the banality of misogyny: super bowl edition

Okay. I did not watch the Super Bowl. I did, however, watch Hulu the day after the Super Bowl and was subjected to the same sexist SB commercial over and over and over and over (thanks, Hulu). The one where men stare at the camera and bemoan the fact that they have to separate the recycling and acknowledge another human being. Oh no! Those Feminists destroyed your solipsistic wonderland. Let’s build a time machine that runs on our tears.

And so, I had time to ponder. I had read a few posts, at the Sexist, at Salon, on Feministing, about the sexist Super Bowl ads. And no one really was able to give a clear critique of what the hell is going on.

In a way, it’s been the same stupid shit for at least five or six years.  Since the women’s movement has never been considered a legitimate protest movement and the very thought of its potentially legitimacy is and always will be hilarious, it is therefore socially acceptable/clever for corporations to exploit the idea of a “man’s movement” in order to sell crap. Middle aged men! Express your secret hatred of the mother of your children by purchasing hamburgers, cars, khaki pants and shaving cream.

The revolution, sponsored by Cheetos. Although, I don’t have to make up tag lines.  The real, actual tag lines include  “Man’s Last Stand” (Dodge), “It’s time to wear the pants” (Docker’s “man-ifesto”), and, just in case you weren’t catching on, “I am man, hear me roar” (Burger King’s “manthem”). In reality, though, it’s an advertisement for  profound intellectual immaturity, professional mediocrity and heart disease…brought to you by  Snickers. **

At first I thought, these commercials are so unbelievably insipid as to be culturally meaningless.  Men are idiots and women somehow manage to be simultaneously overbearing and chattel–nothing new there.

But the Hulu commercial for whatever stupid car is so poorly written, paced and scored that it is difficult to analyze. So here is the analysis: Corporate misogyny is purposefully banal. These ads are  so fucking boring it’s difficult to write about them. They are so stupid that it’s difficult to sustain conversations about them.

And that’s just what these ad agencies and companies want. They want their ads to be beyond analysis. That way, when one criticizes them, the arguments themselves become nebulous;  They become either stick-in-the-mud shrillness (which underscores the ads’ argument once again) or some kind of vague religious-seeming prudishness.

american apparel makes me vomit, again

Oh, there are so many, many things to hate about American Apparel. And I have hated them for so long. I have hated them with the anguish of a teenage goth since that first billboard went up on the same block as Bluestockings, the totally kick-ass feminist bookstore on the LES. I mean, the bookstore was literally in the shadow of an ever-changing woman, with a never-changing focus on her anus.

I hated them when I had to walk by one my way from the subway to class for two years. Every time I walked by I had a different fantasy. Sometimes I would imagine that late at night I would throw a brick through the display window, a different message wrapped around it every time. Sometimes I would imagine that I spray painted something critical and derogatory (yet accessible and well-lettered) on the window. And sometimes I imagined myself just walking inside the door and screaming until I was forcibly removed.

And I have hated everything that I have ever read about Dov Charney, whose harassment of his employees (there have been at least six sexual harassment lawsuits filed against him—and I haven’t checked in a few years) gets him labeled a maverick with a conscience. Okay, just because your stuff is made in downtown LA doesn’t make up for the fact that you are an evangelical misogynist union-buster.

My boyfriend says that our anti-American Apparel slogan should be: “Advertise clothes, not anuses.” And I personally think that if you did a daVinci’s Last Supper type of experiment on every American Apparel ad ever made, the focal point of every single one would be a woman’s anus.

So, it didn’t surprise me at all when I saw that American Apparel was sponsoring a best-bottom contest. They ask young (obviously) women: “Confident about the junk in your trunk? Show us your assets! Post a photo of your booty’s best side for judgment. We’re looking for a brand new bum (the best in the world!) to be the new ‘face’ for our always expanding intimates and briefs lines. The winners will be flown to LA, photographed and featured online. Send in a close-up photo of your backside wearing American Apparel panties, bodysuits or briefs for consideration and vote for your personal favorites.”

Hm, equating women’s asses with their faces? I think that says it all, American Apparel.

But wait. This prank is juvenile to the point of nonsensical. Maybe saying that a young woman’s ass is more important that her face, and that showing it to others who are free to rate and ridicule it is a definite prerequisite to living in American youth culture, isn’t all American Apparel has to say? Could there be another side to this issue?

ask president obama about military rape

As you may know, the POTUS is taking questions from citizens via YouTube. People (mostly young white dudes, upon first glance) have submitted questions which others then vote for or against. The President will respond to the questions with the most yay votes.

Why all the background info? I’ve submitted a question about rape in the military.

Please vote for my question. (If the link doesn’t work, just search here for ’stop military rape’.) Voting ends at 8 pm tonight!

Here is my question:

Mr. President, you honor women serving in the armed forces in nearly every speech you give. But the truth is that one in three enlisted women is sexually assaulted while serving her country. According to a CBS report, in 2007 less than 12 percent of sexual assault investigations led to prosecution. With such a low rate of prosecution it follows that, according to the Pentagon, 80% of military sexual assaults are never reported. As Commander in Chief, what are you doing to both prevent and prosecute military rape?

If you’re interested, Katie Couric did a short report on the problem last year, as did NOW on PBS. And Helen Benedict has a great article in Slate from 2007.

this is not a christmas list, unfortunately.

It’s weird to find out things that you’ve know, deep down, for years, are true: facts that the culture at large ignores or ridicules.  When those truths concern the depth and breadth and justifications for sexism, seeing those truths come it isn’t satisfying but, in a way,  doubly chilling.

• Women make more money and get more respect when writing under a man-handle than a woman’s name. Read this article from Salon
• Sex doesn’t sell...and yet we are still subjected to new, increasingly porny Burger King advertising. I didn’t think it could get any worse than the men marching down the street toward a Burger King singing a parody of “I am woman…”, but alas…it has. I would love to read their internal memos/brainstorming sessions. I wonder what they will come up with next, “Let’s sell white people sandwiches with a commercial in which they sing “‘We Shall Overcome” Hunger, Thanks BK!’”
• Linda “Lovelace,” that famous “porn star” who starred in Deep Throat, which made like hundreds of millions of dollars and was a mainstream release in 1972 was forced to “act” in those movies by her abusive husband. Although she subsequently sued to stop distribution and sued to get some of the money the films made–nothing came of it. Not only did nothing come of it, her experience and perspective fail to make it into any of the contemporary nostalgia about the film. Instead, we have “fun” segments on VH1, romanticized wide-release and PBS (PBS!) documentaries about the film specifically and porn in general, respectively, that fail to mention the words “misogyny” or “exploitation,” despite the implications of the onscreen images.  The dissonance between the images and the narration is like nails on a chalkboard. It represents a kind of blindness in our culture–we’re always ready with another explanation/media focus for violence against women: racism, drug issues, workplace issues, the personal alienation of the perpetrator, free speech, censorship, celebrity, consumerism, and on and on and on.  Relatedly, I am working on a documentary about 1978 and needed to find a picture of Ted Bundy, who raped and murdered more than 35 women. Read the Wikipedia page and be appalled. The concept of misogyny is not mentioned at all, except by Bundy himself—and even then it’s dismissed! He talked about the role of pornography in his socialization. Wikipedia, however, editorializes that he was being disingenuous (!) about the role of pornography in his life, according to “experts” like this.  The horror. The blindness and the horror.

cleo from 1962 to 2009

Is Mahnola Dargis one of the five people who reads this blog? I wish.

Back in reality, however, she and I both love the parenthetical-number-and-exclamation-point-as-criticism for every insipid and insidious “blank of the woman” announcement, as in: “1992 had been popularly known as the year of the woman in politics, partly because of the number of new women elected to the Senate that year (4!) and the House (24!).”

That sentence opens an article about the lack of women directors in Hollywood in a way that will make you want to include a parenthetical scream at the end of every sentence. And here I am saying the same thing.

Dargis asks if reading these statistics, we readers are “[f]eeling queasy yet? Resigned? Indifferent? A little angry?” (This is why we need female film critics.)**

Let’s say all of the above. Especially, especially, when you watch a movie like Cleo from 5 to 7 by my love, Agnes Varda, as I did last night. (A profound love of Varda is another thing that Dargis and I share.) It is genius. It is an absolute revelation. …And here’s the kicker, it was made forty-seven years ago (in 1962!).

cleo: every frame is a work of art unto itself

When my Mom thought that I was moving too slowly as a child, in moments of uncharacteristic and genuine frustration, she would say, “You’re moving at a snail’s pace!”* That is exactly how I feel.

We are moving at a snail’s pace (a snail’s!). I am so tired of not having health care. And not having child care. And not having equal pay. And having pervasive and accepted violence against women.  At having Lady Gaga be the most discussed and revered female artist in America. It feels like being frozen in a moment of rage. It is a distinctly physical feeling. And it is horrible.

But, even though it is so arduous, that snail is moving in the best direction possible. Andrea Dworkin said in 1974 (1974!) that,  “Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes –love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself –and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others –should we call it ”joy’”

And that is what Cleo from 5 to 7 is. It is moving us toward that new theme–that joy. If you don’t know it, it’s the story of a famous Parisienne chantuese awaiting the results of a biopsy. Although she’s been waiting for two days, the move follows the final two hours before her results.

It makes me want to write love letters to her. The way the camera moves. The humanity of the characters. The philosophical depth and deftness. It truly is that new thing that is itself and the other simultaneously: cage and freedom, human and doll, movement and stillness, love and hate, generosity and selfishness.

Thank God for it, because it’s the reason I have any energy at all.

Notes:

*I mentioned my mother. How tacky. Also, insert imagined issues here.

**According to Women Make Movies, “Forty seven percent (47%) of the nation’s top newspapers do not include film reviews written by women, whereas only 12% do not include film reviews written by men.“

jeanne-claude and aliens

A few weeks ago, when the artist Jeanne-Claude died, I wrote here briefly that I hoped there would be a discussion in some future, alien thesis* about her partnership with her husband Christo and what that means for/about/in the context of her work, their work and the art world.

When, there’s just the faintest whiff of discussion going on right now at The American Prospect. I kind of imagine a more  in depth analysis.  Hopefully there is an adult  out there either feverishly writing a readable book (remember, this is my fantasy) about institutional critique and bureaucratic art-process-action or a child wrapping her Playskool house in shiny, flammable dress-up clothes in preparation for some future response.

Here’s the best part: “Christo and Jeanne-Claude had to win over the art world, too, an institution as byzantine as any government. If Jeanne-Claude’s portion of their work was in large part managing and bringing about the wrapping of the Pont Neuf in gold fabric despite then-Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac’s grave hesitations, so much the better — the process is the work. Jeanne-Claude’s battle for recognition has helped shed light on the art world’s discomfort with recognizing both women and the process behind creating large-scale work. That process was part of her work, too.”

NOTE: The term “alien thesis” is a phrase, coined in the back of a 1999 Ford Taurus on a California highway, that my brother and I use when pointing out something in the contemporary world that is clearly weird and meaningful and that we, as contemporary humans, are not totally capable of grasping objectively. We’re basically saying that in two thousand years the language on Burger King signs, for example,  will be written about by alien graduate students. This is not a new idea whatsoever, but I like to imagine the graduate students/anthropologists/whatever as aliens.

An alien thesis is a joke, but others write about it quite stirringly. John Hooker, the suffragist lawyer and husband of Isabella Beecher Hooker wrote in his memoirs about a time of equality in the future humans would be astounded that anyone ever questioned whether women should have the vote.

Check.

In 1974, Andrea Dworkin wrote about future humans seeing 20th c. masculinist art.  Dworkin said in a speech delivered at Smith College that later become a chapter in her book Our Blood: Discourses and Prophesies on Sexual Politics, “As feminists, we inhabit the world in a new way. We see the world in a new way…We intend to change it so totally that someday the texts of masculinist writers will be anthropological curiosities. What was that Mailer talking about, our descendants will ask, should they come upon his work in some obscure archive. And they will wonder–bewildered, sad–at the masculinist glorification of war; the masculinist mystifications around killing, maiming, violence, and pain; the tortured masks of phallic heroism; the vain arrogance of phallic supremacy; the impoverished renderings of mothers and daughters, and so of life itself. They will ask, did those people really believe in those gods?”

Um, we’re still working on this one. But how satisfying is the thought? More on the alien thesis, and masculinist art and Andrea Dworkin to come in the next few hours or days.

hark!

I had a secret fear when I started this project that I would be bored. I never thought that would lead me to so many works that would make me want to rush out into the street with some kind of deranged evangelical impulse and shove unfamiliar materials into people’s hands. Well, it has. And this movie is one of those materials. I would prefer to write something about it, but I can’t help but just shove it into your hands as quickly as possible. It’s a film called Look at Me that is directed, co-written and starring Agnes Jaoui and won Best Screenplay at Cannes in 2004. Go find it!*

*Although I know that that is harder than it should be. But Netflix. Netflix, amen!

starved/nourished and other differences

I have been reading/watching the writing of women for about a month and a half. Despite some trepidation, I figured that I should reflect on what this change has done to  my brain.

There is a sociologist at Berkeley who does studies where he asks various humans to take tests. Simple. Then he asks them to come back a few weeks later and before they take another, similar test they are shown certain images. If they are women they are either shown images of women being degraded (i.e. a rap video, a woman being bullied by someone like Bill O’Reilly) or they are shown a video of a woman doing something well, maybe playing college basketball or giving a lecture. If the test-taker is African-American, he or she is given images of an African-American either being degraded or succeeding before he/she takes the test.  The women/African-Americans who were exposed to positive images do markedly better on the second exam while those who were exposed to negative images do markedly worse.

Basically, the positive-image scenario has been the story of the last month for me.

I feel better, even relieved. There’s no putting it more delicately. I feel calmer and more motivated to act.

Through the summer and into the fall I was working on a PBS documentary about the history philanthropy in the Northeast. I’ve been reading dusty mountains of material about women involved in the abolitionist and suffrage movements: the Beechers, the Grimke sisters, Belva Lockwood and so many whose names are now unfamiliar. I have been wondering and wondering, where did they get that impetus? That popping kernel that moved them to organize, to work,  to make, to do something? While I still can’t speak to where their motivation came from (aside from a kind of white-hot rage at rampant inequity), I can say is that this project has given me a speck of the motivation that they had.
One day a few weeks ago, I parked my car to walk up around the block to the monolithic state library. I caught a glimpse of my face in the car window as I locked the door. I thought to myself, “There is my human face.” It was like this strange moment of plain, unadulterated recognition. And it was strange because as I analyzed the moment I realized I had perhaps never felt it before; It wasn’t that moment when you don’t recognize yourself on film or in a photograph. There was no little voice that is outside of your own perspective that analyzes the way your face looks (saying, “looked better at 20, hair looks dirty today, why can’t I look more put together?” or whatever). There was none of that.  I wasn’t looking at my own face through that weird, automatic camera of self-objectification and judgment; It was though I was looking at my own face with my own brain for the first time.

“It really was not supposed to turn out this way.”

Although it’s not exactly jolly, pre-Thanksgiving reading, here are stories submitted by young people eking out a “living” during the recession via The Nation.

I found the accompanying article disappointing, maybe because it is so unbelievably depressing. It only quotes one woman, but the author does note the continual inequity between young male and female workers and people of color). I really liked some of these submitted stories, however.

Also, here is a painting by my friend Melanie in a style I’ll call Nursery School Expressionism or, as is the current magazine trend, something trivializing like Recession Surrealism. I love the expression on the girl’s face–that’s how I feel when I start thinking about economic inequity exacerbated by the recession. It’s called Donna and Herman Start a Puzzle. A puzzle, indeed.

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