As @feministhulk observed this week, HULK TRY TO OPEN MIND, SMASH EPISTEMOLOGICAL FRAMEWORKS WHICH LIMIT HULK’S THOUGHT, BUT HULK WILL NEVER GET CAT-CALLING.
Since Maggie is a great storyteller I mostly want to let this story stand on its own and let you make of it what you will.
I do want, briefly, to say this. What struck me when I watched the video is how important it is to remember that sexism and beauty standards end up hurting even the women who are supposedly privileged by them. In this situation, because Maggie’s harassers thought she looked “like a model,” they felt entitled to proposition her in the coffee shop at the mall. This is a different type of harassment, to be sure, than the ridicule we who don’t fit the norm experience. It’s easy (because women are encouraged to compete with each other when it comes to beauty) to resent the attention “hot” women receive from strangers. But those women I know who experience that attention usually don’t feel more than passingly gratified. Mostly, they feel under constant siege from people who act like their bodies are somehow public property, perpetually on show, simply because these women had the gall to walk out of the house in the morning in something other than their pajamas (and at times even then!).
My sister has learned how to reject these intrusions and even turn them into humor. She’s in a position to recognize the harassment for what it is and protect herself. But, as she points out some young women might not be so critical of the harassment disguising itself as flattery. Which is why raising awareness of the fact that this kind of harassment is not okay — particularly through humorous means such as the collaborative Hollaback! website — are such awesome resources. Make sure all the people in your life who experience this kind of public harassment know there are ways to speak up and fight back.
I think in my ideal world, in which Dahlia Lithwick and Nina Totenberg would be on the Supreme Court and Jon Stewart would be President, I’m starting to think Jay Smooth would be Attorney General, or maybe Senate Majority Leader.
Does that prove he’s some hard-core racist that doesn’t care about Black people? No. But it does suggest that he’s such a hard-core purist libertarian that he cares more about this abstract set of principles than he cares about any actual people – that he’s more committed to these rigid abstractions than he is to protecting the basic rights of human beings in the real world.
Two videos for you this morning that attempt to teach young people just how narrow a road they must walk in order to survive into adulthood.
First, a health education film for 1950s college students. While it ostensibly targets both men and women, notice how much more time they spend panning the camera up and down the coeds’ bodies, and how clearly the female students are positioned as primarily objects of the male gaze (forget about your homework, girls!). It’s also clear that although the women are supposed to be sexually alluring they are not under any circumstances supposed to cross the line into sexual availability (slut!) or actual sexual activity.
As my friend Rachel put it: “CREEPIEST. DAD. EVAR.”
Enjoy. And then go wash your eyeballs with carbolic soap.
While the case before the court involves an anti-gay petition to repeal a same-sex “everything-but-marriage” law in the state of Washington, the issue before the court is not so much about homophobia, per se as it is about the right to anonymity in political speech: does someone who signs a petition for issue X have the right to keep that act private? In the Washington case, when advocates of the everything-but-marriage law requested to review the petitions in order to check for fraud, the petitioners claimed that the right to privacy protected them from having to make the lists public. They argue that privacy is necessary in order to protect petition signers from harassment by their opponents.
So here’s the thing. I realize that, in this country, we have a right to privacy when it comes to actual votes: I often talk openly about whom I am going to or did vote for, or where I stand on certain issues. But it is my right as a citizen not to be forced to show my hand if I choose not to. However, a petition is something different. I’ve signed a few petitions in my life: usually I’ve done so outside my hometown library, or via websites, or at the grocery store. I’m asked to include my name and address on the understanding that those who tally signatures have to determine — at least in the case of alleged fraud — that I am who I say I am. There’s no implied or expected right to privacy here. I’m putting my name on a form in broad daylight, right below the last person who signed the damn paper and right above the line where the next person will sign theirs. It seems really disingenuous to come up post facto with the argument that signers have a right to anonymity which they were never promised in the first place. You can’t sign a petition “X”.
Unless, of course, that’s your legal name.
What truly bothered me about the pro-privacy advocates in this story is their argument that acts of political speech need to be protected by anonymity so that people who speak up for a certain position can be shielded from having “uncomfortable conversations” with those who disagree with them.
“Uncomfortable conversations”?
Really?
We’re at a point where people who are against same-sex marriage want the right to defend their (in my opinion bigoted) point of view by protesting via a petition drive, but also want the right to remain anonymous so that they don’t have to have “uncomfortable conversations”?
Grow the fuck up already. Part of being a human being in this chaotic, messy, every-changing world of ours is, you know, sometimes interacting with people who hold different opinions from you. And possibly having conversation in which those different opinions come to light. Conversations that turn out to be awkward, stressful, painful, sometimes alienating.
Welcome to the world.
There’s tons of ways to deal with this diversity of opinion. Learn to be confident in your own opinion. Learn to be comfortable speaking up for yourself while also being a good listener. Find like-minded supporters. Possibly (god forbid!) re-evaluate your position in light of new interactions and learn something.
But if you’re going to sign a fucking petition asking voters to revoke the human rights of a certain proportion of the population, then I say you’d fucking well better be able to articulate your reasons. And be willing to do so in public. In the NPR piece, Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna defends disclosure laws on these grounds (though with less swearing).
McKenna replies that only one blogger said he wanted to encourage uncomfortable conversations. And he adds, “I don’t think that encouraging uncomfortable conversations amounts to the kind of harassment or potential intimidation that would warrant keeping these petitions out of public view,” he says.
“In fact, in a democracy, there are supposed to be conversations which are occurring about difficult or contentious political issues,” McKenna says — even if those conversations are uncomfortable.
Yes, it’s important that you be protected from stalking behavior, from verbal abuse over the telephone or from (I’m speculating scenarios here) people who come to your place of business and interrupt your work to abuse you verbally or threaten physical violence. But this sort of behavior is already illegal. What’s not illegal (thankfully!) is the right of person X to criticize (privately or publicly) person Z for an action or opinion of Z’s that X finds misguided, hateful, or otherwise wrongheaded.
There are obviously more or less effective ways of having that conversation. I’m personally a fan of ill doctrine’s approach.
What I am not a fan of is people who try to reinforce systems of oppression and exclusion through law and then argue they have a right to do so without taking flack for it, and without being held accountable. Once you start trying to force everyone around you to accept your version of morality, you lose your right to privacy on that particular issue. If you wanted to keep that opinion private, you should have kept it to yourself.
Today is the final day for filing tax returns* and apparently, some folks on the right have been getting upset that people such as me and my girlfriend (working four jobs we made a total gross income of just under $30,000 last year) pay little or no income tax in addition to payroll taxes (medicare, social security, state and local taxes, etc.). Nick Baumann @ Mother Jonesexplains.
I was mostly grateful that our tax returns enabled us to buy Hanna a pair of new work shoes without worrying about overdrafting the checking account, and maybe put a little money away in the savings account. But it turns out there are some people who are hopping mad that we have the unmitigated gall to be living below the poverty line.
Thankfully, we can count on Jon Stewart to highlight this craziness and make light of it. While simultaneously underscoring, of course, just how incredibly myopic, privileged, and, well, simply mean it is to scapegoat economically marginal folks for paying less tax.
Not to mention: WTF? Aren’t these people the ones who think there is too much tax already?II? Shouldn’t they be jumping with joy that over 40% of American households are in such dire straights economically that they’re in effect starving the government of funds? Pretty soon we’ll have smaller government by default. You can’t have your no-tax cake and eat it too, people!
*(in case you finished them back in February, like me, and had forgotten there was a deadline still to come)
I’m not sure what was more awesome about The Great Race (1965), the fact they thought Tony Curtis needed to spend the entire film in all white (including, in one scene, a white coat with a fur collar that would have done Bernadette proud) or the fact that Natalie Wood plays a thinly-veiled Nellie Bly “equal rights for women” character while dressed in some of the most outrageous costumes money could buy. Here, for your Friday viewing pleasure, is a six minute clip in which Maggie Dubois (Natalie Wood) “interviwing” The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis) in a luxuriously appointed tent.
Okay, okay, so it’s not like we think there are legions of fans out there waiting with baited breath for the forth installment of our 100 movie quotes endeavor (see parts one, two, and three for a refresher), but still: we apologize for the fact that we are delaying the post for another week. Hanna has been working industriously all week transcribing the terrible handwriting of ninteenth-century medical photographers and her wrist has become (as they would have said back then) overstrained. It needs bedrest and a cold compress. And a day or two away from typing — even fun typing.
So instead I bring you a few movie-related links that will hopefully brighten your weekend, and Hanna has volunteered to augment my ramblings with some deftly-chosen youtube clips (minimal typing required). So here we go.
If you’re looking for list-type things to read, wander on over to debontherocks @ Blogher, who put up a post this week of her nominations for “the Opposite Oscars,” where “we could call out the performances and films that aspired for greatness, but turned out to not even be worth the popcorn required to survive them.” While I am not particularly partisan in terms of the films she nominates (most of which I have not seen), I enjoyed this description of the ceremony:
Nominees could attend in their jeans or yoga pants, grab a boxed lunch from the folding table by the door, and wait expectantly to see who was dubbed worst. The loser could then tell off the people who led them to that bad performance, they could nurse their wounds, or just apologize. “I needed the money to pay a bad IRS debt/lift-tuck the twins after breastfeeding the real twins/buy back a digital video camera I inadvertently left in a South Beach hotel room,” they would say. And we might understand, or we might cluck and boo, but at least we’d have resolution.
debontherocks would probably appreciate (if she has not already read) what might just be the best movie review of the year, to date. Actually, I’m quite sure it’s the best movie review I’ve read several years running. Although I feel a bit diminished, as a human being, for writing that since it’s a total pan of a film that I haven’t even seen, the romantic comedy Valentine’s Day. Sady Doyle @ The Guardian writes:
The cumulative effect of Valentine’s Day is to make you feel that all human emotions are shameful. Have you ever been sad about a break-up? Had a crush on someone? Wanted your ex-lover back? Been happy to meet somebody promising? Wanted to have sex? You are terrible. You are feeling the same emotions portrayed in the movie Valentine’s Day. And these emotions, Valentine’s Day confirms, are cheap, and disgusting. For they make you like the characters in this movie.
I mean, wow. That’s quality panning.
If this is really the effect of Valentine’s Day then it deserves to be panned. Because, you know what? Human emotions aren’t shameful. And any movie that makes us feel they are is a disservice to the craft. In fact, I’m a firm believer in movies doing quite the opposite: giving us space in which to witness and experience human emotions (light, dark, and all the shades between) without embarrassment. For example, here’s some quality romance, brought to you by the team who were also responsible for that near-perfection of a film, Love Actually.
(Hanna says I am required to warn you that tissues will be needed to watch this scene.)
I will love John Hannah forever for this scene (well, and for his character in The Mummy, but this primarily since it was the first role I ever saw him in, and he made me cry).
Speaking of things that have made me cry recently (I didn’t realize this post was going to be so teary, but there we are — I promise to end with something more ebullient!), Terry Gross recently interviewed Colin Firth about his Oscar-nominated role in A Single Man.
This, like Valentine’s Day, is a film which I have neither seen nor heard very much about, but which after listening to said interview I fear I might never be able to watch. Not, however, because I fear it sucks, but because I fear it does not. In fact, I fear it is brilliant. It is the story of a professor who, in the opening scenes of the film, loses his lover in a car accident, and who struggles to go on living in the aftermath of that loss. Terry Gross plays, toward the beginning of the Fresh Air interview, the scene in which Firth’s character recieves word that his lover is dead. The audio alone was enough to make me tear up, sitting there at my desk at work.
Firth, in the interview, likens the story to Joan Didion’s memoir describing the loss of her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking, which I likewise know I would love and also know I may never have the strength to read. (For those of you who are tempted to think there’s some enobling purpose to suffering, go read Jonathan Romain’s recent commentary at the Guardian: “Let’s be very clear: there is no divine purpose in suffering whatsoever.”)
And because I can’t possibly leave you all on a note of such existential despair, here’s Colin the Sex God from the aforementioned Love Actually exploring the wilds of Milwaukee with a blackpack full of condoms and an openness to cross-cultural experiences.
Hanna reports there is an urban legend that Kris Marshall refused his paycheck for filming this scene on the grounds that it was just too much fun to count as actual work. I leave it to y’all to decide whether that’s true or not.
Have a good weekend. We’ll be back next Saturday with more movie fun (and possibly even some movie quotes!)
This week, in honor of the Olympics, I bring you the inimitable Eddie Izzard describing the (highly amenable) course of the Olympic games if everyone competed, well, stoned.
So it’s been one of those weeks where every day seems to run from about six am to midnight without a lot of time to stop and pause for breath. Let alonge movie quote blogging. So Hanna and (much more tangentially) I are taking a pass this weekend on the final installment of the movie quotes post.
If you are absolutely positively dying to read lists of things related to film and our commentary about them, then you can enjoy last years’ list of twenty-nine of our favorite romantic movies.
Meanwhile, we were sucked into watching the latter half of the opening ceremony of the Olympics last night and were completely won over by these guys (and gals)
Who played fiddles, had GREAT body art, and did step dancing in doc martens to boot
Enjoy the long weekend, sports (if you like that kind of thing) and movies (if you enjoy that). See you back here next Saturday for the concluding installment of “don’t ever link those two things again…”
the feminist librarian 