Miley, Robin, and the "Secret Keeper Girls"

Recently, a Facebook acquiantance posted that she was attending a "Secret Keeper Girls" concert with her tween daughter.  

A few days earlier, she'd posted a link to an article about not being the kind of girl who wears clothing that encourages boys to look down your shirt.  I almost posted a comment to the effect that while I was on board with that idea, we have to be careful not to go back to the Victorian idea that women are responsible for controlling men's urges.  But not wanting to get into an online debate, I refrained.  

Still, her mention of the "Secret Keeper Girls" intrigued me.  Was this some new girl group, a Christian version of the Spice Girls or the Pussycat Dolls?  I Googled it.  

No: Secret Keeper Girls is a nationwide organization that touts itself as being "The most fun a mother and daughter will ever have digging into God's word."  But what it's really about is promoting "modesty," purity," and--as this post suggests--not having your daughters vaccinated against HPV, but instead warning them about "the risk of sex outside of marriage" (like your husband might not transmit HPV to you? Puh-lease!).

To be fair, the post about Gardisil is very even-handed, generally, and some of the project's goals are ones I support wholeheartedly, such as their effort to lobby the fashion industry to fight the sexualization of pre-teen girls by designing more age-appropriate clothing for that demographic.  The Secret Keeper Girls' petition even cites an American Psychological Association position paper on the issue.

But generally, I agree with a blogger on Jezebel who wrote

I totally support this in principle. And it's good that SKG focuses on healthy body image for girls and recognizes the correlation between overly sexualized kids and [eating disorders]. But why is there no happy medium? Why does this "mission" have to be twinned with God's Plan and chastity belts and what seems to be a generally retrograde and abstinence-only approach to sexuality?....It's depressing that the only voice I've seen publicly calling for any kind of not-slutty kids' clothes is politicized and somewhat problematic, making it easy for us to dismiss any good sense within the rhetoric. Eight-year-olds shouldn't have non-slutty clothing options because God Loves Modesty, but because they're little kids who shouldn't be sexualized.

This isn't a new battle; I remember my mom lamenting the lack of appropriate, well-made fashions for tweens back when I was one in the 1970s.  And the recent kerfuffle about Miley Cyrus' VMAs performance and the "message" it sends to girls is just the latest instance of similarly "shocking" displays going back to...oh, I don't know...probably to the silent-film era.  Hell, probably to ancient Greece.

And why was all the outrage directed at Cyrus?  To me, the video for Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines," the song he performed with her, is the real source of outrage: it's a misogynistic, tedious piece of garbage (and Thicke is a low-rent George Michael-wannabe).  Better yet, skip the original and check out this smart parody by Auckland University's "Law Revue Girls" instead:  





What's ultimately disheartening about all of this is that while we seem to agree that girls and young women are suffering from body dysmorphia more than ever these days, the shots we take at a solution fall way, way short of the mark.  Or, as in the blame-Miley-and-ignore-Robin case, we're missing the target entirely.  Or, in the case of the Secret Keeper Girls, the shots ultimately seem to boomerang and hit the very people they're trying to protect: the girls themselves.

Is it really empowering to tell girls that they shouldn't show their midriffs because "bellies are very intoxicating, and we need to save that for our husbands"?  (See the Secret Keeper Girls' "Truth or Bare Fashion Tests" in this post on Jezebel.)  We may scoff at women wearing the hijab or the burqa, but the logic behind those fashion choices is the same: men can't be held responsible for their actions if you don't dress modestly.

It's easy to use SKG as a straw-girl in this debate.  Too easy.  I can't fault moms for embracing a prefab and seemingly simple "solution" to what is undoubtedly a complex and emotionally wrenching problem.  It's a classic move to think that if we just buy this book, or sign this petition, or wear a t-shirt, that we've done our part for the cause.  SKG's creator, Dannah Gresh, can't be faulted for following in the Great American Tradition of pushing merch and profiting from others' anxiety.  I don't doubt that she's sincere all the way to the bank.

Meanwhile, though, girls and adult women are still faced with the very complicated task of figuring out how to own their bodies and their sexuality in a culture that increasingly tells them that those same bodies are perpetually objects for evaluation, consumption, and capitalization.  Creating a healthy self-esteem is a long, complex, and deeply individual process for everyone, regardless of gender.  Miley and Robin are clearly still working on it, despite--or perhaps as evidenced by--their over-the-top performances.

Good Girl 2.0

Years ago, when I was still a grad student at Ohio State, I baked some cookies for my Introduction to Folklore class.  It was the last day of the quarter, and we were watching a movie.  Plus, the class started at 7:30 a.m., and those folks deserved a reward for having dragged themselves to campus at the crack of dawn for the previous ten weeks.

When I got out the cookies, one of the students said, "I knew you'd bring cookies.  You've just got a cookie personality."

I wasn't really sure how to respond, because the comment was delivered in a positive way, so I decided not to ask too many questions about what it means to have a "cookie personality."  And I wasn't sure I wanted to hear the answer anyway.

This line turned into a running joke, and several years later, after I told that story to a class at the University of Northern Colorado, a bunch of them got on RateYourProfessor.com and left comments about my "cookie personality." 

A colleague at UNC was always kind of snarky about the "cookie personality" thing, referring to it sarcastically on a number of occasions.  It clearly irritated her, and she remarked more than once that she envied the label, even as she coached me to "grow a set," in her words.

More recently, I've run into a similar situation here: a former student told me that when my name came up in a conversation she was having with another professor, the other prof said, "Oh, Rosemary.  She ought to have little birds fluttering around her head." 

I can't tell you how much that irritated me.  Being a "good girl" is a double-edged sword.  Yeah, I'll be the first to say that there are a lot of benefits to it.  My longtime friend Christina and I are sometimes astonished at the stuff we got away with in high school because we were considered to be "good girls" and "good students."  (Don't worry, Mom: it was nothing dire!)

But when you get tagged that way, and--admittedly--when it's important to you personally to be thought of that way, it's a very restrictive and even a dangerous label.  

Recent events at work have left me feeling like being anything but a good girl.  I've been, by turns, enraged, depressed, astonished by people's short-sightedness, and just plain cranky.  I haven't wanted to be nice, or be a team player.  To do so would be to deny my very real, very powerful feelings.  And yet, I worry that if I show my true feelings, speak my mind, people will think that the "good girl" thing has all been an act--that I was just waiting to get tenure so that I could revert to my true, bitchy self.

I posted this image to my Facebook profile,
and a former colleague commented,
"Rosemary! This doesn't sound like you at all."
But it's what I'd like to say sometimes.

Those of you who know me are probably saying "Not bloody likely."  I know.  If only I could say what I feel, be bitchy, pitch a fit, sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of Morgantown.  Instead, the arguments, the sassy comebacks, the bitchy asides just play on a continuous loop in my head.  I'm not a nice person; I just hide my inner mean girl a little too well.

In the wake of all of this, I've been contemplating what "Good Girl 2.0" might look like, since "Good Girl 1.0" is so obviously an obsolete and buggy piece of software.

Good Girl 2.0 would maintain its signature features: trying to be kind, compassionate, reliable, helpful, and thoughtful. 

However, while these are integral parts of the Good Girl programming, they need to not be automatic functions in Good Girl 2.0.  Perhaps the new interface should have a series of pop-up dialog boxes: "Are you sure you want to say yes to that request?"  "Does what you're about to say reflect what you actually feel?" "Can you tolerate disappointing or angering this person?  Because it's OK if you do." 

That last one's tough, since Good Girl 1.0 has a tendency to crash if she thinks someone is mad at her.  And she's also worried that her niceness is an effective whitewash to hide her incompetence, so that without it she'll be revealed for the fraud she is.  Or perhaps the better analogy would be to liken niceness to a bunker:  "If I'm nice [or cooperative, or silent, or invisible], people won't hurt me."

How do you beta-test a new attitude? 

Well, one way is graphically.  Here's how I'm reframing the "fluttering birds" comment:

Any good student of fairy tales knows that in many older variants, the heroine isn't always sweet and docile.  Often, she's wily and intelligent--a trickster.  She often plays into the villain's idea that she's naive and powerless specifically to put herself in a more powerful position.  Folklore reminds us that there's always been a subversive element to good-girl behavior; in Good Girl 2.0, I think that feature needs to be more robust. 

But here's the thing: it's not about the program's interface.  It's about being more user-friendly--the user being me.  In short, I don't necessarily have to change how I respond to things, but where I respond to them from.  If the response comes from that automatic, Good Girl 1.0 place, then it's likely based in fear, or shame.  The 2.0 response might might look the same to another person, but feels entirely different to me because it comes more directly from my feeling in the moment.

Cinderella may still be smiling, but she's not doing it because she feels like she has to.

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TMI

I'm used to virtual strangers telling me their sad tales.  I just have "one of those faces," for good or ill, that makes people (especially crazy, lonely, or troubled people) feel safe.  Most of the time I try to think of this as a good thing, particularly in the classroom.  But for some reason this semester I've been hearing way too much, and in way more detail than I need, from some of my students.

It's the end of week 4, and so far I've heard about

• One student's diagnosis with stage 2 cervical cancer and the surgery to remove her cervix;
• Another student's aunt's brain tumor, and the surgery to remove it;
• Another's HIV test scare;
• Another's cramps, and how they kept her from participating in class discussion.

There was at least one other person with a family member having surgery, and another who told me she'd be missing class because of some sort of medical emergency.  Frankly, I appreciated the vagary of those two excuses.

And it's not just in person.  Here's an excerpt from a recent student e-mail:

I was the girl that had the busted eardrum. Anyways, I just got back from the emergency room because my ear started bleeding out again. I'm concerning you with this because I have to go to the ENT's (Ear, Nose, and Throat Doctors) tomorrow at 9:30am, so they can figure out what the next step is to do with this because this isn't supposed to happen. I was there last Friday for it and they gave me the antibiotics and ear drops to heal the infection in my eardrum and behind it, because when my eardrum actually busted they didn't catch it at Student Health. So, by the time I made it to the ENT's after that the first time my eardrum had already healed, BUT with the infection still in my eardrum and behind it. Therefore, I _might_ miss your class tomorrow.

Why, oh why, can't students use that specificity of detail in their papers?

And just this morning, a student came to drop off her paper and to let me know that she wouldn't be in class because she's got bronchitis.  Suddenly she started taking off her jacket and rolling up her sleeve, saying, "Look where they put the IV!  Why would they use that vein?" 

Now, I'm used to hearing such things occasionally throughout a semester.  And I know that some students worry that if they don't tell you the gory details of their illness, you may not believe they were actually sick.  But this semester, I've heard something like this literally Every.  Single.  Day.

Here's my theory about what's going on:  gray hair.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I've been coloring my hair for years.  Last summer I decided to try to grow the color out, partly because it was starting to feel dishonest, partly because it was damaging my hair, and partly because I was just curious as to how much gray there was.  It seemed like a good time to do it, since I wasn't teaching in the fall, and wouldn't have an audience for the really awkward two-tone phase.

So, this is the first time I've ever been in the classroom as a gray-haired, middle-aged woman, who's visibly the age of my students' mothers.  I honestly think that this sudden surge of confessional stuff, especially around health issues, is due to the fact that I look like I care.  Or like I have to care, because I'm the right age, the right sex, the right hair shade.

I'm half tempted to dye it again just to stem the tide of TMI. 


But then I might miss the occasional gem, like the student who told me that she'd missed class because she'd been taking Nyquil for a cold and didn't know that it would make her sleepy.   She just couldn't figure out why she was so tired all the time until someone explained to her that, well, you're only supposed to take Nyquil at night. 

Penelope Pitstop revisited

This past weekend, Facebook was overtaken by a meme asking members to change their profile pictures to an image from their favorite childhood cartoon.  This was allegedly in an effort to spread awareness about child abuse--the kind of oddly illogical justification that always sets my folklore antenna a-wigglin'.

Regardless of the alleged purpose, it was fun to see what cartoons people chose...and how generationally defined they were.  Among the FB friends I know to be about my age, Bullwinkle, Underdog, Josie and the Pussycats, and Velma from Scooby Doo were especially popular. 

I myself went with Penelope Pitstop.  I have only vague memories of this cartoon, since--as I discovered from that veritable source, Wikipedia--it was only on for one year, in 1969, when I would barely have been four (the show was a spinoff from another Hanna Barbera cartoon, Wacky Races).  All I can figure is it must've been in reruns for awhile after that, because I certainly remember Penelope and her car, a pink roadster that doubled as a makeup compact.  I am embarrassed to say it, but I suspect I did some serious gender imprinting on Penelope.

That Hanna Barbera chose to give Penelope her own show seems apt given the 1969-1970 airdate.  However, Penelope is a dubious feminist "she-ro."  As the show's introduction explains, she's in "perpetual peril from her fortune-seeking guardian, Sylvester Sneakly, who--unknown to her--is really The Hooded Claw!"  And she depends on the help of her "ever-present protectors, the Anthill Mob," a troupe of seven little men who come to her rescue whenever The Hooded Claw ties her to the traintracks, or to a log floating toward a sawmill, or whatever. 

(Hadn't considered the Snow White connection with the seven dwarf rescuers, but it's clearly there.  Maybe that was part of the show's appeal for me?)

As unlikely a feminist role model as all of this makes Penelope out to be, there was nevertheless something deeply thrilling about her.  She raced cars (which my oldest brother also did, much to my admiration), and her car looked like a cat and was also a rolling makeup kit!  Plus, she wore awesome white go-go boots and jhodpurs.  However, she wasn't such a slave to fashion that she allowed style to cripple her, as the clip below illustrates:



As cool as the boots were, Penelope knew when to ditch them in order to save her own hide, and those of the Anthill Mob.  As she says here, she's going to "save the fellas, as well."

All things considered, there were a lot worse cartoon characters I might have imprinted on as a kid.  I'd pit Penelope against Disney's lame-o Princesses any day.  With those boots, she could kick any of their asses from one end of the Magic Kingdom to the other and then drive them all to the hospital in the Compact Pussycat.

It gets better

Me and Jay in a window of our high school, 1982.

In the wake of the recent spate of suicides by gay teens and young adults who'd been bullied, harassed, and tormented because of their sexual identities, advice-columnist Dan Savage has started a YouTube project called "It Gets Better."

The project's goal is to help LGBT teens know that however bad things are at the moment, that isn't going to be a permanent state...they can and should live to see a time in their lives when they can be themselves, and be accepted for who they are.

James Black has written very cogently about the irony of Dan Savage taking up this cause, since Savage apparently has some bullying tendencies himself.

The point that James touches on, and that I hope isn't lost in the movement, is that it's not always kids doing the bullying. 

One of my best friends all through school growing up came out after we started college.  That wasn't much of a surprise to anybody, but of course that doesn't make it any easier for someone to come out.  And for years he had been bullied, harassed, and tormented about being gay...but importantly, not ever, to my knowledge, by his peers.

In many ways I think he'd escaped that kind of treatment by other kids because he was just so damned charming and funny.  I mean, he was truly the funniest person I have ever known.  He was witty, punny, and could stage some of the best practical jokes imaginable with the straightest of faces.  He was also incredibly smart, musically gifted, and genuinely gregarious.  I really credit him for making my own time in high school as easy as it was--somehow, he single-handedly made it cool to be a nerd.

So who was doing the bullying?  Teachers.

I remember sitting in chemistry class my junior year when suddenly the door flew open and Coach Click came in, rolling Jay in front of him in a ball cage from the gym.  He'd apparently stuffed Jay in the empty cage, locked it, put it on the service elevator to the third floor, and proceeded to wheel Jay around from room to room.  (I should mention that Jay was a pretty small guy--probably only about 5' 3" in shoes, and very slight.  Hence, his ability to fit into a 3 x 3 ball cage.)  Jay characteristically laughed it off, I'm sure because he knew that not to would open the floodgates for others to pounce.

The year before that, Jay and I were in the same gym class.  The teacher, whom I've written about here before, was a nasty, sexist piece of work.  During the winter, he often closed the partition wall between the two halves of the gym and put the girls on one side and the boys on the other to play half-court basketball.  Needless to say, he generally stayed on the boys' side and ignored the girls altogether (which was fine with most of us, who weren't that enthused about basketball to begin with).

On one of those days, several minutes after pulling the dividing wall into place, the little door in the partition opened, and Mr. Speciale thrust Jay through, telling him to "Go play with the girls."

Even writing about that now, I find myself breathing faster, my muscles tensing up for a fight.

We need to remember that it's not always kids who are the bullies.  Adults--teachers--can be bullies, too.  And when they're doing the bullying, kids are even more powerless.  After all, aren't your teachers, your coaches, supposed to be the ones looking out for you?  When those alleged allies become the enemy, is it any wonder that kids despair?

Jay didn't kill himself.  At least, not directly.  But he did die of complications of AIDS three years after we graduated.  He died the summer before he was supposed to start his senior year at Cornell, a couple months after he'd returned from a semester abroad in Florence, where he was studying art history.

It's hard for me, even now--some twenty-four years after his death--not to blame it, on some level, on adult bullies like the "coach" and the "teacher."

Realistically, I know that Jay struggled with his sexual identity throughout high school, and couldn't be open about it for a whole lot of reasons that went far beyond the fear of proving those two right, or of inviting more harassment.  And I've resigned myself to the sad fact that it was just pure dumb-ass luck that Jay was becoming sexually active right at the moment when HIV was spreading like wildfire and there was no known treatment for it.

But still, part of me has always, always wondered:  if we'd lived in a world where it was OK for LGBT teens to be honest with themselves and others, would he have died?  Did he get infected because he had to seek out the answers to his questions surreptitiously, with strangers?

The hell of it is that Jay knew it got better.  It was better.  He loved his life, and had loved it all along.  But that life was still cut tragically short because of the stigma attached to his sexual identity.

The last picture of us together, taken about six months before Jay died.

I still miss him like crazy.  And I'd still like to kick Coach Click and Mr. Speciale in the teeth for what they did to him, and moreover for the message they sent to their colleagues and to students that it's all right for adults to behave in those ways.  Cool, funny even.

When the pre-service teachers in my classes start complaining about how kids don't respect teachers these days, and how much better it used to be in the "good old days" when teachers' authority was unquestioned, I remind them that a lot of teachers abused that authority in heinous ways, and were very seldom called on their abuse.  It astonishes me now to think about it, but at the time neither Jay nor any of us thought to report those incidents to another teacher, or to the principal, or to our parents.  That shit just happened.

So, that's my addendum to the anti-bullying campaign:  Bear in mind that bullies come in many forms, and some of them are full-grown monsters.  They're the ones who most deserve to be called on the carpet.  Don't be afraid to tell someone if it's an adult who's bullying you.  And if the first person you tell doesn't do anything to help, go to someone else and keep talking until someone does help.  Someone eventually will. And it does get better. 

Jay as I will always remember him best:  laughing his @$$ off.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the gym (or, Exercising Demons, part II)

First, I just want to thank everyone for their comments--you all have really honed in on the question I was trying to get at, but wasn't articulating as clearly as I'd have liked to:

At what point in your life did you realize that just because you were a dorky, uncoordinated kid, that did not mean that you had no interest in or affinity for movement?

I didn't have that epiphany until my early 30s, when I started going to an aerobics class in Greeley and discovered that I loved it and was OK at it (well, most of the time, anyway).

And it was a revelation to see many women there far older than me who were still active. Granted, Colorado is somewhat of an anomaly--it routinely has the nation's lowest obesity rate--but I can't tell you how many 60- and 70-year-old women I met in that class for whom this was just one of many activities they enjoyed: several were also avid cross-country skiiers, hikers, snow-shoers, and kayakers. Suddenly I could see a "fitness future" for myself that didn't involve team sports, competition, or an unhealthy fixation on how many calories I'd burned.

Is it any wonder the country at large has a weight problem when so many kids (especially girls, the "pleasantly plump," and those labeled as nerds) aren't encouraged to pursue physical activities that feel comfortable and fun for them?

In her open letter to her own high-school gym teacher, Jane mentions that they did square-dancing in gym. One of my fondest memories of gym (and yes, I do have a few!) was when we had a student teacher for our ninth-grade phys ed class who did a whole unit on dance: not just square dancing, but also line dancing, and (this was the early 80s, remember) some disco dancing. We learned The Hustle. In gym class!

I was in heaven. And then her stint was over and she left. And we were back to the old volleyball-basketball-softball routine until that cycling class I mentioned taking for my last PE credit.

In her comment, Christy mentioned one of our high-school gym teachers; I never had the, uh, "pleasure" of having him for class, but I do have a particularly dark place in my soul for another member of the phys-ed faculty. Let's call him "Mr. Special," since that is, believe it or not, the anglicized version of his real name.

Among the many things Mr. Special did to make me a gym-hater were the following:

• Once, when we were working on basketball skills, he tried to teach me the proper form for making a layup. I followed his instructions and put the ball through the hoop. He looked at me and said, cynically, "Well, whaddaya know: she's trainable."

• The second thing he did was to split the boys and the girls up, although it was a co-ed class. In and of itself this doesn't necessarily bother me, since it prevented girls from literally being muscled out of games by overly-zealous boys. But Mr. Special would take this a step further by closing the partition that separated the two halves of the gym, putting the girls on one side, shutting the door, and leaving the girls to our own devices while he worked with the boys. Apparently, we weren't worth his time, even a decade after Title 9.
  

• But most unforgivably, one day he flung open the door between the two sides, shoved my friend Jay through, and told him to play with the girls. Jay, by the way, later came out as gay. I guess Mr. Special decided that his ostracization should start early. Or maybe he was trying to demonstrate for us the corrosive link between sexism and homophobia. Regardless, we all got the message.

I say all of this not to continue the long and well-worn tirade against gym teachers or gym class. As Jane (and I, above) have noted, some of them are amazing and inspirational.

What I'm saying is that in hindsight, I think I would've found gym class vastly more enjoyable and relevant and affirming if it had succeeded in showing me that movement can be expressive and fun, and does not have to be about competition with anyone but yourself. Perhaps then I wouldn't have had to have that realization on my own decades after taking my last gym class.

And as for the fallacious idea that gym has nothing to do with "real" learning, check out this article about gym-class poetry at an elementary school in North Carolina!

Exercising (sic) demons

I was a fat kid.

It's hard to explain the difficulty I have in saying that, since I think I'm also a fat adult, and still have an intense fear that if I call attention to it, I'll be inviting scorn from, well, everyone. A psychologist friend once told me I had the most screwed-up body image of anyone he'd ever known, since I imagine I'm a whale even though, rationally, I know that I'm within the normal weight range for my height, I work out regularly, and don't suffer from any eating disorders, thank god.

Still, in my heart of hearts I worry that if I confess that Greg H. used to call me "Hungry Hippo" in 7th grade, you'll all wonder why you didn't think of that nickname yourself, and will never address me in any other way again.

Weight's on my mind these days since I'm feeling like a slug, post-holiday and in the midst of these dark, gloomy January days that make me want to eat a diet composed exclusively of carbs, nap, and move as little as possible until spring, when I fear I'll be too large to squeeze through the door to enjoy it.

I feel grateful that at least I genuinely enjoy exercise. Like, I kind of get nutso if I can't at least go for a long walk every couple of days...and even that doesn't really do it for me most of the time--I need the elliptical machine, or an aerobics class, or something more strenuous.

It almost feels like a betrayal to say that, since I grew up in a household where athleticism was positioned as the opposite of intellect, and the received message was that smart people don't sweat, and they sure don't enjoy sweating. Where does that idea come from? It's a peculiar kind of snobbery, one that ultimately is quite literally self-defeating. I'm glad that some rebellious part of myself insisted on raging against that belief, though I wish I'd done it earlier and more often.

In hindsight, there are so many things I would have loved to do--taking more dance classes, for example--for the sheer love of movement. But when I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, being "active" meant being an athlete--i.e., participating in competitive sports, which I have always loathed. Until I took a cycling class for my last high-school phys ed requirement, it never occurred to me that gym could be anything other than a trial to be endured.

Even now, I cringe at memories of trying to memorize the difference between man-to-man and zone defense in basketball, and being pissed off at aggressive boys who'd charge halfway across the volleyball court to hit a ball they figured some girl would miss.

Fortunately, it seems that physical education and educators have wised up to this problem, and many school gym programs (if they haven't been cut entirely) focus on wellness and finding activities that every student can enjoy. What took so damn long?

As gym-teacher Phil Lawler says in the article linked above, "After age 24 less than 3 percent of the population uses a team sport as part of their normal physical activity....So we mastered all these skills, for what?" I'd be interested to know what percentage of people participate in a team sport before age 24, since I suspect that figure is still fairly small.

What gym teachers--and the rest of us--need to tap into are the activities that reconnect us with our seven-year-old selves...running 'til you were winded in a game of hide-and-seek, or swimming all afternoon on a summer day, without even thinking that what you were doing was "exercise."

And increasingly I'm adopting my mom's view, that instead of waking up and dreading something I have to do that day, to be glad that I still can do it.

[Post script: An ex-boyfriend (emphasis on "ex") took one look at the above photo and said, "You look like an English schoolboy!" Did I mention he's an ex-boyfriend?]

"Now we don't have to listen to *jazz* all day long!"

'Cause that would be the worst, you know. (Apparently, my enjoyment of jazz makes me a traitor to my gender, the working class, and corporate America.)

I promise a more original post soon, but in the meantime, this is one of the funnier things I've run across lately. I especially enjoy the skewering of those awful Evista commercials.

The art of the witty (and timely) comeback

My previous post (and Jane's response to it) as well as Tom's dream vision, below, put me in mind of that rarest of rhetorical triumphs, the witty comeback. You know, the kind that you usually think of hours or days too late. Only a select few are graced with the right retort in the moment.

The best snappy-comeback story I know of is one that my friend Christina tells. Years ago, when she was in graduate school, she took her car into a local garage to have some repairs done. It was a father/son operation, and she was dealing with Mechanic the Younger at the front desk, while Dad Mechanic was working on something in the vicinity.

As their conversation wound down, Christina said to Mechanic the Younger, "By the way, could you take a look at the horn while you're working on the car? I think there's a short or something in there because it doesn't always work."

From the back of the shop, Dad Mechanic piped up, "Oh, sure, that's just what these women need, to be able to honk their horns more often. We oughta just disable it!"

Christina turned to Mechanic the Younger, batted her eyes sweetly, and said, "Actually, if you could fix it so that it says 'F**k off' instead, that would be even better."

Ah, I get a vicarious thrill just repeating that story.

Alas, I have no good tales to tell. In some ways, I think kids handle this stuff better than adults do--when we study children's folklore in my classes, we talk about how kids are armed not only with a host of traditional insults, but with a parallel set of traditional retorts: "I know you are, but what am I?" "I'm rubber and you're glue; what bounces off me sticks to you." "So's your mother." Maybe we need to come up with a lexicon of quick-draw comebacks for grown-ups, too.

So, faithful readers: any good comeback stories to share?

Meet the new right, same as the old right (now STFU)

The first presidential election I could vote in was in 1984, and I campaigned energetically and naively for Mondale/Ferraro because of Ferraro's being the first woman on a presidential ticket. I got to see her speak on campus at Ohio State, and got even more fired up. Of course, we all know how that turned out.

That all seems like a million years ago--in fact, I'd almost forgotten the whole episode. This time around, I didn't get excited about Hillary's candidacy because she was a woman, and while I'd like to think that's a sign of my and the country's growing sophistication, the Women's Media Center video below shows that I'm dead, dead wrong about that.



On a happier note, we do seem to have arrived at a point where other major media outlets can slice-and-dice that kind of hypocrisy:



[Side note: THANK GOD for Jon Stewart. As I heard a commentator say on a "This American Life" piece once, I would drink his bathwater.]

Now, we all know Karl Rove is an a$$hole, and we all know how unbelievably skillful the right has been at appropriating the political rhetoric of the left and turning it against them. But frankly, to hear Karl Rove denouncing others as sexist was the last straw for me.

It certainly helped me articulate the problem I've been having all along, which is that I'm fed up with the right wing coming along decades too late and slinging accusations like this without first acknowledging that yes: the left had it right (no pun intended) when they got behind feminism (and civil rights, and the 40-hour workweek, and on and on and on). The left takes the heat for trying to corrupt the nation with its wicked, culturally destructive ideas, and then the right gets to sweep in and say, "Hey, you know what? That was a good idea after all. Gimme some of that."

It's interesting to hear McCain's policy advisor in the Daily Show video, above, talk about being insulted by media "attacks" on Sarah Palin from her "female" and "feminine" point of view. Dammit, you were insulted because YOU'RE A [closet] FEMINIST. If you're going to steal rhetoric, you gotta steal the whole package, and be prepared for the backlash.

What Karl Rove knows, and what he's so freakin' good at, is tying up the conversation so that the left can't say anything without spanking themselves.

And he gets this, I think, from the left's idea that "the personal is political." Years ago, when I was in grad school, I was walking up the sidewalk to my apartment building when a teenaged boy walked by with a friend and said, "If you weren't so fat, I'd go out with you."

Now, this wasn't the first time in my life I'd had a random, unknown male say something to me on the street. I've heard it all, both the insulting and the (allegedly) "flattering." But that was the moment at which I fully understood what that maneuver was about: power, and the reification of (white, middle-class, straight) male privilege. The only men I know who have had such experiences are gay: a high-school friend at whom another guy shouted "AIDS case" to on the street, for example. And I got it, the ways in which sexism and homophobia are rooted in the same kind of hatred.

Now, though, if I share that experience, I'm "playing the gender card." And if any of you out there want to disagree with me, you're automatically being "sexist." The right, once again, has shut down all conversation about the issue, which is what they've been doing so skillfully and carefully for over thirty years. And it's how they plan to win this election (as they have in the past).

The only way to fight back? As The Temptations say, "Rap on, brothers [and sisters], rap on!" Crank up the volume!



--With deep thanks to friends and fellow bloggers at Historiann and Leaf-Stitch-Word for the inspiration.

Wasted irony du jour

So, I was in the weight room at the gym this morning, which was (unusually) populated almost exclusively by women, when I suddenly realized that "Killing Me Softly" was playing on the radio that gets blasted in there. And then Little Miss Anorexia walked by (seriously, there are some youngsters in there that I want to hold down and feed soup to).

Yeah, it was the Fugee's hip-hop version of Roberta Flack's original...but still: if you needed evidence that we're living in a post-feminist world, there it was.

Broken record

You may recall my previous rant about Knocked Up's easy dismissal of abortion as a valid choice for women who find themselves unexpectedly pregnant (and, in that film, anyway, pregnant by Josh Rogan's appalling character, no less). So, a caveat: read no further if you don't want to hear more on that topic.

OK--for those of you still with me: so, I saw Juno on DVD last week. And actually, I liked it very much. For all I'd heard and read about how "unrealistic" Ellen Page's character is--too clever, too articulate, too flip--I found her to be a composite of many of the smart, witty, cynical girls I knew in high school. It's an idealized composite, I'll admit, but still realistic: Juno's naivete about the adoptive couple's faltering relationship and her denial of her own emotional investment cast her seeming worldliness in its proper context. She is, after all, still just 16.

But--and it's a big but, as usual--again, the abortion option gets dismissed a little too handily. Granted, the film at least gives a bit more screen time to Juno's struggle with this decision, and it doesn't romanticize unanticipated motherhood the way Knocked Up does. But all it takes for Juno to decide to go ahead and carry the pregnancy to full term and give the baby up for adoption is the news that fetuses have fingernails, a fact passed on to her by the lone protester--a high-school classmate--outside the abortion clinic.

Of course, the whole point of "pro-choice" is that it is a choice, regardless of what decision any individual makes in the end. But both Knocked Up and Juno fail to address the fact that such choices are also deeply influenced by other concerns--namely, the financial stability of the pregnant woman. Both Katherine Heigl's character and Juno are white, upper-middle class women, the former with a successful career (and presumably, a lucrative salary) and the latter with a supportive family. It's easy for Juno to find an affluent couple to adopt her baby and pay the medical expenses of her pregnancy because she's white, smart, and attractive.

But not every woman who finds herself in this situation has all of those advantages, all of which make it vastly easier to "choose" to have the baby--and both films imply that that is the only moral choice to make. Poor girls who get "knocked up" and get abortions become, in effect, second-class citizens, those who exercised their "right to choose," but made a sad, unfortunate choice that--thank god!--nice, middle-class girls from good families don't have to make.

I get that if either of these characters "chose" to have abortions, we wouldn't have a movie to watch. (Which, in the case of Knocked Up, would be no tragedy.) But there's a disturbing double-standard at work here: abortion is OK if you have absolutely no other options, but you should still feel really bad about it, because of course the "right" thing to do is to have the baby.

There's so much liberal anxiety these days about what will happen if John McCain gets elected and fills the Supreme Court with "activist" conservative justices, and what that will mean for the future of Roe v. Wade in particular. But films like Knocked Up and Juno suggest that as a culture, we really need to reexamine our personal attitudes about abortion. If we're so freaking ambivalent about how valid a "choice" abortion really is, how effectively can we defend it?

Well, that explains it

A quick follow-up to the previous post...I just read the New Yorker's review of Judd Apatow's most recent film, Walk Hard, in which male full-frontal nudity plays a prominent role. According to David Denby, the "penis [is] an organ that Apatow, in recent interviews, has vowed to bring into mainstream filmmaking."

Uh, Judd: metaphorically, it's been ALL OVER THE PLACE in your work already. Isn't that enough?

It's just not funny (by Rose)

I’m a huge fan of Freaks and Geeks, the short-lived 1999-2000 TV show produced by Judd Apatow, which treated adolescence in about the most realistic way I’ve ever seen—which is probably why it got canceled. It was at turns painful, hilarious, frustrating, and totally honest, carefully probing the all too human depths of each of its characters. The series starred Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jason Segel, and others who have turned up In later Apatow productions, becoming a sort of millennial “brat pack”—except these guys are all in their 30s or 40s.

Even if you’re not familiar with Freaks, you’ve undoubtedly seen some other Apatow production, since he’s been behind almost every successful comedy of the last several years: Walk Hard, Superbad, Knocked Up, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Talladega Nights, Anchorman. In most of these, you can see his trademark mix of satire, sentimentality, and a weird obsession with gender politics, especially the oddball tribalism of guys. And most of the time, it works and is funny. But recently I’ve seen both Superbad and Knocked Up on DVD, and was completely turned off by both of them—like, close-to-hitting-stop-and-ejecting-the-DVD turned off.

I wanted to like both of these films, especially Superbad, since it had the most promise to revisit the adolescent angst of Freaks and Geeks. But the sexism of both really pissed me off, and what pissed me off even more is the way both films try to justify their sexism by framing it as such—as if an ironic consciousness of sexism somehow excuses it. In both films, at least one of the main male characters is obsessed with porn; in Knocked Up, Seth Rogen’s character and friends are developing a website that will tell visitors how far into any given movie they have to fast-forward to get to the nudity, and in Superbad, the character “Seth” tries to figure out which internet porn site he can subscribe to without his parents’ finding out.

In Knocked Up, this is gotten around by having Katherine Heigl’s character join her unlikely beau in screening movies to spot the tit shot; in Superbad, Seth’s friend Evan toes the pansy “you need to respect women” party line, refusing to have sex with a girl he’s liked for years because she’s drunk. The ultimate punch line is that the girl Seth is chasing turns him down because he’s drunk, creating a lame “feminist” joke that really only underscores the film’s misogyny by showing how that kind of turnabout just emasculates Seth even further.

Now, it may well be that I’ve turned into the prototypical middle-aged prude lamenting the crassness of contemporary pop culture. But really, it’s the fact that I know Apatow is capable of dealing with issues of gender and sexuality in more complex ways that frustrates me. One of the best episodes of Freaks and Geeks revolves around the geek boys’ discovery of some old 16mm porn films, which they watch during the meeting of the projectionists’ club. One of them, Sam, is deeply disturbed by what he sees—so much so that he finds himself terrified of girls. His seeming enemy, the gym teacher, figures out what’s happened, and in a surprising turn of character, talks Sam down by demystifying porn for him. The show ends with a shot of the two of them in the teacher’s office laughing, Sam clearly relieved to have some perspective on the whole issue. It’s an insightful look at the confusion and terror of teenage sexuality, and the isolation teens feel, hearing stuff from peers but being unable to double-check things with a trusted adult.

(The 40 Year Old Virgin manages this delicate balance of crassness and emotional weightiness, too.)

So, the way in which both Knocked Up and Superbad seem to revel in the insularity of that adolescent view of sex, even to celebrate it—well, to me it seems so backhanded, like “You know we don’t really think this way, but isn’t it funny? Isn’t it?!?!?”

Not to mention the pure male fantasy of Knocked Up: would any sane woman actually keep Seth Rogen’s baby AND date him, too? (Don’t even get me started on the way that abortion is handily ruled out as an option for the sake of the plot.) And the way in which menstrual blood is both fetishized and loathed in Superbad—it’s just appalling.

Judd Apatow, what happened? I know you can do better than this. Or maybe I just need to stop watching movies with Seth Rogen in them. He is the common denominator here…hmmm.