So Many Things!

It has been quite a while, my dear Internet friends. I’d apologize for the absence but I’m having way too much fun at my new job to want to apologize for it. The Matilda Effect is still ongoing and I’m truly hoping it lasts forever.

That said, I’ve missed sharing my new stuff with you! So… A few things that have happened since we last spoke (… wrote? read? communicated via pixels?). From newest to oldest:

Show up. Just do it. I wrote about the simple but often un- or under-appreciated value of showing up, especially when it’s cold, you’re busy, and Netflix is calling. This was partly inspired by Wait But Why and Eric Liu’s phenomenal book A Chinaman’s Chance (really just one chapter of it, but seriously, read the whole thing):

On Ego and Exercise. After running my first (and probably only) half-marathon, I wrote about why I exercise and the intersection of ego and self-care.

On slutty slutty Halloween. Every October (this now seems woefully out of date), there are endless think pieces about why girls dress so scantily. I’m so bored of this conversation, so… I wrote another think piece.

On the pay gap and “trusting the system.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella got into trouble by suggesting that women should just work hard and wait around to be recognized and failed to acknowledge systemic and cultural reasons for the pay gap. Oh yeah, this was at a conference for women in tech…

 

Making a Scene Has Gotten a Bad Rap

I’m not talking about making a scene because your pasta wasn’t as al dente as you had requested, or because someone took your favorite spot in the yoga studio (don’t they know it’s yours!?) or because your bagel was improperly creamcheesed. I’m talking about making a scene because injustice is occurring. Because racism is occurring. Because sexism, misogyny, discrimination, are occurring.

Good girls are not supposed to make scenes. We are supposed to be polite, courteous, vaguely deferential to the needs of others. By all means, consider the needs of others, but for the love of Gloria consider your own need to be respected and treated fairly.

If it seems like I’m on a bit of a rant, it’s because I am. In writing an essay about “making a scene” for Role/Reboot this week, I was thinking a lot about Anita, the new documentary about Anita Hill, and The Good Girls Revolt about the 1970 discrimination case brought by the researchers at Newsweek. I was thinking about my contemporaries–Anita Sarkeesian, Adria Richards, Lindy West–who “make scenes” over injustice and sexism and routinely get told to go back to the kitchen/lay back and enjoy it/shut their mouths/remember their place.

But someone must make a scene, because these scenes need to be made. These issues need to be raised (and fixed), these conversations need to be had, these inequalities need to be addressed.

So… it might as well be you.

 

Related Post: Happy 80th to Gloria!

Related Post: The personal is political.

Happy 80th Gloria!

Gloria Steinem turned 80 today and is still killing it all over town. Gail Collins wrote a particularly excellent birthday card at the New York Times, but I also committed my thoughts on Gloria to paper (er…screen? We have got to get some new idioms) for Role/Reboot.

I was recently talking to my mom about how segmented the “movements” are these days. Where are the great thinkers? She said, Where are the great leaders pushing us forward to be better? The Martins? The Glorias? She’s right, I think, that there really aren’t singular “public faces” to movements anymore. Maybe Sheryl Sandberg comes the closest, but even her momentum and appeal is limited to certain demographic wedges. Individuals become flash points, like Sandra Fluke, or Trayvon Martin, but their influence doesn’t sustain over decades.

The way we consume media has become so fractured and specific that for one person to try to galvanize a large swath of the public is rarely feasible anymore. We’ll change the channel to one of the 900 others, or close the browser and open a new one. There are pockets now, specific strains of ism or anti-ism, that we choose subscribe to based on our politics and affiliations. When Tina Fey skewered Jezebel on 30 Rock, which side did you fall on? When Ta-Nehisi Coates berates the President, who do you think is right?

I don’t think it’s a bad thing that we have these sub-affiliations, I think it’s just an indication of how fucking complicated these issues are. I just finished Lynn Povich’s The Good Girls Revolt, about the 1970 sex discrimination lawsuit at Newsweek. In the recollections of some of the participants was a certain reluctance to admit that, actually, they hadn’t wanted the jobs they were suing for. Most of them certainly did (and  they all deserved the opportunity to compete for them), but some felt that the movement was so all-encompassing that to opt-out or question any part of it was to undermine it. They didn’t want to jeopardize the group to protect themselves, even though their interests didn’t always line up 100%.

It was an interesting angle that I wasn’t expecting Povich to address. It’s not all rah-rah. One person or committee or caucus can never speak for everyone, so the goal has to be about creating options, not dictating how we utilize them.

Related Post: Raunch humor and feminism.

Related Post: When celebrities talk about feminism, the good, bad, and ugly.

 

“If you’re feeling attacked, it probably means you’re having your privilege challenged”

If you haven’t spent much time with the Batty Mamzelle essay “This is what I mean when I say ‘White Feminist'”, you should.  If it hasn’t entered the canon of intersectional third wave feminist texts, it’ll be inducted any day now. It is brilliant.

As a feminist who is white, I do not want to be a White Feminist, which Cate defines as follows:

“White feminism” does not mean every white woman, everywhere, who happens to identify as feminist. It also doesn’t mean that every “white feminist” identifies as white. I see “white feminism” as a specific set of single-issue, non-intersectional, superficial feminist practices. It is the feminism we understand as mainstream; the feminism obsessed with body hair, and high heels and makeup, and changing your married name. It is the feminism you probably first learned. “White feminism” is the feminism that doesn’t understand western privilege, or cultural context. It is the feminism that doesn’t consider race as a factor in the struggle for equality. 

For visual learners, she included this amazing Venn diagram, and I’ve added my notes with yellow arrows:

I know I have flirted the line with White Feminism. I was in White Feminism territory when I posted on Facebook about blackface. I was in White Feminism territory when I failed to consider how a movement like SlutWalk may not work for women of color whose experience with hypersexualization (see #FastTailedGirls) is different than mine. And I know that, when my White Feminism tendencies come out (and if you grew up with White Feminism, were taught White Feminism, and read White Feminism, it can be hella hard to retrain yourself), I am epically embarrassed to be called out. When you are working hard to be the best ally you can be and you take a misstep (even a well-meaning one), it’s hard not to go straight for a defensive crouch. But you don’t know me. I’m not like that. I’m on your side. 

But that’s a selfish, unhelpful response. It’s not about you (me). As Cate writes “It can be very off-putting to feel attacked for a transgression that you know yourself not to be guilty of. But in the context of social justice and movement building, if you’re feeling attacked, it probably means you’re having your privilege challenged, not that you are a bad person.” All you can do is apologize, step back, analyze, and learn from it.

In a related story this week, Jeff Yang wrote for the Wall Street Journal about the selection of Ashley Wagner for the Olympic Team (4th place in the Nationals) over Mirai Nagasu (3rd). As he points out in his follow-up piece, we will likely never know for sure whether race, specifically, played a role in the selection, but it’s not unreasonable to ask the question:

My WSJ piece is focused on the idea of the “golden girl” — a term first applied to one of Olympic skating’s early superstars, Sonja Henie, and which has survived since then through the years as an appellation for a particular type of skater: Blonde, ivory-skinned, willowy, slender. The term “golden girl” is akin to the term “great white hope”: It is a racialized archetype that infuriates people when you actually call it out as a racialized archetype.

Remember guys, if you’re feeling defensive, you’re probably just having your privilege challenged.

Related Post: Pax Dickerson didn’t notice male privilege

Related Post: David Roberts at Grist explains White Liberal Dude Privilege

Some very inconclusive thoughts about Beyonce and “Anna Mae”

Let me preface by saying three things:

1. I have read a zillion essays about Beyonce’s new album, Beyonce. Especially this one (Nico Muhly), this one (on bottom bitch feminism) and this one (New Yorker). I have also had many conversations about it with people who know a lot more about hip-hop, music history, black feminism, and other relevant topics than I do.

2. I really, really love the new album from a purely “this is my jam and it feels good in my ears” perspective. I have listened to very little else since it came out, and I find it is the perfect gym accompaniment. Also the perfect cleaning accompaniment. Also the perfect putzing around my apartment accompaniment. It is not good for watching TV, but otherwise, it satisfies most of my musical requirements.

3. I don’t really have any answers to the question below, but I have a few ideas. What I am hoping will happen with this post is that one of you people will have much better ideas than mine and you will write them in the comments and all will be clear. So, what is the question:

What is up with the “Anna Mae” reference?

For background, in the song “Drunk in Love,” Jay Z (Beyonce’s husband and mega-mogul musician, for those of you dwelling under boulders the size of New Zealand), jumps in with a few lines, among them, this section:

Catch a charge, I might, beat the box up like Mike…

I’m like Ike Turner

Baby know I don’t play, now eat the cake Anna Mae

Said, eat the cake, Anna Mae.

“Eat the cake, Anna Mae”, is a reference to the Tina Turner biopic (she was born Anna Mae) about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband Ike. In the movie, What’s Love Got to Do With It, Ike forcefully shoves cake in Tina’s face at a restaurant and than hits her, knocking her to the floor while their friends and other diners look on. Watch the scene here, if you feel up to it.

So. Why does Jay-Z rap a violent, misogynistic lyric about the other most famous black musical couple in the middle of his wife’s triumphant (and explicitly feminist) new album? I don’t know, but I know it makes me really, really uncomfortable. Here are a few possibilities:

• The If-it-walks-like-a-duck… theory: What do I know about the inner workings of Bey and Jay’s relationship? Nothing. If you take him at face value, Jay’s line is bold, in-your-face power move. She may have the fastest selling iTunes album of all time, but in their world, she’s still just Anna Mae. It’s a put-down, and a masterful one because it’s right in front of us and we just go on giving her feminist props. How much more belittling could you get? With one line, he undermines every girl power-laden “bow down, bitches,” she issues. She ain’t got nothing on him, record sales be damned.

• The Y’all-know-nothing-about-us theory: Sasha Frere-Jones for The New Yorker writes, “I won’t pretend to know how this potentially ugly reference works between Jay Z and Beyoncé, but it’s her album and they look pretty happy on the beach, so some sort of inversion is at work.” Now that’s bold. To flaunt a famous instance of another woman’s abuse in your sexy beach video with your husband is to say you’re so far above that shit that you can joke about it. You are so far removed from that life and those problems that you get to make “Eat the cake, Anna Mae,” mean whatever you want.

• The Watch-what -I-can-do theory: If you are the queen of the universe, like Ellie Torres on Cougar Town, words do not define you, you define words. If you say that “Eat the cake, Anna Mae,” is not, in fact, a repulsive piece of misogyny, but is rather a love poem, then so it shall be. Change approved.

• The Pay-closer-attention,-bitches theory: Really masterful fiction writers sometimes shake up a sentence just to make sure you’re still on your toes. They invert a verb, or select an off-putting word that catches in your throat as you murmur to yourself, just to make you wake up and pay closer attention to the language that they chose so carefully. It’s a wake-up call to the reader to signal that everything shouldn’t be taken at face value. Early in the album, “Drunk in Love” could function as the wake-up call to listeners. Lest you glaze through the dramatic feminist acrobatics (see the Adichie TED talk featured on “Flawless,”) Bey complicates the album up front with the Anna Mae reference to make you attend to the lyrical layers that much more carefully. Feminism is not simple, marriage is not simple, race is not simple, sexuality is not simple. “Anna Mae” reminds us of all of those things, and consequently casts a complexity on the album that might otherwise be deemed froth. Do we think she’s that masterful?

What else you got? I’m kind of at a loss.

Related Post: My Role/Reboot on Beyonce’s Superbowl performance.

Related Post: When I got called out for unintentional racism by some friends. 

A Few of My Favorite Things from 2013 (Part 1)

The time-honored tradition of end of year lists must be… er… honored (must it?), so here we go. These are a few of my favorite things to read/watch/listen to/cry at/laugh at/bemoan/enjoy from 2013. 

• Poetry: The Rape Joke, by Tricia Lockwood (The Awl)

• Speeches: George Saunders’ commencement speech to Syracuse University. Also, this conversation with him and his longtime editor Andy Ward.

• Radio: The two-part series on Harper High School from This American Life. Who knew radio could do that to a person?

• TED Talks: Tavi Gevinson’s delightful brand of quirky, confident feminism and that fact that she’s only 17. There is hope for the future after all.

• Obituaries: The obituary of feminist icon Shulasmith Firestone by other feminist icon Susan Faludi in The New Yorker. 

• Editorials: Tim Krieder’s NYT editorial about the power of “I don’t know” in a world full of people who claim to know for certain all kinds of things one can not really know for certain. “I’m always ill at ease when I find myself conscripted by the media into the role of Expert on some subject about which I have rashly written. I felt like the explanatory caption beneath my name on-screen ought to be: PERSON IN WORLD.”

• Comics: Allie Brosh’ return to cartooning with the Hyperbole and a Half entry Depression: Part 2.

Related Post: A few of my favorite things from 2012.

Dating like a feminist

Last week I joined Molly and Brian on Vocalo’s Feminist Wednesdays to talk about dating while feminist. As usual, it was a blast and a half. What part should gender roles play in modern dating? How much should we rely on traditional who-does-what? Should we just mimic the gays? They seem able to figure this out without pointing at genitalia as the reason one person should or shouldn’t buy the other person dinner…

Listen away!

Related Post: Dating should not be a meal ticket.

Related Post: Why online dating is hard for guys.

Dating Should Not be a Meal Ticket

Did you hear about that woman in Toronto who bragged about all the free food she was getting by using her womanly wiles to lure lunkheads into paying for her meals? Oh wait, isn’t that kind of dating works?

I’ve written about the age-old question (well… say, early 70s-old) of who should pay for dates before, and my feelings have not changed. Between peers, I really can’t see any reason that men should be expected to pay for dates. Once things get going, yeah, sure, treat each other or take turns or do whatever works for you, but the assumption that the financial burden of your time together is always on him drives me a little insane.

This week, Erin Wotherspoon became a blip on the pop culture screen when her Tumblr Restaurant Tips from a Serial Dater got noticed for her professed desire to eat her way through Toronto’s finest restaurants on the dime of dudes willing to funder culinary adventures because she’s pretty. Here’s my take on transactional dating for Role/Reboot.

Related Post: Kelly Ripa on who should pay

Related Post: One way that dating inequalities help women

The most dramatic thing to happen on Grey’s Anatomy. Ever.

More dramatic than the bomb in the guy’s chest? Than the house made of candles on the hillside? Than the plane crash that killed Lexi and Mark? Than the shooter who roamed the halls of Seattle Grace? More dramatic than the time that Meredith died? I know, right? That show is craaaaay.

Yes, what happened on Grey’s Anatomy two weeks ago was true drama (skip to 34:00). For those of you who quit this bad boy when it jumped the shark half a decade ago, Meredith and Christina are still best friends, but much else has changed [SPOILER ALERT. Ha, as if anyone waits with bated breath for Grey’s spoilers]. Meredith married Derek and they have two adorable children, Zola and baby Bailey. Christina got married and then divorced when her husband Owen couldn’t abide by her consistent refusal to have children (I mean, come on…. she told him that when they got together, but that’s not the point…) They are both still surgeons at Seattle Grace (renamed Sloane Grey Memorial).

What drama could this mundane divergence of paths produce? There were no bones protruding from skin, no organs spilling on to slick linoleum floors. Nope, no guts and gore here, just good old fashioned human drama. Christina and Meredith had planned an elaborate surgery. Meredith’s day took a turn with kiddie emergencies left and right. Christina boxed her out of the surgery and replaced her with a more prepared doctor, Dr. Bailey. And then this:

Meredith: You stole that surgery from me. 

Christina: I am sorry. I really wish you could have been in there with me. 

Meredith: I worked my ass off to do that surgery with you and you stole it from me. That was low.

Christina: Meredith, you were unprepared, you were unfocused, and you were late. I didn’t steal that surgery from you. I rescued that surgery from you, because you couldn’t do it.

Meredith: I understand that you believe you are god’s gift to medicine, but I am every bit as talented and competent a surgeon as you are.

Christina: No, you’re not. I’m sorry, but you’re not. And that’s, that’s okay. You have different priorities now. You’ve cut back on your clinical hours. You log less time in the OR, I mean, you don’t do research. And I get it, I mean, you have Zola, and baby Bailey, and you want to be a good mom.

Meredith: I don’t believe you! You are saying that I can’t be a good surgeon and a mom.

Christina: Of course not! Dr. Bailey’s a mom, and she was fantastic in there! 

Meredith: Then what are you saying? 

Christina: I’m saying, I’m saying… Bailey never let up. She lives here. Callie? Never let up. Ellis Grey [Meredith’s mother] never let up. And I know you don’t want to be your mother. I’m saying, you and I started running down the same road at the same time, and at a certain point, you let up. You slowed down. And don’t say that I don’t support that, because I do. You made your choices, and they are valid choices, but don’t pretend they don’t affect your skills. You are a very good surgeon, but we’re in different places now. And that’s okay.

Ahhhhh, oh Grey’s, I love you so. For all the deserved flack it gets for melodrama and oversimplified dialogue (whenever Shonda wants you to get an emotional point all she knows how to do is repeat it three times with different inflection. I need you. I need you. I need you. Check it, she does it on Scandal too), she does tap into the political side of female friendship with some serious know-how.

I would rather have conversations like this than landslides and biker brawl mayhem in the emergency room any day. These conversations are hard, way harder than corralling sexting interns or sobbing family members, and they feel real. Your friends will make different decisions than you would make for yourself, or than you would make for them. It’s hard, because you love them, and you trust them, but you’re scared for them, and you’re scared for yourself. You don’t know what’s right or what will happen and when someone who has been running the same race as you for a long time suddenly veers left or slows down or speeds up, it’s hard not to wonder if you should be following suit. Trying to read your own motives and values in the shadows cast by people you love and trust… that shit is complicated and lovely and challenging.

Take notes, Shonda, and keep it up.

Related Post: How Grey’s got gay marriage right. 

Related Post: How The Good Wife gets the second wave vs. third wave tension right

Can Sex Positivity Be Negative?

Last week, Kelly Rose Pflug-Back wrote for Huffington Post about how the mantra of sex-positive feminism has actually been negative for her. She, like many people, had suffered sexual trauma, and the attitude that she perceived as “just have some more orgasms! orgasms for everyone! woohoo! sex!” wasn’t helping her. In fact, it made her feel guilty for not being a “good” feminist.

I really struggled with her essay, especially the portion that suggested we default to treating our partners like survivors:

Given the alarming prevalence of rape and sexual violence in our society, perhaps all of us, regardless of gender, should begin with the assumption that all female-bodied partners we have (and, realistically, quite a few of our male-bodied partners as well) are survivors.

To me, assuming your partners are survivors (or would like to be treated as such) deprives them of the agency to tell/show you how they’d like to be treated. I know that I, personally, do not want to be treated like a survivor, and I would resent someone who approached me with that attitude.

That said, Pflug-Back’s essay has prompted a ton of really interesting conversations about the limitations of sex-positive feminism and the shortcomings of the movement’s messaging. Check out more thoughts on what sex-positivity really means (hint: does not equal orgasm counting) in my new Role/Reboot piece.

 

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