Blogs

It wasn’t until moving to India that I realized just how much I’d been taking toilets for granted, and it wasn’t until coming across the newly published Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender that I realized the extent of what I’d been missing. So, naturally, I decided it was time to dive head first into the loo… metaphorically, of course.

After interviewing Olga Gershenson and Barbara Penner, the authors of the book, I needed some visual to accompany my article—no small feat for a piece on toilets—so I turned to Google to see what was available in the way of tasteful toilet art. Instead I found gender reification and male sexual anxiety.

The healthcare debate this week has certainly been a lot of fingerpointing. In an effort to quash false rumors surrounding Obama's new healthcare plan (please let's never discuss the phrase "death panels" again), the White House went so far as to launch a "reality check" website. But one issue that's missing from the White House site is abortion. Despite the lack of an official White House debunk, the public dialogue on abortion has been just as packed with misinformation and exaggeration as the rest of the national conversation about healthcare reform.

Conservative websites are running with the National Right to Life group's headline that healthcare reform will be biggest expansion of abortion rights since Roe v. Wade. "Condition Red!" flashes the National Right to Life website.

That idea is aided by misleading statements from mainstream politicians. Representative John Boehner (R-Ohio) penned a piece in the National Review spelling out his take on Obama's healthcare plan:

"Fact: The bill as currently written will allow the federal government to classify abortion as an "essential benefit" — a health-care right that would be guaranteed to all Americans. This will make it illegal for health-care providers nationwide — even Catholic and religious-based hospitals with missions that reflect a fundamental moral objection to the killing of the unborn — to provide anything less than abortion on demand for anyone who seeks it."

But when the Denver Post ran a health care fact check, they showed that Boehner's "fact" is actually false. The Post explains that Obama's current health care plan does not override the federal law that bans Medicaid from paying for abortions except in cases involving rape, incest or when the mother's life is in danger. An amendment pushed by Lois Capps (D-CA) allows public and private healthcare plans to cover abortions in other cases, but they can't use federal dollars.

Readers, we are living an era of ill-advised remakes of already great (or at the very least, already classic movies). Titles allegedly in the re-works include: Red Dawn, Red Sonja, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Total Recall, Barbarella, Short Circuit, and The Karate Kid. So this morning’s report from Variety about a new adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel, Mildred Pierce, had me exhaling a huge sigh. According to the report, Todd Haynes, who wrote and directed I’m Not There and Far From Heaven, is slated to write and direct a miniseries staring Kate Winslet with the possibility that it will air on HBO.

While I’d watch Winslet do anything after her guest appearance on Extras, and she can surely go toe-to-toe acting wise with the original film’s star, Joan Crawford, who won an Academy award for the role, I wondered if a new version would have anything different to offer.

 

I admit that when I heard Mad Men was going to premiere just as I was starting this TV guestblogging gig in the otherwise rather deserted month of August, I breathed a sigh of relief.  If there is one television show that not a one of my communist, death-panel-supporting, child-killing liberal feminist friends is ashamed to admit to loving, it is Mad Men.  Mad Men, in short, has an acceptable television pedigree.  In my particular case, and I am not kidding about this, I started watching it because it was recommended to me by none other than Joyce Carol Goddamn Oates at a talk I attended a long time ago at the NYPL.  Talk about your "I-don't-even-have-a-tv" bookworm street cred.  And Feminist bloggers love Mad Men too.  In fact, it's just about the only television show that gets universal coverage in the feminist blogosphere, and all week, everybody's been gearing up for the Big Event.  DoubleX is live-tweeting it.  Some other prominent feminist bloggers, including Pandagon's Amanda Marcotte, are having a salon about it at RHRealityCheck.  And pretty much everyone I know who loves Mad Men loves to talk about how very, very feminist it feels to have so many nuanced portrayals of women on a single television show.

I, too, think that there is a lot of feminist merit in Mad Men - more on that in a second post this weekend, and I'll have thoughts on the premiere next week, it's gonna be a Mad Men heavy guestblogging experience - but I find it really problematic as a show to recommend to people who aren't feminists, or who aren't, at the very least, what I would call ready for a serious discussion of gender roles.