How I Feel Towards Everything About This Post.

I want to talk about Kim Kardashian.

Well, sorta.  I feel compelled to talk about her, having never seen her show and only knowing about her in a vague, hazy fashion.  And of course all this extravagant-wedding-quickly followed-by-divorce stuff is unignorable.

Ms. K is getting seriously lady-bashed recently.  I don’t really think much of her critical thinking skills, perhaps, but what I’m reading and hearing everywhere, from women and men, is soaked in misogyny:  Gold-digger!  Stupid whore!  Slutty sex-taping, plastic, shilling, rich bitch!  And her sisters are ugly/dumb/etc., and her mom is a monstrous beast with spiny, poison-dripping tentacles.  And her (ex-) husband?  …uhhhhhmmmm.  Who was he again?  Oh, that poor sap, getting sucked in by those evil wimmenz.

Not only am I hearing this from men and women, but  from lefties and righties, too.  Righties because KK is a sign of what horrors women, unrestrained by men, are capable of wreaking.  And lefties are bashing her because the fiasco of grotesque display that was her made-for-media wedding provides a convenient pretext to attack anti-marriage-equality types.    But they’re not really attacking anti-marriage-equality types, they’re attacking her.  They’re saying “this idiot slagbag can get married, why not these other nice people?”

I’m not really asking you to break out your tiny violins for Kim Kardashian, or think she’s a benevolent super-genius.  She might be crying all the way to the bank, but I wager she’ll be fine.  My point is that the people who are slavering over KK’s shame, pain, discomfort, whatever, and beating her up for funsies, are the the same people who gobbled up her show and bought crappy cheap weeklies to gawk at her and her sisters. And fuck those people, who consume other humans, salty, bitter, or sweet, and shit all over women for their own nasty pleasure.

And at the risk of offending our readers: if you’re one of those people, fuck you, too.  By participating in this crap, you are partly responsible for making things even worse than they are for women.  For her, and for all the rest of us. Your hunger for this kind of exploitation, your acceptance of The Rise and Fall of Kim Kardashian as entertainment, is what makes this possible.  Look at your choices.

Harpyness readers, however, DO IT RITE.

At brunch yesterday, my fellow Harpies asked if I would be writing a responsa to the 80+ comments generated by my “I Blame Porn” post at Bitch Magazine.

They know me too well. What has two thumbs and likes to have her say? THIS BITCH.

Here it is.

Thank you for all your comments, both here and in the Bitch thread. A few of them made it into this follow-up post.

These are funny robots. Via Dan Coulter @ Flickr.

I’ve recently had my own run-in with a douchebag who insisted insulting women was “just a joke,” and that I should “chill out” and “develop a sense of humor,” so perhaps I’m just a wee bit more aware than usual of bullshit like this:

Skids and Mudflap, twin robots disguised as compact hatchbacks, constantly brawl and bicker in rap-inspired street slang. They’re forced to acknowledge that they can’t read. One has a gold tooth.

Sound hiLARious, right? Those two are meant to provide “comic relief” in the otherwise super-serious Transfuckingformers* sequel. In response to criticism, director Michael Bay, the most brilliantist filmmaker evah, said:

“It’s done in fun,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s stereotypes — they are robots, by the way.

(Sidebar: I love that “by the way.” Robots? In a Transfuckingformers movie? You’re kidding me.)

But no, they’re not racist! They can’t be! They’re robots! And c’mon, you guys, itwasliketotallyfunny, see, ’cause the robot has a gold tooth! Y’know, like somea them black guys…uhhhh.  Anyways.

It’s not funny. It’s not creative or fresh or original.  And it’s not okay. I highly doubt that any of our readers are rushing out to see this film, but if you know people who are, or if you know young people–especially the young dudes that this movie is targeted at–you might consider having a conversation with them about these characters and why they’re so objectionable.  It doesn’t have to be black face to be blackface.  ”More than meets the eye,” indeed.

More details, context, and quotes in a good AP story here.  I’m gonna go look for a sense of humor.

* TM PilgrimSoul.  See the original usage and context in this post.

Many other blogs have covered the new film’s gender trouble, or perhaps more accurately put, its near-total lack of interesting chicks.  Oh sure, dress Zoe Saldana up as an “expert in xenolinguistics,” but her miniskirt and “exceptional oral sensitivity” (oh how I wish I were joking) belie, Mr. Abrams, something of a lack of commitment to this whole grrrl power thing.

Interesting chicks, of course, have never been a forte of the Star Trek universe.  One imagines that the creator, Gene Roddenberry, didn’t know very many.  And were I writing the kind of post I sometimes do where I am making fun of weird male geek proclivities (like Transfuckingformers) I would chalk this up to the usual kind of nerd longing for what he fetishizes as unattainable beauties (read: self-fulfilling prophecy) and be done for the day.

Abrams has changed the tenor a bit, as I’ve mentioned, both explicitly (space-time continuum disruption) and implicitly (no. more. odd. pauses).  But it’s more than slightly depressing, to me at least, that of all the things the production team thought to change/rev up, the lack of strong female characters was not one of them.

Not to make mountains out of molehills, of course, but this is more distressing in Star Trek, to me anyway, than it would be somewhere else.  The thing about Star Trek is that it is something of the idealist among the largely romantic denizens of the science fiction genre.  Its adherence to logic extends beyond Mr. Spock.  Other epics are concerned with myths and archetypes, but Star Trek tends to be bloodless, rational, almost antiseptic at times.   This new movie, for example, has the most blood I have seen in any of the movies/television series so far; hand-to-hand combat is less prevalent in Star Trek than being stunned and/or killed by summary phaser blast.  And the overarching themes of the series seem, sometimes, to have emerged from post-colonial studies classes: the first law of Starfleet, known as the Prime Directive, holds that Starfleet does not interfere with the internal affairs of other civilizations, and more particularly that it will not interfere in the indigenous technological development of those civilizations.

Of course, women are ignored all the time, everywhere, but there’s something particularly stinging about being written out of the future of civilization itself.  I hate to paint such grand strokes about what sometimes is a wooden and cliche-ridden piece of popular art, but I will maintain until my dying day that the way we imagine things is sometimes equally as important as the way things actually are.  Put differently: fantasy life matters because it tries to set out what we wish we were, instead of what we are.  And the more wooden and idealistic, the more this fantasy is solely about our aspirations. And I guess some people don’t find inclusiveness a necessary element of their utopian ideals.

It is a lot to ask, I know, of most of these geek men, this kind of recognition.  Having always seen themselves reflected at the helm, encouraged from birth to steer themselves and their families because it is What Men Do, they hardly can tell what exclusion feels like.  They like to tell us that they are not sexist, look at this TV series starring a woman oh and over there I totally gave her a PhD to make the point that women can have those too.  Sexist is a dirty word these days, nobody wants to be one, and as soon as you bring it up you may be assured you will be be bombarded with self-defense.  “Do you think all art has to be inclusive?  Art is apolitical!  It’s just a TV show.”  And so on, and so on…

Count me as one of the people who is disappointed on more than purely representational grounds that there are still dudes out there who do not think that this kind of thing demands serious revision, remake or no remake.  I’m not looking for a mirror in popular culture.  I am looking for a place in your utopian ideals.  I want women to be the kind of people we imagine steering the universe one day, not casually, not as accessories to wise men, not as that one seat on your guiding councils, not as background extras.  In front, unquestioned, not your mothers or your sisters or your sacrificial lambs.  Not wearing go-go boots or leather catsuits or any other kind of ridiculous uniform of the sexuality that seems to be the only thing you find noticeable in us.   Just there, in whatever we felt like wearing that day and without some other reason to justify our presence.   There because we belong – not just to your future, but to our own.

"Spirit fingers" are also accepted. Via pacbat @ Flickr.

Consternation?  Malaise?  Eye-rolling?  Or just a deep, deep sigh of disappointment?

I suppose I shouldn’t expect anything better from FOX, really, but I was hoping that the pilot/premiere of their new scripted show for fall, Glee, was going to be a Freaks and Geeks for artsy-fartsy nerds like I was. I really wanted to like this show, but I just can’t.

Glee is ostensibly about the trials and travails of a group of goofy high school misfits who love to sing and throw jazz hands, led by a good-hearted but put-upon teacher who fondly remembers his own show-choir glory days.  As a group, they struggle against both the sneering popular kids and an arts-hostile administration, but, Bad News Bears-style, they’ll probably pull it together in time to rise through the ranks of the competitive high school show choir world (yes, there is such a thing).

It sounds pretty rote, right? That’s not the problem. I wasn’t expecting a television revolution here, but I thought it might not fall so completely into same-old, same-old formulas. The Times review called it “blissfully unoriginal in a witty, imaginative way,” but I’m not sure what show they were watching.

(slight spoilers after the jump)

If you click through to that review and look at the production shot, you’ll see five of the six choir kids (more on the sixth in a moment). Any mouthbreather who has been through an American highschool–or merely watched any of John Hughes’ oeuvre–could recognize these misfits: gothy (possibly lesbian?) Asian girl, fashion-obsessed queer boy, nerdy crip boy (played by an able-bodied actor, no less), sass-talkin’ African-American girl, and over-eager, wannabe starlet-who-we’re-supposed-to-see-as-homely-and-unpopular-but-bish-plz. Mmmmm, token-y!

Enter the sixth choir member: Handsome Football Jock. The pilot is basically about how the teacher-director wrangles HFJ into the choir, where he (totally unexpectedly, y’all!) finds he really likes all that fruity-tooty singin’ and dancin’.  After a darkish night of the soul, he finally stands up for himself and his marginalized weirdo buddies to his bullying teammates. (Cue “We Are the Champions.”)

Okay, that’s a pretty good message to send. I guess. But if the show is supposed to be about kids on the bottom rungs of the social ladder, why does it focus on the moral heroics of the handsome straight white able-bodied guy, while pushing those “others” into the margins yet again? (Is that the “witty” or the “imaginative” part?) Gotta get that male 18-34 demo, I guess, and maude knows they ain’t gonna watch a show about a black girl, or some fag.

The other major problem I have with Glee has to do with it’s portrayal of adult women, whose lives seem to revolve around the choir sponsor, Mr. Schuester (well, lookythere! Both central characters are dudes!). Three are established in the first ep, and are only slightly less cartoonish than the kids. There’s an agressive, bonerkilling cheerleading coach (The Enemy), the shrill, greedy, and humorless wife–who later will be revealed to have an hysterical pregnancy (The Shrew), and the doting, cow-eyed, germophobe colleague who gently encourages Schuster, with whom she’s clearly smitten, to follow his heart and work with the kids, not sell out and become an accountant to support his wife’s Pottery Barn habit (The Helpmate).

Yuck. Yuck all over. It’s possible that the series will at least partially redeem itself in the fall, but I’m not holding my breath. Was Fame this retrograde?  I’m apparently in the minority on this one; see reviews here and here and here and here.  How about you?  Did you watch it?  Did you like it?

Susan Boyle sings her heart out. Via ttom_thgwid @ Flickr.

As Boyle introduced herself, the cackling audience provided background noise. Then Boyle sang, and she sang beautifully. Cue the standing ovation and stunned praise. The judges were stunned not at themselves for underestimating a talented woman for superficial reasons, but that a woman like her could possess such a lovely, powerful voice. Each reminded her that “everyone was against [her]” (to paraphrase judge Amanda Holden) before eagerly endorsing her. Boyle was cheerful and optimistic through it all, and the combination of backstory + performance + personality has endeared her to people on a global scale.

The tone of the Susan Boyle media frenzy is one of delighted shock – the same delighted shock expressed by the judges and the BGT audience who initially snickered and rolled their eyes at the woman. As Jezebel’s Sadie observed, they’ve “reduced her to a two-dimensional character who reaffirms our belief in the Power of Dreams.” She’s never been kissed, she was mercilessly bullied as a child, she dedicated the past few years to caring for her ailing mother – her underdog story appeals to a public overwhelmed with home foreclosure and job losses and a desire to transcend their circumstances. I have no way of knowing whether Boyle feels exploited by all the attention, but the freak-show element to the reporting makes me uncomfortable.

Yes, it’s true; there are people out there made invisible by their size, their disability, their class, their frizzy hair… who have amazing but untapped talents and abilities. I wonder who else we are missing out on. For every pre-fab “artist” who sought stardom for stardom’s sake and whose talent is the willingness to undergo soul-sucking makeovers, there are dozens of Susan Boyles. I might be more upbeat about Boyle’s newfound fame were I not convinced that the reverse halo effect – wherein people assume that a person with one supposedly negative quality (overweight, ordinary looks, a learning disability, etc.) – has only negative qualities – was one of the hurdles in her way in the first place. We saw it in action when she took the BGT stage.

Many people are claiming that “she showed them!” But what did she show them? I fear most of humanity considers Boyle a charming exception to the “rule” that only the young and conventionally attractive are worthy of entertaining us. Maybe at this point, Boyle is just thrilled to have gotten the opportunity to showcase her singing voice on such a grand scale. I am really happy for her and I hope she’s able to continue doing so.

No doubt it feels good to prove your detractors wrong like that. Have you ever had that chance?

Via mediafury @ Flickr

Big Love, whose fourth season is airing Sunday nights on HBO right now, took awhile to grow on me. Y’all should be watching it, in my humble opinion, if you’re interested in feminism. When the show first premiered back in 2004, I was skeptical. The sunny colour palette of the promotional material made me wonder if the creators of the series were taking their subject very seriously.

What I suppose I was worried about was a “lighthearted” approach to the practice of polygamy. Now, I’m not going to start listing clichés about true love being between two people only. As a feminist I just can’t get it up for an unequivocal defense of traditional monogamous marriage/relationships per se. But I don’t kid myself that polygamy is challenging traditional notions of marriage. Any notion of marriage in which there is a dominant and a subservient partner is, to me, a priori patriarchal. And the polygamy practiced by the FLDS and various splinter sects of Mormonism is a relationship of unequals. One type of genitalia is heavily valued over another, vaginas apparently being relatively interchangeable but penii divinely called to penetrate as many of the former as possible. Lord help me, indeed.

My fears have largely not been borne out by the way the show has progressed. Much like Mad Men, this story about what I think of as High Patriarchy (which is to say, wholly unapologetic patriarchy) has revealed that the way women struggle to express and assert themselves with men’s feet on their necks holds far more dramatic interest than the actions of their oppressors.

Ta-Nehisi recently wrote, intelligently and thoughtfully as usual, about his personal response to these men (though I can’t get on board with his admiration of the sniveling Don Embry, who often is the mouthpiece for some of the male polygamists’ more misogynist attitudes towards women):

One of the consequences of feminism is not simply redefining roles for women–an unquestioned good–but redefining roles for men. I think that will be a good in the long-term too, but right now a lot of us are in this space of trying to figure out who we are and what we should be. Bill Hendrickson is a guy inventing manhood in this new world–all of his wives want to work, for instance… as he constructs new definitions, he can’t escape the root of the old, of the ancient and all its questions and conundrums. I’m a modern man, and the child of a 60s radical… but even as I try to remake myself, hoping not to repeat the mistakes of those who came before me, old magic is at work, and ancient identities, that we thought we’d shed, call us back home.

There’s a part of me that thinks this gives Bill too much credit. Bill may be full of words and commonplaces about how much he values his family. But it’s Barb, the polygamy doubting-Thomas of the lot, who seems to be making all the real sacrifices. She left her church, her family, her job and she has to accept second and third and mayhap fourth wives who are not the products of divine fate to her in the same way they are to her husband. It’s Nicki who is incandescent in her defense when her brother threatens the safety of the whole family, at the expense of the connection to the FLDS splinter-sect community that was the only life she knew before marrying Bill. It’s Margene who takes the “Principle” of polygamy to a new place when she actively recruits and “dates” a potential fourth wife, and shocks herself when she actually enjoys having a life and existence outside the confined roles of “wife” and “mother.” In short, while I think Bill cares about his family, he is not redefining manhood. He is clinging, often tenuously, to what he thinks it means, at the expense of his wives’ emotional well-beings, and at the expense of proper attention to his children, like Sarah, who are feeling morally adrift in the way he has defined “family” for them.

The show is no less interesting or accurate for this, of course. But if you are watching Big Love – and, as I said, I think you should be – do it for the women, not for the men. It’s the former who have the more interesting things to say about redefining gender roles.