Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Where Are The Women?: SNL's Problem with Black Comediennes
I am not ashamed to admit that at this point in my life, I consider watching Scandal to be one of the highlights of my week. I had a lot of false stops and starts with the show initially: friends tried to convince me "this is a must-see show" or "you'll love it" but each time I tried, my commitment-phobia to the show re-emerged. For whatever reason earlier this spring (obviously, at the exact same time I was meant to be working on my dissertation), I got into it again and stuck with it. Stuck with it so much, in fact, that within three days I had seen every episode. Go figure.
Unlike many others, though,I do not watch Scandal for Olivia Pope. I watch it for Mellie (played by Bellamy Young) and her one liners. I watch it to see what creative, stomach-churning new plot twists producer Shonda Rhimes has created or overseen. The drama is all there, the show has the capacity to make you root for an adulterous couple, and of course, there is the ever present question "what the hell is wrong with Olivia Pope's father?" The show's a treat, if not one that is almost too complex at times for me to truly appreciate.
Kerry Washington's portrayal of Olivia Pope as a steadfast woman who's vulnerability is not wrapped up in the stereotypical trope of black women's victimization is refreshing and enticing. That's why I could hardly have been more disappointed in the way she was compelled to perform as the host of Saturday Night Live on November 2nd. Now, I have been a devotee of SNL for about 15 years and part of me believes I watch it either because I'm masochistic, because I'm nostalgic for earlier days of the show during "the era of the woman" (performers like Ana Gasteyer, Maya Rudolph, Cheri O'Teri, Amy Poehler, and Tina Fey were all on fire from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s), or for both reasons. In any event, I recognize that the show's writers and producers have a limited scope of blackness in American society and of how to involve black comedians in the framework of their sketches. They have had an even harder time incorporating black female comedians into their show.
In fact, in the shows thirty-eight year history, as The Huffington Post has pointed out, SNL has only ever had four black female cast members and Washington was just the 9th black woman ever to host the show. Of the four regular cast members, Danitra Vance and Yvonne Hudson each only performed for one season in the 1980s. Comedienne Ellen Cleghorne fared slightly better (1991-1995) and Maya Rudolph lasted even longer (2000-2007). Let's not also forget that they were four out of 137 cast members the show has ever had, a measly 3%. When asked by The Associated Press about this issue, Lorne Michaels, the show's producer, simply replied "You don't do anyone a favor if they're not ready...It's not like it's not a priority for us...It will happen. I'm sure it will happen."
This lack of concern is nothing new, nor am I shocked by it. When Washington got up on stage and was asked to participate in an insufferable attempt to make fun of the controversy surrounding this topic during the show's opening sketch, it became clear that this episode was not gonna go very far. Washington had to help SNL writers parody themselves by switching from Michelle Obama, to Oprah, to an offstage portrayal of Beyonce while a message streamed about how they don't have a black female cast member who can play majorly popular figures in the American public and about how the two black male characters of the cast have enough seniority now to refuse to dress in drag.
The show ran a series of sketches in which Washington played a "hoodrat" assistant, a jealous girlfriend searching her boyfriend's phone for texts from another woman, a righteous sociology professor who blindly supported Barack Obama, a clown, and a Ugandan beauty pageant who shouted "I keep this dress." Yes, she was versatile. Yes, she could adapt to any character thrown her way. That's a sign of a talented actress and to anyone who's ever seen the woman, it's clear that she has honed her skills and her craft. The reason this episode concerns me is because it demonstrates how much old values about minorities' ability not just as performers but as human beings still remain static.
As evidenced by Washington's performance and in every other episode of SNL, black actors or actresses in recent years have only ever appear on screen to reference the fact that they are black. As if the only thing black people ever do is speak in 1970s blaxploitation jive. As if they have no other concerns. Whether Kenan Thompson is playing Steve Harvey, LL Cool J, Cee-Lo, or Whoopi Goldberg (he has since given this character up), the tone and cadence of his voice remains the same. Even if he is playing a Joe-everybody, a regular guy, his same stereotypical persona seeps into the sketch with the punchline of his jokes primarily being "isn't it so funny that I'm black?"
I wish Washington could've escaped a show that treats black actors (I would say black actresses, but they don't have any at the moment) this way in 2013. As Rhimes has shown, there is room on American TV to have black characters who are rich and complex and funny and vulnerable. She has had two major hit shows, Grey's Anatomy and Scandal, which have managed to include black characters who don't lapse grotesquely into brutal stereotypes about their inability to see anything in the world other than their own color and to be overtly preoccupied by it at every last turn.Why is this issue still a roadblock for many producers in the entertainment industry? Why don't they realize that they are so behind in their view of the world that they may soon become obsolete and that more Shonda Rhimes's will be cropping up in the near future? What's up with that?
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Tough Love on the Subject: A Call for a Different Perspective on Black America
After watching CNN presenter Don Lemon's points about the state of the black family and of black masculinity in America, I had a strong reaction to his summary of the problems that many African Americans face. Lemon was bold enough (and some may say stupid enough) to align himself with comments made by Bill O'Reilly earlier in the week. O'Reilly is possibly the epitome of reptilian, conservative, and backwards-leaning principles. This does not mean, however, that his voice, in a democratic society like the U.S., ought to automatically be ignored (it should, in my opinion, be heavily picked apart and criticized but not devalued). In this clip, lemon outlines his stance and his particular points of agreement with O'Reilly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCASEL9mUxM Having had the experience of being called an Uncle Tom while in high school, I'm well aware of the pitfalls of a middle class black woman calling attention to the troubles of the black community at large and the negative reaction it might engender. I won't make my arguments, though, as a means of criticism for criticisms sake. Instead, I'll charge others to think about the ramifications of accepting the suffering of blacks as a marker of black life in a white society that isn't built for them or to support them.
Many people are aware of the debate about the issue of structural problems vs agency as a running theme in African-American history. The idea behind this debate is that structural problems such as limited education and voting rights for black are written into the racist policies of the United States whereas questions of agency charge black individuals to take responsibility for their own predicaments in spite of whatever world order has been pre-established for them by white society. Lemon makes points, for example, about sagging pants as a problem of low self respect (some critics might say he's bought into a notion of respectability fashioned by white, European standards of proper dress) and of the use of the N-word as a tool to "re-claim" the word. As Lemon points out, though, when he mentions a mother admonishing her son and calling him a "nigger" after the child got upset, the question of whether such a hateful term really gives black people power back is often dubious when looked at in a pragmatic sense. Blacks have, for many centuries, focused on education as a tool for progress and have done so particularly in the forcible practice in the past illiteracy amongst slaves. Somehow, however, as Lemon points out, some black people have, in the post-Civil Rights era, turned the process of education and seeking it out into a measure to doubt one's authentic blackness. By buying into the education system, which most of us can agree is largely flawed in and of itself (a separate question altogether, it should be noted), blacks who are ambitious as scholars encounter, at one point or another, criticism both from within and from outside of the black community that suggests that studious individuals are somehow less than black. They are sell outs....oreos...nerds....not authentic. I don't say this an observer: I say it as a person who's directly experienced this practice both in high school and college.
The reason I'm thinking about these topics is not to simply say that black people need to stop blaming outside society and larger racist influences for the problems that many (but not all) African Americans face. I could count hundreds if not thousands of ways that white society and black internalized self hatred have shifted and halted black progress in American society. I don't doubt for one second, for example, that the results of the Trayvon Martin case weren't heavily skewed by Florida's horrendous racial past and present. I don't doubt that the topic I've studied for 3 years, the prison industrial complex, isn't affected by America's ugly racial history. What I do want to ask, however, is how black Americans want to forge a new path for themselves? Yes, Billy Cosby made complicated and problematic claims about blacks being more concerned with their Air Jordans than with their education a couple years ago. And yes, Don Lemon is simplifying the issue of littering in black vs white neighborhoods in NYC as a signal of low self worth in the black community. But when we will we accept the fact that white America, as some people have pointed out, has no regard for our advancement? It's ok and reasonable and right to blame structural forces for the troubles we face and I do this daily. But unless black Americans rally around means to actually change their predicament (whether through education, parenting styles, etc)., what is the point of endless criticism of those who want to direct the challenge for a better future for the black state in America towards black people themselves?
These discussions, while rich and deep, don't change the way African Americans experience every day life.While we are victimized, it doesn't give us strength to wallow in that reality. It's an important fact to acknowledge, yes, and to grieve it. I applaud people, though, who, though it may not seem like it, are optimistic enough to hope that 100 years down the line, blacks in America are not simply limited to a discussion of how America has always failed them and wasn't intended for them but who instead pray that through means of self advocacy (again, no white Congressman can do this for us), black people can heal some of the wounds that have too often defined us. It's tiresome to look purely at the causes for some of the problems in the black community. It is more useful and helpful, at this stage, to call for practical and realistic solutions. Call me privileged, call me stuck up, call me naive: at the end of the day, I don't want African Americans to be purely defined as a culture who haven't had the ability to establish a better predicament for themselves in spite of the obstacles that they have faced. We have too much depth, creativity, strength,and power (if and when we choose to apply it) to be reduced to simplistic charges that we are nothing more than a suffering group of people. Change has been accomplished before, it can happen again, and I believe it's time to stop focusing on non-black interruption of progress and to instead turn our discussion to a question of how we can make our world more bearable on our own terms. --
Many people are aware of the debate about the issue of structural problems vs agency as a running theme in African-American history. The idea behind this debate is that structural problems such as limited education and voting rights for black are written into the racist policies of the United States whereas questions of agency charge black individuals to take responsibility for their own predicaments in spite of whatever world order has been pre-established for them by white society. Lemon makes points, for example, about sagging pants as a problem of low self respect (some critics might say he's bought into a notion of respectability fashioned by white, European standards of proper dress) and of the use of the N-word as a tool to "re-claim" the word. As Lemon points out, though, when he mentions a mother admonishing her son and calling him a "nigger" after the child got upset, the question of whether such a hateful term really gives black people power back is often dubious when looked at in a pragmatic sense. Blacks have, for many centuries, focused on education as a tool for progress and have done so particularly in the forcible practice in the past illiteracy amongst slaves. Somehow, however, as Lemon points out, some black people have, in the post-Civil Rights era, turned the process of education and seeking it out into a measure to doubt one's authentic blackness. By buying into the education system, which most of us can agree is largely flawed in and of itself (a separate question altogether, it should be noted), blacks who are ambitious as scholars encounter, at one point or another, criticism both from within and from outside of the black community that suggests that studious individuals are somehow less than black. They are sell outs....oreos...nerds....not authentic. I don't say this an observer: I say it as a person who's directly experienced this practice both in high school and college.
The reason I'm thinking about these topics is not to simply say that black people need to stop blaming outside society and larger racist influences for the problems that many (but not all) African Americans face. I could count hundreds if not thousands of ways that white society and black internalized self hatred have shifted and halted black progress in American society. I don't doubt for one second, for example, that the results of the Trayvon Martin case weren't heavily skewed by Florida's horrendous racial past and present. I don't doubt that the topic I've studied for 3 years, the prison industrial complex, isn't affected by America's ugly racial history. What I do want to ask, however, is how black Americans want to forge a new path for themselves? Yes, Billy Cosby made complicated and problematic claims about blacks being more concerned with their Air Jordans than with their education a couple years ago. And yes, Don Lemon is simplifying the issue of littering in black vs white neighborhoods in NYC as a signal of low self worth in the black community. But when we will we accept the fact that white America, as some people have pointed out, has no regard for our advancement? It's ok and reasonable and right to blame structural forces for the troubles we face and I do this daily. But unless black Americans rally around means to actually change their predicament (whether through education, parenting styles, etc)., what is the point of endless criticism of those who want to direct the challenge for a better future for the black state in America towards black people themselves?
These discussions, while rich and deep, don't change the way African Americans experience every day life.While we are victimized, it doesn't give us strength to wallow in that reality. It's an important fact to acknowledge, yes, and to grieve it. I applaud people, though, who, though it may not seem like it, are optimistic enough to hope that 100 years down the line, blacks in America are not simply limited to a discussion of how America has always failed them and wasn't intended for them but who instead pray that through means of self advocacy (again, no white Congressman can do this for us), black people can heal some of the wounds that have too often defined us. It's tiresome to look purely at the causes for some of the problems in the black community. It is more useful and helpful, at this stage, to call for practical and realistic solutions. Call me privileged, call me stuck up, call me naive: at the end of the day, I don't want African Americans to be purely defined as a culture who haven't had the ability to establish a better predicament for themselves in spite of the obstacles that they have faced. We have too much depth, creativity, strength,and power (if and when we choose to apply it) to be reduced to simplistic charges that we are nothing more than a suffering group of people. Change has been accomplished before, it can happen again, and I believe it's time to stop focusing on non-black interruption of progress and to instead turn our discussion to a question of how we can make our world more bearable on our own terms. --
Sunday, July 24, 2011
1983-2011
My dad was the first one to hand me an article about her in the spring of 2007. I kept hearing her on the radio. “They tried to make me go to rehab and I said ‘No! No! No!’” What a catchy song, I thought. She looked like nothing I’d ever seen: sporting a raven beehive, 8 mile long winged eyeliner and the striking face of a young woman who’d somehow already seen to much. She seemed mythical. “Who sings like that?” I wondered. My adoration of Amy Winehouse has spanned the past four years in a major way. Her albums “Frank” and"Back to Black" got me through my summer in South Africa. My rollercoaster of a senior year in high school. My loneliest of nights throughout college and my happiest of times while I lived in the UK. She was my all-purpose safeguard wherever I found myself and in whatever situation I encountered. When my friend texted me the simple but devastating phrase “Amy Winehouse is dead” my brain went blank.
It’s no surprise to anyone who’s ever heard of the woman or at least knows she popularized a song called “Rehab” that Amy had been troubled for years. She faced every issue one could imagine: not only was she addicted to hard drugs and alcohol but she suffered through eating disorders, self mutilation, and bipolar disorder. While many dismissed her as a wreck, I never could. I’ll admit that sometimes I wondered if her distress was all part of a tortured artist act that she’d made herself believe was a necessary part of being a famous singer. But whether she tricked herself into it or would’ve been as self-destructive had she stuck to small jazz shows in London, her work itself was incredible because it hit so deeply.
When she said “I brought you downstairs with a Marlboro Red” or “Yea, you know I’m no good” it made sense. Or “you should be stronger than me” and that “I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself” I got it. In spite of not having gone through many of the things she wrote about or having felt exactly as she did, her voice and her lyrics managed to transcend that disconnect between her experiences and my own. How could a person’s voice move you to hear them out in spite of not having been where she has?
Amy’s now a member of the “27 Club” of infamous and amazing artists like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Kurt Kobain who all died at this young age. As soon as I learned she died, I thought about her age and I thought back to my fear from a few years ago that she would die at this age either accidentally or deliberately (as I suspect in this case) because it’s a perverse part of being known as one of the greats who are gone too soon.
Aside from the great loss I feel for her as a human being and as an artist, I feel most troubled by the fact that this is all the result of addiction and mental illness. Her death, in some ways, serves as a reminder of the power of substance abuse and the constant struggle that Winehouse and millions of others face. What is it about brain chemistry, life circumstances, and cultural attitudes that destroy lives and leads people to early graves? Is there anything that could’ve been done to help this bright, talented and innovative young woman before it came to her being carried away in a body bag a few years prior to her 30th birthday?
It always seems to me that part of the issue surrounding the link between mental illness and addiction is that aside from the genetic predispositions people have towards these conditions, there is little social recognition of the seriousness of these topics. It’s obvious that there’s got to be a societal shift in the way we understand these issues. That instead of throwing the word “crazy” around regularly (which I’m guilty of) and seeing being unstable as laughable, we learn to alter our language and educate ourselves more generally about what these diseases mean. They don’t mean that Amy (or anyone in a remotely similar situation) is weak. It’s not a question of willpower alone or toughening up. No one wants to be dependent on a substance to get him/her through the day. We need to realize that shaming someone doesn't fix the problem, either.Though I don’t know enough about non-Western societies’ attitudes towards addiction, it does seem to be an unfortunate international trend to assume that this disease is a moral failure.
If Amy’s death can illustrate anything, it’s that substance abuse is a devastating thing that can destroy those with promise at any time. I don’t believe for one second that people shouldn’t learn to take accountability for their actions and that they shouldn’t seek help from others when they need it (as she often tried to through her multiple rehab stints), but it’s clear that one way to avoid losing people is to open up a social dialogue about where addiction comes from and about how to respect the challenges that people like Amy face. If any of us looked around, we wouldn’t have to look for very long to find someone close to us who’s hooked on something. It could even be you. Why haven’t we found a way to be more socially responsible about these issues? What’s up with that? R.I.P Amy Winehouse 1983-2011.
It’s no surprise to anyone who’s ever heard of the woman or at least knows she popularized a song called “Rehab” that Amy had been troubled for years. She faced every issue one could imagine: not only was she addicted to hard drugs and alcohol but she suffered through eating disorders, self mutilation, and bipolar disorder. While many dismissed her as a wreck, I never could. I’ll admit that sometimes I wondered if her distress was all part of a tortured artist act that she’d made herself believe was a necessary part of being a famous singer. But whether she tricked herself into it or would’ve been as self-destructive had she stuck to small jazz shows in London, her work itself was incredible because it hit so deeply.
When she said “I brought you downstairs with a Marlboro Red” or “Yea, you know I’m no good” it made sense. Or “you should be stronger than me” and that “I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself” I got it. In spite of not having gone through many of the things she wrote about or having felt exactly as she did, her voice and her lyrics managed to transcend that disconnect between her experiences and my own. How could a person’s voice move you to hear them out in spite of not having been where she has?
Amy’s now a member of the “27 Club” of infamous and amazing artists like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Kurt Kobain who all died at this young age. As soon as I learned she died, I thought about her age and I thought back to my fear from a few years ago that she would die at this age either accidentally or deliberately (as I suspect in this case) because it’s a perverse part of being known as one of the greats who are gone too soon.
Aside from the great loss I feel for her as a human being and as an artist, I feel most troubled by the fact that this is all the result of addiction and mental illness. Her death, in some ways, serves as a reminder of the power of substance abuse and the constant struggle that Winehouse and millions of others face. What is it about brain chemistry, life circumstances, and cultural attitudes that destroy lives and leads people to early graves? Is there anything that could’ve been done to help this bright, talented and innovative young woman before it came to her being carried away in a body bag a few years prior to her 30th birthday?
It always seems to me that part of the issue surrounding the link between mental illness and addiction is that aside from the genetic predispositions people have towards these conditions, there is little social recognition of the seriousness of these topics. It’s obvious that there’s got to be a societal shift in the way we understand these issues. That instead of throwing the word “crazy” around regularly (which I’m guilty of) and seeing being unstable as laughable, we learn to alter our language and educate ourselves more generally about what these diseases mean. They don’t mean that Amy (or anyone in a remotely similar situation) is weak. It’s not a question of willpower alone or toughening up. No one wants to be dependent on a substance to get him/her through the day. We need to realize that shaming someone doesn't fix the problem, either.Though I don’t know enough about non-Western societies’ attitudes towards addiction, it does seem to be an unfortunate international trend to assume that this disease is a moral failure.
If Amy’s death can illustrate anything, it’s that substance abuse is a devastating thing that can destroy those with promise at any time. I don’t believe for one second that people shouldn’t learn to take accountability for their actions and that they shouldn’t seek help from others when they need it (as she often tried to through her multiple rehab stints), but it’s clear that one way to avoid losing people is to open up a social dialogue about where addiction comes from and about how to respect the challenges that people like Amy face. If any of us looked around, we wouldn’t have to look for very long to find someone close to us who’s hooked on something. It could even be you. Why haven’t we found a way to be more socially responsible about these issues? What’s up with that? R.I.P Amy Winehouse 1983-2011.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Justice or Skill?: A Perspective on the Casey Anthony Murder Trial
When I was little, I always had a hard time distinguishing between someone being found “not guilty” and being “innocent.” “Guilty” was clear to me: it meant a bunch of random people on a jury all came to the same conclusion that an accused person ought to be punished for his or her crime. The ideas of crime, court, lawyers, and the law itself have always swirled in my head. It might have something to do with the fact that both my parents are lawyers or that I grew up in a household with the nightly news always blaring. While my parents sat on our old gray-checkered couch, I’d do my little girl thing and bounce about on the carpet. But clearly the message that criminals existed infiltrated my mind and it was at this early age that I began to think, in the way a six year could, about the American legal system.
In fact, as I look back on it, one of the most frightening but necessary realizations I came to in second grade was that, unlike I had previously gathered, there wasn’t a 50/50 split between those who died of old age and those who died by gunfire. It took me a long time to realize that gun violence, while a reality, wasn’t a part of daily life for most people in the U.S. With all these things in mind, I can’t help but think now about what major cases mean for American society and for all those who watch them progress. How do we live in a world where a woman can murder her child, a jury can all suspect as much, and she ultimately escape conviction and be found “not guilty”?
I remember hearing about the disappearance of a little girl named Caylee Anthony a couple years back in 2008. At the time, I was wrapped up in college decisions, leaving a school I’d attended for 13 years, and generally just accepted this missing child as another young girl who’d met an unfair ending. Attention is always paid to the deaths of little girls of particular backgrounds (read: non-minority) and the hyper focus on her disappearance seemed no different. It wasn’t until this spring, though, that I began to pay any serious attention to the case. Her mother, Casey Anthony, seemed by all accounts to be at least partially responsible for her child’s death. It’s all too disturbingly perfect: her 2 year old goes missing and she doesn’t bother to call the police for 31 days (which, by the way, is a month for those who might be counting), chooses to go out and party instead (because what better way to help find your kid than downing a couple cranberry and vodkas), pretends the kid is with a nanny named Zanny (c’mon, please get more creative next time, Casey), there’s evidence of searches for ways to suffocate a human being and the child’s body is found with duct tape across her mouth, and the smell of a decomposing body in the trunk of a car is explained away as a bag of rotting garbage. If all of these pieces together don’t make a strong case for this woman’s guilt, what would?
After hearing that she was found not guilty, two things crossed my mind. The first was horror. The second thing I thought of, though, was my experience as a juror last summer. I couldn’t get out of it. I’d been summoned twice since I graduated high school and unlike everyone in the jury lottery who couldn’t serve because they had to stay home to feed their turtles, were 99 years old or couldn’t make it mostly due to disinterest, I had no real excuse. I was gainfully unemployed for the summer and it seemed like a good opportunity to see what court was like. Without breaking my oath to protect the details of the case, I can share that I had to judge whether the accused was guilty or not guilty of second-degree murder. In my head and according to the evidence presented both by the defense and the prosecution, I believed the man was not guilty. But more than that I trusted that he was indeed innocent, that, outside of the limitations of legal framework and binary guilty vs not guilty, he had not actually committed a murder. My peers didn’t feel the same way, though. We ultimately found him not guilty but hardly any of them believed he was innocent and had not killed a man. Here’s the distinction: there are two legal categories that purely access guilt or not guilt. The law requires jurors like the ones on the Anthony case to assume that the only thing that matters is whether or not guilt can be established by the lawyers in court. There’s no room to convict someone or exonerate them based on what they’ve actually done. Instead, jurors must muse about whether the prosecution proved its case.
This irks me because it means that the legal system isn’t designed to handle the truth but rather what representatives (i.e. the defense and prosecution) manage to present to the jury. A man could murder 15 people but if his defense lawyer can wring his or her hands to come up with ways to diminish the strength of the prosecutor’s presentation, the accused can walk free. Doesn’t matter that he’s torn however many communities and lives apart by his violence. The law isn’t concerned with that. It’s about how clever a lawyer is at evading or shaping or even misrepresenting what’s occurred. None of what I’m saying is new or groundbreaking but it’s important to ask if we can call what we have a justice system. If Casey Anthony can, at the very best, be apathetic to the loss of her daughter (as evidenced by her failure to report the kid missing for an entire month) and at the very worst, be responsible for her death and ultimately walk free after serving a few short years jail time, why do we bother with pretending that this is a fair allotment of justice? Why can’t we inquire about innocence and guilt rather than dolling out prison time according to how skillful a lawyer might be at casting or re-casting the accused's role in a crime? Why don’t we have enough room for truth in the American legal system? What’s up with that?
In fact, as I look back on it, one of the most frightening but necessary realizations I came to in second grade was that, unlike I had previously gathered, there wasn’t a 50/50 split between those who died of old age and those who died by gunfire. It took me a long time to realize that gun violence, while a reality, wasn’t a part of daily life for most people in the U.S. With all these things in mind, I can’t help but think now about what major cases mean for American society and for all those who watch them progress. How do we live in a world where a woman can murder her child, a jury can all suspect as much, and she ultimately escape conviction and be found “not guilty”?
I remember hearing about the disappearance of a little girl named Caylee Anthony a couple years back in 2008. At the time, I was wrapped up in college decisions, leaving a school I’d attended for 13 years, and generally just accepted this missing child as another young girl who’d met an unfair ending. Attention is always paid to the deaths of little girls of particular backgrounds (read: non-minority) and the hyper focus on her disappearance seemed no different. It wasn’t until this spring, though, that I began to pay any serious attention to the case. Her mother, Casey Anthony, seemed by all accounts to be at least partially responsible for her child’s death. It’s all too disturbingly perfect: her 2 year old goes missing and she doesn’t bother to call the police for 31 days (which, by the way, is a month for those who might be counting), chooses to go out and party instead (because what better way to help find your kid than downing a couple cranberry and vodkas), pretends the kid is with a nanny named Zanny (c’mon, please get more creative next time, Casey), there’s evidence of searches for ways to suffocate a human being and the child’s body is found with duct tape across her mouth, and the smell of a decomposing body in the trunk of a car is explained away as a bag of rotting garbage. If all of these pieces together don’t make a strong case for this woman’s guilt, what would?
After hearing that she was found not guilty, two things crossed my mind. The first was horror. The second thing I thought of, though, was my experience as a juror last summer. I couldn’t get out of it. I’d been summoned twice since I graduated high school and unlike everyone in the jury lottery who couldn’t serve because they had to stay home to feed their turtles, were 99 years old or couldn’t make it mostly due to disinterest, I had no real excuse. I was gainfully unemployed for the summer and it seemed like a good opportunity to see what court was like. Without breaking my oath to protect the details of the case, I can share that I had to judge whether the accused was guilty or not guilty of second-degree murder. In my head and according to the evidence presented both by the defense and the prosecution, I believed the man was not guilty. But more than that I trusted that he was indeed innocent, that, outside of the limitations of legal framework and binary guilty vs not guilty, he had not actually committed a murder. My peers didn’t feel the same way, though. We ultimately found him not guilty but hardly any of them believed he was innocent and had not killed a man. Here’s the distinction: there are two legal categories that purely access guilt or not guilt. The law requires jurors like the ones on the Anthony case to assume that the only thing that matters is whether or not guilt can be established by the lawyers in court. There’s no room to convict someone or exonerate them based on what they’ve actually done. Instead, jurors must muse about whether the prosecution proved its case.
This irks me because it means that the legal system isn’t designed to handle the truth but rather what representatives (i.e. the defense and prosecution) manage to present to the jury. A man could murder 15 people but if his defense lawyer can wring his or her hands to come up with ways to diminish the strength of the prosecutor’s presentation, the accused can walk free. Doesn’t matter that he’s torn however many communities and lives apart by his violence. The law isn’t concerned with that. It’s about how clever a lawyer is at evading or shaping or even misrepresenting what’s occurred. None of what I’m saying is new or groundbreaking but it’s important to ask if we can call what we have a justice system. If Casey Anthony can, at the very best, be apathetic to the loss of her daughter (as evidenced by her failure to report the kid missing for an entire month) and at the very worst, be responsible for her death and ultimately walk free after serving a few short years jail time, why do we bother with pretending that this is a fair allotment of justice? Why can’t we inquire about innocence and guilt rather than dolling out prison time according to how skillful a lawyer might be at casting or re-casting the accused's role in a crime? Why don’t we have enough room for truth in the American legal system? What’s up with that?
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better
My mother first noticed something was up when I was five. In fact, she knew she had a miniature perfectionist on her hands within the first few days of my kindergarten class. Apparently, we were all meant to draw a picture of a pig and I took the task a little too seriously. As I drew my pig I wasn’t content with my own depiction. What she observed in her little parents’ circle was that upon seeing others’ renderings of pigs, I slowly slid mine under a big pile of papers and began a new one to catch up to my tiny peers. Theirs looked like Cezanne's and mine like Keith Haring's. Within the short five-year period of my life, I had already demonstrated how seriously I took competition. It meant taking cues from others (no matter how small those cues might have been) to learn their understanding of a task so that I could come up with a way both to know their interpretations and to take them a step further.
This attitude and world perspective has led me to many interesting situations in my life, ones which I am both immensely grateful for and ones which I lament everyday. Perfectionism, from the time I was a wee one up until now, has defined a great deal of my life. It compelled me to pursue my academics strongly at Trinity, it pointed me towards Harvard and has landed me ultimately where I am now, studying abroad at Oxford University for the spring semester of my junior year.
The most interesting thing to me about perfectionism, though, is that although the goal is to attain statuses or situations that palliate the human fear of incompetency, they actually breed insecurity with the false suggestion that once you reach a certain goal, you'll feel completely satisfied.
As I wrapped up my final essays at the end of last semester, I decided, both because of peer pressure and out of sheer curiosity that I would go see the movie “Black Swan,” which dealt with these very issues. Disclaimer: I hate thriller movies and I rarely pay for the experience of being made to feel uncomfortable. I get enough of that for free having lived in New York for roughly two decades and having experienced Harvard life since the fall of 2008. I went, though, with the anticipation that this ”visual masterpiece” (as it had been described) would turn me on to a whole new worldview about the sins of perfectionism. Not so.
I can’t quite tell if I hated “Black Swan” because it was too extremist in its portrayal of a very real, common issue that many of my peers grapple with or because it hit too close to home. I do know for sure that within the first 7 minutes, I wanted to escape the theater. It’s always a really dumb idea, though, to sit in the middle of the row in a theater because you most definitely cannot get out and you will have to get your 11 dollar’s worth whether you like it or not.
The thing that got me about that movie was the problematic quality of a lot of American movies: extremism. Rather than tell the story of a repressed young woman who centers her life around dance, it included insanity and excessive personal repression as a means to convey the fact that the main character struggled emotionally. Must a woman live with her mother into her middle 20’s, sleep with full array of Mattel’s stuffed animal collection, speak with the quiet voice of a seven-year-old, self-injure, endure schizophrenia, have suppressed sexual desires for both men and women, and starve herself before the American public can recognize that she’s a perfectionist?
Sitting through those two hours, it felt like the Hollywood industry was insulting the American audience’s intelligence by suggesting that the only way they could “get” the issue of perfectionism is by constantly reminding us just how infantilized, debilitated, and repressed the main character is. Unfortunately, it’s much easier to be a self-destructive perfectionist than people might think and it doesn’t take that many personal/emotional issues to set someone over the edge…as frightening as that might sound.
The thing I’ve found over the past few days of being in England on my study abroad program is that people all over the world regard American media, including movies such as “Black Swan,” as incredibly over the top. The English people giving our orientation meetings repeatedly commented on how loud Americans are and on how they always insisted on making their presence known. It seems like, as a nation, we haven’t figured out how to narrate stories, however serious or inane they might be, in a way that gets to the heart the matters involved without sensationalizing the problems involved.
The film industry seems to suggest in “Black Swan,” for example, that one of the only ways for women to feel repressed is by restricting what they eat. It's true that thousands and thousands of women feel this way but it only taps into one aspect of many that accounts for the way women encounter oppression. It’s more exciting to focus on the extreme demureness and frailty of a thin body in order to get across point that Natalie Portman feels like a weak woman than to grapple with the fact that modern women are constantly torn between performing the standard traditional ideals of passivity and the modern perspective that women “can do anything men can do.”
We need constant visual and social cues (e.g. her inclusion of dolls in her life past the age of 10) to indicate when someone’s feeling oppressed or treated subserviently. Sadly, there’s more to the picture of the damaging effects of perfectionism than we’re comfortable tackling in a two-hour movie screening. Instead, we pretend that the only people who deal with these identity crises are starved women who suppress their sexuality and who hide behind anorexia and their mommies to protect them. Again, not so.
I’m not sure if it’s my short time in a new environment or my pent up frustration with American media culture, but I’m growing increasingly tired of the way United States entertainment denies the complexity of American women and men’s issues by pretending that it’s super rare to face the inherent problems of perfectionism, suffering, anxiety or depression by portraying characters with these problems as social pariahs.
Why do we pretend that these stories of pain are purely for consumption and entertainment value when we know for a fact that they are not fanciful, rare issues but commonplace factors in many peoples' lives? What is it about the nature of perfectionism in American culture that incites our media to embellish its qualities and our societal members to feel ashamed of taking part in its results? And furthermore, what makes us hungry to hear more and more tales about perfectionism, regardless of what end of this workaholic spectrum we fall under? What’s up with that?
This attitude and world perspective has led me to many interesting situations in my life, ones which I am both immensely grateful for and ones which I lament everyday. Perfectionism, from the time I was a wee one up until now, has defined a great deal of my life. It compelled me to pursue my academics strongly at Trinity, it pointed me towards Harvard and has landed me ultimately where I am now, studying abroad at Oxford University for the spring semester of my junior year.
The most interesting thing to me about perfectionism, though, is that although the goal is to attain statuses or situations that palliate the human fear of incompetency, they actually breed insecurity with the false suggestion that once you reach a certain goal, you'll feel completely satisfied.
As I wrapped up my final essays at the end of last semester, I decided, both because of peer pressure and out of sheer curiosity that I would go see the movie “Black Swan,” which dealt with these very issues. Disclaimer: I hate thriller movies and I rarely pay for the experience of being made to feel uncomfortable. I get enough of that for free having lived in New York for roughly two decades and having experienced Harvard life since the fall of 2008. I went, though, with the anticipation that this ”visual masterpiece” (as it had been described) would turn me on to a whole new worldview about the sins of perfectionism. Not so.
I can’t quite tell if I hated “Black Swan” because it was too extremist in its portrayal of a very real, common issue that many of my peers grapple with or because it hit too close to home. I do know for sure that within the first 7 minutes, I wanted to escape the theater. It’s always a really dumb idea, though, to sit in the middle of the row in a theater because you most definitely cannot get out and you will have to get your 11 dollar’s worth whether you like it or not.
The thing that got me about that movie was the problematic quality of a lot of American movies: extremism. Rather than tell the story of a repressed young woman who centers her life around dance, it included insanity and excessive personal repression as a means to convey the fact that the main character struggled emotionally. Must a woman live with her mother into her middle 20’s, sleep with full array of Mattel’s stuffed animal collection, speak with the quiet voice of a seven-year-old, self-injure, endure schizophrenia, have suppressed sexual desires for both men and women, and starve herself before the American public can recognize that she’s a perfectionist?
Sitting through those two hours, it felt like the Hollywood industry was insulting the American audience’s intelligence by suggesting that the only way they could “get” the issue of perfectionism is by constantly reminding us just how infantilized, debilitated, and repressed the main character is. Unfortunately, it’s much easier to be a self-destructive perfectionist than people might think and it doesn’t take that many personal/emotional issues to set someone over the edge…as frightening as that might sound.
The thing I’ve found over the past few days of being in England on my study abroad program is that people all over the world regard American media, including movies such as “Black Swan,” as incredibly over the top. The English people giving our orientation meetings repeatedly commented on how loud Americans are and on how they always insisted on making their presence known. It seems like, as a nation, we haven’t figured out how to narrate stories, however serious or inane they might be, in a way that gets to the heart the matters involved without sensationalizing the problems involved.
The film industry seems to suggest in “Black Swan,” for example, that one of the only ways for women to feel repressed is by restricting what they eat. It's true that thousands and thousands of women feel this way but it only taps into one aspect of many that accounts for the way women encounter oppression. It’s more exciting to focus on the extreme demureness and frailty of a thin body in order to get across point that Natalie Portman feels like a weak woman than to grapple with the fact that modern women are constantly torn between performing the standard traditional ideals of passivity and the modern perspective that women “can do anything men can do.”
We need constant visual and social cues (e.g. her inclusion of dolls in her life past the age of 10) to indicate when someone’s feeling oppressed or treated subserviently. Sadly, there’s more to the picture of the damaging effects of perfectionism than we’re comfortable tackling in a two-hour movie screening. Instead, we pretend that the only people who deal with these identity crises are starved women who suppress their sexuality and who hide behind anorexia and their mommies to protect them. Again, not so.
I’m not sure if it’s my short time in a new environment or my pent up frustration with American media culture, but I’m growing increasingly tired of the way United States entertainment denies the complexity of American women and men’s issues by pretending that it’s super rare to face the inherent problems of perfectionism, suffering, anxiety or depression by portraying characters with these problems as social pariahs.
Why do we pretend that these stories of pain are purely for consumption and entertainment value when we know for a fact that they are not fanciful, rare issues but commonplace factors in many peoples' lives? What is it about the nature of perfectionism in American culture that incites our media to embellish its qualities and our societal members to feel ashamed of taking part in its results? And furthermore, what makes us hungry to hear more and more tales about perfectionism, regardless of what end of this workaholic spectrum we fall under? What’s up with that?
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Big Girl Love? : Immobility in Adele's Music Videos
A couple summers ago, I was one of the most wretched humans this world has ever seen. I wasted what could have been a great summer by taking out my anxieties about my upcoming my college career on my family. At that time, very few things soothed me. One of those things, though, was music by a singer named Adele, a young British songstress who has risen to stardom internationally over the past few years. “Crazy for You” and “Best for Last” were the songs that got me through Summer 2008. Now, two years later, I continue to adore her music but I’ve always wondered one thing about Adele: why does she sit in almost all of her music videos?
In the videos for “Chasing Pavements,” “Make You Feel My Love,” “Rolling in the Deep,” “Cold Shoulder,” and “Hometown Glory,” Adele is seated in a chair while a story (acted out by other people) unfolds around her. Her music videos all express a type of confinement that seems unnatural given the types of songs she writes. She’s only 22 and she happens to be perfectly able of walking and moving. While not everyone her age enjoys that privilege, she does. It makes little sense for her to sit, then, as if she cannot use both her voice and her body to convey her messages like most other singers do nowadays.
Her songs are definitely not dance songs and I don’t expect Britney’s “I’m a Slave 4 U” moves to pop up on the screen when I’m watching Adele sing “Chasing Pavements.” I guess I just find it interesting that, unlike her counterparts both in age and musical style (think Amy Winehouse, Duffy, etc.), she never has the opportunity to move around in her videos. To me, mobility represents not only a certain type of (physical) freedom but also the capacity to express oneself.
Maybe I’ve been wrongly indoctrinated with the notion that singers must be mobile in their videos in order to fit into the canon of a typical music video and this might be problematic in and of itself. The thing that’s interesting to me about Adele’s case, though, is that even if that standard about motion is inherently wrong, she is still treated particularly problematically within that unfair paradigm. One of the main things that distinguishes her from all of these other women is her weight. At a US size 14-16, she is not the stereotypical size 0-4 singer who is allowed to walk or dance or even stand in her music videos.
While I am sure Adele does what she finds comfortable and may be designing videos this way because it suits her taste, it’s distressing that her videos have the potential to reinforce the notion that being fuller means you are limited in your capacities to express yourself physically. In the same way that she constantly wears big layers of black clothing to cover up her body, she also hides herself allowing actors in the video to communicate her messages on her behalf in her videos. I see her literal confinement to a chair as a sort of figurative confinement of female bodies: if a woman’s body is bigger than the industry standard, it must remain still and as unnoticeable as possible.
Why would a woman with lyrics as powerful as “think of me in the depths of your despair” and "you were just the filler in the space that happened to be free" be confined to a music video life spent in pretty wooden chairs simply because of her "plus-size" frame? Furthermore, why do recent media and advertising endeavors like the Dove “Love Your Body” campaign pretend that there is size acceptance in our society when women with actual curves feel the need to use multiple methods to cover themselves on a regular basis? There’s no need for Adele to rock a string bikini in order to get her messages across but it'd be nice if she could fully participate in her own music videos. My main question, then, is this: why can’t a curvy woman use her body to express herself, too? What’s up with that?
In the videos for “Chasing Pavements,” “Make You Feel My Love,” “Rolling in the Deep,” “Cold Shoulder,” and “Hometown Glory,” Adele is seated in a chair while a story (acted out by other people) unfolds around her. Her music videos all express a type of confinement that seems unnatural given the types of songs she writes. She’s only 22 and she happens to be perfectly able of walking and moving. While not everyone her age enjoys that privilege, she does. It makes little sense for her to sit, then, as if she cannot use both her voice and her body to convey her messages like most other singers do nowadays.
Her songs are definitely not dance songs and I don’t expect Britney’s “I’m a Slave 4 U” moves to pop up on the screen when I’m watching Adele sing “Chasing Pavements.” I guess I just find it interesting that, unlike her counterparts both in age and musical style (think Amy Winehouse, Duffy, etc.), she never has the opportunity to move around in her videos. To me, mobility represents not only a certain type of (physical) freedom but also the capacity to express oneself.
Maybe I’ve been wrongly indoctrinated with the notion that singers must be mobile in their videos in order to fit into the canon of a typical music video and this might be problematic in and of itself. The thing that’s interesting to me about Adele’s case, though, is that even if that standard about motion is inherently wrong, she is still treated particularly problematically within that unfair paradigm. One of the main things that distinguishes her from all of these other women is her weight. At a US size 14-16, she is not the stereotypical size 0-4 singer who is allowed to walk or dance or even stand in her music videos.
While I am sure Adele does what she finds comfortable and may be designing videos this way because it suits her taste, it’s distressing that her videos have the potential to reinforce the notion that being fuller means you are limited in your capacities to express yourself physically. In the same way that she constantly wears big layers of black clothing to cover up her body, she also hides herself allowing actors in the video to communicate her messages on her behalf in her videos. I see her literal confinement to a chair as a sort of figurative confinement of female bodies: if a woman’s body is bigger than the industry standard, it must remain still and as unnoticeable as possible.
Why would a woman with lyrics as powerful as “think of me in the depths of your despair” and "you were just the filler in the space that happened to be free" be confined to a music video life spent in pretty wooden chairs simply because of her "plus-size" frame? Furthermore, why do recent media and advertising endeavors like the Dove “Love Your Body” campaign pretend that there is size acceptance in our society when women with actual curves feel the need to use multiple methods to cover themselves on a regular basis? There’s no need for Adele to rock a string bikini in order to get her messages across but it'd be nice if she could fully participate in her own music videos. My main question, then, is this: why can’t a curvy woman use her body to express herself, too? What’s up with that?
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Don't Hate Me 'Cause I'm Beautiful
While I spent the past 72 hours writing a paper about the Native American war effort in the World War II, the only, and I mean ONLY, thing that kept me going was Keri Hilson’s video for her song “Pretty Girl Rock.” I mean that and the fact that I had a deadline. Anyway, I must have watched the video roughly twenty times at this point and given the fact that it’s a little over four minutes long, I’d say I’ve spent approximately 116 minutes (that’s like 2 hours for those who are counting) watching this fabulous clip.
In the video, Keri Hilson embodies famous black female figures over the past century. In the 30’s she’s Josephine Baker, in the 40's she's a Dorothy Dandridge type, in the 50’s she’s a Candy Girl ,in the 60’s she’s Diana Ross with The Supremes, in the 70’s she’s either Dina Ross sans the Supremes or maybe she’s Donna Summer, in the 80’s she’s Janet Jackson in her infamous “Rhythm Nation” video, in the 90’s she’s T-Boz from TLC in their “Creep” video, and in the 00’s she’s herself in a t-shirt and jeans. Now tacky as the concept is, it works for me for some reason. Maybe it’s because she fully inhabits the women she imitates or because I have fun trying to discern which female figure she’s embodying at any given moment. Whatever the reason, it’s definitely my new jam.
Actually, I think I do know the reason I adore this song/video so much: the lyrics fit in with a history of black empowerment and the visuals add a unique twist to that notion. If I could list my top three favorite lines in this song, I’d go with the following: “Don’t hate me cause I’m beautiful” (which can either mean "don't be jealous of my beauty" or "don't hate me and,if you try, I'm confident enough not to worry about it"), “Mad cause I’m cuter than the girl that’s with ya” and “all eyes on me when I walk in, no question that this girl’s a 10.” A close fourth might be the line “I know I’m attractive.” Now, normally arrogance is NOT cute but there’s something a little different about this song.
Here we have an attractive black woman not only affirming that she’s beautiful but reveling in it, laughing at it and mocking the fact she ought not be so boastful about it. Furthermore, she’s not saying she’s the first of her kind: as she shifts from one beautiful black woman to the next, she gives a little history lesson, and reminder that our society has encountered black female beauty before and that it’s done so with relish.
Watching this video over and over again reminded me of a talk I went to earlier this semester about Beyonce and Lady Gaga. Yes, Harvard does have a few fun things to offer me every once in a while. On this particular night, the question of the night was whether these two women represented the new faces of feminism. Students were quick to agree that there was an inner feminist in Lady Gaga. As I’ve mentioned before in an earlier post, they all noted that Lady Gaga was a feminist because of her ability to mess with all the rules of proper lady-like etiquette. With this, I wholeheartedly agree.
They all also agreed that in the “Telephone” and “Video Phone” videos, there was nothing particularly feminist about Beyonce’s performance. My heart almost popped out of my chest: I thought I’d finally found people who dug pop culture and who understand it the way I do but I was wrong. If you’ve ever seen the “Telephone” video in which Beyonce poisons her abusive boyfriend or the “Video Phone” video in which men’s heads are transformed into cameras (i.e. in which they embody the problems of Laura Mulvey’s “female gaze”), you might find at least an inkling of feminism in her performance. If these things aren’t the modern, extremist equivalents of bra-burning, I don’t know what is. I’m not directly saying that women should go out and poison those who treat them wrong or that they should look at men as perpetual objectifiers of women…..but those are options.
In any event, the students’ responses during this event frustrated me because I felt they tried to apply the same standards to black and white women and that simply can’t, I mean CANNOT, be done. Black and white women have two very different legacies in American history. While it’s definitely feminist (read: critical of the gender status quo) of Lady Gaga to defy the logic of how blonde artists ought to behave, we have to recognize that she has the flexibility to be a weirdo (and one I adore) because of the fact that she’s white. White women are already assumed to be attractive in Western society. Black women, on the other hand, are still in the position of trying to get their foot in the door on this front. While Hilson notes several famous examples, not enough people have given black women’s beauty due credit overall. Beyonce’s music and her presence as an undeniable sex symbol represents a sort of feminist progress for black women: she invites everyone to consider that black not only can be beautiful but that it IS beautiful.
This message has been lost on plenty of people,though, black men included. Go to any Harvard party on a Saturday night and you’re sure to see every last white girl at a black party pinned up against some black man whether she’s average-looking, elephantine or busted, rusted and disgusted. Beyonce and Keri Hilson, albeit in a pop, silly fashion, de-constructs the notion that being white and female is the only way someone could do the “Pretty Girl Rock.” What’s sad is that it’s taken so long for this to be a popular message that people can rock out to. Or at least one that I can listen to non-stop during reading period. Why aren’t there more songs about how pretty brown skin is? Have we become complacent about reinterating this message since the Civil Rights era has ended? What’s up with that?
In the video, Keri Hilson embodies famous black female figures over the past century. In the 30’s she’s Josephine Baker, in the 40's she's a Dorothy Dandridge type, in the 50’s she’s a Candy Girl ,in the 60’s she’s Diana Ross with The Supremes, in the 70’s she’s either Dina Ross sans the Supremes or maybe she’s Donna Summer, in the 80’s she’s Janet Jackson in her infamous “Rhythm Nation” video, in the 90’s she’s T-Boz from TLC in their “Creep” video, and in the 00’s she’s herself in a t-shirt and jeans. Now tacky as the concept is, it works for me for some reason. Maybe it’s because she fully inhabits the women she imitates or because I have fun trying to discern which female figure she’s embodying at any given moment. Whatever the reason, it’s definitely my new jam.
Actually, I think I do know the reason I adore this song/video so much: the lyrics fit in with a history of black empowerment and the visuals add a unique twist to that notion. If I could list my top three favorite lines in this song, I’d go with the following: “Don’t hate me cause I’m beautiful” (which can either mean "don't be jealous of my beauty" or "don't hate me and,if you try, I'm confident enough not to worry about it"), “Mad cause I’m cuter than the girl that’s with ya” and “all eyes on me when I walk in, no question that this girl’s a 10.” A close fourth might be the line “I know I’m attractive.” Now, normally arrogance is NOT cute but there’s something a little different about this song.
Here we have an attractive black woman not only affirming that she’s beautiful but reveling in it, laughing at it and mocking the fact she ought not be so boastful about it. Furthermore, she’s not saying she’s the first of her kind: as she shifts from one beautiful black woman to the next, she gives a little history lesson, and reminder that our society has encountered black female beauty before and that it’s done so with relish.
Watching this video over and over again reminded me of a talk I went to earlier this semester about Beyonce and Lady Gaga. Yes, Harvard does have a few fun things to offer me every once in a while. On this particular night, the question of the night was whether these two women represented the new faces of feminism. Students were quick to agree that there was an inner feminist in Lady Gaga. As I’ve mentioned before in an earlier post, they all noted that Lady Gaga was a feminist because of her ability to mess with all the rules of proper lady-like etiquette. With this, I wholeheartedly agree.
They all also agreed that in the “Telephone” and “Video Phone” videos, there was nothing particularly feminist about Beyonce’s performance. My heart almost popped out of my chest: I thought I’d finally found people who dug pop culture and who understand it the way I do but I was wrong. If you’ve ever seen the “Telephone” video in which Beyonce poisons her abusive boyfriend or the “Video Phone” video in which men’s heads are transformed into cameras (i.e. in which they embody the problems of Laura Mulvey’s “female gaze”), you might find at least an inkling of feminism in her performance. If these things aren’t the modern, extremist equivalents of bra-burning, I don’t know what is. I’m not directly saying that women should go out and poison those who treat them wrong or that they should look at men as perpetual objectifiers of women…..but those are options.
In any event, the students’ responses during this event frustrated me because I felt they tried to apply the same standards to black and white women and that simply can’t, I mean CANNOT, be done. Black and white women have two very different legacies in American history. While it’s definitely feminist (read: critical of the gender status quo) of Lady Gaga to defy the logic of how blonde artists ought to behave, we have to recognize that she has the flexibility to be a weirdo (and one I adore) because of the fact that she’s white. White women are already assumed to be attractive in Western society. Black women, on the other hand, are still in the position of trying to get their foot in the door on this front. While Hilson notes several famous examples, not enough people have given black women’s beauty due credit overall. Beyonce’s music and her presence as an undeniable sex symbol represents a sort of feminist progress for black women: she invites everyone to consider that black not only can be beautiful but that it IS beautiful.
This message has been lost on plenty of people,though, black men included. Go to any Harvard party on a Saturday night and you’re sure to see every last white girl at a black party pinned up against some black man whether she’s average-looking, elephantine or busted, rusted and disgusted. Beyonce and Keri Hilson, albeit in a pop, silly fashion, de-constructs the notion that being white and female is the only way someone could do the “Pretty Girl Rock.” What’s sad is that it’s taken so long for this to be a popular message that people can rock out to. Or at least one that I can listen to non-stop during reading period. Why aren’t there more songs about how pretty brown skin is? Have we become complacent about reinterating this message since the Civil Rights era has ended? What’s up with that?
Sunday, December 5, 2010
The Dog Days Are Over
As I sat, wolfing down stuffing at Thanksgiving dinner, my uncle, a Harvard alum and self-professed Crimson fanatic, turned to me and asked "Susie, when you go abroad, what will you miss the most about Harvard?" My answer? "Nothing." Shocked and appalled, he asked "You're not gonna miss anything?!" I said, "My friends. But beyond that, nothing." Normally, I try to be polite because that's how my parents raised me but at that moment I truly felt honesty was the best policy.
After the semester I've had, I've spent many hours contemplating how disappointed and angry parents would be should I drop out of college, find a husband, have a baby and set up a small but lucrative cookie shop on the boardwalk of Venice Beach in California. The funny thing, though, is that while I've had all these fantasies of escape, I found one particular movie (which is a film adaptation of a best-selling book), Eat Pray Love, completely repulsive.
Well, to be fair, over the holiday I tried to watch it but I only got about 15 minutes in. So I can only safely speak about the quarter hour that I saw and my disdain while watching it. Julia Roberts plays a woman who is bored with her life and so, in her late 30's, she decides to drop everything and spend a year in Italy, India and Bali.
Now, while this part of the film does offer the important feminist message that women shouldn't stay in relationships they aren't happy with, the explanation of her unhappiness seems silly. Her husband tells her that he wants to go back to school for a Master's in Education and poor Julia can't take it. "A man who wants to educate himself to learn how to educate others? How disgusting!" Since this is my blog and I'm allowed to state my opinions I will go ahead a say it: you shouldn't divorce a spouse purely because he or she wants to get a Master's degree.
Luckily enough, the film doesn't entirely suggest that the reason she's mad is because he won't be able to provide financially for her. It doesn't imply, as a film from the 1950's might, that his re-education process would be problematic because she, as a woman, would be forced to be the breadwinner. That is one possible interpretation, though, of the cause of her anger: that she would have to assume a man's role and be a provide while he broke husband got his degree. The film teeters on these perilous lines of gender essentialism and it also plays up racial stereotypes in which brown, third world individuals share their ever-present, ever-exotic wisdom with her. In one review of the film, the critic referred to the original book as "privilege literature" which captures the messages of this movie perfectly.
I say all of this by way of unpacking the reasons why I thought this specific movie problematically explored the nature of personal escape. Don't get me wrong, though. I'm all for taking breaks when you need to. I, for example, am also about to embark on a break while I study at Oxford University for the spring semester. While that sounds like the definition of privilege (and it is), I hope I'm not as not racist and classist about my experience Roberts' character was in that movie. I hope that I can use the time not as a vacation to reward myself but as a reflection period. I hope that it isn't a time I use to avoid boredom or to give myself something new to do. Like Julia, "I want to marvel at something" but I don't wanna do it with the same flat, boring expression that she did. And I don't expect an Indian men to read my palms to tell me what's gonna happen in my future, either.
I guess the biggest reason that I look forward to this break from Harvard is that it will allow me to gain perspective on the things that have happened to me here and that it will allow me to see how else I can exist in the world. After a semester which involved visiting people in hospitals, encountering loved ones' illnesses left and right, moving out of my room and into a another one because of a problematic living situation and losing friends in the process, enduring mistreatment at the hands of multiple men on campus, adding two incredibly stressful and time consuming extra-curriculars to my schedule and taking on an extremely demanding course load, I'm done with Harvard for the time being.
While we can't all be 39-year-old upper middle class white women with the flexibility to travel to multiple countries in search of inner selves, maybe Julia Roberts' character can offer one important bit of advice: we all need to find a way to take pauses in our lives to think about where we've been, where we are and where we hope to go. Whether we study abroad, travel often, write, listen to music, exercise, pray or hang out with loved ones, we need healthy ways to escape our routine and to try to feel whole. Why is it so hard for us to give ourselves these breaks, though, and why do we always make excuses for finding personal stability? What's up with that?
After the semester I've had, I've spent many hours contemplating how disappointed and angry parents would be should I drop out of college, find a husband, have a baby and set up a small but lucrative cookie shop on the boardwalk of Venice Beach in California. The funny thing, though, is that while I've had all these fantasies of escape, I found one particular movie (which is a film adaptation of a best-selling book), Eat Pray Love, completely repulsive.
Well, to be fair, over the holiday I tried to watch it but I only got about 15 minutes in. So I can only safely speak about the quarter hour that I saw and my disdain while watching it. Julia Roberts plays a woman who is bored with her life and so, in her late 30's, she decides to drop everything and spend a year in Italy, India and Bali.
Now, while this part of the film does offer the important feminist message that women shouldn't stay in relationships they aren't happy with, the explanation of her unhappiness seems silly. Her husband tells her that he wants to go back to school for a Master's in Education and poor Julia can't take it. "A man who wants to educate himself to learn how to educate others? How disgusting!" Since this is my blog and I'm allowed to state my opinions I will go ahead a say it: you shouldn't divorce a spouse purely because he or she wants to get a Master's degree.
Luckily enough, the film doesn't entirely suggest that the reason she's mad is because he won't be able to provide financially for her. It doesn't imply, as a film from the 1950's might, that his re-education process would be problematic because she, as a woman, would be forced to be the breadwinner. That is one possible interpretation, though, of the cause of her anger: that she would have to assume a man's role and be a provide while he broke husband got his degree. The film teeters on these perilous lines of gender essentialism and it also plays up racial stereotypes in which brown, third world individuals share their ever-present, ever-exotic wisdom with her. In one review of the film, the critic referred to the original book as "privilege literature" which captures the messages of this movie perfectly.
I say all of this by way of unpacking the reasons why I thought this specific movie problematically explored the nature of personal escape. Don't get me wrong, though. I'm all for taking breaks when you need to. I, for example, am also about to embark on a break while I study at Oxford University for the spring semester. While that sounds like the definition of privilege (and it is), I hope I'm not as not racist and classist about my experience Roberts' character was in that movie. I hope that I can use the time not as a vacation to reward myself but as a reflection period. I hope that it isn't a time I use to avoid boredom or to give myself something new to do. Like Julia, "I want to marvel at something" but I don't wanna do it with the same flat, boring expression that she did. And I don't expect an Indian men to read my palms to tell me what's gonna happen in my future, either.
I guess the biggest reason that I look forward to this break from Harvard is that it will allow me to gain perspective on the things that have happened to me here and that it will allow me to see how else I can exist in the world. After a semester which involved visiting people in hospitals, encountering loved ones' illnesses left and right, moving out of my room and into a another one because of a problematic living situation and losing friends in the process, enduring mistreatment at the hands of multiple men on campus, adding two incredibly stressful and time consuming extra-curriculars to my schedule and taking on an extremely demanding course load, I'm done with Harvard for the time being.
While we can't all be 39-year-old upper middle class white women with the flexibility to travel to multiple countries in search of inner selves, maybe Julia Roberts' character can offer one important bit of advice: we all need to find a way to take pauses in our lives to think about where we've been, where we are and where we hope to go. Whether we study abroad, travel often, write, listen to music, exercise, pray or hang out with loved ones, we need healthy ways to escape our routine and to try to feel whole. Why is it so hard for us to give ourselves these breaks, though, and why do we always make excuses for finding personal stability? What's up with that?
Sunday, November 14, 2010
One-way Pleasure: Pornography and Capitalism's Effects on Men and Women
Have you ever been at a party, having a great time focused on nothing but your two-step when you realize something larger is going on around you? This happened to me a few nights ago when I went to a fraternity-hosted party at a hotel in Boston. It might sound random but last year when I was foolish enough to believe I could be a Social Studies concentrator (no offense to the lovely individuals in that department), I was most struck by Karl Marx's work, which flashed back to me that night. In his texts, he talked about the insidious nature of capitalism and the way it compels all of us to compete in a market system whether we explicitly give consent or not. Since I read his work and, tragically, took an Economics course, I have reevaluated my views on competition and have realized its inevitability. And also its extent: you can even see it in Americans' sex lives.
How do I reckon this? Well, first of all, I believe we can see it both in the sex industry and on the dancefloor. As my economics professor discussed, most goods are more valuable the more rare they are. That's why diamonds cost way more than chocolate. Though hand me a piece of chocolate at the right point of the day and I might be yours forever. Daydreams aside, though, rare and in the American case, extreme, things are typically favorable. Pornography, for example, was once something disseminated in a few films, images and magazines. Now in 2010, the public has access to and consumes pornography easily and frequently. The more twisted and violent the films are, the more they are watched. This fad of new and unseen ways to abuse women is so popular, in fact, that it has its effects on everything from erectile dysfunction (ever that seen that Sex and the City episode where Miranda's lover can't get "ready" without porn playing in the background?) to changing gender norms in dancing.
Mainstream pornography, not specialized fetish films or imagery, is increasingly pushed to extremes that often focus on excessive violence towards women. Choking, slapping, and brutal language are no longer reserved for BDSM films: they are the norm in mainstream films and clips that are easily accessible for free with the help of basic internet connection. They are ever-present in the most popularly consumed films.
The funny part about all of this is that while it's simple to dismiss these films purely as fantasy, we don't take the time to stop and ask why these are our fantasies in the first place. Why in the past, when women had less financial or social power, was porn less hostile towards them and why, in a new era in which double duty as mommy and career are more present, do we fantasize and sexualize violence against women?
One of the clearest examples of the fact that porn does not remain purely a fantasy but instead affects our reality is the popular trend of grinding during dances. For all the freaky-deaky clips you can find on Youtube of people dancing wildly on Soul Train, for example, in the 70's, you'll be hard pressed to find images of women turning around, bending over and grinding with their male partners.
However, if you're a college student in Boston or any part of the country, you can expect to see this display on any dance you show up to. As a result of the undying competitive part of my nature and the fact that I've grown up in a capitalistic society that compels each individual to compete for what you want, regardless of the personal or ethical costs, I've regularly behaved in ways that compromise my feminist values for the sake of getting male attention. While I'm not exactly the wildest of wild things, I participate in this ritualized trend along with my female and male peers mostly because it is a learned behavior and because we grew up in a time in which it was all we've ever known.
Why does it seem natural to our generation, though, for women to bend over for whomever shows interest in them and for men to expect that they can do this to whomever suits their fancy at a given moment at a dance? Why do we expect that it's more important for men to receive pleasure without women getting anything in return (except, perhaps, for the emotional and psychological reward of knowing someone momentarily wants you)? I believe it has to do with a culture of pornographic films which feature women being treated in a way that often has more to do with them being hurt than pleased. As I've witnessed at many parties (I could also be hitting up the wrong parties but seeing as I've witnessed this many a time at a variety of parties with a variety of demographics, I believe it's a widespread thing),I know it is a common cultural phenomenon that reflects changing attitudes towards women: if you belong to a patriarchal society, one of the best ways to degrade the rising power of women is to sexualize their pain and subjugation and to carry that over into dancing practices.
If you see a bold, powerful, outspoken woman on campus, for example, who speaks her mind and who seems to have a strong future ahead of her 5 days out of the week but you see her bent over, faced away from a man without the man kissing her or doing anything to try to please her sexually every Friday and Saturday, you re-think how much security the woman has. On the one hand, she might just be confident in her own ability to separate the sexual from the personal but on the other hand, she might be a girl who has been made insecure enough by society to see herself as an inevitable pawn in a capitalistic, sexist, and patriarchal practice of one-way pleasure. Why is this something we've allowed ourselves to accept and why isn't it expected that men are supposed to do us ladies right, too? What's up with that?
How do I reckon this? Well, first of all, I believe we can see it both in the sex industry and on the dancefloor. As my economics professor discussed, most goods are more valuable the more rare they are. That's why diamonds cost way more than chocolate. Though hand me a piece of chocolate at the right point of the day and I might be yours forever. Daydreams aside, though, rare and in the American case, extreme, things are typically favorable. Pornography, for example, was once something disseminated in a few films, images and magazines. Now in 2010, the public has access to and consumes pornography easily and frequently. The more twisted and violent the films are, the more they are watched. This fad of new and unseen ways to abuse women is so popular, in fact, that it has its effects on everything from erectile dysfunction (ever that seen that Sex and the City episode where Miranda's lover can't get "ready" without porn playing in the background?) to changing gender norms in dancing.
Mainstream pornography, not specialized fetish films or imagery, is increasingly pushed to extremes that often focus on excessive violence towards women. Choking, slapping, and brutal language are no longer reserved for BDSM films: they are the norm in mainstream films and clips that are easily accessible for free with the help of basic internet connection. They are ever-present in the most popularly consumed films.
The funny part about all of this is that while it's simple to dismiss these films purely as fantasy, we don't take the time to stop and ask why these are our fantasies in the first place. Why in the past, when women had less financial or social power, was porn less hostile towards them and why, in a new era in which double duty as mommy and career are more present, do we fantasize and sexualize violence against women?
One of the clearest examples of the fact that porn does not remain purely a fantasy but instead affects our reality is the popular trend of grinding during dances. For all the freaky-deaky clips you can find on Youtube of people dancing wildly on Soul Train, for example, in the 70's, you'll be hard pressed to find images of women turning around, bending over and grinding with their male partners.
However, if you're a college student in Boston or any part of the country, you can expect to see this display on any dance you show up to. As a result of the undying competitive part of my nature and the fact that I've grown up in a capitalistic society that compels each individual to compete for what you want, regardless of the personal or ethical costs, I've regularly behaved in ways that compromise my feminist values for the sake of getting male attention. While I'm not exactly the wildest of wild things, I participate in this ritualized trend along with my female and male peers mostly because it is a learned behavior and because we grew up in a time in which it was all we've ever known.
Why does it seem natural to our generation, though, for women to bend over for whomever shows interest in them and for men to expect that they can do this to whomever suits their fancy at a given moment at a dance? Why do we expect that it's more important for men to receive pleasure without women getting anything in return (except, perhaps, for the emotional and psychological reward of knowing someone momentarily wants you)? I believe it has to do with a culture of pornographic films which feature women being treated in a way that often has more to do with them being hurt than pleased. As I've witnessed at many parties (I could also be hitting up the wrong parties but seeing as I've witnessed this many a time at a variety of parties with a variety of demographics, I believe it's a widespread thing),I know it is a common cultural phenomenon that reflects changing attitudes towards women: if you belong to a patriarchal society, one of the best ways to degrade the rising power of women is to sexualize their pain and subjugation and to carry that over into dancing practices.
If you see a bold, powerful, outspoken woman on campus, for example, who speaks her mind and who seems to have a strong future ahead of her 5 days out of the week but you see her bent over, faced away from a man without the man kissing her or doing anything to try to please her sexually every Friday and Saturday, you re-think how much security the woman has. On the one hand, she might just be confident in her own ability to separate the sexual from the personal but on the other hand, she might be a girl who has been made insecure enough by society to see herself as an inevitable pawn in a capitalistic, sexist, and patriarchal practice of one-way pleasure. Why is this something we've allowed ourselves to accept and why isn't it expected that men are supposed to do us ladies right, too? What's up with that?
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
$ Money, Money, Moooonnnaayyyy $
October is an incredibly difficult month at Harvard. Reality sets in that it's no longer the beginning of the year, midterm season begins, and people start wearing suits all the time. Why? It might have something to do with the invasion of corporate recruiters and the onset of punch season (what students at every other college in America call "rushing"). This will not be a rant about how elitist and repulsive final clubs are: plenty of people on campus discuss this issue all the time. It would be hypocritical of me to complain about them, in fact, because I have enjoyed myself at some of the places precisely because they are supposed to be important spaces on campus. What interests me about this time is that you get to see, in a practical manner, how important belonging to a perceived space of power is for some students' identity here at my favorite Ivy and about what all this means for me, as well.
Having grown up in the New York private school scene and spending the past 2.5 years on this campus, I'm no longer shocked as I watch young men (and women) struggle to enter "powerful" social circles. I'm no longer washed anew each day by how many people plan their careers and futures at the age of 19, 20 and 21. Nor do I begrudge the people offered these opportunities to take full advantage them. Instead, this month reminds me of something: one day, I won't be in school anymore and I will have to make my own way financially. Much as I try to pretend that my life will always be about school, watching other people suit up to get into the right clubs in order to make the right connections which will eventually lead to the right careers and lifestyles grounds me a bit.
I realized this, that is, the power money and my future have over me, most especially last week when I lost my wallet in a cab. Seems mostly harmless, no? You lose your stuff and you try to find it. Maybe you will, maybe you won't. It wasn't harmless, though. My debit card was subsequently stolen and used to make purchases at Footlocker (I've never shopped at Footlocker and have maybe visited 2 of their stores in my 20 year existence) and in various grocery stores in Dorchester (again, places I've never visited). In addition to being robbed and deprived of access to money, I began to depend on other people to help me do what I wanted to. Chinese food at 2:30 in the morning? I had to ask my friends for it. A slice of pizza and a Vitamin water? I needed my friends to agree to pay for it before I could safely know that I could have it.
It wasn't only the lack of agency to make my own purchases and the fact that I had to depend on the kindness of others that got to me: it was the fact that I realized, like many of my male peers, that money and power are connected in such a way that not only is the physical paper important but that these entities define our sense of importance. I spent those days feeling empty and useless for no other reason than that I was missing access to my savior (aka my debit card). I shouldn't have felt breathless as many times as I did considering food, shelter and my lovely classes were all available to me in addition to all the supportive people in my life who surround me. But what continued to get me down was this belief that without the ability to navigate my surroundings with money and, in my mind, free choice, I had no "value."
I also discovered this fear that not only money but the idea of money controlled me as I've sat through various career fairs and events this past month. Much like final club boys, I've been dressing up to give the appearance that I am someone "worthy" of belonging to wealthy institutions. I've donned heals for consulting companies, Teach for America presentations and public interest careers. And I've felt like a prostitute at each one of them: "Come here, baby, hire me. I'm the one you want. I'm wearing the right clothes and I'm smiling the way you like, right?" At the same time, I realize that this is and will be my reality in the next couple years and in my future in general. I'm getting a little too long in the tooth to deny that anymore and, quite frankly, it keeps me up some nights.
My main take away from all of these experiences is that I need to balance reality with an awareness that the capitalistic terms we use to refer to ourselves such as "valuable" and "worthy" are themselves problematic. How can I do this, though, when I wake up each day in a Harvard owned bed and the consciousness that I will have to make good on the promise of a great (and in American terms, this is usually defined financially) future? Are the desire to be financially secure and to,at the same time, reject being defined by my bank account mutually exclusive? More realistically, why can't I calm myself even with this new perspective? What's up with that?
Having grown up in the New York private school scene and spending the past 2.5 years on this campus, I'm no longer shocked as I watch young men (and women) struggle to enter "powerful" social circles. I'm no longer washed anew each day by how many people plan their careers and futures at the age of 19, 20 and 21. Nor do I begrudge the people offered these opportunities to take full advantage them. Instead, this month reminds me of something: one day, I won't be in school anymore and I will have to make my own way financially. Much as I try to pretend that my life will always be about school, watching other people suit up to get into the right clubs in order to make the right connections which will eventually lead to the right careers and lifestyles grounds me a bit.
I realized this, that is, the power money and my future have over me, most especially last week when I lost my wallet in a cab. Seems mostly harmless, no? You lose your stuff and you try to find it. Maybe you will, maybe you won't. It wasn't harmless, though. My debit card was subsequently stolen and used to make purchases at Footlocker (I've never shopped at Footlocker and have maybe visited 2 of their stores in my 20 year existence) and in various grocery stores in Dorchester (again, places I've never visited). In addition to being robbed and deprived of access to money, I began to depend on other people to help me do what I wanted to. Chinese food at 2:30 in the morning? I had to ask my friends for it. A slice of pizza and a Vitamin water? I needed my friends to agree to pay for it before I could safely know that I could have it.
It wasn't only the lack of agency to make my own purchases and the fact that I had to depend on the kindness of others that got to me: it was the fact that I realized, like many of my male peers, that money and power are connected in such a way that not only is the physical paper important but that these entities define our sense of importance. I spent those days feeling empty and useless for no other reason than that I was missing access to my savior (aka my debit card). I shouldn't have felt breathless as many times as I did considering food, shelter and my lovely classes were all available to me in addition to all the supportive people in my life who surround me. But what continued to get me down was this belief that without the ability to navigate my surroundings with money and, in my mind, free choice, I had no "value."
I also discovered this fear that not only money but the idea of money controlled me as I've sat through various career fairs and events this past month. Much like final club boys, I've been dressing up to give the appearance that I am someone "worthy" of belonging to wealthy institutions. I've donned heals for consulting companies, Teach for America presentations and public interest careers. And I've felt like a prostitute at each one of them: "Come here, baby, hire me. I'm the one you want. I'm wearing the right clothes and I'm smiling the way you like, right?" At the same time, I realize that this is and will be my reality in the next couple years and in my future in general. I'm getting a little too long in the tooth to deny that anymore and, quite frankly, it keeps me up some nights.
My main take away from all of these experiences is that I need to balance reality with an awareness that the capitalistic terms we use to refer to ourselves such as "valuable" and "worthy" are themselves problematic. How can I do this, though, when I wake up each day in a Harvard owned bed and the consciousness that I will have to make good on the promise of a great (and in American terms, this is usually defined financially) future? Are the desire to be financially secure and to,at the same time, reject being defined by my bank account mutually exclusive? More realistically, why can't I calm myself even with this new perspective? What's up with that?
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Humiliation in the Age of Reality TV and the Internetz
Last week, after a series of wreckless weekends, a failed date, and the crushing realization that I'm half way done with college, I came to the conclusion that I needed a change. Naturally, the first place I looked to for that change was an online dating site. OKCupid is definitely not for the faint of heart. The site incentivizes you to answer more and more questions by reminding you that the more you fill out, the more public your profile will be. Delicious.
So in my crisis mode, I decided to join partly for laughs, partly because my friends were doing it (a little peer pressure never hurt nobody) and partly because I would like to meet people outside my usual social circle. Men-type people. My first mistake, though, was thinking that at the age of 20 years old, I needed to be advertising myself as a hot commodity in the virtual world. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we kids these days insist on embarrassing ourselves regularly?
Maybe it's because if you turn on the TV at any given point in the day, you will see young people doing a whole host of things that make no damn sense. There's Fear Factor, Jersey Shore, Judge Judy, Teem Mom, For Love or Money, I Love New York, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, etc. The amount of "reality" we consume that is based on pure self objectification and humiliation is astounding.
One of the first reality shows was The Real World, which aired in 1992 and which was filmed in New York City. It basically centered around a group of diverse young people doing hood rat things with their friends/ roommates in a giant, unaffordable New York loft. I'm willing to say that this show can be viewed as a predecessor to some of the tomfoolery seen (sometimes by me at my weakest of moments) on TV at any hour of the day.
This sense that the institution of being young involves self-ridicule and humiliation seeps from the TV screen onto the computer screen, too. You don't have to search Facebook long before you find pictures of people you awkwardly-don't-know-but-are-"friends"-with-anyway doing things they shouldn't if they happen to ever want a job in the future. In fact, a recent study by HGSE Prof. Howard Gardner and Research Director Carrie James suggests that teens and young people's social responsibility and ethics are sometimes compromised while surfing the web. No surprise there, given the recent string of teen suicides as a result of cyber bullying. As fun as it is to access any and everything at whenever one wants to on the internet, it's also a terribly dangerous tool.
And no one knows that better than I do after spending half a week on an online dating site. Though I gave answers before about why I decided to join the site, I really can't think of any logical reason why I did it. It could have been because of those damned eHarmony commercials that lie and say "1 in 5 couples meet online now." The point is, when gregarious and personable friends tell you how easy it was to find people on the internet, don't lie to yourself by saying that you're just as outgoing as they are if you really aren't. I guess even over the internet, people can still tell that I'm shy.
It really is an unnecessary humiliation, though, to watch as 55,000 people are online and none of them of them contact you for days at a time. When you're able to track the number of people who could be interested in you but who aren't contacting you, it reinforces whatever insecurities you might have, whether they're reasonable or not.
My question about all this belief that youth= intentional, self-sacrificing embarrassment is this: have young people always been inclined to be this masochistic and finally just now found the tools to act on those desires OR has technology ushered in a new age where youth culture has been taught that this is the only way to exist? If my half week stint with OKCupid has taught me anything, it's that putting yourself out there might be really cute in real life but not as hot on the internetz. What's up with that?
So in my crisis mode, I decided to join partly for laughs, partly because my friends were doing it (a little peer pressure never hurt nobody) and partly because I would like to meet people outside my usual social circle. Men-type people. My first mistake, though, was thinking that at the age of 20 years old, I needed to be advertising myself as a hot commodity in the virtual world. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we kids these days insist on embarrassing ourselves regularly?
Maybe it's because if you turn on the TV at any given point in the day, you will see young people doing a whole host of things that make no damn sense. There's Fear Factor, Jersey Shore, Judge Judy, Teem Mom, For Love or Money, I Love New York, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, etc. The amount of "reality" we consume that is based on pure self objectification and humiliation is astounding.
One of the first reality shows was The Real World, which aired in 1992 and which was filmed in New York City. It basically centered around a group of diverse young people doing hood rat things with their friends/ roommates in a giant, unaffordable New York loft. I'm willing to say that this show can be viewed as a predecessor to some of the tomfoolery seen (sometimes by me at my weakest of moments) on TV at any hour of the day.
This sense that the institution of being young involves self-ridicule and humiliation seeps from the TV screen onto the computer screen, too. You don't have to search Facebook long before you find pictures of people you awkwardly-don't-know-but-are-"friends"-with-anyway doing things they shouldn't if they happen to ever want a job in the future. In fact, a recent study by HGSE Prof. Howard Gardner and Research Director Carrie James suggests that teens and young people's social responsibility and ethics are sometimes compromised while surfing the web. No surprise there, given the recent string of teen suicides as a result of cyber bullying. As fun as it is to access any and everything at whenever one wants to on the internet, it's also a terribly dangerous tool.
And no one knows that better than I do after spending half a week on an online dating site. Though I gave answers before about why I decided to join the site, I really can't think of any logical reason why I did it. It could have been because of those damned eHarmony commercials that lie and say "1 in 5 couples meet online now." The point is, when gregarious and personable friends tell you how easy it was to find people on the internet, don't lie to yourself by saying that you're just as outgoing as they are if you really aren't. I guess even over the internet, people can still tell that I'm shy.
It really is an unnecessary humiliation, though, to watch as 55,000 people are online and none of them of them contact you for days at a time. When you're able to track the number of people who could be interested in you but who aren't contacting you, it reinforces whatever insecurities you might have, whether they're reasonable or not.
My question about all this belief that youth= intentional, self-sacrificing embarrassment is this: have young people always been inclined to be this masochistic and finally just now found the tools to act on those desires OR has technology ushered in a new age where youth culture has been taught that this is the only way to exist? If my half week stint with OKCupid has taught me anything, it's that putting yourself out there might be really cute in real life but not as hot on the internetz. What's up with that?
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Networking, Theft and Creativity: A Review of "The Social Network"
I've had an addiction for roughly 4 years now. Unlike an addiction to drugs, shopping, alcohol, or even sex, there is no rehab for Facebook. I'm on the site regularly and it might be considered my number one extracurricular activity. It's a time to be weird and creepy (which I excel at) and to "reconnect" with those people who you see every day of your sad, sappy life. One of the funnier things about the site, though, is that I was invited by my friend to join as a sophomore in high school and can't really remember life before Zuckerberg's creation. Or rather the Winklevoss' creation that Zuckerberg manipulated and stole. See, on Thursday night or , more precisely, Friday morning I went to the midnight showing of The Social Network, the new movie out about the creation and development of Facebook which challenges all of our notions about where the site actually came from.
First of all, before that night, I'd never been to the Harvard Square movie theater, which is both a travesty and mystery given that I've been visiting this campus since I was wee. Somehow it was just one of those obvious things that I've never done (similarly, I'm a life long New York who's never been to the Empire State Building). But I finally got around to it in the most Harvardian way possible: I went with other Harvard students to a Harvard Square movie theater to watch a movie about Harvard students' shenanigans. How many times can I say "Harvard" in a couple sentences? The answer: many, many times. Anyhow, I thought the movie was absolutely fabulous.
There were clutch lines like "Mark, I have to study" to which Mark (played by Jesse Eisenberg) replied "No you don't. You go to BU" and the one where one of the giant, WASPy crew twins exclaimed, "I'm 6'5, 220 and there are two of me!!" I had a great time watching the movie's portrayal of the final club and social scenes on campus. I've seen many unfortunate things at parties here at school but I've yet to see girls in nothing but their underwear and heels at parties. Maybe I'm just not hitting up the prime spots on my Saturday nights. Part of the fun of watching the movie was dissecting which things felt realistic(like the social pressure placed on males to insinuate themselves into particular power circles) and which ones didn't (the buildings looked nothing like they do in real life).
I felt this way about the movie overall but there was one element of the film that got to me: Eisenberg's portrayal of Zuckerberg. It's like when you go to H&M and you look from across the room at a really cute gray sweater. It's everything you've been dreaming of and you know it'll complete that outfit you planned to wear to dinner next Saturday. Then you walk up closer to it and all the detailing is fabulous EXCEPT for the random patch of rhinestones along the collar. The collar is obviously a central part of the top and it will be seen by all but it's just not quite right. That's exactly how I felt about Eisenberg's portrayal of Zuckerberg.
If you wanna play a slightly autistic person, inhabit the person's slight autism. If you wanna be relentlessly obnoxious, be relentlessly obnoxious. If you wanna play a pathetic person, act as a pathetic person would. But how could it be, Eisenberg, that Zuckerberg was all three of these things but still social enough to ever have any friends? Don't get me wrong: Harvard has more than its fair share of weird and unfortunate humans. However,Eisenberg's portrayal makes the Facebook creator seem less like a socially challenged person and more like a maniacally brilliant man-child. Without seeing the movie, it's hard to communicate the difference between being a tool and being other worldly (in a bad way) but to me, the story didn't make sense because if in real life Zuckerberg was as unpleasant as he appeared in the film, he would have no social contact to speak of.
The oddity of his demeanor was especially distinct and bizarre when compared to the other characters in the film. Andrew Garfield's portrayal of Saverin as an innocent but likeable bystander made sense in the context of someone who'd been ripped off and JT's depiction of Sean Parker (a man who made and lost millions by stealing music and offering it to people for free) as a sleazy individual seemed believable. Armie Hammer captured what the Winklevoss' must have been like. But there was just something about Eisenberg that felt too forced and too robotic to me.
Zuckerberg is clearly a smart or at least clever man who figured out how to create a social networking site that would, in a few short years, revolutionize the way young people interact across the planet. It's interesting that the movie tried to at once demonstrate his creativity and passion for this website and at the same time focused on possibility that he ripped off the Winklevoss' original website. Was he inventive and brilliant or was he merely a thief? The movie doesn't really answer the question.
At the end they do tell us that the twins won a $65 million settlement, which you'll know, even if you struggled with arithmetic in grade school, means that each twin got $32.5 million. And I've heard they're still trying to go back for more. I mean, it's true, $32.5 million is chump change at the age of 25. However, I do think it's enough to get by on. Like you can maybe get some ramen with that and take your girlfriend out to Denny's with that twice a year.
This movie to me was funny because it showed the intersection between money, creativity and white male identity. It reflected the motivations behind these people's actions and the complexity of power structures: the Winklevoss's had money and social power while Zuckerberg had the creativity and skills not only to make his own website but to capitalize on their idea. In America, it doesn't matter whose idea comes first. As "The Social Network" reveals, the ability to enact an idea and to figure out a way to monetize it is the only thing that counts. Whether Zuckerberg's character was as putrid and weasely as the movie insinuated, one thing's certain: he's made his mark (haha, get it, that's his name...Mark...ok I'll stop) on social affairs. Does this mean that I have to be as relentlessly unbearable as Zuckerberg to get ahead in life/start a social revolution? Is that my only option? What's up with that?
First of all, before that night, I'd never been to the Harvard Square movie theater, which is both a travesty and mystery given that I've been visiting this campus since I was wee. Somehow it was just one of those obvious things that I've never done (similarly, I'm a life long New York who's never been to the Empire State Building). But I finally got around to it in the most Harvardian way possible: I went with other Harvard students to a Harvard Square movie theater to watch a movie about Harvard students' shenanigans. How many times can I say "Harvard" in a couple sentences? The answer: many, many times. Anyhow, I thought the movie was absolutely fabulous.
There were clutch lines like "Mark, I have to study" to which Mark (played by Jesse Eisenberg) replied "No you don't. You go to BU" and the one where one of the giant, WASPy crew twins exclaimed, "I'm 6'5, 220 and there are two of me!!" I had a great time watching the movie's portrayal of the final club and social scenes on campus. I've seen many unfortunate things at parties here at school but I've yet to see girls in nothing but their underwear and heels at parties. Maybe I'm just not hitting up the prime spots on my Saturday nights. Part of the fun of watching the movie was dissecting which things felt realistic(like the social pressure placed on males to insinuate themselves into particular power circles) and which ones didn't (the buildings looked nothing like they do in real life).
I felt this way about the movie overall but there was one element of the film that got to me: Eisenberg's portrayal of Zuckerberg. It's like when you go to H&M and you look from across the room at a really cute gray sweater. It's everything you've been dreaming of and you know it'll complete that outfit you planned to wear to dinner next Saturday. Then you walk up closer to it and all the detailing is fabulous EXCEPT for the random patch of rhinestones along the collar. The collar is obviously a central part of the top and it will be seen by all but it's just not quite right. That's exactly how I felt about Eisenberg's portrayal of Zuckerberg.
If you wanna play a slightly autistic person, inhabit the person's slight autism. If you wanna be relentlessly obnoxious, be relentlessly obnoxious. If you wanna play a pathetic person, act as a pathetic person would. But how could it be, Eisenberg, that Zuckerberg was all three of these things but still social enough to ever have any friends? Don't get me wrong: Harvard has more than its fair share of weird and unfortunate humans. However,Eisenberg's portrayal makes the Facebook creator seem less like a socially challenged person and more like a maniacally brilliant man-child. Without seeing the movie, it's hard to communicate the difference between being a tool and being other worldly (in a bad way) but to me, the story didn't make sense because if in real life Zuckerberg was as unpleasant as he appeared in the film, he would have no social contact to speak of.
The oddity of his demeanor was especially distinct and bizarre when compared to the other characters in the film. Andrew Garfield's portrayal of Saverin as an innocent but likeable bystander made sense in the context of someone who'd been ripped off and JT's depiction of Sean Parker (a man who made and lost millions by stealing music and offering it to people for free) as a sleazy individual seemed believable. Armie Hammer captured what the Winklevoss' must have been like. But there was just something about Eisenberg that felt too forced and too robotic to me.
Zuckerberg is clearly a smart or at least clever man who figured out how to create a social networking site that would, in a few short years, revolutionize the way young people interact across the planet. It's interesting that the movie tried to at once demonstrate his creativity and passion for this website and at the same time focused on possibility that he ripped off the Winklevoss' original website. Was he inventive and brilliant or was he merely a thief? The movie doesn't really answer the question.
At the end they do tell us that the twins won a $65 million settlement, which you'll know, even if you struggled with arithmetic in grade school, means that each twin got $32.5 million. And I've heard they're still trying to go back for more. I mean, it's true, $32.5 million is chump change at the age of 25. However, I do think it's enough to get by on. Like you can maybe get some ramen with that and take your girlfriend out to Denny's with that twice a year.
This movie to me was funny because it showed the intersection between money, creativity and white male identity. It reflected the motivations behind these people's actions and the complexity of power structures: the Winklevoss's had money and social power while Zuckerberg had the creativity and skills not only to make his own website but to capitalize on their idea. In America, it doesn't matter whose idea comes first. As "The Social Network" reveals, the ability to enact an idea and to figure out a way to monetize it is the only thing that counts. Whether Zuckerberg's character was as putrid and weasely as the movie insinuated, one thing's certain: he's made his mark (haha, get it, that's his name...Mark...ok I'll stop) on social affairs. Does this mean that I have to be as relentlessly unbearable as Zuckerberg to get ahead in life/start a social revolution? Is that my only option? What's up with that?
Friday, September 3, 2010
Brangelina vs. Aniston: A Look into Reproductive Rights
About a decade ago I watched this movie about a sullen chick who'd sort of lost her way and ended up in an insane asylum with some actual crazies. That movie was called Girl, Interrupted and technically starred Winona Ryder but more importantly centered around her friend Lisa, played by Angelina Jolie. I was a weird 10 year old/ I'm still weird but I had a real fascination with mental illness and with how media sources portrayed people who are colloquially referred to as "nuts." I found it even more interesting that Angelina not only played an insane woman in film but also seemed to have a few screws loose in real life, as well. She was kissing her brother, having major Daddy issues, wearing a vile of blood and, most pitifully, dating Billy Bob Thornton.
Cut to about ten years later and now the woman is juggling 6 kids, a career as an action film star, her peace work in foreign countries and a sex life with Mr. Brad Pitt! Things have certainly changed for her but it's one particular moment in her life that gets my attention: the moment when she "stole" Brad Pitt from Jennifer Aniston.
I'm clearly a devotee of celebrity gossip and of celebrity interviews and I always remember hearing that Brad Pitt wanted children. In fact, I think there is an American law that determines that it would be a crime for him not reproduce. It's there in fine print somewhere, I swear. The man's gorgeous. Jennifer Aniston, on the other hand, clearly didn't want to: didn't wanna be pregnant and didn't want to adopt as evidenced by the fact that she hasn't done so in the five years since this all broke out. May sound harsh but any woman who says, "no, no Brad Pitt, I'm holding out for someone better to be the father of my children (biological or not)" can't have it all together. That might've been a fair excuse while she was starring on "Friends" but after it ended, they still stayed married without having any babies. Then entered Angelina.
The reason I'm thinking about this now is because last night, I was speaking with two friends about the movie Salt. They both agreed (in jest) that Angelina was wrong to have taken a woman's husband and it got me thinking. What right does any spouse have to deprive the other of a child? Alternatively, what right does a partner have to force the other person to be a parent if he or she doesn't want to? They wisely asked me why I assumed that she even could have kids or didn't want to have children. They suggested that maybe at one point towards the beginning of their marriage they both wanted to be childless but he changed his mind or that maybe they planned for children and then she decided against it. Maybe there were fertility issues involved. Whatever the case may be, I don't believe that two people who are in love have to or should stay together if they have radically opposing ideas about having children.
They could've adopted children or been foster parents. There are a multitude of ways for people to become parents. But a few definite ways not to be a parent include not getting pregnant and not taking in children who aren't biologically yours. In the Jennifer-Brad-Angelina triangle, it's clear that after he left Aniston, he chose (along with Jolie) to become parents to a brood of children. Clearly he wanted to be a parent: no man finds a woman with two adopted children, stays with her as she adopts another and then proceeds to procreate twice more with her if he isn't interested in the job.
In the conversation we had, my friends did the crucial job of asking me to illuminate my point and why I believed so fervently that this shift in relationships was understandable and just. I didn't make the judgment call because I think women should all be babymakers or that I was trying to claim that women who can't have children are somehow less than women. The truth is, I would make the same assertion if a woman wanted to have children and her male partner didn't. This is not, at it's core, a question of gender issues. To me, reproductive rights and fairness are the focus of this debate regardless of whether the person is a man or a woman. Not to go all creepy and morbid (i.e. Angelina circa 1999) but the fact of the matter is that we are all on this planet for a limited amount of time and the closest any of us gets to immortality, should we desire it, is by reproducing our DNA so that it can be passed on for generations and generations or by sharing our personality traits with adopted children.
With that said, I feel that every person has the right to choose the best scenario that either allows them to pursue this possibility or to decide that he or she has no interest in doing so. What I don't think should happen, is that a person has these options limited on account of who he or she is partnered with. If two people are going along fine until they hit this very important issue and realize they wanted two entirely different things, I don't believe that each of these individuals ought to be obligated to stay with his/her partner for the sake of maintaining a relationship.
By no means do I want to downplay the importance of the love and mutual devotion between couples but I don't think it's reasonable to claim that Brad did the wrong thing by leaving or that Angelina was a homewrecker. It's hard to break something, in this instance, a marriage, that is truly and honestly unshakeable. Pitt should not have cheated on Aniston (in fact, that was his true crime) but his decision to leave a woman with seemingly little interest in childrearing for someone who shared his desire to be a parent makes perfect sense to me. Should we really be deprived of children or forced to have them because the person we love has other interests? Actually, how can we believe someone truly loves us if he or she doesn't want us to do the best we can to get things we want out of life? What's up with that?
Cut to about ten years later and now the woman is juggling 6 kids, a career as an action film star, her peace work in foreign countries and a sex life with Mr. Brad Pitt! Things have certainly changed for her but it's one particular moment in her life that gets my attention: the moment when she "stole" Brad Pitt from Jennifer Aniston.
I'm clearly a devotee of celebrity gossip and of celebrity interviews and I always remember hearing that Brad Pitt wanted children. In fact, I think there is an American law that determines that it would be a crime for him not reproduce. It's there in fine print somewhere, I swear. The man's gorgeous. Jennifer Aniston, on the other hand, clearly didn't want to: didn't wanna be pregnant and didn't want to adopt as evidenced by the fact that she hasn't done so in the five years since this all broke out. May sound harsh but any woman who says, "no, no Brad Pitt, I'm holding out for someone better to be the father of my children (biological or not)" can't have it all together. That might've been a fair excuse while she was starring on "Friends" but after it ended, they still stayed married without having any babies. Then entered Angelina.
The reason I'm thinking about this now is because last night, I was speaking with two friends about the movie Salt. They both agreed (in jest) that Angelina was wrong to have taken a woman's husband and it got me thinking. What right does any spouse have to deprive the other of a child? Alternatively, what right does a partner have to force the other person to be a parent if he or she doesn't want to? They wisely asked me why I assumed that she even could have kids or didn't want to have children. They suggested that maybe at one point towards the beginning of their marriage they both wanted to be childless but he changed his mind or that maybe they planned for children and then she decided against it. Maybe there were fertility issues involved. Whatever the case may be, I don't believe that two people who are in love have to or should stay together if they have radically opposing ideas about having children.
They could've adopted children or been foster parents. There are a multitude of ways for people to become parents. But a few definite ways not to be a parent include not getting pregnant and not taking in children who aren't biologically yours. In the Jennifer-Brad-Angelina triangle, it's clear that after he left Aniston, he chose (along with Jolie) to become parents to a brood of children. Clearly he wanted to be a parent: no man finds a woman with two adopted children, stays with her as she adopts another and then proceeds to procreate twice more with her if he isn't interested in the job.
In the conversation we had, my friends did the crucial job of asking me to illuminate my point and why I believed so fervently that this shift in relationships was understandable and just. I didn't make the judgment call because I think women should all be babymakers or that I was trying to claim that women who can't have children are somehow less than women. The truth is, I would make the same assertion if a woman wanted to have children and her male partner didn't. This is not, at it's core, a question of gender issues. To me, reproductive rights and fairness are the focus of this debate regardless of whether the person is a man or a woman. Not to go all creepy and morbid (i.e. Angelina circa 1999) but the fact of the matter is that we are all on this planet for a limited amount of time and the closest any of us gets to immortality, should we desire it, is by reproducing our DNA so that it can be passed on for generations and generations or by sharing our personality traits with adopted children.
With that said, I feel that every person has the right to choose the best scenario that either allows them to pursue this possibility or to decide that he or she has no interest in doing so. What I don't think should happen, is that a person has these options limited on account of who he or she is partnered with. If two people are going along fine until they hit this very important issue and realize they wanted two entirely different things, I don't believe that each of these individuals ought to be obligated to stay with his/her partner for the sake of maintaining a relationship.
By no means do I want to downplay the importance of the love and mutual devotion between couples but I don't think it's reasonable to claim that Brad did the wrong thing by leaving or that Angelina was a homewrecker. It's hard to break something, in this instance, a marriage, that is truly and honestly unshakeable. Pitt should not have cheated on Aniston (in fact, that was his true crime) but his decision to leave a woman with seemingly little interest in childrearing for someone who shared his desire to be a parent makes perfect sense to me. Should we really be deprived of children or forced to have them because the person we love has other interests? Actually, how can we believe someone truly loves us if he or she doesn't want us to do the best we can to get things we want out of life? What's up with that?
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
"The Good Ones" and "The Bad Ones": A Debate about the Mosque Near Ground Zero
On the morning of Tuesday, September 11th 2001 I had newly become a sixth grader. By that afternoon, my world had been rocked. I spent my entire childhood living in a Battery Park City apartment not even two blocks away from the Twin Towers. My home was destroyed that day and my sense of security in this city and frankly in this world was absolutely shattered. My family was fortunate enough to survive that day and to have started our lives over again but the hurt of the day will never leave me.
With that said, someone might assume that I would harbor prejudice against all Muslim people because the people responsible for the attacks were also Muslim. But I don't. Even though a huge part of my world was ruined on that day, I don't make the inexcusable mistake of associating all Muslim people with those who created terror that September morning. That's why I've been so shocked by the extremely negative response to the proposed Mosque that could be built 2 blocks away from Ground Zero. The other thing that gets me, which my mother articulated very well to me when we spoke of this, is that the title "Ground Zero Mosque" sounds just like a headline constructed by advertising executives sitting around a table, figuring out how to "brand" this story. The mosque will be at Park Place which is not on top of Ground Zero nor directly next to it. It's two blocks away. In New York real estate, we don't even go two blocks without multiple Starbucks' and Duane Reades.' 2 blocks in Manhattan terms means a WORLD of difference.
Leaving real estate aside, let's take a quick glance at the Constitution of the United States. You know, the principles that make us uniquely American. The rules we're all supposed to live by. The undeniable standards which we're supposed to hold ourselves to. Now if you don't like reading too much and it gives you a headache to go too deeply into it, then let's just look at the first one. The very first one says the following: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." What most people take this to mean is that you have the freedom to practice religion regardless of where you choose to worship. This means that all the people in downtown Manhattan and anywhere who are rejecting the plan to build a mosque near the site of the September 11th attacks are actually suggesting that the builders forego the first principle of the United States Constitution to make an exception...where there absolutely shouldn't be one.
While I believe that this very basic legal reason should suffice and should end all public discussion about whether this building should be built, there is clearly something deeper here. These protestors are asking for the prohibition of this building because it would be an official indication that the U.S. has declared Islam an un-American religion. The problems with this are limitless but here are a few key points that stick out in my mind: 1) how dare we declare anyone's religion unfit or unworthy when our good ol' American principles of liberty and freedom directly state otherwise?; 2) calling ourselves the land of the free and the home of the brave is rendered entirely useless when we try to place bans on people simply because they share the same religion or ethnicity as those directly linked to terrorist attacks; and 3) I'm so surprised that after years of trying to be PC and hide racism towards, oh I don't know, every minority race that exists in this country, people haven't figured out how to conceal their Islamophobia.
From another angle, let's think about this: after Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995 (the largest terror attack prior to 9/11), no one said that all blond males in Oklahoma City should be banned from living in the area. The only time people are willing to blame an entire class of people for the actions of a few is when the criminal or criminals belong to a minority group.
In the times when I've watched the news long enough to sit through the stories about these protestors, I've watched people make comments like "this mosque is un-American" and "they can have a mosque wherever they want but just not here" and, my personal favorite, "we don't know which ones are the good ones and which ones are the bad ones." Now if the rules that define our nation allow us to practice religion freely, then no one religion can be persecuted as being "un-American". Furthermore, the second statement suggests that you can be free everywhere except for right here. Reminds me of when blacks were free to live however they wanted in their homes and go to school anywhere BUT with little white children. The people foaming at the mouth with signs of how their sons and daughters and cousins and fathers died that day have let their emotions, and not their knowledge of the rules of this society, get the better of them. Whether you personally feel comfortable with a religion or not, or use all Muslims as scapegoats in your own mind, you really shouldn't claim that you want to protect the rights and freedoms of the United States and enter a public sphere saying that some people just don't deserve that.
And the final statement about the "good ones" and the "bad ones" is the best because it illuminates the struggle that minorities continue to deal with in this country. When people start seeing bad apples in one group and using those examples to generalize about everyone who even remotely looks like those criminals, we've lost it all as a nation. I'm pretty damn sure that the potential mosque goers at this site will be no more like the terrorists that day than I am like any black criminal on Death Row.
We can't just bend the rules because this was a massive volume of people who died or because it shook up the nation or because it is "insensitive." A mosque and Islam have little connection to the terrorists who flew into the towers. It's not only embarrassingly racist and prejudiced to hold these beliefs but it's really shameful and inconceivable. Whether you feel personally comfortable with Islam or any religion for that matter, it is certain that it would be illegal not to build this house of worship on the grounds of religion alone. If the mosque isn't built, and didn't join the other mosques and churches that are already in the area, it should be because of zoning issues and financial reasons alone. I mean are we really gonna say a certain group of people should be less free to practice religion because people who looked like them once did something horrifically destructive? What the hell is up with that?
With that said, someone might assume that I would harbor prejudice against all Muslim people because the people responsible for the attacks were also Muslim. But I don't. Even though a huge part of my world was ruined on that day, I don't make the inexcusable mistake of associating all Muslim people with those who created terror that September morning. That's why I've been so shocked by the extremely negative response to the proposed Mosque that could be built 2 blocks away from Ground Zero. The other thing that gets me, which my mother articulated very well to me when we spoke of this, is that the title "Ground Zero Mosque" sounds just like a headline constructed by advertising executives sitting around a table, figuring out how to "brand" this story. The mosque will be at Park Place which is not on top of Ground Zero nor directly next to it. It's two blocks away. In New York real estate, we don't even go two blocks without multiple Starbucks' and Duane Reades.' 2 blocks in Manhattan terms means a WORLD of difference.
Leaving real estate aside, let's take a quick glance at the Constitution of the United States. You know, the principles that make us uniquely American. The rules we're all supposed to live by. The undeniable standards which we're supposed to hold ourselves to. Now if you don't like reading too much and it gives you a headache to go too deeply into it, then let's just look at the first one. The very first one says the following: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." What most people take this to mean is that you have the freedom to practice religion regardless of where you choose to worship. This means that all the people in downtown Manhattan and anywhere who are rejecting the plan to build a mosque near the site of the September 11th attacks are actually suggesting that the builders forego the first principle of the United States Constitution to make an exception...where there absolutely shouldn't be one.
While I believe that this very basic legal reason should suffice and should end all public discussion about whether this building should be built, there is clearly something deeper here. These protestors are asking for the prohibition of this building because it would be an official indication that the U.S. has declared Islam an un-American religion. The problems with this are limitless but here are a few key points that stick out in my mind: 1) how dare we declare anyone's religion unfit or unworthy when our good ol' American principles of liberty and freedom directly state otherwise?; 2) calling ourselves the land of the free and the home of the brave is rendered entirely useless when we try to place bans on people simply because they share the same religion or ethnicity as those directly linked to terrorist attacks; and 3) I'm so surprised that after years of trying to be PC and hide racism towards, oh I don't know, every minority race that exists in this country, people haven't figured out how to conceal their Islamophobia.
From another angle, let's think about this: after Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995 (the largest terror attack prior to 9/11), no one said that all blond males in Oklahoma City should be banned from living in the area. The only time people are willing to blame an entire class of people for the actions of a few is when the criminal or criminals belong to a minority group.
In the times when I've watched the news long enough to sit through the stories about these protestors, I've watched people make comments like "this mosque is un-American" and "they can have a mosque wherever they want but just not here" and, my personal favorite, "we don't know which ones are the good ones and which ones are the bad ones." Now if the rules that define our nation allow us to practice religion freely, then no one religion can be persecuted as being "un-American". Furthermore, the second statement suggests that you can be free everywhere except for right here. Reminds me of when blacks were free to live however they wanted in their homes and go to school anywhere BUT with little white children. The people foaming at the mouth with signs of how their sons and daughters and cousins and fathers died that day have let their emotions, and not their knowledge of the rules of this society, get the better of them. Whether you personally feel comfortable with a religion or not, or use all Muslims as scapegoats in your own mind, you really shouldn't claim that you want to protect the rights and freedoms of the United States and enter a public sphere saying that some people just don't deserve that.
And the final statement about the "good ones" and the "bad ones" is the best because it illuminates the struggle that minorities continue to deal with in this country. When people start seeing bad apples in one group and using those examples to generalize about everyone who even remotely looks like those criminals, we've lost it all as a nation. I'm pretty damn sure that the potential mosque goers at this site will be no more like the terrorists that day than I am like any black criminal on Death Row.
We can't just bend the rules because this was a massive volume of people who died or because it shook up the nation or because it is "insensitive." A mosque and Islam have little connection to the terrorists who flew into the towers. It's not only embarrassingly racist and prejudiced to hold these beliefs but it's really shameful and inconceivable. Whether you feel personally comfortable with Islam or any religion for that matter, it is certain that it would be illegal not to build this house of worship on the grounds of religion alone. If the mosque isn't built, and didn't join the other mosques and churches that are already in the area, it should be because of zoning issues and financial reasons alone. I mean are we really gonna say a certain group of people should be less free to practice religion because people who looked like them once did something horrifically destructive? What the hell is up with that?
Friday, August 6, 2010
In Defense of Men: A Look at Men in the Movie Industry
One of the joys of a liberal arts education is that you get to take random classes that will probably never serve you again save a few key moments. I realized the other day, though, that one of things I took away from my Psychology 1 class freshman year was the following phrase: "'is' does not imply 'ought'" While the professor was invoking Hume's wisdom to talk about the fact that though a certain genetic pattern may exist, it does not mean that it should necessarily demonstrate itself, I adapted the phrase to fit my own meaning. See, I was chatting with my younger brother who is the biggest movie guru on the face of the earth and I started asking him about movie trailers. I did my usual thing where I partially ask him a question and partially harass him about his response. Seems to me that if a Martian (yes, bear with me, a Martian) were to visit Earth and head to the nearest Loews, he/she/it would assume that most men are slobs and that women are beautiful props.
Movie trailers for films like the recent "The Other Guys" with Will Ferrell and Eva Mendes, "Knocked Up" with Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl, "Dodgeball" with Vince Vaughan and Christine Taylor, and practically any Judd Apatow film paint comedy through very masculine lenses. And not strong, heroic, valiant lenses but rather slovenly and grotesque ones. Furthermore, this perspective also clouds dramatic and action film trailers like "Fast and the Furious" so much that it leaves very little room in the way of 3 dimensional female characterization: in a 45 second clip, 25 seconds are devoted to cheesy dialogue between men, 15 seconds are allotted for gunshots and explosions and 5 seconds are left for a hot babe to sashay sultrily through a room. It's a tried and true formula.
Typically, when I notice portrayals of women like this, I get a frustrated because they're just other instances of females being relegated to second tier roles. It wasn't always this way, though. Movies like "Marnie" from 1964 and 1961's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" centered on the female protagonists, with all of their flaws and endearing characteristics. There was no effort to hide their weaknesses or romanticize them but they were instead given the decency of being examined from all angles. Even movies in the 80's like "Sixteen Candles" focused on Molly Ringwald and all of the frustrations that come with being a teen girl. So when I started to question my brother about why it is that women aren't the focal point of many popular movies, whether comedic or dramatic, he gave a very simple and understandable explanation. He told me that the biggest demographic of tickets sales are men aged 18-30. Of course movies come from a very masculine perspective because they're primarily pitching to a masculine audience and, considering this is a capitalist society, that equation makes a hell of a lot of sense.
That's when I thought back to the "'is' does not imply 'ought" equation. Simply because movie goers tend to be male, does that mean that a female perspective should be left out? I mean, after all, women do make up 50% of the population so it seems like an odd omission to pretend that their only function is to be shrewish figures whose bodies men crave but whose opinions they could do without. But a story of sexism towards women is an old one, staler than that loaf of bread you've held onto too long in your kitchen cupboard. What really started to interest me, though, in that moment is how unfair these movies are to men.
I get, as my brother told me, that these types of films represent a fantasy: a man can be however disheveled he wants (in comedic films, that is) and get a hot chick. Who says, though, that men want to think of themselves that way? That they want to maintain the lowest common denominator of proficiency at life? No doubt, the prospect of being able to do as you want and act like you want is a freeing one but it doesn't represent men in a positive light. Is every man comfortable with the fact that a huge sector of media represents them as socially inept losers with little going for them and a sense of humor that doesn't transcend gender lines? In "Superbad," for example, the funniest bits of the film are when Seth Rogen and Michael Cera engage one another but as soon as women enter the equation, they feel the need to tone their banter WAY down. There's definitely truth to this sort of behavior but it doesn't feel idyllic to me.
If I were an average dude, age 18-30, I'd rather pay $15 to watch a movie where a basic dude with a basic job and basic hygiene gets a supermodel. Not a Jonah Hill, Michelin Man-look alike or an unclean looking Vince Vaughan type. And the worst part is that it’s not as though these movies are entirely humorless: in fact, they can be extremely entertaining. They would be ten times,funnier, though, if there wasn’t the added distraction of wondering how on God’s green earth Seth Rogen managed to make a modern, working woman like Katherine Heigl keep his baby after a one night stand. I wouldn't fantasize about being incompetent because that wouldn't reflect well on my membership in the male species and it wouldn’t speak highly of my standards for myself.
So as much as it bothers me as a chica to watch movies that turn people like me (i.e. those with breasts) into bobble heads or uptight princesses, I'd really like to see the movie industry paint a better picture of what it is to be a man. How is it that a male dominated field can't manage to balance relatable actors and a few redeeming qualities in its characterization of men? Dude, what's up with that?
Movie trailers for films like the recent "The Other Guys" with Will Ferrell and Eva Mendes, "Knocked Up" with Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl, "Dodgeball" with Vince Vaughan and Christine Taylor, and practically any Judd Apatow film paint comedy through very masculine lenses. And not strong, heroic, valiant lenses but rather slovenly and grotesque ones. Furthermore, this perspective also clouds dramatic and action film trailers like "Fast and the Furious" so much that it leaves very little room in the way of 3 dimensional female characterization: in a 45 second clip, 25 seconds are devoted to cheesy dialogue between men, 15 seconds are allotted for gunshots and explosions and 5 seconds are left for a hot babe to sashay sultrily through a room. It's a tried and true formula.
Typically, when I notice portrayals of women like this, I get a frustrated because they're just other instances of females being relegated to second tier roles. It wasn't always this way, though. Movies like "Marnie" from 1964 and 1961's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" centered on the female protagonists, with all of their flaws and endearing characteristics. There was no effort to hide their weaknesses or romanticize them but they were instead given the decency of being examined from all angles. Even movies in the 80's like "Sixteen Candles" focused on Molly Ringwald and all of the frustrations that come with being a teen girl. So when I started to question my brother about why it is that women aren't the focal point of many popular movies, whether comedic or dramatic, he gave a very simple and understandable explanation. He told me that the biggest demographic of tickets sales are men aged 18-30. Of course movies come from a very masculine perspective because they're primarily pitching to a masculine audience and, considering this is a capitalist society, that equation makes a hell of a lot of sense.
That's when I thought back to the "'is' does not imply 'ought" equation. Simply because movie goers tend to be male, does that mean that a female perspective should be left out? I mean, after all, women do make up 50% of the population so it seems like an odd omission to pretend that their only function is to be shrewish figures whose bodies men crave but whose opinions they could do without. But a story of sexism towards women is an old one, staler than that loaf of bread you've held onto too long in your kitchen cupboard. What really started to interest me, though, in that moment is how unfair these movies are to men.
I get, as my brother told me, that these types of films represent a fantasy: a man can be however disheveled he wants (in comedic films, that is) and get a hot chick. Who says, though, that men want to think of themselves that way? That they want to maintain the lowest common denominator of proficiency at life? No doubt, the prospect of being able to do as you want and act like you want is a freeing one but it doesn't represent men in a positive light. Is every man comfortable with the fact that a huge sector of media represents them as socially inept losers with little going for them and a sense of humor that doesn't transcend gender lines? In "Superbad," for example, the funniest bits of the film are when Seth Rogen and Michael Cera engage one another but as soon as women enter the equation, they feel the need to tone their banter WAY down. There's definitely truth to this sort of behavior but it doesn't feel idyllic to me.
If I were an average dude, age 18-30, I'd rather pay $15 to watch a movie where a basic dude with a basic job and basic hygiene gets a supermodel. Not a Jonah Hill, Michelin Man-look alike or an unclean looking Vince Vaughan type. And the worst part is that it’s not as though these movies are entirely humorless: in fact, they can be extremely entertaining. They would be ten times,funnier, though, if there wasn’t the added distraction of wondering how on God’s green earth Seth Rogen managed to make a modern, working woman like Katherine Heigl keep his baby after a one night stand. I wouldn't fantasize about being incompetent because that wouldn't reflect well on my membership in the male species and it wouldn’t speak highly of my standards for myself.
So as much as it bothers me as a chica to watch movies that turn people like me (i.e. those with breasts) into bobble heads or uptight princesses, I'd really like to see the movie industry paint a better picture of what it is to be a man. How is it that a male dominated field can't manage to balance relatable actors and a few redeeming qualities in its characterization of men? Dude, what's up with that?
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Is it 2010 or 1950? Questions about Sexism in Modern Television programming
Sometimes I don't even know why I bother to watch TV anymore. The other day, I literally sat through an advertisement for a show about dwarfs who run a pitbull rescue organization. The head dwarf's name is Shorty. C'mon, son. It's the summer, though, and because I've been gainfully unemployed since my return from Espana, I've lapsed into turning on the 'set every now and again. I did that this past Sunday to disastrous results. Don't get me wrong. I love attractive, successful black men and I suppose the football player Chad Ochocinco is technically one of those. However, I do require that those same men not speak Ebonics and that they have some grasp on a language with an actual dictionary. Not so with Ochocinco in his new reality dating show, "The Ultimate Catch."
Better yet, I'd prefer if he didn't outsource his dating life to VH1 for a reality show. I mean I get it: how hot would it be to have a collection of hot singles hanging on your every last word? As I continued to watch the show, Heaven knows why, I found a few things interesting. Number 1: I don't buy this "I have no preference for a particular type of woman and anyway, people are too hung up on race" attitude that Ochocinco espouses. Out of 17 young girls, he picked 2 black women to be in his top 16 and the rest are mostly brunette white women. The man clearly has a preference and he should just own up to it. Issue number 2: what separates an attractive girl from her less attractive peers? I mean if we're gonna play this game of reverting back to the good ol' days when women existed merely for the benefit of men, can we at least establish a clear rulebook of how they need to look to do this? I've always been confused about what it is men find sexy. Clearly, the answer is that they like ALL types of women. Perhaps what I should really be asking is what is it that they find definitively unattractive? I've often heard guys talk about that "ugly chick" or that "fat girl" and then assumed that only absolute bombshells will suffice. But then I watch wonderful shows like this where the man picks both unequivocally beautiful girls as well as ones who look like they baked too long in the oven and my head starts spinning. And the real shocker is that he reacted to all of them, the pretties and the not-so-pretties, with the same enthusiasm.
Or maybe I should amend that: he DID show different levels of enthusiasm for each girl. As a matter of fact, he determined the ones he liked in a ranking system similar to one that you'd find in a March Madness bracket. This, to me, is even more tragic than Flavor Flav's show, the Bachelor or any other dreadful TV dating show. Not only are women assessed based on their looks, the number of times they make out with the main protagonist or how many bitch fests they get into with other women in their obligatory mansions. Here, the women are directly given a ranking, starting with 1-16 and paired up with another contestant so that they can be judged comparitively. Speaking of objectification in my prior post, I feel like this must be it. A man evaluating a woman, giving her a number according to his particular preference and then expecting those women to compete for his affection.....not too cute.
And it's really not too cute in 2010. The thing is, the minute I turned away from that show, I landed one of the many channels that routinely plays "Family Guy." I will admit, hands down, that some of the writing on that show is absolutely hilarious and brilliant. But there's definitely an undercurrent of disdain and agression towards women that's popular in a lot of male and/or masculine humor of a show like this. As if it wasn't sad enough to watch these treacherous looking women teeter on their heels as this man looked them up and down on VH1, here I am watching these shows with my mother as Peter says to Meg "You can't give up sex. You're what we call a 'Practice girl.'" Both my mother and I are Harvard educated women sitting in a room in the modern era with a Black President and our kind (aka womenfolk) are still being disparaged left and right.
I'm not such a wet blanket that I believe we should entirely abandon all elements of pop culture just to make sure no one's been offended.It's not enough, however, to simply say "shut off the tv if you don't like it." As long as someone's watching, whether it's me or your cousin Dan or any other random person, those things become filtered into our collective cultural conscience and affect they way we view and interact with one another.I would like to hear a strong argument from people who watch these shows without a critical about whether they'd want their future daughters to grow up with these subtle but omnipresent messages.Why can't I imagine a solid response? What's up with that?
Better yet, I'd prefer if he didn't outsource his dating life to VH1 for a reality show. I mean I get it: how hot would it be to have a collection of hot singles hanging on your every last word? As I continued to watch the show, Heaven knows why, I found a few things interesting. Number 1: I don't buy this "I have no preference for a particular type of woman and anyway, people are too hung up on race" attitude that Ochocinco espouses. Out of 17 young girls, he picked 2 black women to be in his top 16 and the rest are mostly brunette white women. The man clearly has a preference and he should just own up to it. Issue number 2: what separates an attractive girl from her less attractive peers? I mean if we're gonna play this game of reverting back to the good ol' days when women existed merely for the benefit of men, can we at least establish a clear rulebook of how they need to look to do this? I've always been confused about what it is men find sexy. Clearly, the answer is that they like ALL types of women. Perhaps what I should really be asking is what is it that they find definitively unattractive? I've often heard guys talk about that "ugly chick" or that "fat girl" and then assumed that only absolute bombshells will suffice. But then I watch wonderful shows like this where the man picks both unequivocally beautiful girls as well as ones who look like they baked too long in the oven and my head starts spinning. And the real shocker is that he reacted to all of them, the pretties and the not-so-pretties, with the same enthusiasm.
Or maybe I should amend that: he DID show different levels of enthusiasm for each girl. As a matter of fact, he determined the ones he liked in a ranking system similar to one that you'd find in a March Madness bracket. This, to me, is even more tragic than Flavor Flav's show, the Bachelor or any other dreadful TV dating show. Not only are women assessed based on their looks, the number of times they make out with the main protagonist or how many bitch fests they get into with other women in their obligatory mansions. Here, the women are directly given a ranking, starting with 1-16 and paired up with another contestant so that they can be judged comparitively. Speaking of objectification in my prior post, I feel like this must be it. A man evaluating a woman, giving her a number according to his particular preference and then expecting those women to compete for his affection.....not too cute.
And it's really not too cute in 2010. The thing is, the minute I turned away from that show, I landed one of the many channels that routinely plays "Family Guy." I will admit, hands down, that some of the writing on that show is absolutely hilarious and brilliant. But there's definitely an undercurrent of disdain and agression towards women that's popular in a lot of male and/or masculine humor of a show like this. As if it wasn't sad enough to watch these treacherous looking women teeter on their heels as this man looked them up and down on VH1, here I am watching these shows with my mother as Peter says to Meg "You can't give up sex. You're what we call a 'Practice girl.'" Both my mother and I are Harvard educated women sitting in a room in the modern era with a Black President and our kind (aka womenfolk) are still being disparaged left and right.
I'm not such a wet blanket that I believe we should entirely abandon all elements of pop culture just to make sure no one's been offended.It's not enough, however, to simply say "shut off the tv if you don't like it." As long as someone's watching, whether it's me or your cousin Dan or any other random person, those things become filtered into our collective cultural conscience and affect they way we view and interact with one another.I would like to hear a strong argument from people who watch these shows without a critical about whether they'd want their future daughters to grow up with these subtle but omnipresent messages.Why can't I imagine a solid response? What's up with that?
Monday, July 19, 2010
Globalization and Objectification Pt. 2: Morocco
I love the times in life when you're handed lemons and you choose to go to Morocco. One such time came approximately 4 Fridays ago when I decided to participate in a tour of three Moroccan cities named Tanger, Tetuan and Chefchaouen for a weekend. After hours of bus and boat travel, I finally reached Africa. This was my second time in the Motherland. What I came to realize, though, was that this African nation was nothing like South Africa, which I had traveled to three years prior. In fact, the entire weekend I was there, I only saw about 3 other people with black skin. I was also made aware of the rarity of my visit and presence as a black American in Morocco by several people on my trip.
Thankfully, all of their comments and jokes were in good fun and never meant to harm me. But I did find it hilarious that our tour guide and his companion insisted on calling me their "Soul Sister" and that other men in the streets felt comfortable re-naming me "Mama Africa" and "Obama." The irony was priceless: I was being reminded that I'm black more openly in Africa than in any other place I've ever been. No this wasn't the Africa where people had been segregated into different castes with a system of separation and degradation. I wasn't in a post-Apartheid African country. I was just as much (if not more) an anomaly in Spanish-Arabic Morocco as I am living on the Upper West Side of New York City. And yet there was something playful about the black American and Arabic Moroccan dynamic that I encountered in those few days.
I had an extreme connection to them because the African continent is something that we, meaning myself and the Moroccan people, hold close to our hearts. However, we felt that way for very different reasons. For them, it's their homeland but we definitely don't share a racial identity. For me, merely being on African soil had an almost indescribable significance, as if I had returned to sites close to "home."
As I started thinking through my days and my time there, it really dawned on me that there are definitely some values and interests that are shared between Western and non-Western cultures. Morocco and the U.S. had similar, yet vastly different opinions of me: they both agree that I'm black and somehow an "other," but while Morocco celebrates that,the U.S. has yet to make up its mind about me. Similarly, the two countries share a bit of pop culture. My guide insisted that he be called Michael Douglas because he knew in his blessed heart that he was the actor’s doppelganger and said he was looking for his Catherine Zeta-Jones. The weekend was filled with similar antiquated pop culture references that would've been fitting 10 years ago and I was charmed by every last one of them.
It's really creepy and hilarious at the same time to think of two wildly different nations sharing some of the same cultural and racial images. Why is that wherever an American travels, she can't go long without being reminded of some element of U.S. life? Our American tentacles reach all corners of the globe, whether the women in that country are culturally and socially permitted to show their faces in public or not. Sure, they had to try to establish connections to us in order to make us feel comfortable in their environment and so that we'd be more inclined to buy one of their beautiful but overpriced rugs. But it strikes me as odd that in order for us to get on the same page, we harkened back to U.S. idols and delicious U.S. presidents( I do intend to be Mrs. Obama one day....sorry, Michelle) in order to feel each other out rather than Moroccan public figures. At the risk of sounding very naive, I'll ask this: why the hell do they know so much more about intrinsic parts of American culture (our racial schizophrenia, our utter OBSESSION with Michael Douglas, the list goes on....)while our only image of North Africa and of Arabic countries in general is either of war zones, burqas and Aladdin? Furthermore, how is it that no matter whether I travel to North Africa or stay in the U.S., the very fact of my existence is a constant source of curiosity to all those I encounter (as evidenced with silent stares or elated shouts of "Baila, baila, Morena!"= "Dance, dance, Black girl!" in Chef Chaouen)? More importantly, now that I've returned to the States, why should I be deprived of the pleasure of being called Mama Africa every 20 minutes? Life's really just so unfair. What's up with that?
Thankfully, all of their comments and jokes were in good fun and never meant to harm me. But I did find it hilarious that our tour guide and his companion insisted on calling me their "Soul Sister" and that other men in the streets felt comfortable re-naming me "Mama Africa" and "Obama." The irony was priceless: I was being reminded that I'm black more openly in Africa than in any other place I've ever been. No this wasn't the Africa where people had been segregated into different castes with a system of separation and degradation. I wasn't in a post-Apartheid African country. I was just as much (if not more) an anomaly in Spanish-Arabic Morocco as I am living on the Upper West Side of New York City. And yet there was something playful about the black American and Arabic Moroccan dynamic that I encountered in those few days.
I had an extreme connection to them because the African continent is something that we, meaning myself and the Moroccan people, hold close to our hearts. However, we felt that way for very different reasons. For them, it's their homeland but we definitely don't share a racial identity. For me, merely being on African soil had an almost indescribable significance, as if I had returned to sites close to "home."
As I started thinking through my days and my time there, it really dawned on me that there are definitely some values and interests that are shared between Western and non-Western cultures. Morocco and the U.S. had similar, yet vastly different opinions of me: they both agree that I'm black and somehow an "other," but while Morocco celebrates that,the U.S. has yet to make up its mind about me. Similarly, the two countries share a bit of pop culture. My guide insisted that he be called Michael Douglas because he knew in his blessed heart that he was the actor’s doppelganger and said he was looking for his Catherine Zeta-Jones. The weekend was filled with similar antiquated pop culture references that would've been fitting 10 years ago and I was charmed by every last one of them.
It's really creepy and hilarious at the same time to think of two wildly different nations sharing some of the same cultural and racial images. Why is that wherever an American travels, she can't go long without being reminded of some element of U.S. life? Our American tentacles reach all corners of the globe, whether the women in that country are culturally and socially permitted to show their faces in public or not. Sure, they had to try to establish connections to us in order to make us feel comfortable in their environment and so that we'd be more inclined to buy one of their beautiful but overpriced rugs. But it strikes me as odd that in order for us to get on the same page, we harkened back to U.S. idols and delicious U.S. presidents( I do intend to be Mrs. Obama one day....sorry, Michelle) in order to feel each other out rather than Moroccan public figures. At the risk of sounding very naive, I'll ask this: why the hell do they know so much more about intrinsic parts of American culture (our racial schizophrenia, our utter OBSESSION with Michael Douglas, the list goes on....)while our only image of North Africa and of Arabic countries in general is either of war zones, burqas and Aladdin? Furthermore, how is it that no matter whether I travel to North Africa or stay in the U.S., the very fact of my existence is a constant source of curiosity to all those I encounter (as evidenced with silent stares or elated shouts of "Baila, baila, Morena!"= "Dance, dance, Black girl!" in Chef Chaouen)? More importantly, now that I've returned to the States, why should I be deprived of the pleasure of being called Mama Africa every 20 minutes? Life's really just so unfair. What's up with that?
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Globalization and Objectification Pt. 1: Spain
Primero: Viva Espana!! So happy that Spain won the World Cup! Now, on to more important matters. If you know me, you know that I’m not big on sports. Sure, I watch Yankees games with my Dad when I’m home, know basic rules to most sports and have played (bench warmer) on a few high school teams but you won’t find me seeking sports out in my day-to-day life. That’s why I find it incredibly funny that the first time I actually cared to know what was going in the sports world was when I spent this past June in Spain studying abroad for part of the summer. Generally, if I have any interest at all in a team or in a game it’s mostly because I want to know more about the players...you know, as people. I’ve generated several theories about these guys, especially one a few years ago about how Melky Cabrera and Robinson Canoe were secret gay lovers. And about how Jason Giambi was manic-depressive. And about why black basketball players only marry white women. But these are stories for another time. My main point is that the only way I’ve been able to get into sports in the past is by envisioning the life stories of those who played them. Not so in this case: I was only in it for pure “objectification” purposes.
What better way to celebrate the diversity of people on this planet then by seeking out the hottest soccer players from 32 teams around the globe? I mean there were dark ones, thin ones, ripped ones, short hair, braided hair, brown eyes, green eyes-- there was really just a lot of beauty to take in at once. Yes, sometimes I did want to know where the players were from and how they got to this point but, more importantly, I just wanted them to take their shirts off every now and again.
Let me take a step back, though. The reason I put the term “objectification” in quotes is because I hesitate to use that word as freely as other people tend to sometimes. Objectification is most definitely a real phenomenon but it doesn’t mean that something bad or dirty has happened every time someone appreciates another person’s body. For example, as I was sitting in a room with a group of Spanish men and American women watching the match between Spain and Honduras a few weeks ago,I looked over to the girls and said “I love objectifying men" with glee as if this was some type of revenge for all the women in the world who’ve been gawked and stared at throughout their lives. At the time I felt I was objectifying them by the very act of watching them run around and insisting in my own head that they were nothing more Adonises. Indeed,in my mind, I had done what men do to women all the time: I had turned them into desirable objects.
But question: isn’t our status as sexual beings a large part of what makes us human (and not inanimate)? We got here because our parents had sex. In fact, besides test tube babies, everyone on the planet who’s ever lived came as a result of sex. It’s not something to shy away from or think of as some nasty part of us. I don’t think that the mere act of appreciating the physical qualities of a man or woman constitutes as "objectification." It just seems like a term that is thrown around to loosely and that it waters down the potency of what it actually means to shape someone into a thing or a tool rather than a being.
To make this distinction a little bit clearer, let me use some real world examples. I spent a month in Spain and had more compliments thrown my way simply walking down the street than I ever have in my 20 years living in the US. Whether it was the the novelty of it or my general excitement to be living in a new place, I never felt as if I’d been turned into an object just because people were reacting to my presence. I was just being me, walking down the street and if someone cared to holler, that didn’t diminish my human value in anyway shape or form.
On the other hand, there are definite times when women (and sometimes men) are looked at purely as objects, and at these moments, objectification becomes a real issue. Video vixens, for example, act as if the only thing they live for is sex and pleasing men. No surprise here: that's their job. I'm not trying to pass a moral judgment on their professions but I am willing to say that they allow themselves to be portrayed as accessories for men's fantasies. None of these rappers seem to value what pleases these women or how they can work to mutually turn each other on. The women, like props, are in the background of the scenes to make the male leads seem extra capable and attractive. Whether the man looks like Rick Ross or Nelly, all women around them are (unrealistically) excited to be in the shot, just to be near a rap star. Whether the sexy scenario makes sense or not, there they are. The video girls in skimpy clothes are just dying to turn around and back that thang up for whoever can get them on TV.
In thinking about this term objectification, there are definitely many loopholes and subtleties that are difficult to discern but if I can try to illuminate it, I think this is it: when I watch teams of beautiful men doing what it is they love the most (i.e. playing soccer), it’s not designed so that I look upon them with lust. If it happens, that’s simply a byproduct. If instead they went out into the field and started flexing particular muscles to an all female and homosexual male crowd, then that’d be a different story. They would then be purposefully acting in a way that demonstrated that they knew how they were supposed to perform in order to excite other people. Likewise, if a man notices and comments on a woman's beauty with a "Que Bonita"without an expectation of her doing anything in return for the compliment,this is not objectification. If, on the other hand, he says, he whistles and says "Hey yo, Ma, can I talk to you for a second?" with an expectation that she walk over to him, that's, again, a different story.
There's room for us as sexual beings to notice and appreciate the beauty of others without looking at them purely as our playthings. Attraction is fun but using someone isn't. These are difficult topics to wrestle with and I wish I could be more clear. Why am I always looking for a clear cut, black and white explanation, though? What's up with that?
What better way to celebrate the diversity of people on this planet then by seeking out the hottest soccer players from 32 teams around the globe? I mean there were dark ones, thin ones, ripped ones, short hair, braided hair, brown eyes, green eyes-- there was really just a lot of beauty to take in at once. Yes, sometimes I did want to know where the players were from and how they got to this point but, more importantly, I just wanted them to take their shirts off every now and again.
Let me take a step back, though. The reason I put the term “objectification” in quotes is because I hesitate to use that word as freely as other people tend to sometimes. Objectification is most definitely a real phenomenon but it doesn’t mean that something bad or dirty has happened every time someone appreciates another person’s body. For example, as I was sitting in a room with a group of Spanish men and American women watching the match between Spain and Honduras a few weeks ago,I looked over to the girls and said “I love objectifying men" with glee as if this was some type of revenge for all the women in the world who’ve been gawked and stared at throughout their lives. At the time I felt I was objectifying them by the very act of watching them run around and insisting in my own head that they were nothing more Adonises. Indeed,in my mind, I had done what men do to women all the time: I had turned them into desirable objects.
But question: isn’t our status as sexual beings a large part of what makes us human (and not inanimate)? We got here because our parents had sex. In fact, besides test tube babies, everyone on the planet who’s ever lived came as a result of sex. It’s not something to shy away from or think of as some nasty part of us. I don’t think that the mere act of appreciating the physical qualities of a man or woman constitutes as "objectification." It just seems like a term that is thrown around to loosely and that it waters down the potency of what it actually means to shape someone into a thing or a tool rather than a being.
To make this distinction a little bit clearer, let me use some real world examples. I spent a month in Spain and had more compliments thrown my way simply walking down the street than I ever have in my 20 years living in the US. Whether it was the the novelty of it or my general excitement to be living in a new place, I never felt as if I’d been turned into an object just because people were reacting to my presence. I was just being me, walking down the street and if someone cared to holler, that didn’t diminish my human value in anyway shape or form.
On the other hand, there are definite times when women (and sometimes men) are looked at purely as objects, and at these moments, objectification becomes a real issue. Video vixens, for example, act as if the only thing they live for is sex and pleasing men. No surprise here: that's their job. I'm not trying to pass a moral judgment on their professions but I am willing to say that they allow themselves to be portrayed as accessories for men's fantasies. None of these rappers seem to value what pleases these women or how they can work to mutually turn each other on. The women, like props, are in the background of the scenes to make the male leads seem extra capable and attractive. Whether the man looks like Rick Ross or Nelly, all women around them are (unrealistically) excited to be in the shot, just to be near a rap star. Whether the sexy scenario makes sense or not, there they are. The video girls in skimpy clothes are just dying to turn around and back that thang up for whoever can get them on TV.
In thinking about this term objectification, there are definitely many loopholes and subtleties that are difficult to discern but if I can try to illuminate it, I think this is it: when I watch teams of beautiful men doing what it is they love the most (i.e. playing soccer), it’s not designed so that I look upon them with lust. If it happens, that’s simply a byproduct. If instead they went out into the field and started flexing particular muscles to an all female and homosexual male crowd, then that’d be a different story. They would then be purposefully acting in a way that demonstrated that they knew how they were supposed to perform in order to excite other people. Likewise, if a man notices and comments on a woman's beauty with a "Que Bonita"without an expectation of her doing anything in return for the compliment,this is not objectification. If, on the other hand, he says, he whistles and says "Hey yo, Ma, can I talk to you for a second?" with an expectation that she walk over to him, that's, again, a different story.
There's room for us as sexual beings to notice and appreciate the beauty of others without looking at them purely as our playthings. Attraction is fun but using someone isn't. These are difficult topics to wrestle with and I wish I could be more clear. Why am I always looking for a clear cut, black and white explanation, though? What's up with that?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)