via bluedharma @ flickr

“I want to be free.”

So began the trailer for the film Amelia, which was released late last month to an almost universal critical drubbing. When I saw the trailer over the summer, I had a bit of hope that the film might be worth the price of admission. Not because I’m a huge Hilary Swank fan (I’m pretty neutral on her) or a Richard Gere fan (meh), or even because it has Ewan McGregor (although I’ll see anything he’s in, as evidenced by the fact that I went to see this the night it opened with one of our dear readers). It was because, as someone who loves history, I’m always anxious to see if films about real people deliver the goods. Most of the time they don’t (see: A Beautiful Mind), but sometimes they hit the mark (see: Frost/Nixon, The Last King of Scotland). And if a filmmaker chooses to structure a biopic as a love story, it tends to work better when both parties are supposed to be the subject of the biography (see: Reds, Walk the Line). The fact that Amelia was presented as a love story would have been fine — if it was about Amelia and her passionate love for flying. Instead, we got a movie about her passion for . . . Richard Gere?

Director Mira Nair and screenwriter Ronald Bass seemed all too happy to keep the focus on the domestic front and not the cockpit. This movie is about a woman who was a pioneer for women in aviation, someone who dared to cut her hair short and wear pants at a time when that was considered completely outrageous. She was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. And we never see the development of that passion for flying. The film opens with her meeting George Putnam (Gere), who she will go on to marry after what appears to be the most anemic courtship in biopic history. There’s a bit of did-they-or-didn’t-they business when Earhart meets the suave aeronautics instructor Gene Vidal (McGregor), whose son Gore (yes, Gore Vidal) asks Earhart to marry his father. Never mind that there’s no actual evidence of an affair with Vidal; it’s more a device to throw tension into the Earhart-Putnam romance, which doesn’t work because the audience never feels invested in that marriage. And since the audience doesn’t care much about the marriage, it sucks the air out of the interest in Amelia herself. She’s presented as half of a partnership more than she is as an independent woman, and that’s the tragedy of Amelia.

By the way: Putnam was only ten years Earhart’s senior; Gere is twenty-five years older than Swank. But that much older man/younger woman pairing is a proud Hollywood tradition, as is completely missing the point of the subject of a biographical film.

Look, nobody is pretending that false rape allegations are never made. But Blazina seems to think that is the only issue here. He obviously doesn’t care about those athletes who have committed sexual assault (to say nothing of the women who were rape victims), because it’s a hell of a lot easier for him to stand on a soapbox and rail about the poor athletes who are accused of rape “Because they are high-profile performers, lightning rods who face temptations and risks when they interact with the public” — not, apparently, because they actually commit the crime. Blazina notes that “In many cases . . . incidents involve athletes on the road in hotels”, and includes a list of athletes accused of committing rape in hotel rooms, including Mike Tyson, who was actually convicted. Question: if you’re dedicating your column to proving that athletes are vulnerable to false accusations, why include Tyson to completely undermine your argument? Not only is the column offensive, it’s nonsensical.

Even the column’s title is enough to cause teeth-gnashing: “Athletes Susceptible to Sexual Allegations”. My guess is that Blazina will never write a corresponding column entitled “Women Susceptible to Sexual Assault and Objectification By Men, Athletes or Otherwise”. He quotes former football player Ralph Cindrich as saying “Unless a guy is going to be a monk, he’s going to go out and get involved with women. You never know what might happen. . . . Any time you are going to a golf event and you’re with a bunch of guys in a hotel, you’re open to something like this.” Congratulations, Mr. Blazina and Mr. Cindrich, you’ve accomplished a brilliant employment of a red herring. Blazina cites several cases that ended in criminal acquittals (think Kobe Bryant) or died before reaching court, conveniently ignoring that acquittals do not always equal innocence, just as convictions do not always equal guilt.

A December 2003 study by USA TODAY showed the difficulty in winning a criminal sexual misconduct case against an athlete. The newspaper found that in allegations involving 164 athletes during the previous 12 years, 22 cases went to trial and six resulted in convictions. Another 46 cases resulted in a guilty plea to a reduced charge.

Maybe, Mr. Blazina, there can be difficulty in winning these cases because we live in a culture that worships these men and, y’know, boys will be boys, men will be men, and women should know better than to be alone with these dudes. Or they have to be after money and attention. Or they’re bitter.

The column includes another quote from Cindrich, who says that “It’s an allegation that really only involves two people. Who else really knows?” Well, Ed Blazina thinks he knows! He wants women to stop victimizing the dudes of the sports world, these poor men who have left themselves vulnerable so that the women will end up pouncing. Really, this is not about the isolated Roethlisberger allegations as much as it is about the widespread belief that women who accuse famous men of sexual assault either got what they asked for or are just lying. Talk about dudely privilege.

The bunny has the same reaction I do. via blue meridian @ flickr

Some conservative women were upset feminists didn’t protest loudly when late night host David Letterman initially refused to apologize for his off-color joke about Palin’s daughter. Is that because Sarah Palin isn’t a feminist? Can a conservative woman be a feminist these days?

I’m trying to follow that train of thought, but it just makes me dizzy. I seem to remember that a number of feminists did indeed protest vociferously about the Letterman “joke”, including SarahMC.

Also, notice that Costello says “some conservative women”, not “some conservative feminists”. Apparently the reason for that bit of semantic difference is the quote she gets from Mary Matalin:

“No conservative woman would choose to call herself a feminist as it’s described by liberals today,” she says. Matalin says feminism used to be about the freedom to choose the life you wanted. Now it’s an exclusive club, closed off to women like Sarah Palin.

Feminism as a conservative v. liberal issue! Oh that TOTALLY is what feminism is ALL ABOUT. See, we liberal feminists hate it when women who don’t share our political ideologies are granted equal status, so we don’t let anyone into our fun feminist treehouse unless they can prove they voted for Obama. Them’s the breaks.

Costello concludes by asking, “So, if the word ‘feminist’ is weighed down by such political baggage, why keep using it?” Because it’s a vital, necessary word that represents a vital, necessary concept. Is it really that difficult to understand? And if anyone really does think feminism is obsolete and our world doesn’t need it anymore, here’s a lovely pastiche of comments left on the post:

- Yep . Feminism is as dead as a door nail these days. We have bigger fish to fry. By the way you’re very pretty.

- Feminisim[sic] /Maleism what is your point? It is just one more way to divide people. Keep up your bad work and have all people hating each other for what ever reason you chose.

- Feminism today simply means women with short hair, and either unmarried or unhappily married.

- Feminism is not only obsolete, but it is also a devisive crutch that takes the power away from the individual powerful women, and puts that power into a facade of an obsolete civil rights movement that most of americans under thirty never can completely understand.

- It took away to come up with something sturdy but, I’m just gonna’ say that Chivalry was killed by the cold silent glare of feminism and I wish it hadn’t been. There’s no way to avoid getting yelled as sexist as a man and you can’t really call a woman sexist without getting yelled again so you know what, screw it!

That’s it, you oh-so-chivalrous-but-still-dudely dude, yell SCREW IT! Fight the power! Stand up to the MAN! Er, woman.

One reason this is supremely fucking maddening to me is that I was tipped off to this whole thing by father.of.a.lesser.god, who woke me up this morning with an excited phone call about the whole thing. As I mentioned in today’s Harpy Seminar, he sometimes contacts me with ideas for Harpyness posts. I thought he was so sweet to do so this morning! Then we started talking, and as I wrote in an email to my fellow Harpies, “As I got into the discussion with my dad, he said that [the question of obsolescence] depends on the society and I pointed out that even in the most ‘progressive’ societies like ours truly, there’s still that lovely privilege that allows men to blatantly check out/whistle at/catcall at women on the street without fear of retribution, and that kind of objectification is one of the MILDER examples of why feminism cannot be ‘obsolete’. Dad’s reaction? ‘Oh, I do that. It’s not offensive.’ HEADDESK. I RETRACT MY PREVIOUS SEMINAR STATEMENTS.”

I walked for about 6 miles this morning through the streets of Manhattan, and I received some of those fun catcalls. It’s objectifying, it’s offensive, and God help us all if feminism is viewed as being obsolete — because being eye-fucked by strangers on the street is the very least of the problems women are faced with.