How come only the boys on Girls grow up?

I’m a big fan of Girls. I caught on to Lena Dunham’s HBO series late, binged my way through the first few seasons, and it now has the distinction of being the only show I watch in real time, as new episodes come out every Sunday. I liked it because it was fun and well-written and because the characters rang true. I liked that, unlike the characters on other shows I won’t mention, this coed bunch of spoiled Millennial brats actually got called out on their bullshit. But somewhere around the third season, I noticed more and more it was the men calling the women on their bullshit (often eloquently, and with good reason) and rarely the other way around.

As the seasons roll by, this dynamic has corresponded to a puzzling trend: the show’s male supporting characters are maturing. The four female leads are doing the opposite.

Here’s a quick roundup: Ray, once a misanthrope with no ambition or permanent address, is now managing his own business and running for public office (although what happened with that whole thing I’m not sure). He’s also shown a softer side, doggedly defending the women who so relentlessly screw him over. Adam started out as a reclusive, compulsive man-child whose dirty talk was laced with allusions to pedophilia. Now he’s enlightened, generous, evolved. Elijah started out dating a rich older man, perfectly comfortable “being Wendi Deng.” Now he’s backing away from a fling with a celebrity because he knows he deserves more respect. Would the old Elijah have a moments’ hesitation? I think not.

As for the eponymous girls: the two big recent leaps into adulthood – Marnie’s marriage and Shoshanna’s career, have come to screeching halts. Jessa seems to have found a path to relative stability, but has shut out her friends and become financially reliant on a boyfriend in the process. And Hannah is in the middle of some bizarre sociopathic freefall that I don’t even know where to begin with. This growing divide only makes the dynamic of bad female behavior tempered by a male voice of reason more and more pronounced, and it reached a fever pitch this week.

The episode “Homeward Bound” starts with Hannah hightailing it out of a camper and demanding that Fran (the patron saint of male reasonableness) leave her at a truck stop. When he finally relented, called her selfish and rude, and granted her wish, I cheered him on. Hannah then calls her female friends for help. No dice, they’re too busy being selfish and rude. Only Ray is enough of a friend to come and rescue her. And she responds by forcing road head on him, causing him to crash his car, refusing to apologize, and then abandoning him to hop in a stranger’s car. It’s hard to imagine Season 1 Hannah being that awful. And it’s hard to imagine Season 1 Ray accepting it. But that is the trajectory that both characters have been on.  

Elsewhere in Girls-world, we have Shoshanna running in to her ex-boyfriend - another one-dimensionally decent dude - at a sushi restaurant, where he explains to her (because apparently she really didn’t know) why it is reprehensible to apply for government assistance while still indulging in pricey sushi lunches. We have Caroline abandoning her partner and baby. We have Adam stepping in to take care of his niece, to Jessa's apparent chagrin. When Jessa uncharacteristically freaks over some spit-up, she hands the infant off to Adam, and demands his help. Adam, in stone-faced disapproval, says “You're an adult. She's a baby. Why do you need more help than a baby?” The camera cuts to Jessa, admonished and without a comeback. 

The episode is absolutely chock full of women being entitled, petulant, and naïve, and men counseling them on how reasonable adults behave.  

There’s this insidious notion running through TV and movies that female characters have to be likeable in order to be compelling. Lena Dunham has always said a fearless “fuck you” to this idea, and I applaud her for that. I also applaud her for flipping the tired old trope of the perfect, beautiful woman with endless patience for the unworthy, flawed man in her life. But at this point in Girls, that role-reversal is starting to feel like an overcorrect. Why is all the emotional support on this show handed down from a man? Why, when the women try to turn to each other for comfort and guidance, does it almost always devolve into brush-offs and accusations? Why, at this point, does all the wisdom on the show come from a male voice? I’m not saying I have to like these women. I’m not saying they have to start behaving themselves, or dedicating their energy to saving the men in their lives. I’m just asking for some indication that as the years have passed, they’ve gained a little wisdom all their own. 

I'm with Kim on this one

International Women’s Day is an annual celebration of womens' social, political and economic achievements. Naturally, Kim Kardashian recognized this day by posting a nude selfie on Instagram. We should expect nothing less of Kim. This is her role, the job we have all collectively assigned her and she is going to keep doing it until we stop watching. It was just Kim being Kim, which is exactly what she gets paid (obscene amounts) to do.

To be clear: I am no great fan of Kim Kardashian. For all her time in the limelight, she hasn’t said much of consequence. She’s mostly used her own tautological celebrity as a platform to promote herself and her friends. Granted, she’s built herself into a powerful and lucrative brand. But I think that says more about her mother’s ruthless marketing chops and society’s weird priorities than it does about Kim’s business acumen. Her continued relevancy is largely the result of her association with other celebrities: OJ Simpson, Paris Hilton, Ray J, and now Caitlyn Jenner, Kendall Jenner, Kanye West. She’s also very beautiful. But it’s my general feeling that someone who believes themselves to be the most interesting thing in the world is almost certainly a boring person, and Kim is a shining, shellacked example of that.

So it’s not like I was tearfully slow clapping her nude selfies last week. But I was dismayed by the backlash they got. It came from some unexpected places: Chloe Grace Moretz (one of the most exciting young actresses around right now) tweeted “I truly hope you realize how important setting goals are for young women, teaching them we have so much more to offer than just our bodies.” Pink, who I admire, also took to Twitter encouraging women to rely on their brains and talent, “It may not ever bring you as much ‘attention’ or bank notes as using your body, your sex, your tits and asses, but women like you don’t need that kind of ‘attention.’”. And Piers Morgan decided that his thoughts on this topic were so essential they merited a whole Daily Mail article. He wrote:

“I found it all a bit depressing, Kim’s 35 now, and the mother of two very young children. She still looks fantastic, and of course has every right to post as many naked pictures as she likes. It’s her body, her life. But it’s hard to escape the creeping suspicion that this new frenzied and frankly rather desperate attempt to ‘break the internet’ is happening because other younger members of her family have been grabbing at all the scantily-clad attention recently, notably half-sister 20-year-old Kendall ‘Instagram Queen’ Jenner. Every super model, movie and pop sex symbol (with the exception of the increasingly grotesque and embarrassing Madonna) knows there comes a time when you have to hand the baton onto the next generation, however reluctantly.”

That was the passage that sent me shuffling grudgingly over to Team Kim. Pink and Moretz were arguing that women who promote their sexuality can’t be good role models (which I disagree with, but fine). Morgan is implying something far more abhorrent: once a woman is past a certain age, and a mother, her sexuality becomes something shameful. He seems to be saying that women only show their bodies out of insecurity. And that insecurity is acceptable in a childless 20-year-old. For a 35-year-old, it’s “frenzied and desperate.” In a 57-year-old, “Grotesque and embarrassing.” Piers Morgan, who is in his fifties himself, seems to suggest that “scantily clad” is exclusively the purview of current and recent teenagers. To sexualize a woman not yet old enough to legally drink is just standard industry practice. To sexualize a woman in her 30s is “depressing.”

I’m sure he’d prefer we interpret his words as something like “Come on, Kim, don’t advertise yourself as some bimbo sex object. You’re so much more than that!” But his subtext is much more sinister. Saying a woman shouldn’t post nude selfies because she’s married, or a mother, or over thirty, etc. is akin to archaic religious laws exerting control over women by insisting they dress in accordance with their sexual or marital status. In this system, the patriarchy decides when a woman becomes desirable, when she stops being desirable, and when her desirability belongs to her husband. Which may seem like an extreme comparison, but where else did Piers Morgan get the idea that he has the right to make sweeping claims about when women must “pass the baton”?

In conclusion, do I love that Kim Kardashian celebrated International Women’s Day by celebrating herself? No. But I will defend to the death her right to do it.     

Why am I not more excited about Hillary?

In the never-ending clown show of the 2016 primary race, certain observations are frequently rammed down our throats (as Marco Rubio would say twice in a row). Chief among them on the left is the reminder that Bernie Sanders – a 74-year-old curmudgeon who can’t pronounce “Snapchat” correctly – has lit a fire under the nation’s youth. This is a big deal. Young people are far less likely to vote than their older counterparts. Conventional wisdom is that they’re lazy cynics who take their civil liberties for granted. So if they don’t have a candidate that they truly believe in, they’ll probably just Netflix and chill on election day.

I’m 27, which means I’m young enough to be lumped in with this elusive “young voter” crowd. But I’m also old enough to have voted for Obama in 2008, which I did. I was totally swept up in the Shepard Fairey HOPE momentum. I stood in the rain for hours on my birthday to cast my vote. The night he was elected, people set off fireworks and danced in the street. I cried watching his acceptance speech. My ultra-liberal college campus held a spontaneous dance party. Today Bernie Sanders - sincere, anti-establishment, and unapologetically pissed off - is getting that same treatment. And once again Hillary has been pushed to the sidelines (if not downright vilified) by young liberals.

There are plenty of explanations for why Hillary Clinton still fails to inspire. There are legitimate reasons to distrust her and doubt her integrity. Her wealth and chumminess with Wall Street - while par for the course among politicians of her stature – look shitty in light of Sanders’ populist diatribes. And idealism will always make for better soundbites than pragmatism. But in 2007, Americans were clamoring for change, and Clinton reeked of more of the same. Now they’re clamoring harder, and Clinton reeks even worse.  Of course a handsome young mixed race first-term senator with a foreign-sounding name felt like a welcome departure. But when you’re standing next to an old white guy whose been in politics for three decades, and HE'S the breath of fresh air, you know you’ve got a problem connecting with people. 

In the Feb. 5 debate, Clinton challenged Bernie's assertion that she represented the establishment saying "Senator Sanders is the only person who I think would characterize me, a woman running to be the first woman president, as exemplifying the establishment."  It wasn't convincing. Which in a way is weird. Because the first female president SHOULD feel groundbreaking, should feel like sticking it to the (literal) man, should be a big fucking deal. So why don’t I, as an American woman, feel impassioned and energized at the prospect of a vagina-having commander in chief?

Clinton de-emphasized her gender when she campaigned against Obama. That was deemed a mistake, and she’s tried to make more of it this time around, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Is this because Clinton, after a lifetime of trying to be taken seriously in a man’s world, is such an establishment figure that her gender doesn't even read anymore ? Or are we reaching a point where gender inequality simply doesn’t feel like a pressing enough issue?

Madeleine Albright suggested recently that there was a special place in hell for women who didn't vote for Hillary. Gloria Steinem went so far as to suggest that naive Millennial gals were just emulating "the boys" with their Bernie support (gag, Gloria, gag). But these two groundbreaking women, baffled at why younger women fail to recognize the revolutionary shift that Hillary's election would represent, are the product of an earlier time. A time when sexism was rampant and blatant and visible everywhere you turned. For many, it still is. But even though I am a woman with strong feelings about gender equality, in 2007 I supported Obama in part because I felt it was more pressing and significant to elect the first black president than the first female one. I still feel that way. And while I’ve spent most of this election cycle assuming I would vote for Hillary in the primary, it’s always been a cerebral choice, not an emotional one. I feel like if elected she would continue the largely good work Obama has done on domestic policy, but that her experience as secretary of state would make her stronger on foreign policy. And maybe the fact that she’s kind of a shifty opportunist might actually help ease the congressional gridlock a little. And I don’t NEED to love the president, dammit, so long as they’re competent and on the right side of history. But my reasons for supporting Hillary really have nothing to do with her gender, and I bet she’d prefer it that way. 

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. 

Is Elizabeth Wurtzel the Ghost of Lena Dunham Future?

Lena Dunham has a new book out. A collection of essays called Not That Kind of Girl describing her charmingly rocky road to adulthood. It’s a road we’ve been down before, via her first feature film Tiny Furniture her hit HBO show Girls and in the odd New Yorker article. As Alice Jones writes in her review of the book for The Independent: “Her life is her art. Always has been. Everything that happens to her is near instantly processed as fodder for a story.” Lots of people find themselves fascinating. The millennial generation is full of over-privileged naval-gazers with creative aspirations. Not That Kind Of Girl is surely far from the only memoir of its kind. It is, however, the only one that received a $3.7 million advance from Random House.

Part of the magic of Lena Dunham is how she refuses to spare herself. She’s been subject to some vicious critiques – entitled, narcissistic, not pretty enough - but they all fall flat because she’s already incorporated them into her act. On TV, the character she plays is a walking exploration of everything that can and has been said about the actress that plays her. She also lets herself be filmed naked on the toilet. Not even “lets” – insists. It’s her show, she’s the one making these choices. And it works. We are as transfixed by her compulsive honesty as we are by her wit.

If she were a hack, I would dismiss her as a novelty. A by-product of a generation raised on voyeurism and nurtured by (false) assurances that they are uniquely magnificent. But she’s not a hack, she’s talented. Which makes me excited to see where her career will go, and more than a little bit worried as well.

I worry because I don’t know if obsessive self-examination is enough to sustain an entire career. I do think it’s worthwhile. As they say “write what you know” and it’s arguably impossible for a writer to write well about any other subject until she truly understands herself. That said, I think that early success as a memoirist can stunt the growth of a young writer. Case in point: Elizabeth Wurtzel.

Elizabeth Wurtzel published “Prozac Nation” in 1994 when she was 26-years old. The parallels between Wurtzel and Dunham are significant: the New York upbringing, the frankness bordering on exhibitionism, the struggle with mental illness. Both women, in their time, have been crowned the “voice of a generation.” In Wurtzel’s case, it was Generation X.  Her memoir about depression and self-destructive behavior struck a chord with America’s gloomy youth when they were reeling from the suicide of their idol Kurt Cobain. Suddenly she was living every young writer’s dream. By her own account, she celebrated by getting heavily into drugs and sleeping with a different man every night. Which was her prerogative. But the trouble is, she never quite pulled off the same trick again – of cataloguing her own experiences in a way that resonated widely with her peers.

Fran Lebowitz has said that while experience is essential to being a writer, some writers can only write about being young. “Once they’re no longer young, they can’t do it anymore”. Elizabeth Wurtzel made a name for herself writing about what it was like to be “young and depressed in America.” She has stayed true to her self-as-subject ever since, with ever diminishing returns. She has described the indignities of aging, the burden of being conventionally pretty, the thrill of sleeping with married men. In January 2013, New York Magazine published her piece “Elizabeth Wurtzel Confronts her One Night Stand of a Life,” a periphrastic whine/brag about how the writer managed to reach her 40s without accumulating any of the conventional trappings of adulthood. Now, at 47, she has found love at last. The world knows this now, because of her essay in this Sunday’s New York Times entitled “Getting Married Is Easy” where she announces her engagement by describing what a disaster her dating life was for decades before meeting her now-fiance. Wurtzel is still dealing with themes that people can emotionally connect with, but it’s almost irrelevant because she has so thoroughly cordoned herself off from any audience she may still have.

Swimming against the tide of social expectation isn’t easy. It’s understandable that twenty years of it has given Wurtzel a “me against the world” mentality. But I think her writing suffers from it. When she briefly turns her focus towards the people around her, she tends to make sweeping generalizations that don’t always ring true. Observations along the lines of “everyone else is doing this” or “most people feel this way” are seldom substantiated, and it often feels like she’s only interested in the general population insofar as it proves how removed she is from it. A harsh critic of her times, she revels in her status as outcast. Because if society is so debased, then there is a kind of purity in failing to conform, right? “In a world gone wrong, a pure heart is dangerous” she writes with zero irony. The reader is then antagonized by default. You may feel like an outcast, or a failure, or a “difficult personality” but you’re not Elizabeth Wurtzel. Therefore, you can’t relate to what she’s going through. You can only stupidly think that you do.

It’s a shame really, because she’s not a hack either. She’s probably almost as smart as she thinks she is, which is impressive. But she crossed a threshold somewhere. Self-scrutiny is a window into the outside world. But taken too far it can also become a dark, locked room.  

I don’t believe that Wurtzel is the Ghost of Lena Dunham future. For some reason, I see the latter staying grounded and adaptable where her predecessor spiraled off into self-aggrandized oblivion. Why would that be?

An article on the blog The Pessimist called “Ugly: The Problem with Elizabeth Wurtzel” suggests that the memoirist’s career was doomed by her, well, hotness. This may be partly true, but only because she insisted on making such a big damn deal about it. It’s hard to be on board with anyone who waxes poetic about their own beauty. Conversely, Lena Dunham has probably benefitted from the accessibility of her looks. She’s extremely cute, she’s got a rock star boyfriend, and she’s been on the cover of Vogue. But in the Twilight Zone of Hollywood, she does stand out for looking a bit more like the rest of us. Her arrival on the scene was heralded as “refreshing” and “real” which helped fuel her meteoric rise. Will it help her career in the long run, in the same way that being moviestar gorgeous hurt Wurtzel? Maybe. But I think that Dunham’s salvation will be more a matter of intellect than looks.

I was introduced to Dunham (like many people) through Tiny Furniture. That movie was the story of her fictionalized self, but the other characters were fully realized as well. The same applies to her costars on Girls. I think that her talent is strongest in her dialogue, which bodes well. Because writing dialogue forces you to step out of your own perspective and inhabit someone else’s. You don’t have the option of relating to the whole world as a monolithic foe (the way Wurtzel so often does) when you’re writing a screenplay. So the fact that Dunham has such a knack for that particular art form gives me hope that her work will continue to resonate even when she and her cohort are no longer young.   

Rejected Princesses is My New Favorite Tumblr

Sorry, Kittenstache.

Former DreamWorks animator Jason Porath has a new Tumblr dedicated to some of the baddest bitches of all time. He presents the weird, wild, and often horrifying facts (taken directly from history and myth) about these women’s lives, alongside cartoon renderings of them in the familiar Disney style.

I love this idea because it draws attention to two important facts: 1) The stories that Disney tells about women are consistently disappointing, and 2) history is full of amazing stories about women that barely get told at all.

Consider the classic trifecta of Disney princesses: Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White. All three are borrowed from traditional fairy tales, and afforded basically zero personality or autonomy. They’re just pretty, and in a terrible situation because some older woman is jealous of how pretty they are. They yearn to be rescued (see: Snow White’s signature ballad “Some Day My Prince Will Come”) and after some series of events totally outside of their control, their handsome saviors show up and rescue them by turning them into wives. Cringe. Yawn.

Then Disney evolved a little bit, and started giving us heroines with a little moxy: Belle was a bookworm, Ariel was adventurous, Pocahontas was strong-willed, Jasmine was disobedient. All of these women started out feeling restless, eager to discover the world outside of the confines of their sheltered lives. But every damn one of them finds her destiny in some man. Every one of them ventures just far enough to discover her soulmate and then settles back in, satisfied that her love story (and therefore her entire story) has reached its happy ending.

Which is the first reason why Porath’s Tumblr is so awesome. I can’t think of a pop culture trope I am more eager to see turned on its ear.

The second reason is that it reminds readers of some amazing people who should never have been forgotten in the first place. Some of them are admirable, some controversial, some downright sinister. But all of them are complex and powerful, and all of them serve as a reminder that the so-called “fairer sex” is a whole lot more interesting than history has given it credit for.

Reading this Tumblr, I was happy to learn a lot of new names, and to see some familiar ones that I do not see very often. Here are a few personal favorites:

Ida B. Wells: Journalist, activist, and early hero of the civil rights movement, Ida B. Wells is an all-around inspiration. She dedicated (and often risked) her life for the cause of spreading truth as an instrument of social justice. At a time when the horrific practice of lynching was common and widely misunderstood, she wrote about its brutal reality in works like her book Southern Horrors.

Pasiphae: Although she is totally fictional, I loved seeing Pasiphae on there because the story of the Minotaur is my number one favorite story of all time. I just love the characters, including the Minotaur’s mother Pasiphae, who is often omitted when people tell the tale of this famous hybrid monster.

Wu Zeitan: While studying Chinese history in college, I remember reading Wu Zeitan’s story and wondering if she was a full blown psychopath or just a product of her times. She was the only female emperor ever to rule in China. Remember that speech in Macbeth where Lady Macbeth vows that she would kill her own baby if it secured her in a position of power? Yeah, Wu Zeitan actually did that. But it begs the question of whether a woman who was anything short of a cold blooded child killer could have done what she did, given the attitude of the time.

Elisabeth Bathory: History’s most prolific serial killer. With a title as incendiary as that, you’d think she’d be more widely known. Twilight brought pop culture’s love affair with vampires to new extremes. But even that couldn’t raise this “Blood Countess” (whose story served as inspiration for the original Dracula myth) from the coffin of history.

Even though these are some of the most impactful women (and/or intriguing stories) of all time, none of them are household names. Sure, they’re documented, and some people know about them. But if you mentioned any of them at a party it would never get the same reaction as mentioning, say….Benjamin Franklin. Or Napoleon. Or Alexander the Great.

Why is that? Maybe it’s because they’re hard to like. The three dudes mentioned above were all profoundly flawed, but we would never let those flaws overshadow their historical significance. With women, if we can’t root for them every step of the way, we can’t handle them. 

A Disney princess may be sulky or stubborn or mischievous, but beyond that she’s utterly unobjectionable. Just like she always has Barbie-esque proportions to match her perfectly symmetrical face. Mulan is something of an exception to the mold outlined above. But for all her genderbending badassery, her character presents no challenge to the viewer. She is consummately virtuous. She never does anything that might complicate how we feel about her.

Not so with most of the women on Porath’s list.

We’ve all heard Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s charming adage that “well behaved women seldom make history”. This is true, but even badly behaved women struggle to make the cut. A lot of people, when confronted with a difficult woman, will awkwardly avoid her. Historically, we tend to put them off to the side where we don’t have to deal.

That’s why it’s so important to pay tribute to the outliers, who managed to write their names in ink (or blood) in a world that didn’t expect them to make an impact. And if we can do that while making fun of a cultural powerhouse that promotes antiquated gender stereotypes, so much the better! 

What can we learn from the "Fappening"?

Jennifer Lawrence is a victim. All of the women included in the recent mass celebrity nude photo leak are victims, just like someone whose house is robbed is a victim of robbery. Outside of the statements released by various PR and legal teams, that word “victim” hasn’t come up much. Partly because it is sympathetic, and a lot of people decline to sympathize with rich celebrities as a matter of principle. But also because it is exculpatory. Much of the coverage of what the internet has saucily dubbed “the Fappening” has been laced with judgment. Judgment that a bunch of public figures were foolish enough to store their naughty pics online. And more than that, judgment that they took the naughty pics in the first place.  

The iCloud leak should definitely serve as a cautionary tale, but the celebrities’ actions are far from unusual. All over the world, millions of people use the internet every single day. Many do so with a false sense of security, assuming that their passwords and “friends-only” filters are sufficiently protecting their private information from malefactors and thieves. The rest of us, to varying degrees, are gambling. We know that should some hacker somewhere decide to access say, our social security numbers, bank statements, addresses, phone numbers, and any personal photos that may be floating around, they would be able to do so quite easily. We knew the risks involved when we made that information available online. We decided it was worth it, given the remarkable convenience we enjoyed as a result. In much of America, to opt out of such risks is downright eccentric, perhaps even impossible. The moment we fill out the paperwork necessary to open a bank account, or start a new job, it will be archived in an online database and vulnerable to hacks.

This is all to say that anyone criticizing these women on the grounds of technical naivete is probably a damn hypocrite.

Some have made the argument that they should have been more careful, given their celebrity status. To that, I would like to point out how obnoxious it is when a celebrity acknowledges her fame, and how refreshing it is when she carries on as though she were an ordinary schmo. Like when an actress is photographed leaving the gym looking a sweaty mess because she can’t quite believe that a bunch of paparazzi would actually be interested in documenting her workout routine. Furthermore, many of the pictures are several years old, and pre-date big time fame.  

But this isn’t really about hating on someone for not understanding the Cloud. As Jason Segel says in “Sex Tape” (or at least in the trailer for Sex Tape, I didn’t watch that mess) “No one understands the Cloud. It’s a fucking mystery”. This is about punishing famous women for exploring their sexuality and having the gall not to share it with us.

We feel like these actresses transgressed, and as a result we are now entitled to these images whether they want us to see them or not. It’s the same principle as revenge porn. Revenge porn is a serious problem which is being addressed somewhat but not nearly as actively as it should, because of the same biases affecting the victims of the leak. We are still a long way from living in what Dan Savage would call a “sex-positive” society, and as a result, we can’t quite rally around a woman who displays her naked body in that way. We waver on the line, saying “yeah, it was shitty that her ex-boyfriend exposed her like that, but what was she doing taking those pictures in the first place?”

What she was doing was appreciating her body. She was seeing her naked self in the mirror, liking the way it looked, and capturing the moment on film.

A lot of people have taken naked selfies. A lot of people have sent those naked selfies to a significant other using a technology that would make it possible for an obsessive creep to intercept them. And I would wager that a lot of the people who so proudly haven’t might just change their tune if they woke up tomorrow morning looking like Jennifer Lawrence.

These pictures were taken privately, and saved, which means that in a lot of cases they probably had a positive association for these women. They were reminders of a moment of self-esteem, or of feeling sexy and desired by someone they liked. Like all pictures they preserved a memory, in this case a memory characterized by confidence, arousal, fun, and trust. The leak took all of that and turned it into something that they needed to be ashamed of. That’s a fucking bummer.

I think that we can all learn from this incident in the sense that we all learned from the Snowden leaks: information that is saved or shared digitally is never really secure. But there is another important lesson here, and I fear that the puritanical coverage of the event will serve only to obscure it: just because a woman is comfortable with her sexuality does not mean that her sexuality belongs to anyone who wants it. A woman’s sexuality belongs to herself, and whoever she consents to share it with. When these women took these pictures, they did not consent for them to be publicly available. The fact that they took naked pictures in the first place does not count as consent, nor does it deprive them of the right to make that choice. These are simple ideas, which we ignored the moment the pictures became available, because we are a society that still believes that a woman’s body (especially when she has the audacity to appreciate it on her own terms) belongs to us. Let’s all take a moment to reflect on how fucked up that is and try to keep it in mind the next time a bunch of private photos get hacked.

The Dangers of Humor in a Pre-Post-Sexism World

I’d like to propose a new expression. This expression refers to the phenomenon wherein someone makes a joke based on the assumption that we live in a post-sexism world, and ends up pissing everybody off because we do not actually live in a post-sexism world. Such a misstep shall heretofore be called: a Spinning Vergara.

Example: “At the Christmas party, Dan pulled a Spinning Vergara when he attempted to guess Michelle’s bra size. He argued that since he was only kidding and truly respects her as a coworker and an equal, that it wasn’t really sexist.”

I am talking, of course, about the much pilloried skit at this year’s Emmys where Sofia Vergara was displayed on a spinning platform as a sexy adornment to some executive’s speech about how far television has come in terms of gender and racial diversity. It was meant to be ironic; the Television Academy congratulating themselves on their progressiveness while displaying a woman of color like a brainless prize. More than that, it was supposed to be amusing. The public (as embodied by the Twitterverse/blogosphere/mainstream media in that order) was not amused. People were shocked and appalled by what they perceived as a tasteless, sexist, disgusting stunt.

I am constantly mystified by the choices made by the entertainment industry. Rarely do I watch an awards show without asking myself “oh God, what were they thinking?” several times. Strangely enough though, this was not one of those times. I’m not saying it was a great bit. But I can kind of see what they were going for. I can see why they thought it would be funny to jazz up a boring speech with some good-natured T&A. I can see how the repeated instances of the term “platform” in the speech led to the idea of using an actual platform. I can see how they discussed who could sell the bit best, settling on the one woman who had the measurements of Christina Hendricks, the hammy comedic chops of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and was a past Emmy winner to boot. I can totally imagine how they came up with this idea, and I also can see how they hedged their bets and concluded that most people would appreciate the humor. After all, it’s an overt send up of sexism. That’s why it’s not sexist. Right?

                For whatever reason, I feel the need to play devil’s advocate on this one. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because the subtext of the skit (“Hey! Look at Sofia Vergara! She’s hot! It’s funny because she’s hot!”) is also the subtext of pretty much every scene that she’s in on Modern Family. And if there is one thing that the Emmys LOVE it is Modern Family. One way or another, Vergara’s fabulous curves are being exploited to comedic effect. And to celebrate that exploitation in one context while chastising it in another seems a mite hypocritical to me.

                I also genuinely believe that Vergara liked the idea and wanted to do it. She responded to the first round of haters, saying the skit was “the opposite” of sexism, going on to say “it just means that someone can be hot and funny and make fun of herself”. Her defense didn’t seem to change anyone’s mind, which I find kind of surprising. It’s almost like they’re suggesting that Vergara, silly naif that she is, simply failed to recognize that she’s being objectified. This is not giving her anywhere near enough credit. She is the highest paid woman on TV. More importantly, she is a 42 year old, curvaceous Latina owning an industry that is still overwhelmingly biased towards scrawny 22 year old white girls. She knows what she’s doing, and she’s totally in control of her own image. So if she’s doesn’t see a problem with it, why should we?

                I’m not saying the skit was a good idea, because it wasn’t. It grossly misinterpreted the times. It’s like when a joke is considered “too soon” except in this case it’s more like “not yet.” Hopefully there will come a time when the objectification of women of color in entertainment is such a foreign concept that a skit blatantly lampooning the practice doesn’t leave a bad taste in anyone’s mouth. But we don’t live in a post-sexism world yet. At best we live in a pre-post sexism world. The goal is in site, and we’re all working towards it, but the reaction to this skit was a powerful reminder that we’re not there yet. In the meantime, many more Spinning Vergaras will occur. And when they do, we need to take them as a chance to reflect, reassess, and communicate with each other.

Feminism is finally in the spotlight - now what?

Feminism is everywhere these days. It’s become such a buzzword that one would think it had only recently appeared in the lexicon, flanked by “selfie” and “YOLO.” But of course, the word dates back to the nineteenth century, and since then many books have been written, university departments have been established, and multiple “waves” have ebbed and flowed. So why does it all of a sudden feel so fresh? So fresh that it stole the show at the trend-obsessed VMAs? 

During her performance of her hit “Flawless” Beyonce (aka Queen Bey) projected the word FEMINIST in towering lights on the screen behind her, while a monologue from author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie played in the background. Beyonce has made it clear that her identity as a Feminist (like her identity as a mother) plays a major role in her uber-brand. She’s not the only one. Taylor Swift and Katy Perry have jumped on the bandwagon, after nimbly avoiding the term for years. Joseph Gordon Levitt recently identified himself as that rare and controversial creature: the male feminist. The rapper Brooke Candy (whose music videos make 2014 Miley Cyrus look like 2008 Miley Cyrus) expressed both support and skepticism about this new trend in an interview with Bust Magazine, stating “I just wish it had happened earlier, and that they weren’t so afraid back then. I guess maybe now they’re not afraid anymore.” 

Candy doesn’t specify what “back then” refers to. But since she is 25 years old it’s likely that she’s referring to the mid-nineties to early 2000s, when millennials were first becoming aware of popular culture. “Back then” there was a sense that overt feminism could be detrimental to a female artist’s career. That it would make her seem too serious, too intense, less fuckable. And by extension, less marketable. 

Feminism “back then” had a very strong presence in the music industry, just not in the most lucrative part of it. That was the heyday of Ani DiFranco and the Lilith Fair crowd. The riot grrrl music scene – thanks to Kathleen Hanna and her contemporaries – was a dominating force in the 90s. As were musicians like Courtney Love, who allowed themselves to be loud and messy and complicated. They were opinionated in their lyrics, confrontational in their stage performances. Being a lust object for teenage boys, as often as it happened, was never the top priority.

But that was the alternative crowd, and the early 2000s were all about TRL dominating pop stars like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Jessica Simpson. Women whose public personas were shaped by record labels, who would never ascribe to any idea system that hadn’t first been market tested and deemed acceptable.  For a female performer hoping to achieve super mega stardom in the mainstream, the term “feminist” was too heavy a load to bear. Fortunately, the industry had a solution, a phrase that was pro-female without all that icky baggage: Girl Power. 

The term “Girl Power” was originated by Bikini Kill, but passed on to the Spice Girls who turned it into Feminism’s bubbly little sister. This cute, non-threatening alternative evoked no thoughts of bra-burning or head-shaving or state-smashing whatsoever. Geri Halliwell (aka Ginger Spice) sometimes elaborated her catchphrase with “Girl power: equality between the sexes.” So really, the two terms meant exactly the same thing. Only one had intellectual, historical, and political implications, and the other could be written in sparkly letters on a tube top sold at Limited Too. The “Girl Power” trend coincided with another trend of decorating tween garments with 60s hippie iconography (flowers and peace signs, etc.) creating a weirdly neutered homage to a revolutionary time gone by. 

So maybe this was the fear that Brooke Candy referred to. This idea that in order to be desirable, bankable, and universally loved, a woman had to sugar coat her demand for equality. Now we’ve got Beyonce announcing herself as a feminist with the same showmanship she used to announce her pregnancy at the 2011 VMAs. No one is sexier than Beyonce, and no one is more of a feminist than Beyonce. There is no better way to broadcast the message that Feminism is sexy now.   

I cringe at the implication that Beyonce is more influential than her radical predecessors, but it’s hard to argue with those numbers. As Roxane Gay (author of the brilliant Bad Feminist) tweeted “What Bey just did for feminism on national television – look, for better or worse, that reach is WAY more than anything we’ve seen.” 

Fact is, militant feminists have been risking their lives and livelihood for the cause for many years, but the idea was never meant to stay on the fringes of society. It was meant to gain traction over time until it became the norm. It’s great that the superstars of today can proudly say that they support gender equality and female empowerment without having to duck behind some floral scented euphemism. 

The challenge now, is to make sure it sticks. The problem with being “of the moment” is the fact that moments pass quickly. Monster trends like metallic lipstick and partially shaved heads tend to sour and turn passe within a matter of months. This was the fate of Girl Power – it ossified as part of a moment in time, without inciting a long term paradigm shift. No name stays in bright lights forever. We need to ensure that once feminism is forced out of the spotlight it can still find a permanent – albeit less glamorous – home in our social consciousness.  

Blake Lively's Preserve.us and the Desperate Quest for Authenticity in the Digital Age

Blake Lively’s lifestyle website Preserve was released last week and the internet - right on cue – ripped it apart. Some amount of giddy opprobrium was to be expected. Even Lively saw it coming, predicting “plenty of people who will say horrible things” in her interview for the August issue of Vogue. But she was referring to the public’s love of ridiculing celebrities. That accounts for part of the abuse, no question. But I’m sure we could have found a way to forgive Lively her stardom and acknowledge that she’d made a good website – if she had made a good website. Unfortunately, she made Preserve.

Where to begin. There’s the writing, which is overthought, overwrought, and under-edited. Most of the copy reads like it came from a thirteen year old (or a beautiful, famous 26 year old) who has never been told to scale it back. There’s also the weird tone deafness of the site’s philanthropic side. It’s good that the company wants to do nice things for those in need, but there’s something uncomfortable about dedicating an entire section (one of only three tabs at the top of the homepage) to the fact that somewhere out there people are starving and they intend to kind of help. A classier move would be to mention in a discreet footer that a percentage of the proceeds were going to a specific charity. Speaking so blithely about human suffering while reminding us that they are a for-profit company (I’m sure we’re supposed to be refreshed by the transparency) is somehow callous and sanctimonious at the same time. The bleeding heart capitalist asking for absolution so that she can sell $40 sea salt with a clear conscience.

But all of that could be overlooked if the site was showing us something new. If it had tapped into some nascent trend, and was ready to introduce us to our future tastes. And if it had been released ten years ago maybe it would have done so. But it came out in 2014, and hipsters everywhere have been doing the whole upscale rustic thing for a good while now. “Artisanal” has replaced “organic” as the fastest way to get cool young folk to pay a premium for something they don’t need. The aesthetic was well enough established in 2012 that Portlandia was able to flawlessly mock it with the sketch “The Dream of the 1890s.”

Preserve aims to introduce the past (as personified by a dude in a bowler hat writing poetry on a typewriter) to the future (e-commerce websites). Thing is, these two worlds have already met. In San Francisco, the heart of the tech boom, pretty much every business catering to the Google Glass set is lousy with hand-carved tables, small batch goods, and vintage light fixtures. And every stand at every flea market has an Instagram account and Twitter handle RTG.

It’s no surprise that the Gossip Girl star’s tastes are not exactly cutting edge. Trends are invented by outsiders, creeping inwards until they can be tamed and mass produced for maximum profit. Now that the stylized nostalgia craze has reached the point in its lifecycle where a Hollywood starlet believes she came up with it herself, perhaps it is time to retire and move on. There are other signs: on August 4^th the New York Times published an article about a recent spike in barn weddings (weddings held – often by rich city folk with a yen for the pastoral – in a barn) and how annoying they are to the actual farmers next door. Articles like this one remind us of what we really are: posers. Posers who crave the authenticity that we associate with the past, while becoming increasingly reliant on modern gadgetry.

Why is this? Perhaps we feel like our attachment to the days of yesteryear when everything was simpler and faintly sepia tinted (right?) is the only thing keeping us from a full-blown sci-fi dystopia. If we don’t keep buying Polaroid cameras on Amazon and decorating our apartments with rusty (sorry, oxidized) 50s Coca Cola advertisements, then we may as well surrender to our robot overlords.

Or not. According to the site’s description, the creators of Preserve “believe that nurturing a better tomorrow upholds the yesterday we cherish”.  Maybe so – but they skipped a day. Is it me or has the present been getting the shaft recently? We’re always either distracting ourselves from immediate reality with our phones, or drooling over how great some other era was (20s, 60s, 90s, pick a decade). Maybe it’s time to pay a little more attention to the here-and-now, instead of waiting for the retroactive rosy glow to set in. Maybe for once we could try knowing what we’ve got before it’s gone.

Or we could drop $20 on a wooden cocktail muddler because Serena Van Der Woodson wrote a free verse poem about it. Either way. 

What #YesAllWomen reminds us about "no"

It’s easy to find men who don’t think of themselves as misogynists. It’s not difficult to find men who will argue that misogyny is all but eradicated in America. You’d be hard pressed, however, to find a female-identified person whose life is not impacted by that thing that doesn’t really exist anymore.

That such a massive discrepancy could happen in the age of communication is why we need the #YesAllWomen campaign. The idea behind #YesAllWomen is that sexism in all its forms (notably the sense of entitlement to women’s bodies and attention) is alive and well and affecting all women everywhere all the time. It is a gesture of support, as well as a wake up call to well-intentioned men who have been complacently patting themselves on the back for not being part of the problem.

It was a wake up call for me, too. Reading through the tweets and articles, I have run into a lot of what I’ll call “Oh yeah, what the fuck?” moments, where something that I’ve come to accept as normal suddenly hits me as the bullshit that it is.

I had a big OYWTF moment while reading Amanda Hess’s article in Slate, “Why It’s So Hard For Men to See Misogyny“. She describes a man who had recently barged in on a conversation she was having with a friend at a party. Taking their politeness as encouragement (as people who barge into conversations often do) he asked for the friend’s phone number. She declined, explaining that she had a husband, even though that was (as Hess later observed) “like the sixth most pressing reason she wouldn’t go out with him”.

This is a strategy that many women – single or spoken for, straight or gay – have employed at one time or another. The old, “I have a boyfriend” maneuver. Why? Because it’s fucking effective. “I’m not interested” tends to inspire follow up questions, or denial, or even anger. But “I have a boyfriend” sends them on their merry way. Because, as Hess says, “aggressive men are more likely to defer to another man’s domain than accept a woman’s autonomous rejection of him.”

There’s no denying that “I have a boyfriend” gets results. But this quick fix deepens the bigger problem. To tell a man that he is trespassing gives credence to the notion of women as property. Furthermore, it contributes to the idea that “no” coming from a woman, is not a red light, but a yellow one. Not “go away,” but “stick around, and maybe I’ll change my mind.”

A woman doesn’t need a reason to not want to date, or sleep with, or even talk to someone. But these reasons are demanded of them, and flat out rejection does not always suffice. On a certain level, I understand why guys would get the impression that a bare “no” is negotiable. We are surrounded by assurances that rejection from a woman is really just a playful invitation to try harder.

First off, there’s the cool guy cred that comes from being able to win a girl over. The more fervently she refuses, the more awesome a guy is for convincing her to go back on her word. It’s a major ego boost. Like when Richard III yells victoriously “Was ever woman in this humor won?” after convincing Lady Anne to marry him shortly after he’s murdered her husband and brother. Or when Pitbull boasts in the 2013 hit 'Timber' “I’m slicker than an oil spill. She says she won’t but I bet she will.” A no from a woman is an opportunity to prove oneself. If you’re really smooth, she’ll come around eventually. 

Of course, it’s not always about proving how worthy a guy is. It’s also about proving how worth it a girl is. There’s the episode of “How I Met Your Mother” when Ted gets a crush on Stella the dermatologist. She says no. He asks the early rejection trifecta: Husband? Boyfriend? Lesbian? And upon receiving three more no’s, he demands to know why she won't at least try going out with him. The rest of the episode then revolves around his efforts to “turn a no into a yes.” He eventually does, through creativity and persistence. Because Ted is a romantic. The kind of guy who will really go the extra mile to score the girl of his dreams.

That’s the guy who won't take no for an answer in romantic movies. He’s not menacing at all. He’s John Cusack holding a boom box. He’s Ryan Gosling in the Notebook, hanging one-handed from a ferris wheel until Rachel McAdams agrees to go out with him. Imagine if men always took “no” at face value. We’d be robbed of some of the greatest movie romances of all time.  

So there’s the “cool guy” reason to reject rejection, and then there’s the “nice guy” reason. This is where it gets murky. Because persistence is romantic in real life just like it is onscreen. And playing hard to get is a real thing. But I do think we should be careful about what kinds of “nice guy” mythologies we build in TV and movies. Some of the most sexist statements I’ve ever heard have come from the mouths of self-proclaimed “nice guys.” You know, nice guys. As in “women are crazy, why don’t they just want a nice guy like me?” kind of guys.

With this in mind, perhaps its time to re-think hard-to-get. Not that we should do away with this old courtship chestnut altogether, just that we should make a clear distinction between “no” and “not yet” so that the authority of the former is not undermined.

Someone inclined to take rejection badly will probably take it even worse if persistence doesn’t pay off. There are two ways to take rejection badly: to internalize it, and allow an isolated incident to diminish one’s entire self worth. Or to externalize it, and direct the negative feeling towards another person. Generally the person doing the rejecting. A certain type of man will lash out at a woman who has spurned his advances. A certain type of that type will do so in a way that is violent or threatening. No, this is not all men. Not even close. But a woman turning a random guy down at a bar has no way of knowing whether he fits into this category or not.  

Which brings us back to why a woman indulges her overly aggressive suitor. Why she answers his questions, laughs at his jokes, and assures him that she’s only turning him down because another man has already claimed her. She’s protecting herself, just in case.

The #YesAllWomen campaign was sparked by the May 23^rd Isla Vista killings. While the terrible crimes of Elliot Rodger demand a discussion of everyday misogyny, I am hesitant to link the issues too closely. Rodger believed that women deserved violent retribution for rejecting him all his life. And although he was a member of society, and influenced by the same cultural mores as everyone else, he was also profoundly disturbed. I do believe that the behaviors glorified by the entertainment industry can sometimes bring out the worst in normal people. But the worst in normal people is not Elliott Rodger. He was a severely sick person, living in a country where mental illness is stigmatized and guns are easy to acquire. To suggest that his actions were the natural end result of popular culture, to scramble for a scapegoat to rationalize a privileged white kid’s brutality, is missing the point.

Washington Post film critic Anne Hornaday wrote a piece in response to the massacre stating that Rodger’s mindset was “influenced, if not created, by the entertainment industry”. The article, which specifically called out filmmaker Judd Apatow, received a lot of well-deserved criticism. First of all, I personally think that Apatow should be commended for bringing nuanced female characters to the cro-magnon stoner comedy genre. And I don’t even know if Rodger was a fan of those movies. But even if the movies were sexist, and if Rodger was obsessed with them, artists cannot be held responsible for how psychotics interpret their work.

While she should not have carried it into the mind of a murderer, I agree with Hornaday’s observation that movies “powerfully condition what we desire”. We’re surrounded by media. Of course it’s influencing us. It can do so most effectively when we don’t even notice it happening. For example: if a TV character uses the words “woman” and “kitchen” in the same sentence, our sexism alarm goes off, but a male character undermining a woman’s decision to reject him might go unnoticed.

#YesAllWomen puts our warped culture of “no” in the spotlight. Hopefully, it will inspire more “oh yeah what the fuck” moments in daily life. And when they occur, we can all (men and women) make the decision to acknowledge them, and speak up.