Salon's Rebecca Traister on Michelle Obama

There's a great piece up on Salon by Rebecca Traister entitled "The Momification of Michelle Obama," in which she criticizes the fact that all the publicity surrounding the new first lady focuses on her clothes, what schools she's going to send her daughters to and how she plans to stay out of politics (i.e. "Look, she's black, but she's not scary, because she's definitely not a Hilary Clinton-type first lady!"). Now, I love reading about the Obama family as much as the next person--They're getting a new dog! They're BFFs with the Bidens!--but something about the coverage of Michelle had definitely been irking me, and Traister does a great job of illuminating why.

If only she had refrained from stating that the media coverage of Michelle Obama reveals "the shortcomings of feminism." Way to generalize, Traister. Whose feminism? Which feminism? Ugh.

An excerpt, for those of you too busy to read the (rather long) article:

All of these imaginatively ghoulish impressions of Michelle were made possible by her real-life achievements: She had a career that made the equal division of labor in her home a necessity; she had an education and pedigree that meant neocon critics could pick apart her honors thesis; anxieties about her imagined conference remarks had heft only because it was plausible that this accomplished woman would be at a conference with Bill Clinton to begin with. What was even scarier was that Michelle was widely understood to be her husband's closest advisor and consigliere. The threat of Michelle Obama was built around her intellectual and professional competence, her personal power and insistence in the home and in the world that she have the same opportunities for success as a man.

But the day that Hillary Clinton dropped out of the race, the bar for conversation about Michelle dropped precipitously. Suddenly Fox News was calling her "Obama's baby mama," and Michelle was on "The View," jawing about her bargain dress and pantyhose, breakfast foods and childcare. It was back to cookie-recipe land, the antiquated universe from which she has not since escaped. And we understand why. The exoticism and difference of Obama's race was all the progress the American people could take in one election, conventional wisdom went. A threateningly competent woman might put them over the edge.

Your Daily Dose of Evangelical Crazyfaces

The American Family Association has thoughtfully released a video entitled, "They're Coming to Your Town," in which they detail the eeeevvvvvil strategies of gay activists who INTEND TO TAKEOVER THE WORLD OMG DOOM IS UPON US!

Some gems from the production description:

Residents of the small Arkansas town of Eureka Springs noticed the homosexual community was growing. But they felt no threat. They went about their business as usual. Then, one day, they woke up to discover that their beloved Eureka Springs, a community which was known far and wide as a center for Christian entertainment--had changed. The City Council had been taken over by a small group of homosexual activists.

The Eureka Springs they knew is gone. It is now a national hub for homosexuals. Eureka Springs is becoming the San Francisco of Arkansas. The story of how this happened is told in the new AFA DVD “They’re Coming To Your Town.”

Also available in a convenient five-pack, in case you want to give a little paranoid hatred to all your favorite people for Christmas this year!

I promise, I am not kidding you with this. You will watch the trailer, and you will think it is parody, and you will be wrong.

The Bechdel Rule

In one 1985 strip of her comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For," Alison Bechdel made a joke about representations of women in films. One of her characters claims that she doesn't go see movies unless they meet three criteria: 1) It has to have at least two women, 2) who talk to each other, 3) about something besides a man. The punch line? "The last movie I was able to see was Alien... The two women in it talk to each other about the monster."

Since NPR dredged this strip up in "All Things Considered" in September, people have been talking about whether it's still so difficult to find movies/TV shows that fulfill the Bechdel Rule. I'd say that most TV shows meet the qualifications, mostly because they just have a lot more screen time in which to do so (although Sex and the City is, surprisingly, borderline). But movies--that's a little more difficult. For the sake of curiousity, my roommate Danielle and I went through our DVD collections (somewhere in the range of 150 movies combined).

1) Fried Green Tomatoes
2) Steel Magnolias
3) Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
4) Divine Secrets of the Yaya Sisterhood
5) Now and Then
6) Girl Interrupted
7) Chicago
8) Mean Girls
9) Iron-Jawed Angels

So, that's a grand total of 9 that meet fulfill "The Rule." (Plus two that were debatable--9 to 5 and The Matrix--because women talk to each other about men, but not in romantic ways.) And this is from the movie collections of two feminists! Of those 9, we've got 5 stereotypical chick flicks, 2 movies about women who are criminal/crazy, 1 about girls being mean to each other, and... okay, 1 about the suffrage movement. Conspicuously missing (and yes, I do own a fair amount of films in these genres): action films, sci fi/fantasy, indie movies, Disney...

Of course, this isn't the only thing to think about when looking at movies--there are a lot of other films that I like, and some on that short list that I'm not too fond of. And certainly, the pool of acceptable movies would get considerably smaller if, for example, we limited it to two women of color talking to each other about something besides a man. But it's definitely something to think about in terms of media representation of women.

Not to mention that all this seems a whole lot more like a conscious choice to marginalize women in movies in light of incidents like the president of Warner Bros. declaring last year that he wouldn't even look at scripts with women in the lead role. Seriously?

Good Reads: Joan Didion

How have I never read anything by Joan Didion until now? Actually, I can tell you exactly how. I remember reading rave reviews when her book The Year of Magical Thinking came out in 2005, and promptly deciding not to read it because it had a stupid title that sounded a whole lot like a self help book. Ditto on my choice to ignore someone recommending her collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem--possibly because I have a tendency to avoid anything with religious allusions in the title.

However, I am an idiot. Despite her penchant for lame titles, Didion is exactly my kind of author. Thoughtful, nostalgic, a gift for beautifully detailed sentences that perfectly describe a moment or a feeling... I read her most famous essay, "Goodbye to All That," yesterday, and I think I'm in love.

Fortunately, some good (typo-prone) samaritan has transcribed the essay online--read it, please. I need other people to gush about how gorgeous it is with me. And if you have already read it, recommend which of her books I should read next! I need more.

The beginning of "Goodbye to All That," to tempt you:

How many miles to Babylon?
Three score miles and and ten—
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again—
If your feet are nimble and light
You can get there by candlelight.

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

Plagiarism and Academic Dishonesty

Apparently large research universities are a foreign planet on the academic honesty front. At my undergraduate institution, a tiny liberal arts school that's basically engaged in a love affair with its honor code, the process was fairly simple when someone got caught cheating: hearing in front of the Honor Council, typically guilty verdict, leading to a likely semester-long suspension, at least. It seems that schools like UT just don't have the time or patience to deal with all the instances of lying, cheating undergraduates that crop up when you have 50,000 students. The stories I've heard from my TA friends of students caught in the process of blatant, shameless cheating on tests getting passes from professors and administration are astonishing. Frequently, the punishment seems to be a meeting with the Dean, where if you apologize, you're let off the hook. Really? What is this teaching students? Pull a couple fake tears out of your ass and everything's okay? (Academic) honesty doesn't matter in the first place?

Lately, there's been a lot of coverage in the local news about an adjunct professor who was recently fired at Texas A&M for publishing in his blog the names of six students who plagerized an assignment for his class. His syllabus provided a warning that this result was possible, stating, ""No form of dishonesty is acceptable. I will promptly and publicly fail and humiliate anyone caught lying, cheating, or stealing. That includes academic dishonesty, copyright violations, software piracy, or any other form of dishonesty." Upon the publication of the names, one student went to the administration, and the professor was fired for a breach of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

Now, this professor's method probably wasn't the best or most mature way of dealing with cheaters. But what do you do with students who seem to have no respect for the system? I can imagine that as a professor, watching students unapologetically cheat and get away with it one semester after another, you might reach a level of frustration that would cause you to seek any new solutions you could think of. Thoughts, dear readers?

Sex for Voting?

In honor of election day tomorrow, I thought I'd open up a little friendly debate on when it's appropriate to incorporate women's sexuality into advertising campaigns. The above poster, made and distributed by a group of women in Brooklyn, is a takeoff on a 1968 anti-war poster that read "Girls say yes to boys who say no."

Now, there's a variety of opinions floating around the online feminist community about this poster. According to the feminist magazine Bust, the poster proves that "politics can still be fun." But several Salon writers criticize the ad for its "boring, overdone sexual politics and its hipster aesthetics," with one going so far as to claim that it makes her "want to put a fist through the wall." And taking something of a middle ground, feminist blog Jezebel weighs in on the poster as "a little self-consciously cutesy, certainly derivative and ironically playing into outdated sexual mores, but ultimately harmless."

Most importantly, my roommate Danielle pointed out that the only place she'd even seen this poster was on feminist blogs, so why the hell did anyone even care?

Frankly, I'm more inclined to fall on the anti-poster side here, but not necessarily because I'm intensely offended at the poster's invocation of women's sexuality. The use of sexuality in advertisements is nothing new, and it seems clear to me that this poster is not intended to be taken literally in any way. With its retro black and white design, and the fact that it was created by a group of obviously historically aware women, I find it incredibly implausible that anyone involved with its making really intended to convey the message that all women would have sex with any man who voted for Obama. Especially since the text at the bottom of the poster reads, "Sarah Palin is not a woman's choice," it seems difficult to argue that the purpose here is to speak to men who want to get laid. And honestly, I don't think contemporary men are so dumb that that's the message they're going to get out of this. Instead, the poster seems intended humorously and aimed at a female audience.

On the other hand, the nostalgic nod to the New Left that lies at the core of this poster kind of irritates me. Considering how sexist the progressive movements of the 1960s were--need I evoke the famous quote that "the position of women in SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] is prone"?--I am fairly certain that the original poster was not intended in a tongue-in-cheek manner, nor was it directed at women. I'm consistently frusterated by the way that many contemporary youth progressive movements (particularly on college campuses) evoke the 1960s as some sort of perfect, idealized moment of activism. In saying, "Girls say yes to boys who say no," anti-Vietnam war activists intended to establish sex with liberal girls as some sort of prize for good protest behavior. So my question when I look at this Obama poster becomes: why even go there?

Obamalove '08

Sorry I've failed at posting for the last week and a half, folks. Things have been busy, life happens, you know how it goes. And you can't say I didn't warn you - I am famously bad at updating blogs. But - aha! - I'm back, so let's not dwell on the past.

Instead, can we think about the fact that in two days, Barack Obama (according to all polls in sight) will be elected President of the United States? You know, I sometimes worry about the amount of hope that so many people have invested in this man, and whether all this change that we want to believe in can really possibly happen. But then I watch things like his thirty-minute Infomercial of Hope, Joy, and Love, and let me tell you, I've totally bought in to the message. I really believe that an Obama presidency will shift the direction of this country.

Maybe we won't even be the object of the entire world's distaste anymore! (Really... I know it sounds excessively optimistic, but The Economist's Global Electoral College poll suggests that every country except Iraq, Algeria, and the DRC pretty much stands in Obama's corner.)


Besides, how can you look at a picture like this one and not see epic leadership? The man gave an inspirational speech in the rain! If that's not presidential, I don't know what is.