The Women's Land Army

I found this really interesting article about how women who were part of Women’s Land Army in the UK during WWII are being honored by the government on the BBC news site. These were women who made sure the farms and lumber mills were still working during the war and it seems that they were also responsible for the distribution. This would have been invaluable work during the time when food was rationed and the country was under attack. I don’t really have a comment. I just think it’s interesting and I am glad they are being honored.

How to Ruin a Good Game

Guitar Hero was a great game because it crossed all sort of boundaries and erased some barriers to entry for people who thought that they would never play a video game. It has a controller that looks and plays similar to a guitar and can allow anyone to feel like a rock star. I even wrote an article about the wonders of Guitar Hero and why it was so seminal.

Guitar Hero was bought by Activision and that was the end. Activision is a company known from the Tony Hawk video game franchise and known by me as the people who quickly eliminated professional female skaters as avatars from that game. They seem to take joy in removing game play aspects that appeal to women who game.

When Activision redesigned the characters for the new game they took hold of the one avatar the vast majority of the female gamers I know play, Judy Nails. Before this new build you just had to mention Judy Nails to a fellow woman gamer and her eyes would light up with joy. Judy was everything I wanted to be. She was super cool with a punk riff and she could totally rock a guitar. While I was standing in my living room barely making it through a song, Judy was on the screen rocking her way into guitar heaven.

Unfortunately, the new version of Judy looks like a meth user whose boob job went horribly wrong. All of the characters have been made to look more cartoonish, but none was slashed as badly as poor Judy. The women gamers on a list-serv I belong to were talking about the death of Judy from the minute the game hit the shelves and I was skeptical. I mean how could they make her look THAT bad? So down I went to Best Buy to try the demo and see for myself and it is! I was having trouble playing because I was absolutely mesmerized by her crazy bouncing breasts. It just looks uncomfortable.

One small change, the essential elimination of one character and that is it. I won’t buy it and neither will lots of other women who were loyal to the game. The video game makers say that it doesn’t matter, that they are selling more of this version of the game than ever before. But that is just short term thinking. I know play Rock Band and I tell everyone I know about how much better it is. In the long term the loss of a small piece of market share will be big.

Enchanted is Terrible

I was excited to take my children to see Enchanted, the new Disney film, this past weekend. I had read reviews about what a wonderful movie it was and how it did a great job of skewing the traditional fairy tale.

It turned out that this was not true. Enchanted is a very traditional fairy tale that uses some gimmicks to sell itself as a modern recreation. As I have written before, I am not a fan of the traditional fairy tales. I am only interested in a princess who is able to save herself and perhaps not even want the prince when she’s done. This bit of tripe with a focus on marriage as the ultimate attainment is just disturbing.

The princess, Giselle, is as wide-eyed, dewy and dopey as the best 1930’s creations. I think that she is supposed to be seen as naïve because she is in a strange land, but the beginning sequence sets her up as naïve and incompetent in her own land as well, so I thought that her confusion, once she lands in New York from her animated fairy tale land, just seemed like a continuation of her lack of mental acuity.

SPOILER ALERT!

Of course, Giselle is expecting to be saved from New York by her prince and brought back to the poorly named animated fairy tale land, Andalasia. And, of course, she falls in love with the guy who randomly picks her up and brings her back to his apartment with his six year-old daughter. The only part of the movie that seemed remotely plausible, (even if this is a fairy tale) was when the father had the daughter sleep in his room so that she won’t be left alone in her room while the clearly delusional princess sleeps on the sofa.

There is a small part where Giselle stabs the evil queen after she turns into a dragon and where she saves her love by throwing a sword that sticks him to a post while the dragon falls to her doom, but it was just too gooey for my taste. This bland bit of brain candy isn’t worth the price of the ticket.

SPOILERS END

Not to mention that I am just completely done with the entire Disney Princess franchise. What happened to the idea that princesses would be feisty and diverse, like Belle, Jasmine and Mulan? I want my children to see movies with characters that are willing to stand up for their beliefs and have an interest outside of marriage. As the single mom who took her daughter to see this movie with me said, “How am I supposed to talk to my daughter about this?” The rapt focus on marriage as the ultimate end goal made this movie seem like it was from the 30’s and I wish it would have stayed there.

For the same age child, I would just wait until Nancy Drew comes out on video.

Why Aren't We Talking About Race Anymore?

I teach a class on critical media theory to students at a private school and we have been focusing on race and discrimination for the past few weeks. I was looking for a quiz they could take on-line that would challenge their assumptions about stereotypes and/or highlight the subtle ways that discrimination can take place. These students are relatively liberal and do not see themselves as being prejudiced and I wanted something that would help them understand the ways they see the world, and how their discrimination may be unnoticeable to them because they live in such a privileged and secluded world.

I was surprised that this type of quiz is much harder to come by than I had initially assumed. I had thought that many quizzes would have been developed and waiting on the amazing internet to help instructors like me. I was wrong. It turned out that I had to use Google.uk to find a quiz that I thought would be helpful. I found two quizzes; one was British, the other Australian. The scarcity of quizzes led me to thinking and then to some research.

From my research, it seems to me that the conversations about race and ethnicity are much more out in the open in the UK and Australia, than they are here. This is not to say that there is not discrimination and prejudice in these other countries, just that they seem to be talking about it a lot more. This got me thinking to the way the television shows are cast. I watch a lot of BBCAmerica and the BBC, in particular, is very careful about the way they cast their shows using a more diverse cast that represents a wide variety of ethnicities. Now, Americans might argue that Keeping Up Appearances, and Time Goes By, two staples of BBC comedies shown on PBS, are not at all diverse. But those are not modern shows. I am thinking of Torchwood, Doctor Who, and Hotel Babylon. These are programs where the cast is diverse and in a really natural way.

The diversity seen on BBC programs makes me think about how segregated our casts have become. There is always a spectrum, and I am not certain why we are swinging in this way. Are we confident that as a country we have overcome racism and discrimination and refuse to see it when it exists, or are we just tired of the battles and are hoping they will go away and things can go back to the way they were? You know, when everything was perfect and money was flowing from the taps and children were always polite, those halcyon days of yesteryear that we all hearken back to as we get older.

The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard is Amazing

This is not minutia, this is a big thing. If you have not had the chance to experience The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard on PBS' Masterpiece Theater, you need to re-think your viewing choices. This show is AMAZING!

It takes place in the UK and is about a woman who becomes Prime Minister and the head of a new political party partly through her shrewd understanding of people and partly as a result of the professionals that attach themselves to her as the next big thing. I really appreciate the fact that although it is about a woman as Prime Minister, it does not take the line (so far anyway) that she is a stooge or a befuddled mother. She is befuddled often, but only as a result of her lack of experience as a politician. Her entire cabinet is made up of women who are all working with their own motivations and the fact that they are women is simply not discussed. I sort of expected the other political parties represented to belittle the government because they were run by women, and it just has not come up.

So watch it and let me know what you think.

Halloween Recap

I can only speak to my neighborhood, but I have to say that, as usual, the media misses the details. Of course there was a big brouhaha about the state of the world based on the scantily clad outfits being sold to girls for Halloween. Certainly, no one was commenting on the inappropriate outfits being sold to boys, but back to my point.

The media can finally put down their bells and alarms, the state of the world has not changed dramatically, Halloween outfits this year are standing firm. I witnessed girls dressed as fairies unlicensed by Disney, aliens, fighter pilots, and doctors. There was a large segment of creepy vampires of both genders and the requisite cats, bunnies, various insects and yes Disney princesses. Basically the same outfits children have been wearing for the past ten years.

I am tired of the fear of female sexuality being played out in super creepy and inappropriate ways, such as through a bizarre discussion of slutty Halloween costumes for girls. Lots of things exist in the marketplace every year with the hope that it will sell, but that doesn’t mean that the world has changed and they do sell. These are just the same fears being revisited in different forms. The next thing you know people will be talking about how birth control causes girls to have sex, the boys not so much, but the girls are the ones to watch out for. Very scary indeed.

Of Princess Dreams

So Annie Leibowitz has a new photography project where she is recreating images from Disney movies with famous actors and athletes. Rachel Weisz is featured in a story in the Daily Mail about the project and discussed how happy she was to be featured at Snow White, because, “it is every little girls dream.”

Really?! I thought that each girl had different dreams uncontrolled by the Disney Corporation. I certainly don’t know many little girls who dream of being rejected by their new step mother based solely on their appearance, clearly ignored by their father and needing to flee to an isolated location to escape certain death at the hands of the stepmother’s henchmen. And while children, including some girls, do enjoy playing in the kitchen I don’t think they often dream of making a move down from princess to cook and housekeeper stuck with a limited social group, none of whom can relate to you only to be put to sleep by a poison apple and then placed in a glass box. All this, just to be awakened by a man you never knew and being unable to go back to your own home, you need to leave with him for his kingdom with the hope that his family will accept you.

Yeah, wow. That just sounds ideal. I mean if I was required to choose a Disney princess to emulate Snow White would not be it. At least Belle has an intellectual life and fights back. My favorite, of course, is Mulan who was a real woman that saved a freaking kingdom. Now there’s a Disney character I would want to be.

The Peephole

There was a story in my rather horrid daily newspaper about a woman who was beaten and sexually assaulted in her apartment and in the article they discussed how the woman who was assaulted had opened the door without looking through the peephole. As if it was somehow her fault that she was assaulted because of her gross peephole negligence. The reality is that even if she had looked through the peephole, she probably would have opened the door anyway, because she didn’t know the people on the other side of the door were dangerous. It isn’t like looking through a peephole lets you into someone’s brain.

I find it amazing that when a woman is reported as being assaulted it’s still somehow her fault. Like her gross negligence in choosing the perfect attack proof clothing, or not being able to look into someone’s soul as they knock on her door makes her somehow partially responsible for the attack. The reality is that this is never the case with men, especially white men, who are reported as victims out of the sheer wonder of it all. No one would ever write that a white guy was assaulted in his home after neglecting to look through the peephole, now would they?

Video Games are Good

I am tired of conversations in the media that begin with the idea that video games are bad…for everyone…always.

Video games can be sexist, or stupid, or boring. But they can also be interesting, and intriguing, and fun. The idea that video games are bad because they are a newer form of media that many adults did not grow up playing is just ridiculous.

The biggest problem I have with the idea that video games are bad, is that talk like that ends up keeping girls away from the games. Concerned parents read some study linking video games to some negative attribute and the next thing you know the parents are limiting their son’s video game time and eliminating their daughters. Since the video game industry has done such a good job of creating an image of themselves as a bastion of manliness, parents are more likely to give their sons a slide. The daughters never have a chance.

The Space Station Whip

How inappropriate would it be for the title of an article to read, male space station commander receives whip to keep female crew in line? Yet there are numerous articles being run in the international media abut the first female commander of the space station to receive a whip. She received a traditional Kazakh whip from a Russian official.

While I understand that the whip was given as a joke, I find it far more interesting that the media chooses to focus on the whip when discussing the launch of US astronaut Peggy Whitson into this historic role. This is just another way to highlight how unusual it is for women to lead and the idea that the men may not be respectful of women in power.

Do men really want to be portrayed as people who have so little respect for a woman who is their commanding officer that she may require force for them to listen to her? I realize that this is logged under the ‘all just a good bit of fun’ category, but it is jokes like this and the pervasive way that they are repeated ad nauseam throughout the media that help to keep women viewed as ‘unusual’ leaders and those who would need help if we were to get there.

The Pernicious Glass Ceiling

In a fascinating interview with women leaders in the film industry on Salon, the director, Kimberly Peirce, stated that “you can’t get bonded if you’re pregnant.” Translation: you can’t get insured and therefore can’t make a movie if you are pregnant. Seriously! It surprised the heck out of me and some of the other directors on the panel as well.

It surprised me so much in fact, that I chose to track down a company that insures movies to see how they responded to the idea that women are somehow not insurable when they’re pregnant. Well, of course they can, in theory be insured, but it turns out that they need to qualify for secondary insurance without exemptions first. Which I can only assume is more than difficult.

Pregnancy as a state of ill health has been used to keep women out of the workforce for years. In the 1950’s women who were married were often not chosen for jobs over single women, because the married ones were assumed that they would get pregnant and be unable to work.

As a director, if you are unable to work while pregnant, that is a year out of what is likely a young career, since it is less likely that a woman in her 50’s would be getting pregnant, although it is possible. This is while a male director, who can’t get pregnant and is not at all limited by his biology, is able to go right along with his career.

This highlights the tenaciousness of the glass ceiling. The glass ceiling used to be obvious. Women weren’t allowed to do certain jobs, so we knew where the line was drawn. Now the lines are fuzzy. Some female directors feel the need to choose between being a mother and having the career they want. Male directors don’t have to feel the same pressure. They don’t get pregnant. According to the women interviewed, most have found it a huge challenge to be both a mother and a director.

Women haven’t progressed as much as we should have toward equality, but it’s at least positive that women are directors now. That in itself was a long time coming.

The Food Police Are Coming!

Again, the devil is in the details. I was curious when I read on Shapely Prose about the new The Incredible Adventures of the Amazing Food Detective game by Scholastic and Kaiser Permanente that is supposed to teach kids good health habits and the title makes it sound like a fun game, which it is not.

Being a good detective myself, I decided to play the game and investigate. When I began the game I was surprised that when you click on a child’s card to start the case, all of the children shown have some “bad habit” that is identified on the cards, like “Eats Too Much” or “Gets Tired Too Easily.” This seems like a simple tactic to get the player into the game, but EVERY child has a bad habit. There is no model of what a ‘good, healthy child’ is supposed to look like. This simply encourages the children playing the game to be judgmental about the characters based on surface assessments. Maybe Matthew is really tired all the time because he has severe anemia and Antonia just watches from the sidelines because she suffers from depression. A good detective would probably learn more about the child than the fact that Matthew’s problems will all be solved if he just does jumping jacks at a super human speed.

This is just more of the “you will never be good enough” messages that are spouted by mainstream media. They might as well have included a picture of a “heroine chic” Kate Moss as a role model. The main message is fine –eat right and exercise- it’s the way it is implemented that’s creepy.

Of course, I want my kids to be healthy, but I also don’t want them to have a screwed up fear of food or a strange sense of entitlement that they can tell everyone they see that they know how to make their life better. And on top of all that, it isn’t even a good game!

More Women on the Board of Directors = More Money (Really)

While it’s important to pay attention to what and how things are said in the media, it is also important to note what is not said. A study was released on October 1^st by Catalyst that states that as companies obtain a higher percentage of women on their Board of Directors their profits increase. Reuters picked up the study for their wires, but I didn't find the study discussed or referenced by any major news service.

This is relevant when compared to a post on Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily that she had heard that Warner Brothers President of Production Jeff Robinov would not do movies with women in the lead. This comment was credited to three producers and was attributed to the result of poor box office performance by the latest Jodie Foster and Nicole Kidman movies. I am deeply concerned that Warner Brothers might be judging the popularity of female lead movies based on two poor performing movies. Movies are one way that society mirrors itself, however, given the media’s limited attention span, I find it frustrating that a story with a focus on Hollywood is taking attention over a serious body of work that may help to alleviate the problem of a male studio head deciding that women are not valuable as leads based on two poor performing films.

The idea that we live in a free market economy based on using strategies that make the most money is false. Women are often neglected as buying partners or consumers to the detriment of a variety of industries who choose to take a slanted look at the evidence. Companies instead choose to move their buddies into board positions, those with whom they feel comfortable, this often translates into other men. A male centered world view leads to comments about the value of women as money makers based on random criteria. Whether or not Warner Brothers is choosing their movie strategy based on an incompetent idea is similar to companies refusing the ignore, not just one study but a large number of studies that show that diversity of ideas and people is beneficial for the bottom line.

Why Do We Only Count in October

With the release of the Imagine series focused on girls who of course want to all be fashion designers or play with babies, I was really irritated by the video game industry and then I saw the announcement for the second Fight Like A Girl Halo Tournament. The problem is that this is a Breast Cancer Awareness Charity event taking place in October, Breast Cancer Awareness month. I am glad that there are tournaments for women and girls who play Halo, but I am troubled that this tournament is taking place in the context of a charity event. It somehow lessens the impact when it is modified by the soft and feminine blanket of a charity event, for Breast Cancer no less.

Of course there are other charity events put on in the gaming community, but there are not that many women’s only gaming events and the supposedly gender neutral events have a very skewed gender representation. I think it is great for there to be a space for women to frag with the best of them, I just wish that space was the general gaming space and not a safer charity events.

My Crush on Ethan Hawke

I think that the big media images are important, but I think that it is the small media details where the focus really should lie. It’s easy enough to decide that a Budweiser ad is tasteless or that you really like the new style of Benetton, but it’s the words that people use, the way images are displayed, the way people are represented in movies or on TV that really set the tone for what is acceptable in our society. Monday I wrote about the language used by two hosts on Air America radio and how it set an inappropriate tone for the network. Well, I was very surprised when last Thursday I read an interview with Ethan Hawke in my local paper, the Austin American Statesman, to find that his word choices make me swoon.

I am not a follower of celebrities, so I was fairly unclear as to who Ethan Hawke was when I started to read the interview, but when he was discussing his decision to make art that is personal to him his word choices really got me excited. He said, “But the idea that I am a narcissist because I would make personal art, that I would be somehow a deeply flawed, bad human being because I would do such a thing as take things from my life. Because if I am, then so is Emily Dickenson, so is Jane Austin, so is Proust …” I mean WOW we are talking about a male celebrity and the first authors at the top of his tongue are women…intelligent, literate women. If a woman would have mentioned Emily Dickenson and Jane Austin first, it would have passed unnoticed. Women are supposed to think about intelligent women. Men are supposed to think about beer. It is one of the many gender distinctions that the media focus upon.

This is where the nuance is important and why I so swoon over Ethan Hawke after reading this interview. If women artists were on the tip of men’s tongues regularly, this would be a much different world. If when asked questions like, who do you most respect in the world of rock music? men answering those questions were (even with some regularity) to honestly answer with names of women, the barriers would be broken. We would be equal. It is because, oftentimes the work of men is considered better by both men and women that we are still holding steady at second place.

September 25, 2007

Words are powerful. If I say to someone that they're stupid, that's meaningful. That is a message that they take with them. When I tell someone that they are kind they take that too. While the messages that are directly conveyed to someone are powerful, so are the words used by the women and men in our media. I have recently been aghast at the language used by two different talk show hosts on Air America Radio this past week. Today Ed Schultz was discussing the way he was treated by the UAW and he said that he was "passed around like a French prostitute." He was also discussing how the UAW was engaged in old-thinking and this got me to thinking about how old the thinking is of someone who thinks that he can simply pass off a reference to the degradation of women as a simple inconvenience. Although the gender was not indicated, it is clear that the implied gender of the prostitute is female, because who else would be discussed so casually as being “passed around” than a woman.

This comment by Ed Schultz reminded me of another comment by Lionel on the Lionel Show, also on Air America Radio that happened last week. I can't remember exactly what Lionel was talking about but he commented that “it was like being raped” and then he went on to reference that the reason it felt like that was because it was an hour he would not get back. I continued to listen to the show for a bit to see if he would recognize his error and recant his comment, but apparently references to rape do not need to be reexamined so quickly so on he went.

This casual use of language referring to degradation or violence that is most often perpetrated against women in order to discuss a casual inconvenience on any radio channel is inappropriate and lazy.

Lionel is not the first person to use the act of rape to describe something mundane. I find that the word rape is often bantered about as if it does not matter, as if it can be used to highlight a great inconvenience.

The problem with a thoughtless use of language is that it does matter. The use of words like rape or comments about passing around prostitutes send subtle messages that those things really don’t matter and the fact that these things most often happen to women by men means that the women who they happen to don’t matter as much, because rape is simply an inconvenience and prostitutes don’t deserve any protections anyway.

As a society it is important to be thoughtful with what we say. These messages are conveyed to everyone, including children. Parents need to counteract these messages and be careful with the language that they use around their children. I don’t want my children to think that what happens to other people doesn't matter. It matters deeply.

When we talk about actions against people with thoughtlessness that means that those actions don’t require any thought that they don’t matter, but they do.

Remember, your words are powerful.