So for whatever reasons, my weekly movies posts seem to have permanently morphed themselves into biweekly ones. I can’t promise this’ll change — I want to be writing more, but it doesn’t seem to be coming easily. I keep half-writing posts in my head, promising myself I’ll get them done when I get home from work, and then not actually doing it. It kind of defeats the purpose of having a blog if I make a big thing out of posting. Continue Reading »
It’s a bit late this week because of school-related exhaustion, and the first two are repeats that I’m kind of written out about.
I am pretty bummed about brownfemipower’s taking down her blog.
I don’t really want to comment on the actual controversy (which you can read about at this Feministe post and of which something really nice seems to have come of at Shakesville) but I am sad that BFP chose to take down her blog. I learned a lot from her and her writing is one of the things that made me really rethink my stances on a lot of feminist-adjacent issues and my approach to feminism in general.
I’m not writing this to take a side or declare an allegiance, I just wanted to note it here and express regret that I never left a comment to say thanks back when there was somewhere to leave a comment at.
So, thanks.
So I’m kind of on a “healthy eating initiative in an attempt to effect weight loss,” which is to say I’m on what some people might call a “diet,” but I refuse to do because the whole “diet” concept is toxic and is generally linked to scary moralizing about food wherein eating more is “bad” and eating less is “good” and people’s weights somehow become indicators of their health or work ethic or moral fortitude or attractiveness or whatever, none of which I think is the case, intellectually.
Which is to say, I am on a diet, but I am somewhat ambivalent about it.
Because of my mistrust of diets, and the fact that I didn’t really eat that badly before, I am basically restricting my dietary efforts to eating less cheese, less bread and pasta, less sugar (though not much, because it’s physically impossible), and more vegetables and fish and vegetarian sources of protein (beans, nuts, tofu, etc.). Oh, and I am drinking more water. Ideally I will start doing more exercising at some point in the future, but I don’t want to be all “new regime!” about it because I am pretty sure that putting pressure on myself to make a whole bunch of lifestyle changes at once right now (while I am writing THE THESIS) is a bad idea and will result in me just giving up completely. Plus I am lazy.
My “diet” can be differentiated from a diet without quotes in that I am not actually weighing myself or counting calories and I value enjoying food more than I value getting my dress size back down to the single digits.
Basically what brought this about was talking to my mom, who’s lost a fair amount of weight in the last few years through healthy eating and running half marathons and stuff, and she talked about how she gained her weight gradually over the course of years. A little bit of weight every year doesn’t seem like a big deal, she said, but multiply it by ten. Given my family has a history of cholesterol problems and the fact that if I really just ate whatever I wanted, I would eat pizza for dinner four nights a week, guacamole on the fifth night, and butter chicken on the sixth and seventh, I decided I need to get this shit under control.
I haven’t really been on my “healthy eating initiative” long enough for there to be any effects at all, except that I am constantly thinking about food. That is for sure the worst part because I am finding it hard to gauge if I’m hungry or just thinking about what I should eat when I am.
Last week, Barbara Ehrenreich posts a feminist polemic about Disney princesses. It’s picked up in a couple of places and linked a lot in the “feminist blogosphere.”
This week, this dad named Trey Ellis writes a response. He’s a good feminist dad and his daughter still likes princesses.
Like Ms. Ehrenreich and all good PC parents at first I was terrified. Where had I gone wrong? Why is my little angel (princess?) so obsessed with cuddling her dolly, tea parties and wiping off the dining room table? I knew it was best to let her make her own toy choices but it was hard. It was as if she had been possessed by the Beaver’s mom or Donna Reed. Or maybe she was in long-term training to grow up to become a scullery maid.
Three years later her little brother came along and for a while he delighted in playing dolls with her. Now, however, he is six and has dedicated himself to becoming a ninja.
The more you watch your kids the more you realize that some key gender specifics are as hardwired as hunger and thirst. Most, but not all little girls go through a pink, princessy phase. Most, but not all little boys go through a phase where everything needs to be whacked and/or destroyed.
(Emphasis mine.) How do you know these gender things are hard-wired? Does his daughter have no female peers who like princesses? Watch no TV? Have no contact with women who are traditionally feminine from whom she modeled this behaviour? I find it exceedingly hard to believe that a three year old is actually genetically predisposed to care about painting her nails. I’m not sure what part of the chromosome that’s on.
I honestly don’t think a little girl liking Disney shit is anything to worry about, necessarily; most people aren’t defined by one cultural influence. For example, I loved The Little Mermaid when I was a kid and my parents are fiscal conservatives, but they raised me to think for myself and they valued my intelligence, so I turned out a feminist and somewhat of a commie.
But, like Jezebel points out, grown women are buying tiaras for their weddings. I think the existence of the wedding industry is a pretty good rebuttal to anyone who thinks that the whole princess narrative is something every girl “grows out of.”
I think Ellis really missed the point; he was like “my individual daughter likes princess shit, that doesn’t make me a bad dad.” But Ehrenreich wasn’t talking about him as a dad, she was talking about the princess thing as a cultural and commercial entity, which is some scary shit.
I saw five movies this week, which shall forever be known as “the week Paris Hilton went to jail.”*
So, I’m reading my feminist feeds, and I notice this post on the WIMN’s Voices blog about how America’s Next Top Model had a crazily misogynist photo shoot in which the girls all posed as murder victims in their underwear:
The “beautiful corpses” episode of Top Model (a series that traffics in bottom-feeder humiliation, objectification and degradation of women in the name of fashion, fun and beauty for the deep profit of integrated marketers such as Cover Girl and Seventeen magazine) serves as sharp reminder that what millions of reality TV viewers believe is harmless fluff… is anything but. ANTM is less a “guilty pleasure,” as TV Guide and infotainment shows have called it, than it is a cynical CW cashcow guilty of making product placers, and Tyra Banks, rich at the expense of not only the self-esteem of the few hungry (in every sense) young strivers appearing in the modeling competition, but of the millions of girls and women, boys and men, who watch the show uncritically, learning that unhealthily underweight, Brazilian-waxed waifs can only achieve the ultimate in beauty when they appear to be erotically, provocatively maimed and murdered (as they were this week), self-abusive (as when models were made to pose as bulimics mid-purge last season*), corpses (as they were during a prior season when the challenge involved posing in caskets lowered into open graves in a cemetery).
I kind of disagree, and when I say kind of, I mean not necessarily with her characterization of the show, which is pretty true, but that that’s all that’s going on with ANTM. (Actually, I think the first photoshoot this year, in which the girls were all tarted up to portray political viewpoints like “Pro-gay marriage,” and “pro-straight marriage,” or “vegan” and “pro-meat,” or “pro-death penalty” and “pro-life in prison” did a way bigger disservice to women, but I guess you could also just call that camp.)
I’m not going to pretend that the show (or the fashion industry) is in any way not misogynist, but how many people do you think watch the show “uncritically”? I mean, maybe I’m giving people too much credit, obviously they get tons of girls who try out every year. But I think the majority of viewers watch it with some level of irony-meter turned on.
This isn’t to say that it’s in any way helping the world with its standards of beauty, but I generally lean toward seeing ANTM in particular as sending mixed messages. Just because something is a corporate product cynically produced to make a bunch of money for Tyra Banks and her production company doesn’t mean it can’t also Trojan-horse in some contradictory messages.
Its many flaws are (for me) at least somewhat mitigated by the way it shows how constructed and fake the images of women put out there by the fashion industry are. Instead of pretending that models are somehow naturally that thin or that nonchalant or that they wake up all made up like that, the show emphasizes the work of modeling, and how the poses that “look good” in the fashion world are, for the actual models, totally uncomfortable and unnatural. So far this hasn’t really sparked a fashion revolution, but I think emphasizing the constructedness of conventional beauty — through make-up, weaves, unnatural body positions, etc — is actually pretty interesting and could be positive, in a “gradual shifting of perspective” kind of way.
I don’t think that actually is in any way a defense for the weirdly straight-faced way they treated the whole “violent death” photo shoot (and it was beyond awful to make the girl who was mourning the very recent death of a friend to play a corpse). Usually I am the first person to be like “hear, hear, feminist criticism of pop culture!” Maybe I’m just feeling defensive because I watched the show and it didn’t gross me out, especially not to “letter writing” proportions. It’s not that it wasn’t bad, it just didn’t occur to me that it was appreciably worse than anything else they do on the show; I’m inclined to think that literalizing that fashion=lifeless women could have been fascinating/hilarious, if it had been handled less creepily by the judges, or taken to a campier extreme.
*It was actually only one girl. And given that she was eating cake, it was more “mid-binge.” The rest of them posed as other goofy “modeling industry stereotypes,” like “girl with a tiny annoying dog.” I’m not defending it, I’m just saying.
Talking It Over by Julian Barnes
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
