it while Serial was still unfolding. It’s going to keep happening as the news becomes more and more immersive. This will help some innocent people, hurt some innocent people, help some guilty people, and hurt some guilty people. If the fad passes, we can all tally up the results and argue over whether it was a good or a bad thing overall.