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The Rachel Papers

Kjerstin Johnson — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 15:11:52 -0500

Now you can quit camping out for the USPS to deliver your copy of "Buzz" and start reading Jonanna Widner's piece on Rachel Maddow, exploring the the pundit's prime time rise and unprecedented fan club around the country, and offering a social critique to the madness around Maddow! Click on the article for interactive reading!

Bite Me! (Or Don't)

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 01:54:04 -0500

Abstinence has never been sexier than it is in Stephenie Meyer’s young adult four-book Twilight series. Fans are super hot for Edward, a century-old vampire in a 17-year-old body, who sweeps teenaged Bella, your average human girl, off her feet in a thrilling love story that spans more than 2,000 pages. Fans are enthralled by their tale, which begins when Edward becomes intoxicated by Bella’s sweet-smelling blood. By the middle of the first book, Edward and Bella are deeply in love and working hard to keep their pants on, a story line that has captured the attention of a devoted group of fans who obsess over the relationship and delight in Edward’s superhuman strength to just say no.

The Twilight series has created a surprising new sub-genre of teen romance: It’s abstinence porn, sensational, erotic, and titillating. And in light of all the recent real-world attention on abstinence-only education, it’s surprising how successful this new genre is. Twilight actually convinces us that self-denial is hot. Fan reaction suggests that in the beginning, Edward and Bella’s chaste but sexually charged relationship was steamy precisely because it was unconsummated—kind of like Cheers, but with fangs. Despite all the hot “virtue,” however, we feminist readers have to ask ourselves if abstinence porn is as uplifting as some of its proponents seem to believe.  

Given that teens are apparently still having sex—in spite of virginity rings, abstinence pledges, and black-tie “purity balls”—it might seem that remaining pure isn’t doing much for the kids these days anyway. Still, the Twilight series is so popular it has done the unthinkable: knocked Harry Potter off his pedestal as prince of the young adult genre. The series has sold more than 50 million copies, and Twilight fan fiction, fan sites, and fan blogs crowd the Internet. Scores of fans have made the trek to real-life Forks, Wash., where the series is set. The first of a trilogy of film adaptations of the books, starring Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, was scheduled to hit theaters in time for Christmas. 

Nowhere was readers’ multigenerational infatuation with Bella and Edward’s steamy romance more evident than in their “engagement” party at a Sandy, Utah, Barnes & Noble store. On the evening of August 1, 2008, before the fourth book was released, guests flocked to the store wearing formal wedding attire to celebrate the happy fictional couple. Preteen girls in princess dresses, “My Heart Belongs to Edward” stickers plastered to their faces, posed for photos. Grandmothers in flowing gowns or homemade “I Love Edward” t-shirts stood in line to play Twilight trivia. Clever teen boys in Edward costumes fought off ersatz Bellas.  

The air in the store was electric as fans broke into two groups: the much smaller group of Jacob fans (Jacob is Bella’s best friend who is hopelessly in love with her, but it’s a doomed relationship since Jacob is a werewolf, a lifelong enemy of the vamps) and the group of rabid Edward fans. The questions of the night were: Will Edward and Bella finally do it? If so, will the magic be ruined when the abstinence message is gone? But nobody seemed to be asking an even more important question: Has the abstinence message—however unwittingly—undermined feminist sensibilities?  

The answers came sooner than expected. After the engagement party, fans rushed home with their copies of Breaking Dawn, only to discover that Edward and Bella go all the way in the first few chapters, after they get married, of course. But it seems that in the context of marriage and parenthood (which comes quickly, natch), Edward and now-19-year-old Bella are just like our traditional grandparents. Or the Moral Majority.  

Breaking Dawn’s Bella is a throwback to a 1950s housewife, except for the fact that Edward has turned her into a vampire. But this act is one of ’50s-esque female self-sacrifice: It’s precipitated by Bella’s need to let her human self die in order to save their half-vampire baby. Their monstrous offspring is frightening, but what’s really frightening is Bella and Edward’s honeymoon scene. Edward, lost in his own lust, “makes love” so violently to Bella that she wakes up the next morning covered in bruises, the headboard in ruins from Edward’s romp. And guess what? Bella likes it. In fact, she loves it. She even tries to hide her bruises so Edward won’t feel bad. If the abstinence message in the previous books was ever supposed to be empowering, this scene, presented early in Breaking Dawn, undoes everything. 

What’s worrisome is that fans are livid about the last book not because of the disturbing nature of Bella and Edward’s sexual relationship, but because they consummated it in the first place. Shimmerskin, a poster on the message board Twilightmoms.com, summed it up best for a number of defeated fans: “The first three books were alive with sheer romanticism but I never felt it in [Breaking Dawn]. The sweep and scope of a grand love affair in [the first three books] was absent. The brilliantly innocent eroticism that took our breath away was also gone.” Some fans are so upset at this loss of “innocence” they’ve created an online petition demanding answers from Meyer and her publisher, Little, Brown. “We were your faithful fans…,” the petitioners write. “We are the people that you asked to come along with you on this journey, and we are disappointed.”  

Perhaps some of this bitter disappointment stems from book four’s departure into adult territory, where Bella becomes a traditional—and boring—teenaged mom. The removal of the couple’s sexual tension reveals two tepid, unenlightened people. Neither character has much to offer outside the initial high school romance storyline: Bella doesn’t have any interesting hobbies, nor is she particularly engaged in the world around her. Her only activity outside her relationship with Edward seems to be cooking dinner for her father. Edward hangs out with his family, but the bulk of his 24 hours a day of wakefulness seems to go to either saving Bella from danger or watching her when she sleeps—you know, that age-old savior/stalker duality. Romantic!  

As other feminists like Anna N. on Jezebel.com have pointed out, Edward is a controlling dick, a fact that becomes abundantly clear in the leaked pages of Meyer’s first draft of Midnight Sun, a retelling of Twilight from Edward’s perspective. In those pages, available on Meyer’s website, Edward imagines what it would be like to kill Bella. “I would not kill her cruelly,” he thinks to himself. Ever the gentleman, Edward. His icy calculation of how best to kill Bella is horrifying, and it illustrates the disconnect between the two characters. 

By extension, readers who interpreted Edward’s reluctance to be near Bella in Twilight as evidence of his innocent “crush” on her are forced to recognize that even Edward—the dream guy—is not at all he’s cracked up to be. Digging into Edward’s mind reinforces the old stereotype that underneath it all, even the best guys are calculating vampires, figuring out how to act on their masculine urges. Edward holds all the power, while Bella—and female readers—romanticizes the perfect man who doesn’t exist. It’s no wonder that Midnight Sun has not been widely released: It would likely spark even greater fan ire.  

Such disappointment suggests something about the desire readers have for abstinence messages; it may also suggest readers’ belief that, pre-sex, Edward and Bella were the perfect couple. In reality, the abstinence message—wrapped in the genre of abstinence porn—objectifies Bella in the same ways that “real” porn might. The Twilight books conflate Bella losing her virginity with the loss of other things, including her sense of self and her very life. Such a high-stakes treatment of abstinence reinforces the idea that Bella is powerless, an object, a fact that is highlighted when we get to the sex scenes in Breaking Dawn.  

Of course the paradox is that the more Meyer sexualizes abstinence, the more we want Bella and Edward to actually have sex. This paradox becomes extra-convoluted when we find out, in a moment that for some is titillating, for others creepy, that sex could literally equal death for Bella. In one scene in Twilight, Bella asks Edward in a roundabout way if they would ever be able to consummate their relationship. Edward responds, “I don’t think that…that…would be possible for us.” Bella responds, “Because it would be too hard for you, if I were that…close?” Yes, Edward tells her. But more than that he reminds her that she’s “soft” and “so fragile” and “breakable.” “I could kill you quite easily, Bella, simply by accident.”  

And it’s not just Bella’s life that’s at stake—it’s her very humanity. The closer she and Edward get, the more tempting it is for him to bite her and turn her into a vampire, and the conflation of his vampiric and carnal urges is obvious. As Midnight Sun reveals, Edward’s bloodlust is every bit as potent as his romantic love. It doesn’t take a Freudian to read Edward’s pulsating, insistent vampire lips pressed against Bella’s pale, innocent neck as an analogy for, well, something else. From clandestine meetings in Bella’s bedroom to time spent in a forest clearing, Edward almost always has his lips on Bella’s neck—a dangerous activity, as we learn in Twilight that “the perfume of [Bella’s] skin” is an unbearably erotic and tempting scent for Edward. When they do kiss, Bella often loses control of herself, which means Edward must be ever-vigilant in controlling “his need.” After their first kiss, Bella asks if she should give him some room. “No,” he tells her, “it’s tolerable.” He goes on, “I’m stronger than I thought.” Bella responds, “I wish I could say the same. I’m sorry.”  

Fan fiction reveals fans’ tacit understanding of the serious dangers of sex and the excitement of it, illustrating that readers have picked up on Meyer’s analogy where the sexual penetration of Bella’s human body is akin to the vampiric penetration of Bella’s skin. One piece of fan fiction was posted to TheTwilightSaga.com on June 22, 2008, before the release of the fourth book, by a particularly ardent fan (hardy’sgirl). In the story, Edward and Bella have gotten married and are on their honeymoon. Edward begins kissing Bella (on her neck, of course), and then begins removing her jeans. Bella, with a pounding heart, asks herself, “Would I really let him go all the way?” Keep in mind that within this story, Bella and Edward are married; waffling about “doing it” with your husband might point to the age and maturity of the writer, but it also taps into the fear of intimacy that Meyer establishes in the books. The fan writer picks up on that fear as she continues her story: As Edward becomes more sexually aroused, he turns into something Bella doesn’t recognize, and she begins to fight him. The fan writes:  

Edward had become a monster. that dangerous vampire he held hidden away from me…and I was the one about to pay for it…he held my arms above my head pinned onto the bed in iron clasps. i was panicking and my breathing was fast. Edward sat up above me…and the look in his eyes weren’t ones ive ever seen before…unless he was about to feed.  

The rape fantasy is apparent, of course, but even more salient is the fan writer’s subconscious understanding of the theme Meyer has been establishing: that sex is dangerous and men must control themselves. It’s a matter of life or death, and ultimately men are in charge. 

It’s clear from both the books and the fan fiction response to them that Edward has taken on the role of protector of Bella’s human blood and chastity, both of which, ironically, are always in peril when Edward is nearby. Bella is not in control of her body, as abstinence proponents would argue; she is absolutely dependent on Edward’s ability to protect her life, her virginity, and her humanity. She is the object of his virtue, the means of his ability to prove his self-control. In other words, Bella is a secondary player in the drama of Edward’s abstinence.  

Reader Shimmerskin again astutely notes, “…it’s so clever that these books aren’t just about sexual abstinence. Edward is fighting two kinds of lust at the same time. Abstaining from human blood has probably been good practice for tamping down his sexual appetites now that he’s with Bella.…” 

It’s arguably clever, sure, but it’s also a sad commentary on Bella’s lack of power. Ultimately, it’s a statement of the sexual politics of Meyer’s abstinence message: Whether you end up doing the nasty or not doesn’t ultimately matter. When it comes to a woman’s virtue, sex, identity, or her existence itself, it’s all in the man’s hands. To be the object of desire, in abstinence porn is not really so far from being the object of desire in actual porn.  

Christine Seifert is an assistant professor of communication at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah. She teaches classes in professional writing and rhetoric.  

Rules of Play

Kyla — Sat, 31 May 2003 00:00:00 -0400

To stroll the aisles of your local Toys “R” Us is to venture into the heart of gender darkness. Whether you believe that boys emerge from the womb with dump trucks clutched in their tiny fists or see toys as an early means by which kids are trained to hew to culturally determined gender differences, you’ll find plenty of evidence to back you up. (It basically comes down to how you interpret all that pink.)  

As sex stereotyping waxes in some places (near-ubiquitous girls’ guides to everything you could possibly think of, ensuring properly feminine comportment in all activities; arguments that Title IX should be repealed because trying to get equal numbers of girls and boys onto sports teams just holds back those ever-active boys; increasing numbers of chick flicks) and wanes in others (the cross-gender popularity of professional women’s soccer), we thought it was time to see if toys, long an arena that has profited from the exploitation of gender difference, have gotten worse or—we hoped—better. What we found was that toys are indeed getting scarier, in ways that have both nothing and everything to do with gender. Herewith, the rules toymakers are playing by.  

Rule # 1 Train ’em young.

Toys have always provided instruction in the ways of the adult world—think kitchen sets and post-office windows—but things seem to be getting a little out of hand these days. Play-money sets now come with checkbooks and credit cards; piggy banks have been replaced with plastic atms. Fun Years Preschool Car Alarm is a keychain with three plastic keys and “realistic sounds,” so that kids 2 and up can disarm the alarm, start up the car, and honk at people. There’s also the Fun Years My First Driving Center, which, as the packaging prominently advertises, comes complete with phone—because, obviously, pretending to drive with both hands on the wheel wouldn’t really be pretending to drive at all, would it? 

Then there’s the Undercover Girl Secret Note Kit. This gadget is charmingly neo– Harriet the Spy. But, what with the cartoon spokesgirl on the package chirping “Shredder destroys evidence fast!,” one can’t help but wonder what kind of accounting shenanigans are going on during social studies. In the same vein, Small World Kids’ Caught in the Act Security Camera allows children 7 and up to “keep out those pesky intruders” with a motion sensor, red flashing lights, and a touch pad that communicates verbal warnings and alarm sounds; Lights, Camera, Interactive’s Magnetic Clock and Daily Planner comes with a plethora of magnetic reminders for things like brushing teeth and playing outdoors, impressing upon youngsters the importance of micromanaging their every second. 

Clearly, technology plays a crucial role in why children’s playthings seem to be growing more and more adult; emulation is the name of the game, and savvy manufacturers now make increasingly realistic mini-me versions of grown-up toys like cell phones and pdas. Is the drive to provide kids with all the accoutrements of adulthood destined to turn them into paranoid, document-shredding, unsafe drivers who have to check their calendars before hitting the swing set? Probably not. After all, they’ll find out eventually what a drag adult chores actually are. 

Rule # 2 Brand ’em younger.

Product placement has taken over the toy store. No longer confined to movie and television tie-in merch (though make no mistake, there’s no shortage of Harry Potter Lego sets and SpongeBob SquarePants water wings), the practice results in toys based not on beloved fictional characters but on brands. Toy food sets, which used to feature cute plastic “cans” of generic peas and the like, are now full of Big Macs and Dairy Queen Dilly Bars. Housekeeping toys (which, of course, invite a whole host of other ranty comments, especially when manufacturers like Creative Design boast that their toy vacuum cleaner “is being hailed as one of the best toys for girls on the market”) are replicas of Dirt Devils or come emblazoned with the Mr. Clean logo. Play cookware is Calphalon. Tool sets are courtesy of the Home Depot. Instead of encouraging you to make up your own weirdo treats, the Play-Doh Cookie Makin’ Station tells you to make Oreos, Chips Ahoy, and Teddy Grahams. Easy Bake oven mixes come cobranded with Life Savers, Rice Krispies, and Pop-Tarts. Licensing agreements have turned playtime into a vehicle for the same advertisements that saturate mass media and public space, and that should terrify us all. 

Rule # 3 Toys that have no reason to be gender-coded must be gender-coded.

Cultural ideas about gender are never more obviously on display as when an otherwise gender-neutral toy is coded as either masculine or feminine by its styling. The age-old dolls-vs.-action-figures divide is still going strong, but it’s in the transportation-toy aisle that the differences among products become as telling as they are tiny. Take the Little Tikes pastel-pink and pale-blue Push & Ride Doll Walker and its corresponding primary-colored Push & Ride Racer. Never mind that they are exactly the same toy, down to the extra seat designed for an inanimate companion. The two vehicles are different. How do we know? Well, the little girl pictured on the Doll Walker box has a doll in her extra seat, while the boy on the Racer box totes his teddy bear along for the ride (presumably a speedy one—boys have so much energy, you know). The Little Tikes website says of the Doll Walker, “The doll seat on this cute toddler-mobile holds a favorite doll or stuffed toy”; it calls the Racer a “sporty toddler-mobile” with a “high spoiler.”  

Similarly, Tek Nek’s Glitter Girl Tot About and Rescue Tot About are identical in design, but in this case the twist goes beyond color and supposed function to include an audio component. Each plays a series of songs when a button is pushed, but the songs on the boy’s ride are manly little ditties about being a fireman, while the girl’s declares, “I’m a very pretty pony; clippety-clop, clippety-clop.” This might be less of a problem if the Glitter Girl Tot About were, say, shaped like a horse or had any other discernible equine attributes. But it’s as though the manufacturers decided that every clichéd feature of girlhood—the love of pink, the need for glitter and frippery, the horse fixation—needed to be incorporated into the toy. Compared with the straightforward message of the Rescue Tot About—boys rescue, firemen rescue, boys are firemen—the girls are offered nothing more than a confusing collection of prescriptions. (I’m a…pony? Who likes…glitter?) 

An interesting twist on this phenomenon: Educational company LeapFrog makes its LeapPad reading toy in both pink and blue. The products and packaging are identical except for the color of the thing and the word “pink” to helpfully clue the buyer in. It’s clearly a nod to the desire some (presumably female) children harbor for pink stuff, but, refreshingly, without any of the “just for girls” adornment or the assumptions that go along with it. Is this progress? We’re not sure. 

Rule # 4 Girls are pretty princesses. In hip-huggers.

Though Barbie, perennial target of ire that she is, remains a viable scapegoat in the role-model wars, there are some new girls on the block to threaten her status. “Urban” dolls like Bratz and Diva Starz are, like Barbie, fashion dolls. Their raison d’être is simply to look cool and show off a succession of Britney-fied outfits—filmy peasant blouses, low-rise jeans, leather chokers, etc. Girls who once had to wrestle teensy pumps onto Barbie’s weensy feet can now meet their dolls’ footwear demands by simply popping off an entire sandal-clad tootsie and replacing it with one sporting platform boots.  

Perhaps more appealing is the fact that the Bratz and Diva Starz, with their oversized, Keane-eyed faces and modestly proportioned figures, are considerably less adult-looking than Barbie (at least in the facial area), and more racially diverse; nonwhite girls looking for a doll “like them” no longer have to make do with Barbie’s tinted supporting players. But the message of these urban urchins is still very much the same—clothing, hair, and makeup are of paramount importance; materialism is encouraged. We never thought we’d find ourselves defending Babs, but let’s face it—the girl worked. She was a doctor, a waitress, a lounge singer, an athlete. And yes, most of these professions were just an excuse to get her all decked out in the appropriate outfit. But when you’ve got a Diva Starz doll whose fashion options all seem to be directed toward going to the mall, Barbie’s ambition suddenly looks kinda good. 

Most disturbing—and baffling—are the Hook-Ups, dolls whose selling point is that they can be hung up by an attached hook. However, the names of some of the dolls (Raven, Muffin, Serenity) and their attire—each comes garbed in some combination of fishnet stockings, bra tops, microminis, boas, thigh-high boots, and the thickest eye makeup this side of Wigstock—suggest a hook-up of an entirely different kind. There’s no nice way to say it: These dolls are skanky. What’s next, the Mustang Ranch play set? 

Rule # 4B The object of the game is to be a paragon of femininity.

The Bratz Passion for Fashion board game has a goal that is not unlike the classic Pretty Pretty Princess or Mystery Date, in which players go around the board collecting everything they need to be a princess or to prepare for a particular kind of date. In this case, the Bratz (each player chooses to be Yasmin, Cloe, Sasha, or Jade) must assemble a “stylin’” outfit for a night out by navigating the board and collecting clothes from the wardrobes of fellow Bratz. The snags come in the form of other players borrowing an outfit you need or messing up your hair. (The box copy warns, “Only an emergency visit to the local beauty salon could help you then!”) Certainly, competitiveness is central to board games, but the stated goals here—“Will you be the first to mix ’n’ match the hottest fashion looks and make it home to win the fashion game and be Bratz beautiful?”—highlight only the most stereotypical concerns of female life, and capitalize on tween girls’ supposed cattiness, to boot. Yes, we know that’s the point, but we can still be annoyed, can’t we?  

Rule # 5 It’s not called the Erector Set for nothing.

While venerable (and relatively ungendered) building sets like Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys are still hanging out on the shelves, the more complex and flashier sets that allow kids to build everything from a monster-truck arena to an electronic game arcade to a roller coaster are clearly where it’s at. Which is too bad for girls, apparently, since K’Nex, one of the most popular brands, seems to think that only boys are interested: Each and every K’Nex box we saw pictured at least one boy; there were no girls to be seen.  

But lest we worry that girls will be left out of the building fun entirely, Toys “R” Us features a just-for-girls line called the Ello Creation System—stocked far closer to the craft sets than to the building sets, we might add—that comprises an assortment of beads, stickers, and shapes that can be used to create jewelry, people, and environments. But don’t take our word for it—here’s what the package copy has to say: “Girls can build, design and create anything they can imagine with the Ello Creation System. Girls will love building a funky Ello person, beading jewelry or even creating a simple piece of furniture. The pieces are easy to connect and versatile. Bead, build and be brilliant! Ello pieces come in great girl-friendly shades like purple, aqua, pink and green!” 

There’s a lot to parse here. Though the Ello system is supposed to be the distaff answer to the likes of K’Nex, it’s not so much a building toy as it is an arts and crafts set—which is supposedly one of the elements that makes it more appealing to girls. Ello is touted as an imaginative toy—but “anything [girls] can imagine” is pretty much limited to people, animals, jewelry, and furniture. The assumption that girls don’t want to make a roller coaster or game arcade like those offered by K’Nex sets becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

However, if you work hard enough, you can break rules 1 through 5.

With a moderate amount of effort, you can keep the kids in your life supplied with gender-neutral goodies, but it does take work.  

The first thing to do is avoid the chain retailers. It’s not that independent toy stores don’t sell Barbies or tutus or plastic cell phones; they do. But their layouts are devised by individuals coping with small and often oddly configured spaces, not by a central planner determined to double profits by keeping brothers and sisters from sharing toys. The bigger a company is, the more risk-averse it’s going to be, which means you’re unlikely to find any toy that’s not tried-and-true. Indie stores are more likely to carry products from small suppliers or companies whose interests are geared toward making playtime more progressive, like those of the Swedish company Brio, which manufactures a line of primary-colored building toys that are emphatically not gender-coded. (The independents are also a lot more likely to sell a shopping basket of plastic fruit instead of a Happy Meal play set.) 

The next thing to do is ignore packaging. There are plenty of great toys that would surely delight kids of any gender—as long as you can get past their just-for-girls or boys-only trappings. (The Animal Planet Giant Ant Farm sounds fun, but why is it under “Gifts for Boys” in the Toys “R” Us online store?) It’s hard not to be guided by the imagery on the box (those marketers know what they’re doing), especially if you’re buying for someone else’s kids and you aren’t sure how parents will react to their son being given a crafts kit that’s adorned with hearts and flowers and the exhortation to “Create a Mosaic Jewelry Box!” But a fun art project is a fun art project, even if you have to crack open the box and re-wrap it yourself. 

The third thing to do is have confidence in kids not to swallow all the messages. After all, kids don’t necessarily see the same things adults do in their toys—much less in the packaging—and anyone who’s ever given her Barbie a buzz cut knows that kids easily devise ways to subvert the intentions of their toys. In its increasing gender segregation, Toys “R” Us is more likely aiming to fleece cash-holding adults than they are the kids who end up doing the actual playing—but that’s no excuse for putting up with it, right?

 Lisa Jervisand Andi Zeisler are the founding editors of Bitch. 

Teen Girls + Boy Love Dolls = Tru (heart) + $ 4Ever

Kyla — Thu, 31 May 2001 00:00:00 -0400

Pop-sensation lifespans have been shrinking since the dawn of pop sensations, but the power of the boy band has proved enduring. These prefab crews of scrubbed, smiling teens busting a synchronized move to manufactured beats have a special place in pop – music history and in the hearts—and notebooks and lockers—of their (mostly female) fans. 

Although the manufactured boy band has become the music-industry juggernaut of the late 1990s and beyond, achieving success and sales numbers usually reserved for more genuine musical talent, it’s by no means a new phenomenon. Record companies have long assembled product—’scuse us, pop stars—targeting specific markets (such as the large and increasingly cash-rich teen-girl demographic) based more on expected sales than artistic vision. (Although artistic vision was not precluded—the Beatles, for instance, famously combined musical genius with a teenybopper allure that led fans to widespread crushes and critics to label bandmembers “the cute one,” “the smart one,” etc., in deference to their appeal to different types of girls.) 

Today’s crop of boy bands has earrings, tattoos, and intricately sculpted facial hair. The boys shimmy and shake in time with each other like male Rockettes or Solid Gold Dancers. They are earnestly goo-goo-eyed and eager to please their teen and preteen female fans, and you could bounce a quarter off their ripped abs. Their songs are crafted by industry professionals; their voices, even at live shows, are churned through a mixer, tricked out with untold effects, and broadcast all plastic and pretty.  

They are the most assiduously marketed—and the most blatantly prefabricated—of all the boy bands who came before. In the past, it was kept at least perfunctorily secret that these groups were assembled via callboards and auditions—these days, they’re created on reality tv. (Making the Band, the ABC show that gave us O-Town, was renewed for a second season; it also inspired a female counterpart, the WB’s Popstars.) Some boy bands of the past replaced members one by one as they grew out of their teens; now, entire bands are the new models—introduced yearly by impresarios like Lou Pearlman, puppetmaster of the Backstreet Boys, ’N Sync, and O-Town—and have far more lenient age restrictions. (The fact that at least a few of the Backstreet “boys” are pushing 30 seems like more of a curiosity than a liability.)  

Feminists with an eye on pop culture have traditionally looked toward arguably positive female role models like Buffy or Madonna as the key to creating a strong self-image in young girls—perhaps overlooking the importance of teen idols and prototypical sex symbols. After all, the conflict between who you want to be and whom you want to please is a universal and classic one for women, and our socialization to be pleasing is powerful. For many girls, the teen idol plays an important role in our psychological development, affecting sexual fantasies and real-life desires. A pop star is often the first person for whom we feel recognizable lust; his often-androgynous beauty and significant removal from our lives allows us, as young teenage girls, tremendous freedom in the realm of fantasy—more so than the cute guy in bio ever will. And the current roster of boy bands sells the fantasy more calculatedly than any of their precursors.  

In contrast to their hot-pantsed female counterparts Britney and Christina, the sexuality these boys are selling is adolescent, not adult. This was no more apparent than when several members of ’N Sync joined Steven Tyler of Aerosmith onstage at the Super Bowl xxxv halftime show. Performing “Walk This Way,” the admittedly past-his-peak Tyler humped the microphone, wagged his tongue, and looked like he wanted to fuck all the girls in the audience and never call them again; the ’N Sync–ers, with their sidelong sheepish grins, were more like, “Gosh, honey, can you believe I’m doing this?” Their sweet, soft image doesn’t impose anything other than the purest visions of good-boyfriendhood on their teen audience—a tactic that’s historically been the m.o. of manufactured male love dolls from the Monkees to the New Kids, in keeping with cultural views of budding female sexuality.  

And it’s this sexuality that keeps the boy bands in business. As American pop culture embraces and attacks the desires of girls (often simultaneously), one constant is that it’s men who decide what a girl wants. How can these middle-aged Svengalis deliver compelling reflections of burgeoning female lust? Despite the changes that continue to be wrought in the cultural arena of teen sexuality, clearly it’s not just the little girls who understand.  

The Middle Ages Gregorian monks popularize chanting. 

The Renaissance Castrati and traveling troubadors originate the raw elements of the boy-band formula: high-pitched singing, sappy love songs, and goofy outfits. 

1900s Barbershop quartets. 

1931–32 The Mills Brothers, a teenage jazz group originally billed as Four Boys and a Guitar, hit it big with “Tiger Rag” and “Dinah.” The brothers’ career continues well into the 1950s. 

1938 Seminal jazz-vocal foursome the Ink Spots begin recording romantic songs such as “If I Didn’t Care” and set a standard for both doo-wop and tender ballads for years to come. 

1950s The boy-band model—four or more boys with clean-cut looks, dreamy lyrics, and gentle harmonies—is cemented by outfits like the Penguins (“Earth Angel”), Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers (“Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”), and the Five Satins (“In the Still of the Night”), among others. 

1957 The Everly Brothers release “Bye Bye Love,” the first of many hit songs about teen love, lost love, unrequited love, and eternal love that will prove to be lyrical templates for many boy bands to come.  

1958–63 Philadelphia, home of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, becomes teen-idol ground zero, with three record companies and a host of producers, promoters, and djs making overnight sensations of Fabian, Bobby Rydell, and Frankie Avalon. 

1959 Dion and the Belmonts release the single “A Teenager in Love.” 

1961 The Beach Boys, a quintet of uniformly toothy Californians, invent a sound combining heavenly harmonies with utopian imagery of surf, sun, and girls. 

1962 The Osmonds, five singing brothers from Utah, begin performing barbershop-style melodies at Disneyland. Youngest brother Donny joins the band later, resulting in both a poppier style and almost instant teen-idol status.  

1964 The Beatles appear for the first time on American tv, on The Ed Sullivan Show, followed soon after by the movie A Hard Day’s Night. Hysteria ensues. Meet the Beatles becomes the top-selling album in history. 

1966 The Monkees, a television show about a wacky young rock ’n’ roll band patterned after A Hard Day’s Night, premieres complete with a cute one, a serious one, and not one but two goofy ones. The show runs for two seasons, during which the Monkees garner a rabid following of teen fans—many of whom boo Jimi Hendrix offstage when he is put in the very weird position of opening for a fake band.  

1967 Teenage British-Australian brothers the Bee Gees hit number one in the U.K. with their single “Massachusetts.” Precocious songwriters and musicans through the ’60s, their greatest success will nevertheless come later, as arguably brilliant contributors to the disco oeuvre. 

1968 Bubblegum—the effervescent genre of pop epitomized by the Archies (“Sugar Sugar”), the Ohio Express (“Yummy Yummy Yummy”), and Tommy James and the Shondells (“I Think We’re Alone Now”)—enjoys a brief period in the spotlight. It was neither played by teens nor particularly marketed to them, but it was intrinsically teen music. As critic Lester Bangs wrote in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, “The irony, which everybody missed at the time, was that while rock was trying to be so hip and ‘adult,’ many bubblegum songs had some of the most lubriciously explicit lyrics in the world.” 

1969 Family singing group the Jackson 5 is signed to Motown Records. A string of hits and a much-loved cartoon series soon follow.  

1972 Kiss forms in Queens, New York. Ostensibly a band for adults (see: penis metaphors, tongue waggling), Kiss’s cartoonish presence proves ideal for marketing to kids in their teens and younger—with Kiss lunchboxes, masks, comic books, and cereal-box promotions.  

1975 A symbolic monkey wrench is thrown into the clean-cut works of the boy band when British clothing-boutique owner Malcolm McLaren constructs the Sex Pistols—supposedly in order to expose the empty commercialism that had consumed the purity of rock ’n’ roll. Scottish teenybopper act the Bay City Rollers garner number-one hits in both the U.K. and the U.S. Their youthful, tartan-clad image makes for international fave-rave status, but behind it is a very unpretty picture that in the coming years will include drugs, attempted suicide, vehicular manslaughter, and side careers in pornography. 

1977 Menudo forms in Puerto Rico and goes on to become the first Latin band to achieve global success. Members are required to leave after their 16th birthday (the age limit is later extended to 18); this structure provides a training ground for successful adult careers, most notably Ricky Martin’s. Meanwhile, producer Jacques Morali creates meta–boy band the Village People. Like the Beatles or the Monkees, bands that offered a dream date for each fan, the Village People takes the fantasy even further, serving up a tongue-in-cheek assortment of homosexual icons. 

1983 Teenage fivesome New Edition releases the high-pitched “Candy Girl.” Assembled by producer/songwriter Maurice Starr as a new-style Jackson 5, the group quickly chafes under his creative control and fires him.  

1986 New Kids on the Block, a quintet of blue-collar Bostonians, release a self-titled debut album under the tutelage of former New Edition producer Starr. By 1989, the New Kids and their fusion of pop, rap, and unforgettably bad dancing will be the biggest-selling act in America and a mainstay of teen-fanzine covers. 

1990 Nelson, twin sons of onetime teen idol Ricky Nelson, hit big with their debut album After the Rain. Not a boy band in the typical packaging, Nelson is rather a fusion of the boy-band ethos with the power chords of musical forebears like Winger. Of the duo, critic Gina Arnold writes: “There was a time when I objected to bands like this one imposing the shallow dreams and false values of their golden locks and starry eyes on the defenseless minds of unsophisticated little girls. I thought those girls deserved a better mousetrap, and that it was the responsibility of the rock ’n’ roll community…to provide quality music with content and depth for those little girls to chew on. But now that I’m older, I doubt if that’s true. I think that Nelson understands those girls—that there’s a bond between the two groups, which people like me have no right to deny either faction.” 

1991 British teen soon-to-be-sensation Take That release a debut single, “Do What U Like,” on their own label. The band is unlike many of their teen-band counterparts in that they write their own material and have no apparent Svengali, but they will also eventually commit the unfortunate act of foisting Robbie Williams’s solo career upon the world.  

1994 Irish prefab quintet Boyzone have their first hit, a cover of the Osmonds’ “Love Me for a Reason.” 

1997 Hanson, three blond brothers from Oklahoma, release “MMMBop,” a ridiculously catchy single in the tradition of the Jackson 5. 

1998 After hitting it big in Europe three years earlier, the Backstreet Boys’ U.S. debut is the third-biggest seller of the year.  

1999 The boy band explodes. Backstreet Boys, ’N Sync, Savage Garden, 98°, 5ive, Westlife, Youngstown, BBMak, and on, and on, and on. Taking fauxness to a whole new low, fictional boy band the Meaty Cheesy Boys shills for Jack in the Box by singing love songs to the fast-food chain’s Ultimate Cheeseburger. A company press release asserts, “While the ad is obviously intended to parody the current wave of young, sensitive-yet-hunky boy groups, it’s clearly an effective pitch for a popular product, a chance for us to build our brand with our target 18 – to 34-year-old male customers.” Because those are the people who appreciate boy bands? 

2000 Always quick to exploit a trend, MTV teams up with ABC to produce the reality series Making the Band. The show documents the nationwide talent search and rehearsal process resulting in O-Town.  

2001 The Beatles are named “#1 Boy Band” in the April issue of Tiger Beat, largely on the strength of 1, a compilation of the Fab Four’s 27 number-one hits that, aptly enough, spent eight weeks at number one in the U.S. and hit number one in another 33 countries. In a March 30 USA Today front-page story, Trina Yannicos, a Beatles fanzine publisher, offers one possible explanation for the phenomenon: “A majority of today’s artists seem to be manipulated by their managers, record companies, and corporations. Until today’s pop stars stand up for their creative rights, the record-buying public, who are mainly young people, will continue to long for a musical past that encouraged experimentation and originality.” A visit to Amazon.com reveals that customers who bought 1 also snapped up the Backstreet Boys’ Black and Blue.

Alison Fensterstock prefers John to Paul and Keith to Mick, but she gets confused trying to tell contemporary boy band members apart. She lives ’n’ writes in New Orleans, the City That Care Forgot. Andi Zeisler’s first teen-idol crush was Adam Ant, but it ended badly when she saw a picture of him without makeup. Dianna Huculak was fired from her last researching job.

Solid Gold Dancer

Siobhan Brooks — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 19:20:14 -0500

gina gold is a writer and filmmaker who spent five years in San Francisco’s sex industry, starting out as a phone sex operator, then becoming an exotic dancer at the Lusty Lady, the Market Street Cinema, and the Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theater. Her first film, Do You Want Me to Stay?, grew out of an autobiographical one-woman show that she wrote, directed, and performed at the Luna Sea theater last spring. She is currently working on The Island of Misfit Toys, a memoir. Since leaving the sex industry she has remained active in the Bay Area sex workers’ community, sitting on the advisory committee of the Exotic Dancers Alliance, a labor-rights advocacy organization, and working to set up a peer-counseling program at the St. James Infirmary, a clinic for sex workers. She has a lot to say about the complexities and contradictions of getting naked for cash. 

How did you get started in the sex industry? 

I was studying acting at Boston University, and I got a really bad case of mono, so I was always sick. I became tired of not feeling well, and I hated walking. It was an effort for me to do anything. So, one day I just packed six outfits in a suitcase and came out west to California to visit a friend who had graduated the year before. I’d said to myself that I was only going to stay in California for two weeks, but I ended up living here.  

I started working at this telemarketing company, selling appliances. One day the manager said to us that we weren’t selling enough appliances, and that maybe to get the customers to buy products from us we should flirt with them. I thought to myself, there’s no way I’m going to flirt with customers on the phone to get them to buy some appliances. One of my coworkers said to me that if she was going to do that, she might as well be a phone sex operator. Something in my head clicked when she said that. I quit that job and ended up doing phone sex. It had everything to do with just being out in a new place, and feeling like I could do anything because I had left everything behind. 

What did you think of doing phone sex work? 

It was interesting, because sex had always been a problem for me. When I was in middle school I had an unwanted sexual experience with someone and got the rep for being a whore at school and in my neighborhood, even though I didn’t do anything to deserve that label. I was blamed for this incident happening to me. That was the first sexual experience I’d ever had, so it had a profound effect on me.  

Doing phone sex gave me the opportunity to act on a lot of power issues I had. I felt at the time that since I was called a whore and I didn’t do anything, this time I was going to play that role. I felt that I was somehow taking control over my life.  

At this company, you were not allowed to say explicit sexual terms—you had to use metaphors. So you had girls saying, “Put your buns in the oven,” or, “Park your car in the garage.” I was surprised at how easy it was to turn these men on. When I heard the first man respond, I felt so powerful that my voice was able to get this reaction from him. Power was something that was very important to me, because I felt so powerless at the time. 

How long did you keep the phone sex job? 

A few months. At this company they start you out doing soft porn, meaning there is no bestiality or mention of sex organs. But then you move up to hard porn, where you can say profanity and have fantasies involving animals, violence, children. I had a real difficult time dealing with the hard-porn calls, because at this company you had to take those calls, even if you were uncomfortable with them. You were not supposed to reject calls from customers. So, in a couple of weeks I had moved up to hard porn.  

I guess phone sex came naturally to me, and at first it was fine; then I started getting calls involving children. I remember on the hard-porn line some guy called up with a fantasy that he was the manager of a toy store and I was this little kid in the store, and I was like, oh, no! The customer then went on to say that I came in the store with my parents and had somehow gotten away from them. The guy caught me stealing something and takes me in the back of the store. He then told me to lift up my dress, take an ear of corn…. When I heard that part I bumped the customer off the line. On the hard-porn line you couldn’t do that, but I did it anyway. I just couldn’t bear hearing fantasies like that. The supervisor reprimanded me, saying that I wasn’t taking the job seriously, that it was a very important job, and I was supposed to be turning these men on. She then threatened to kick me off hard porn. She told this to everyone, because no one wanted to take those calls. That’s what I really liked about the women [I worked with]—they didn’t take much shit from anyone. 

What kind of women worked there?  

It was really funny, because the company advertised the women to be these California babes with big tits and blond hair, and the number was 777-wett. But most of the women who worked there were young black girls from the ghetto. It would be different types of models modeling for the ads, but the women were all us. The strange thing was that the customers did not even notice that the women weren’t white. The customers would ask the girls to describe themselves, and in their ghetto twang they would say that they had blond hair and blue eyes. The men fell for it, and I think that’s when I became really scared of men— because they just don’t give a damn. They are so different, the way they relate to visual images or verbal stimulation. I cannot imagine myself getting turned on in that way. I remember I was taking a call and I was moaning and I gave the phone to someone else, and the customer didn’t notice. It got to a point where I had no respect for the customers and I would stop talking in the middle of a call and tell a coworker to get me some fish and chips from the store—while the customer was still on the line. I would still hear the customer on the other end going, “Ooooohhhh.” 

When did you start stripping? 

Well, one of my coworkers also worked at the Lusty Lady, and she always suggested that if I wanted more money I should come work there. I always felt that I could never, ever strip. I felt that my body wasn’t good enough and that I was too shy. My coworker kept stressing that it was a feminist theater with women managers, and at that time I had never heard of strip clubs and feminism mixing with each other. So I told her that there was no such thing as a feminist theater, and I kept telling myself that because I didn’t want to hear that there could be. I thought it was a complete contradiction. I went home and thought about it, and I started to ask her questions about the work environment. She told me to come down for an audition. I went down a few days later and auditioned and was hired. I asked the show director how she could define herself as a feminist and still dance. She told me that there was nothing wrong with being a sex worker, and that it was possible for sex workers to actually be feminist. I had just never combined the two before.  

The more you engaged yourself in dancing, what did you notice changed in yourself? 

I always felt that I was separate from myself; everything seemed hazy, like a dream—very surreal, like it wasn’t happening. I would work at night and the mirrors, the lights, the whole stage didn’t feel real. It was really weird for me. I felt like I was in a neon fish tank with these nude women who I didn’t know dancing next to me while windows were constantly going up and down. I hated the way the mirrors often distorted my body, which I think had to do with the fact that I didn’t have high self-esteem about my body. I had to get used to women studying nude in the dressing room. I didn’t have the stereotype that strippers were stupid or that they didn’t go to school, but there was still something strange about seeing women coming from class, undressing, and getting ready for work. After a while women walking around nude with books became natural for me. During my first few weeks there I was very disconnected from myself and other dancers, and I had extreme body-control issues. To stand in front of a mirror onstage and look at my whole body was a huge deal for me. I had never really spread my legs apart and looked inside my vagina, and looked at it from different angles. I felt strange having men jacking off to it and ejaculating on the [peep-show] window. 

Did you feel separated from your vagina while men were doing this? 

Yes, I felt very separated from it, but at the same time I think that’s why I chose to be an exotic dancer— because I felt so separate from that area of my body. So I felt that by doing this I had control over how I was going to use it. I felt that doing sex work was the only way I had control over my body; I was presenting this image of myself as a real sexual being, when in reality I was not. I always felt like a fraud, like I had this big secret I couldn’t tell anyone. I felt that the other women around me didn’t have that problem, at least not in the same sense I did. However, the good thing about the industry was that I gained a lot of power. I used to have a problem with men following me on the street, and I wouldn’t really do anything about it. If men spoke to me on the street and I wanted them to go away, I didn’t feel that I could tell them to go away. I would be nice to them when I knew I wanted them to leave me alone. One night, after a shift at the Lusty Lady, I was walking home and this man followed me. I knew he was following me, but I wanted to be in denial that he actually was, so I kept walking. The man started gaining on me, and when I was almost at the bus stop this carload of black guys pulled up, and the man ran away. The guys asked me if I knew that the man had been following me for the past few blocks. I was really lucky that those men drove up. I told the show director what happened, and she asked me what I did. I looked at her as if she was crazy and asked her what I could have done. The man was following me. I didn’t understand why she asked me that question. The show director was like, “You could have told that man to stop following you.” She kept insisting that I should say that next time, and that if someone was following me I had every right to tell them to stop. That was one of the best things that ever happened to me working there; I slowly realized that I had the power to tell someone to get away from me.  

Did a situation like that happen to you again? 

The next time I caught a guy following me on the street, I turned around and told him that I wanted to walk in peace. He apologized and crossed the street. I could also tell he was embarrassed. I was so surprised that the technique of telling men not to follow you worked, because I had expected that men would want to converse with you more because you spoke to them. I learned that I didn’t have to give men a reason for not wanting to talk to them when they asked why, whereas before I felt that I did. That was a great breakthrough for me. 

What else did you find empowering? 

I found talking to the customers to be empowering, especially reprimanding them for not following rules. When I first started, I would tell the customers to please not knock on the glass to get a dancer’s attention, but I didn’t have any confidence when I said it. My voice always sounded meek, and customers wouldn’t take me seriously. Another dancer would come from behind me and say, “Did you hear what she said? Stop banging on the window,” in a firm voice, and the customer would stop. Soon, telling customers not to behave in certain ways wasn’t a problem, and I was starting to be assertive in my everyday life.  

It’s true that women lose a sense of power even before they come into the sex industry, just because our society is sexist—but women can also gain something powerful from being in the sex industry. Many strippers feel they are in control of their work environment because they can dance for customers part-time and get paid. When you lap dance you’re hustling, telling customers, “You need to do this. You need to give me this amount of money.” That’s a skill most women aren’t taught to have. But look at who owns the club. You also wouldn’t be standing in five-inch heels, false eyelashes, and a teddy for five hours just for the hell of it. You do it because you’re a woman and you know that’s what men expect, so there’s a loss of power.  

What were your relationships with other dancers like? 

It took me a while before I was comfortable with the women, because I didn’t want to make the fact that I was stripping real. I felt that I had to keep everyone at a distance because this wasn’t my real life, and these women could never be my friends. I kept telling myself that the whole experience of dancing wasn’t real, and that I was only going to do it for three months, not five years.  

I also had an intimate relationship with a woman outside of the Lusty, which distracted me from interacting with my coworkers. At that point I was comfortable working in the industry, but when the relationship ended it forced me to interact more with my coworkers. One of the things that I really liked about the women I worked with was their knowledge about herbs and different ways to take care of your body. They were consistently taking herbs and vitamins, or doing acupuncture. 

Why did you leave the Lusty Lady to work at the Market Street Cinema? 

Because I became greedy; I wanted more money. At the Cinema there was an opportunity to make more money than at the Lusty Lady, because you lap danced, whereas at the Lusty customers don’t touch you. I figured that since I was already in the industry, I might as well keep going.  

When you were at the Cinema, what were the working conditions like? 

The conditions have gotten worse, but they were always bad. We would tip out $5 or $10 a shift, and I remember complaining about that. If you didn’t tip out you were treated really bad by the djs. You would be ready to perform onstage and your music wouldn’t start, or your cds were scratched. You would ask for a night shift, but get a shift at a quarter to two when the club was almost empty.  

We had a day-shift guy and a night-shift guy, and the night-shift guy was really mean—only to girls he felt were old or ugly. The day-shift guy was usually pretty nice to me. But I remember during my first shift there, a customer squeezed my breast and I slapped the shit out of him. This other girl saw it and said, “Oh, you better tell the day-shift guy what happened so you won’t get in trouble with management.” I told the guy what happened, and that I slapped a customer. The guy looked at me and said, “I don’t care if a customer takes his fist and shoves it up your pussy as far as it will go, you sit there and you take it. Then you tell me and I’ll stick my foot up him.” I looked at him and was like, you expect me to sit there and take that shit?! How is that helpful to me?  

This was also around the time that girls began to form the Exotic Dancers Alliance and began filing lawsuits about back wages and horrible working conditions. 

How did you feel going from a structured club like the Lusty Lady to one like the Cinema? Did the Cinema give you more freedom? 

The things I hated about the Cinema were also things I liked about it. I loved the fact that any old fucking thing could occur at the Cinema. It was just funny to be around that kind of environment—you probably could have murdered a customer there and still be on the schedule. I loved the freedom of being in an area of society that didn’t have any rules; in that aspect it was my favorite club to work at.  

How long did you work there? 

Three years, and I usually made $100 to $500 a night. I really didn’t do that well, but I had a regular and that’s where most of my money came from. He was this white businessman with a ton of money. Without regulars I didn’t do well, because I could not stand for customers to touch me. Men would jack off and want me to touch them or they wanted to touch me, and I could not hang with that. It didn’t have anything to do with me being prudish or uppity, I just couldn’t physically stand someone touching me, even brushing against my breast. I hated customers kissing the back of my neck; the feeling of putting my clothes back on after being touched grossed me out. When customers tried to touch me while I was lap dancing, my whole body would tense up, and I would want to sink through the floor. I think one of the reasons I have back problems is from tensing up from customers trying to touch me. Plus I was wearing heels. Many times when customers did touch me, I didn’t want to screen them out because often they were the only lap of the night. I tried nicely to tell them to stop, but I didn’t want to tell them nicely, so I was holding in a lot of anger, too. Usually, customers couldn’t see my facial expressions while I was lap dancing because my back was to them, so I would try to hold down their arms so they wouldn’t touch me. I think that men could feel my body language and that affected my money. 

How were you able to retain regulars? 

I could be charming if I knew I wasn’t going to be touched. If I thought I would be touched then I couldn’t talk to the customer, and I wasn’t charming. It was really hard for me to lap dance in the beginning because of my restrictions relating to touch. I noticed that my black customers never lasted as long as my white customers, so most of my regulars were white—plus they were attracted to the elegant way I spoke. I also noticed that if the black customers didn’t get what they wanted—like touching me—they would move on quicker than my white customers. If it wasn’t for my few white businessmen, I would not have lasted there, because I could not compete with dancers letting customers touch them in different places for certain amounts of money. There were actually a lot of dancers who did negotiate things like that with customers, which surprised me. I’m not sure why it did; I guess I thought everyone had body issues like I did. When I found out dancers were letting themselves be touched, I felt really alienated. That’s when I realized that I probably should not be lap dancing, but I was anyway. I pimped myself out; I told myself: You’re going to go out and do this whether you want to or not. I wanted to prove to myself that I could hang, instead of drawing the line at being touched. I can’t say that I regret doing it, or I wouldn’t be fighting for these women today. But I think I abused my health—I have back problems, and my nerves are shot. 

What were your relationships like with customers? 

My relationships with customers have been pretty amazing; they’ve actually helped me out a lot. The first time I met a customer outside of the premises of work, I had gone with a friend and she was meeting a customer, so I decided to come with her just for the hell of it. I figured that this was her customer anyway, so I was just along for the ride. This customer and I got along really well—to the point that he bought me a car, taught me how to drive, and got me the insurance. He never wanted sex in return; he really wanted me to be self-sufficient. I had told him that I had credit problems—he helped me fix my credit. He knew that I didn’t have a decent computer to do rewrites on my book, so he bought me a laptop. I owe a lot to this customer, and even now I don’t know what his motives were—but I’m thankful that he’s helped me out so much. 

How did you get out of the sex industry, after being in it for five years? 

I went on this meditation retreat for two weeks where all I did was meditate. I was alone with myself and not allowed to speak to other people, so I couldn’t fool myself any longer about what I wanted from my life. The retreat made me realize I had to be honest with myself by stating that the truth was I didn’t like that job, and I didn’t want to work there anymore. It’s not healthy for anyone to be under that kind of stress. It was hard, because I kept thinking that I needed the money—but the job was becoming boring for me. It was exciting in the beginning, but after five years of going through costumes and wigs, it gets tired.  

How is your book coming along? Talk a bit about your process of trying to get published. 

The book covers my life growing up in Queens, New York; moving to California; and my thoughts and views on being a stripper. It also includes interviews with different dancers. Grove Press almost picked it up, but they said they had already bought a book on stripping just before they received my manuscript. I was really depressed about that; then my agent suggested that I rewrite it, because it’s more than 500 pages, and he felt there was no reason for it to be that long. I think the other reason I’m having a problem getting it published is because white men don’t want to hear about themselves shoving yams up their asses. My book exposes a lot of kinky sexual behavior middle-class white men do behind closed doors. 

During an interview in the documentary Straight for the Money, you said that while you were giving this white customer a lap, he asked you why black women looked so young, and you replied that it was because we have a lot of melanin in our skin. The customer then said, “Oh, you mean watermelanin.” Were racist comments like that common? 

Thank god, no. Overt racist comments like that were rare. The only other time I had a racist incident was with this Asian customer in Hawaii. When I approached his table, instead of saying, “Hi, how are you?” he said, “I was just chillin’ with my homeboys the other day.” I said, “Excuse me?” The customer repeated himself, and I didn’t realize at first what he was trying to imply—I really didn’t understand why he had said that to me. He then explained that he was trying to talk jive to me. I had to explain to him that I didn’t talk like that, and that he was making racist assumptions about black people. That situation was really strange to me: that’s like if I were to walk up to an Asian person and instead of saying, “Hi, how are you?” saying, “Pork fried rice and chow mein.” I think black dancers overall have to work a lot harder than white ones, but the financial reward is worth it. 

How did you get into filmmaking?  

I wrote and directed Island of Misfit Toys: Are You There Baby?, which is a one-woman stage show about my life in the sex industry. I was doing the show and I thought that the lap dancing piece would be too hard to do live. I was working with another actor and I didn’t want to put him in the position of having to do that live. I mean, he was only 20 years old. He’s a genius, but I wanted to make sure I captured that genius. So I was like, ok, I need to get this on film. And then I realized how much I liked film. It came out of me wanting to capture a moment that I was afraid I wasn’t going to get onstage.  

How was it doing video work? 

I knew I wanted to make films, but I didn’t realize how important that piece was going to be until I started doing it. It was my favorite part of doing the show. I realized doing a one-woman show that I’d rather work with people. It’s really lonely up there. I realized I like directing, too. So I learned a lot doing that—it made me realize that I want to do film work. I love that you can edit and perfect it. You don’t have one chance to make it right. I could show the film and not have to worry about stage fright. I was afraid of exposing myself being attracted to customers, showing that kind of vulnerability—but it felt good to be truthful about my experience. I would like to say that I was disgusted by the customers, but that wasn’t true. I remember in real life having a customer pull my hair and liking it, and I felt ashamed that I enjoyed it. But life is too complex for it to be one or the other. 

What are your future writing and filmmaking plans?  

I’m going to set up a public access show. I’m going to be doing little skits and excerpts from my show that will be more fully developed. So it’ll be more about stripping and about my relationship with my mom, which was a big part of the show.  

What kind of reactions have you received from the audience, especially women of color? 

Everyone loved it, but I do remember after the show two black women came up to me and said that they found my show to be degrading to women. That made me feel really horrible—it hurt to have the few black women in the audience say that comment. 

How do you deal with the comment that you are perpetuating negative stereotypes of black women by being in the sex industry—that we’re already seen as sex objects? 

I deal with that by coming out as a sex worker who is intelligent. I’m a writer, an artist, a filmmaker. I feel like my work refutes negative stereotypes of black female sex workers. I’m dispelling myths that sex workers are stupid. I’m not ashamed of having been a sex worker. That’s why I produce my shows, to make people aware of our issues.  

Keep up with Gina Gold’s screening schedule and cable tv doings at http://tristesse.com/~gina. This interview is excerpted from Siobhan Brooks’s book-in-progress, Dancing Shadows: Interviews with Men and Women Sex Workers of Color.

Why Don't We Do it in the Road?

Kira Garcia — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 18:28:20 -0500

the traveling spoken-word gang Sister Spit started five years ago as a weekly open mike where grrrly-type poets and performers could ply their trade at San Francisco bars and coffeehouses. In 1997, co-ringleader Michelle Tea, author of the charming and intimate memoir The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America, and her partner-in-crime Sini Anderson, who has rocked poetry scenes from subway stations to Lollapalooza and everywhere in between, kicked off the annual Sister Spit Road Show. Every spring they determine the tour lineup by drawing from a hat filled with the names of women whose writing they like. The randomly chosen few pile into vans and take off across the country, unleashing new-school, girls-only poems and stories armed with heartbreak and humor (and the occasional striptease) on rabid fans and hapless victims everywhere.  

Of course, tours need roadies. You know, drive the van, sling t-shirts and books, and try not to get drunk before you count the money. The day I met Michelle, she “just had this feeling” that I was destined to be the roadie for Sister Spit’s 1999 Road Show. Um, give up my professional summer internship behind a desk editing copy in exchange for a few thousand miles in a caravan of rowdy, punk-dyke poets? Hell, yes.  

Oakland, California | June 30 

It’s late and I’m a bit delirious. I’m spending the summer with a group of women I don’t know. As cool as they are, as utterly defenseless as I am in my college-girl bookishness, what stands in the way of humiliation? I have visions of sleeping in the van, parked outside of a biker bar, while older, veteran Sister Spitters drink each other under the table. Mommy! 

Santa Cruz, California | July 1 

I’m riding with Tara Jepsen, who reads hilarious stories about New Age yoga retreats and high school keg parties; Kassy Kayiatos, slam poetry and beatbox champ; Anna Joy Springer, who sang and wrote songs for the now-defunct punk band Cypher in the Snow; and Silas Flipper, guitarist and songwriter for the legendary punk-dyke extravaganza that is Tribe 8. We are cruisin’ in Tara’s dad’s Astrovan, with Tara as captain. A ’78 Chevy van named Sheila is crammed with the rest of the gals: Nomy Lamm, fat activist, singer, and author of the erstwhile zine I’m So Fucking Beautiful; Ali Liebegott, who on any given night may make you cry with her heart-wrenching poetry or elicit entirely different emotions by crushing a beer can with her tits; ex–Vitapup singer Jane LeCroy, who charms us all with sexy a cappella jazz songs about praying mantises and rhinoceri; Tarin Towers, who rocks the mike with a hand on her hip and slam poetry to knock your socks off; Laurie Weeks, pee-in-your-pants-funny poet and story writer of The New Fuck You fame (“The best dyke anthology ever!,” says Michelle); and our fearless leaders Sini and Michelle. 

My fears are assuaged pretty quickly when Kassy admits she’s never done anything like this before either. Anna Joy puts me at ease, too—she paints her toenails on the dashboard and makes everyone laugh.  

I wasn’t aware we were staying with the infamous Susie Bright in Santa Cruz. I’m a bit starstruck as we stumble out of the van and into her big orange Victorian. Susie’s a great hostess. No one else seems fazed, so I’m quiet and amazed all by myself for the rest of the evening, trying to act cool. Yeah, I hang out with lesbian icons all the time, whatever. Still, I’m sitting on her deck two hours later eating dinner prepared by her partner, thinking, “Who can I call and scream, ‘I’m at fuckin’ Susie Bright’s house eating salmon and rice!’?” 

Highway 5 | July 2 

At our first meal stop, Ali and Laurie do some kind of stand-up routine involving croutons. Laurie has a wicked laugh and says things like “That’s enraging!” in a very bad-girl, Heathers kind of way; she introduces the first of many running jokes when she refers to the vagina as “nature’s little backpack.” We derive endless humor from this, with different versions getting crazier and more disgusting with each passing moment. Everything is funny, especially the descriptions of the food on the Denny’s menu, and I’m beginning to think this is some kind of defense mechanism against road psychosis.  

Las Vegas, Nevada | July 3 

The Double Down Saloon is not particularly remarkable-looking, but the crowd is huge. The show gets loud and dirty; the performances are sharp and hilarious. None of this comes as a surprise in a bar that serves something called ass juice.  

It is decided that the best way to finish off the evening—the obvious choice, really—is to drop Ecstasy and take in a show at an ultraclassy strip club called Cheetahs, where admission is free for the ladies. The girls twirl around poles like piñatas. Everyone is happy and in awe. “You’re so pretty! Here, take some money. I love your outfit!” We stay up ’til dawn, wandering around the almost-empty casinos. When the sun starts to rise, we’re standing on the “dock” at the fake pirate-ship casino, listening to tape-recorded sounds of crickets chirping and ropes creaking. The Strip looks like a full-scale movie set, ready for a car chase to go careening by at any moment. One night in Vegas is enough for me.  

Tucson, Arizona | July 5  

By the time we arrive in Tucson, I feel drunk and strangely happy from watching the same landscape go by for hours. Our hostess welcomes us into her long, narrow house. I stay in back on a covered porch with a dirty concrete floor. By the time I lie down, it looks and feels like heaven. A big orange cat named Joshua looks skeptical at my arrival and pees in the corner near my head, but I am too tired to do anything about it. When I wake up, large red ants are busily transporting food to their home along the length of my arm.  

Tonight we’re at a small queer community center that seems especially reserved in comparison to the Double Down. I’m perpetually amazed by the art produced by these women. I’ve spent the last few days expressing myself through nervous laughter between the moments when I’m just amazed and quietly watching. Here’s how it generally goes at the shows: At the club, everyone mills around; Sini and Michelle do business. “Where are the drink tickets?” “When are we starting?” I lug heavy boxes in from the van, defying both gravity and the laws of clumsiness in platform shoes. Someone, usually the bartender, tells me where I can set up the merchandise table. Generally it’s too small, wobbly, or both. I unload boxes, lining up books and cds. Sometimes the suppressed poet in me squirms with jealousy. I’m guarding the tangible evidence of genius that isn’t mine, grrr… 

I watch the show each night from the merch table, referred to by Michelle as the Sister Spit mini-mall. Sini and Michelle have an impossibly good improv between acts. They are like nutty infomercial hosts, unfailingly charming the audience. I still don’t have all the merchandise prices memorized. In fact, I have no idea what I’m selling. What’s in this book? Wow, good question. I could perhaps be the worst salesperson in the world. I make a little vow to read through most of the stuff so I can at least bullshit my way through a conversation.  

After the show, we stop by the neighborhood pool with our hostess for a scantily clad midnight swim. Michelle and I scramble up onto shoulders to chicken fight, screaming like sorority girls in some sleazy ’80s movie. On the road that night, wet underwear dangles from the rearview mirror. 

Albuquerque, New Mexico | July 7 

Lightning in California is nothing like this—big flashes that crack the sky open over and over. The rain keeps it from being too hot. We seem to have imported some ants from Tucson. Now many of us are suffering from Phantom Ant Syndrome, which consists of slapping at nonexistent ants after sensing the distinct brush of their tiny legs.  

Unfortunately, the ants become the least of our worries when we find that our lodgings—a concrete garage with some mats on the floor, a couch, and a fully reclined car seat to serve as beds—are infested with palmetto bugs. They look somehow more menacing than cockroaches: in essence, large chunks of living, scurrying, flying grossness. It isn’t so bad until Laurie, after the lights are out and we’re all tucked in, insists that she can hear the whirring of their wings. Ali takes us on a guided visualization to lull us to sleep. “Imagine you’re floating in a boat, on a tranquil sea…of squirming palmetto bugs.” We all scream laughter into the darkness. Soon Laurie and Ali are in rare form. Laurie insists that we all really should read the autobiography of the famous puppet Lambchop, titled Your Fist Inside Me: My Life with Shari Lewis.  

The New Mexico–Texas border | July 9 

We are cowgirl truckers cruisin’ up to the Lone Star State, expecting trouble any second. Last year the van got pulled over like crazy, just for looking funny. Maybe it’s our new “Show us your hooters!” bumper sticker, but we still seem to be irresistable to the boys in blue. We are apparently missing a license plate light (incidentally, we’re also missing door handles, locks, and dashboard lights). While the first set of peacekeepers is politely informing us of this fact, four or five carloads of the Man arrive on the scene. (How many Southern sheriffs does it take to change a license plate lightbulb?) They are curious, to say the least, noses in the air like cats trained to the sound of the can opener. What are y’all doing in Texas? Where y’all from? “Um, we’re poets.” It just sounds funny; we know it and they know it, too. They want to search the van. They really, really want to search the van. We must regretfully decline this proposition, as fun as it sounds. Luckily, Ali is driving and she knows it’s actually ok to tell cops they can’t search your vehicle. We tool away unscathed, except now we are all seething with that special kind of anger you feel when movie-style bad guys manifest themselves in real life.  

Austin, Texas | July 10 

Anna Joy gets in trouble for dipping her tits in our hostesses’ goldfish pond. The show is at a lesbian coffee shop called Gaby and Mo’s, populated by lots of smiling Indigo Girls types. I am getting sick; my throat’s too sore to swallow, so I haven’t eaten much recently. Cranky, homesick, and unable to sleep, I fantasize about running away from everyone, somehow miraculously transporting myself back to my bedroom and normal life. At 4:00 a.m. I decide to take a walk.  

The third or fourth solitary man in a pickup truck to whistle at me scares me out of my stupor. I’m realizing that any minute, one of these guys could become more insistent about his desire for company. I discover Arkie’s diner, which has presumably just opened for the morning to the truckers who have worked up an appetite harassing pedestrians on the country road. It smells, and all three of the other patrons look at me like I’m nuts, but it’s nice to be among strangers without the obligation to speak or interact. I entertain myself by concocting stories about the torrid affair the waitress is having with the guy at the other end of the counter—she makes eyes at him when she refills his coffee. I think about buying a newspaper, but really this moment of quiet is what I need more than anything.  

New Orleans, Louisiana | July 15 

The Deep South offers up some of the best souvenirs yet: Anna Joy buys a ceramic pig clock, and Laurie’s new neon-green t-shirt reads, “I Go Nuts for Cowboy Butts.” This will undoubtedly go over very well at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. We cross the Mississippi River in the afternoon. I am so awestruck I feel confused. It is hard for me to understand the concept of so much fresh water in one place. It takes longer to cross than the San Francisco Bay.  

My illness is making me progressively crazier. Everyone hates me in New Orleans, and I don’t blame them. I haven’t eaten in days, and I can’t tell whether I have a fever because it’s a million degrees outside. I just generally pout and act like a jerk. I feel like a big baby and spend the next two days doing very unfun things, like going to the emergency room.  

We perform at a restaurant/bar in the French Quarter called Lucky Cheng’s. The club features performances by flawless-looking drag queens. Their slogan is “Eat, drink and be mary.” Thankfully, the show is relatively low-key. Surprising—I expected a bottle-smashing, chair-throwing kind of crowd. Maybe all this talk of New Orleans being the murder capital of the U.S. is really hooey. The place is kind of creepy, though. Very frozen-in-time, with teeny narrow streets and crumbling houses. Everything is very sad and very beautiful. Except maybe the cockroaches, which are neither; they are just enormous and nauseating.  

Atlanta, Georgia | July 16 

By now the point game has been in full effect for at least a week—basically, we’re all supposed to be competing for action while on the road. One point for kissing, two points for feeling up, three for “whatever your feminist definition of penetration is,” as Michelle puts it. Silas gets a little kiss onstage, one more point. The rest of us might as well give up, though, because Kassy is way ahead—she’s using a really straightforward approach to romance the ladies, and as a result is rackin’ up the points like crazy. Maybe it’s the fact that she looks a little like Ricky Martin, but those teenage girls just go nuts for her. Our hostess displays great Southern hospitality—she stops to buy us toothbrushes at the convenience store on the way home.  

Athens, Georgia | July 17 

How many days did I sit in algebra class fantasizing about how to get to Athens, convinced that Michael Stipe would find me the minute I stepped off the Amtrak and propose marriage? At last, I am here, six or seven years too old to be starstruck. For some reason everyone is reading gross-out stories tonight, for a crowd that seems only mildly enthused in a jaded, college-town-hipster sort of way. Silas tells a story about getting deported while on tour with Tribe 8, which includes a lovely moment about swallowing a bug. Anna Joy then favors us with another on-tour-in-Europe story, about how a particularly smelly case of chlamydia offended her bandmates. I have no idea what the locals are thinking about all this, but at least the bartender loves us. The drinks keep coming long after the show, culminating in an impromptu strip show performed on the bar by Silas and Sini.  

Asheville, North Carolina | July 18 

Somewhere I never thought I’d see. We somehow manage to arrive almost two hours early, so before the show I eat pizza with a weird local guy who was reading Yeats at the table next to me in a coffee shop. He’s maybe a little bit creepy, but he has good stories about seeing fairies while camping in Iceland. The gorgeous bartender at the show has glittery stuff all over her; she makes me something with Alizé and cranberry juice. I think, cheerily, that vitamin C is just what I need to kill my lingering throat ailment. 

Washington, D.C. | July 20 

Blech, heat so thick it’s like having a big mouthful of potatoes all the time. The club is packed; this venue sold tickets in advance and it’s impossible to even get across the room to the bar. Jane’s performance tonight is particularly great. She is part science nerd, part Etta James. She sings “Lost My Way” all slow and goosebumpy. Her stage getup—elbow-length gloves, a black dress, eyeliner—is melodramatic in the most gorgeous way. She sings her praying mantis and rhinoceros songs.  

We spend the next afternoon in a big shopping center. Kassy and I ride little kids’ bikes around Kmart while our clothes dry at the laundromat next door.  

New York, New York |  July 23–26 

As I’m driving through the Holland Tunnel, I try not to think about the fact that even if I weren’t totally deranged from sleep deprivation, driving in New York would be scary. Strangely, I’m fine; the whole drive is less stressful than trying to turn left in San Francisco.  

My hostess is Jane; I sleep on her big tiger-print couch in a living room with red walls. Geographically, I have traveled as far from Oakland as I will all summer, but New York feels like home. I feel totally content, awake all the time and full of energy. The first morning, we eat bagels and drink coffee in the park with Jane and her husband Dorian. Everyone agrees that he is wonderful. He takes the subway with Kassy and Jane and me to the Meow Mix, where we’re performing. The club is big, with a pool table downstairs and a small stage. People are packed in, but without air conditioning they don’t last long. Still, both shows go well.  

We find lots to entertain ourselves with in the city for two whole days off. We go to a club called Foxy’s, where there’s a competition among the audience members for the nastiest onstage sex show. Drunken sorority girls and frat boys do their best to humiliate themselves for cash prizes while the audience gets trampled trying to see the stage. Fortunately or unfortunately, I get a little too shitty to stick around for long. I decide it would be a really great idea to just lie down for a minute. Ali cradles my drunk head in her lap while Duran Duran blasts through the speakers. Eventually I manage to drag myself to a cab and back to Jane’s, where the heat and my drunkeness create a very realistic version of hell. I feel like I’m in one of those antidrinking ABC Afterschool Specials. I am picturing how I would film myself from above, my wretched, sweaty body twisting uncomfortably in the sheets.  

Providence, Rhode Island–Chicago, Illinois | July 27–August 6 

Days pass in a blur. In Providence, we stay at a huge punk warehouse where they have a silkscreening shop, a big stage, and lots of bikes for communal use. Boston is a big city with lots of thick-necked guys in baseball hats. We sell out a 500-seat auditorium at Massachusetts College of Art. I feel like a real roadie, taking pizza and beer backstage, and then watching the show from so far away everyone looks like ants.  

In Buffalo, we see a boy/girl who goes by “V” do a superfast striptease dance to Lords of Acid. S/he has big bleached-blond hair, punk-rock eye makeup, and a plastic miniskirt. Other queens named Armani and Fanta See Island give us signed pictures of themselves with messages like “Sister Spit—Follow Your Dreams!!”  

On the way out of town, someone finds a big vibrator in a paper bag in Sheila’s back seat. It has little faces in relief all over it. “It’s linty!” says Ali, holding it up for everyone to see. She is distressed, waving it around. “Whose dick is this?!” No one will confess. Anna Joy waves it out the driver’s window for the other van to see. “Is this yours?” Still, no one claims it. We get to a stoplight and Ali runs out, Chinese-fire-drill-style, to toss it in the passenger window of the Astrovan. It lands in Tara’s lap and that’s the last we see of it until Sini chucks it out the window at a tollbooth. The car in the lane next to us crushes it. The toll-taker is not amused. “There’s a $100 fine for littering in the state of New York!” We are reliving the hilarity when Sheila starts grumbling and breaks down. Some kind-hearted bricklayers stop to help while we sit on the side of the road, drinking the Pabst they had in their truck. Turns out some part we had installed in Buffalo is wrong.  

Laurie, Tarin, and I spend the night in a town called North East Pennsylvania to get the van fixed. The next day, Tarin and I alternate driving with our legs wrapped in cold, wet towels to defend ourselves from the heat of the engine. We miss the Columbus, Ohio, show and arrive in Chicago just in time the following night. The whole thing is quite unexpected, though, because Sini’s psychic, Dante, told her in New York that we wouldn’t break down.  

Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival | August 9–15 

The festival—a huge perk of my job, as we’re performing only one show this week—is exactly what I imagined: lots of women with no shirts on pushing wheelbarrows and trying to scrub off purple body paint with organic soap in the outdoor showers.  

Tribe 8 plays an amazing show to huge crowds of rowdy girls crashing into each other. Some Sister Spit girls get onstage to do a little dancing in the tie-dyed g-string panties we picked up in Reno especially to impress the Michigan chicks. Sure enough, the ladies love the Sister Spitters, who prance down the catwalk waving fern branches, all hippie parody and punk-rock craziness. I chicken out of the dancing, and of course instantly regret it the minute they hit the stage. I have definitely missed my only chance to be an almost-naked go-go dancer for a dyke punk band at a notorious outdoor hippie music fest.  

For the encore, Nomy comes onstage dressed as her hairy, sleazy, hesher-boy drag character, Roy. Tribe 8’s Lynn Breedlove and Roy, frontman for the fictional band Flesh Thresher, drive the audience crazy with fellatio antics and pyrotechnics. Someone gives Nomy a button that says, in all its misspelled glory, “I blew Lenny.” 

Highway 80 | August 17–18 

No stopping for anything wimpy like sleep or showers between here and California. One night or early morning, Kassy and I go into hysterics choosing snacks at a gas station. I have never felt so completely deranged in my life.  

Highway 80 | August 19 

I’m idly thinking about what I’m going to do with myself when I get home tomorrow morning; suddenly, something’s on fire. Black smoke spills out from somewhere in the dash, and we have to pour bottled water on whatever it is. We are left with no brakelights, headlights, or taillights—but miraculously, Sheila still runs. I’m the only one with a valid license on hand, so I get to drive the van to the nearest exit. The Astrovan tails us, hazards on, into Lovelock, Nevada. 

We heave a big collective sigh and check into the ultradepressing Cadillac Motel. We figure we’ll just wait for daylight to get home, when we won’t need headlights. The Astrovan crew is long gone, understandably too desperate for home to stick around with the sick van.  

Highway 80 | August 20 

We cruise over the Sierras without getting rear-ended or even pulled over. By rush hour we’re at the bay, and all of a sudden there’s my house. I kiss Anna Joy and Kassy goodbye and run madly into my apartment. I am filthy, hungry, crazed, and I don’t know what to do first. I am almost as happy to be back as I was to be so far away.  

Kira Garcia has finally managed to catch up on her sleep. Get the latest Sister Spit info at www.klever.org/spit.

Go Forth and Multiply

Eve Kushner — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 17:14:52 -0500

ah, movie magic. hollywood always manages to make difficult situations turn out well after two hours—and nowhere is this more apparent than with cinematic treatments of unplanned pregnancy. 

Unexpected conceptions occur onscreen with surprising frequency, but filmmakers routinely play it safe, avoiding substantial discussions of a pregnancy’s pros and cons. They keep abortion out of plots and even out of dialogue, ensuring that movies end with a heartwarming birth. Female characters rarely feel any ambivalence about carrying unplanned pregnancies to term—and why should they, when life always works out so perfectly? An unhappy and unwilling dad-to-be will convert to a pro-baby stance in time for a happily-ever-after ending. If mom isn’t too crazy about dad and would prefer to parent by herself, she’ll soon find that single motherhood is a cinch. Although childrearing seems expensive in the real world, money isn’t much of an obstacle for film parents (and made even less of one by the fact that most movies feature middle-class women with plenty of resources).  

This sentimental support for parenthood in movies matches our culture’s strong pronatalist streak and its profound uneasiness with abortion. In spite of the facts—82 percent of Americans think abortion should stay legal, and 43 percent of American women will end at least one pregnancy by age 45—the issue remains highly controversial, with anti-choice groups garnering disproportionate visibility and wielding significant political influence. Against this backdrop, unplanned pregnancy on film plays out in an alarmingly oversimplified manner. Procreation becomes every woman’s destiny and every man’s responsibility, regardless of circumstances. Abortion exists only as a faux option—something to choose against. 

So—unintentionally pregnant? Just watch some American films from the last decade, check your brain in the lobby, and learn how movie magic can make your problems (and your choices) disappear. Here are eight pointers. 

1

if you have an unplanned pregnancy, birth is the only option. You should act oblivious to other possibilities, even if you or your partner is unhappy about the conception. 

1a

you might complain about the pregnancy you have conceived, but in making these comments you won’t actually be proposing abortion. Just as the gag rule prohibits staff in federally funded clinics from mentioning abortion, characters in movies cannot use the a word if they don’t wish to continue a pregnancy. They can throw tantrums, make sarcastic comments, and whine, but they can’t say, “I think abortion would be best,” even if they obviously feel that way. 

In Father of the Bride, Part 2, George (Steve Martin) is quite unhappy about the pregnancy of his wife, Nina (Diane Keaton), but he does not suggest an alternative. Instead he resorts to jokes: “Our kid will probably be more comfortable calling us Grandma and Grandpa in front of his friends. Because, let’s face it, we’re going to be in our 50s when he’s in preschool. In our 60s when he graduates college. But…it’ll be great to see another kid in cap and gown…. If we can still see by then.” He goes on and on with this negative speech, but nowhere does he refer to abortion—not even euphemistically. That’s against the rules. 

Parenthood actually does include a discussion of abortion—but only in a slippery, backhanded way. When Gil (again, Steve Martin) and his wife, Karen (Mary Steenburgen), conceive, he gripes about the ill-timed pregnancy without actually proposing abortion. Karen then asks him to put his cards on the table: 

karen: Why don’t you just say what you’re really thinking? 

gil (sarcastically): What am I thinking? 

karen (sadly): That I should have an abortion? 

gil: I didn’t say that. 

No, he hasn’t said that. Although abortion is clearly what he wants, he keeps sidestepping the issue just as a politician would: 

gil: That’s a decision every woman has to make on her own. 

karen: Are you running for Congress? Don’t give me that. I want your opinion…. What do you want me to do? 

gil (pained and angry): I want…I want whatever you want.

When she then says she wants the baby, all he can do is make biting jokes: “Well, great! Let’s have a kid! Let’s see how I can screw the fourth one up. Let’s have five. Let’s have six. Let’s have a dozen and pretend they’re doughnuts. I’m really happy about the way things are turning out, aren’t you?” The film is back in safe territory, clarifying that although Gil is angry about the pregnancy, neither he nor the filmmakers have committed the sin of suggesting abortion. 

1b

you may talk about abortion only in a negative form. You can say, for instance, “Well, I’m certainly not going to have an abortion!” Or, “I can’t believe you would suggest abortion.” Just make sure you use the word to bolster your own self-righteousness. 

In Look Who’s Talking, when Mollie (Kirstie Alley) tells her lover, Albert (George Segal), that she’s pregnant, she indicates that she wants to carry to term and adds, for extra emphasis, “I’m not getting an abortion.” Albert croons, “Mollie, Mollie, I wasn’t going to ask you to do that!” Whew—they’re both off the hook. 

In The Opposite of Sex, after Dedee (Christina Ricci) reveals that she’s expecting, Lucia (Lisa Kudrow) asks, “Do you want to get an abortion?” Dedee’s boyfriend Matt (Ivan Sergei) answers for her with a horrified, “No! God!” Then the film distances itself further from the possibility of abortion, ignoring Lucia’s sensible critiques of the whimsy of unplanned parenthood. When Lucia later tells Dedee that “smoking is bad for the baby,” Dedee makes a gratuitous dig at Lucia’s pro-choice stance: “Like you care! Or was it someone else who mentioned abortion?” Dedee implies that because Lucia raised the possibility of abortion, the baby’s health is unimportant to her. 

2

if circumstances make the pregnancy problematic, don’t worry—everything will work out somehow. Just be happy. After all, a baby is on the way. 

In Nine Months, Rebecca (Julianne Moore) has mastered the “don’t worry, be happy” mind-set. She states all the reasons not to continue her pregnancy: She and her boyfriend, Samuel (Hugh Grant), aren’t emotionally prepared for this accidental conception, a baby could damage their relationship, the apartment would require redecorating, and she’d have to stop teaching dance classes while pregnant. Then comes the zinger: “There’s not one good reason that I should keep this baby. But I still want to.” 

And if she ends up going it alone? Also not a problem—Rebecca knows that single motherhood is a snap. Although she has never reared children, she asserts that she can handle the responsibilities alone, as if parenting would be no more difficult or demanding than her current life: “I’m prepared for that. You know, I can do that.” 

Advanced age might be another disincentive to giving birth. In Father, Nina and George conceive at the combined age of nearly 100. As Nina points out, her cohorts are doing Geritol and Fixodent commercials. But hey—what does age have to do with pregnancy? Nothing! When George grouses about reproducing at their age, she retorts, “I know how old I am, George. I’ve already been the mother of the bride. But here I am—at the age I am—and I’m pregnant.” What a persuasive reason to proceed. Even their doctor presents the news of Nina’s pregnancy as if it’s problem-free. When George says he’s too old to become a father again, the doctor tries to talk him into it: “C’mon! Picasso had children well into his 70s.” Way to go—coercing people to parent. 

Even If These Walls Could Talk, a film spotlighting the evolution of abortion rights (see sidebar), is disappointing in this respect. The filmmakers create every reason for the middle-aged Barbara (Sissy Spacek) to abort. Caring for her four out-of-control children consumes most of her time and energy. She’s back in school, savoring the respite from domestic chaos and pursuing her goals. If she has another child, she’ll have to postpone her degree, her husband won’t be able to retire as soon as he’d like, and their daughter won’t be able to attend an expensive, first-rate college. Barbara wants to work out the pregnancy “without us all having to give up everything that’s important to us.” She researches abortion in depth. Then, though she never expresses any desire for another kid, out of nowhere she chooses birth and completely ignores the conflicts. In presenting the decision to her tearful daughter, all Barbara offers is, “Don’t worry, honey. It’s what I want. It’ll be ok.” The story ends there; viewers never learn how the family will accommodate a child and still avoid unpleasant sacrifices. 

3

you will glow with pride and femininity as you proceed with the noble mission of carrying to term. Even if you didn’t plan or especially want a baby a little while ago, you will spring into maternity mode as soon as you learn of the pregnancy. Life will be a stream of baby showers (Father), trips to the toy store (Nine Months, Look Who’s Talking), and nursery renovations (Father, Look Who’s Talking). 

In addition to those terribly original shopping-set-to-music montages, viewers are treated to sentimentalizing like the scene in Father after Nina and George learn that they have conceived. As they drive through town, George comments in a voice-over on how “glowing” and “peaceful” Nina looks. Indeed, she gazes beatifically out of her window and sees happy images of maternity, including a mother and a daughter who skip down the sidewalk in flowing skirts. Viewers hear the song “On the Sunny Side of the Street” with its sappy “Can you hear the pitterpat?” lyrics. 

4

when you deliver the child, there will again be irrepressible joy and widespread celebration. It’ll be glaringly obvious that birth was the only valid decision. If you aren’t up to the task of parenthood (which is doubtful, because everyone takes to it naturally), scores of people will sub in for you. 

The Opposite of Sex’s Dedee isn’t the “mommy type,” but it doesn’t matter because every gay man in town wants to take care of her baby. And why not? Babies are “miracles” and “magic” (according to a character in Nine Months). They glow under a soft-focus lens. They don’t cry much. If they do, some dancing will quiet them down (again, Nine Months). In the womb or even as mere sperm they think amusing thoughts and feel physical sensations (Look Who’s Talking). Given that babies, fetuses, and even sperm are so darn personable, how can anyone not feel swept away by the prospect of birth? 

Even Parenthood, which focuses on parenting failures and the resultant emotional pain, concludes with a peculiar pronatalist frenzy: Every woman under 55 conceives, and the characters blindly embrace hopes that future parenting attempts will turn out better. We’re supposed to forget the struggles we’ve just witnessed and join in the euphoria. After all, a birth represents a joyful new beginning—and, conveniently, a happy ending. 

5

if you’re a man, you may feel unready or unwilling to have a baby, in which case you’re just a party pooper. You should rise to the occasion and improve yourself if necessary. 

Father’s George needs to work on himself until he can see things clearly (that is, less realistically and more sentimentally). The film shows his journey from a sour antinatalist viewpoint (he initially complains about his daughter’s and his wife’s pregnancies) to a profound appreciation of babies (at the end he holds both kids and says that life doesn’t get any better). As he prepares for renewed parenthood, he acts as if he’s training for an athletic event. He wonders whether he’ll have the “stamina” for a baby. He says he and Nina will be “the oldest parents ever at the starting gate.” And he shoots a basket while saying, “I’ll be able to do it again. I’m sure I can. All right, if it swishes, no problem—father of the year.” The ball drops in perfectly, of course, implying that parenthood is as easy as a jump shot. 

George’s preparations are mild compared with what Samuel endures in Nine Months. To “grow up” and prepare for the pregnancy, he must get rid of his cat and his convertible. Then he must stop believing that children grow up to hate their parents (as he has seen in his child-psychology practice). He learns to worship his developing child by reading What to Expect When You’re Expecting, attending a Lamaze class, and becoming teary while watching an ultrasound video. Although Rebecca has left him, he never once moons over her—only over the fetus. Samuel later tells her, “I’m in love with my child…. And I’m completely in love with you for having it.” (In other words, he values her as an incubator, not as a person in her own right.) He repudiates his earlier feelings about the pregnancy and redeems himself for his sin—an unwillingness to parent—by effectively erasing himself: “Now I don’t care what I think or don’t think anymore. I don’t give a damn about me.” That’s some self-improvement program—it got rid of his self altogether. 

6

babies only strengthen romances. Couples may worry that new babies could stress out their relationship. But no—babies keep families together. Although the couple might separate during the pregnancy or after the birth, fatherhood will appeal to a man so much that he’ll soon return to the woman and his child. It happens in Nine Months. Why shouldn’t it happen for you?  

7

what this world needs is babies, babies, babies. Bring them on by the caseload. Don’t stop to think about the population explosion. 

Nobody in movieland thinks about urban sprawl, crowded classrooms, and congested freeways. Why, those ideas could put a wet blanket on all the giddy baby showers! Only sarcastic, recalcitrant jokers (see 1a) and misanthropes (see 8) would be so low as to point out that three or four children might be more than enough for one couple. 

8

a childless life is worthless, and anyone who doesn’t want kids must be bitter and selfish and morally deficient. If you postpone or eschew parenthood, you’ll face a future of unhappiness and regret. 

When Nine Months’s Sean (Jeff Goldblum) states his opposition to parenthood, he comes off as an unpleasant, self-important woman-hater. He has this to say about an ex-girlfriend who wanted children: “She was hungry for seed. So I closed the iron door. Denied her my essence. I’m not ready to be biologically extraneous. She would have devoured me from the head down. Chewed up my manhood, swallowed my youth, and gobbled me up like some praying mantis.” He’s an unfeeling killjoy; when his sister announces the impending birth of her fourth child, he notes that “the world is overpopulated” and “has too many starving children.” (See 7.) 

Clearly, his child-free life will end terribly. “You keep this up, you’ll die alone like a dog, like a bum,” scolds his sister. And just a few scenes later, Sean inexplicably comes to agree with her: “Look at me. Look what I’ve become…. My life’s a pile of shit…. It’s empty and pointless…. If I continue this way, I’m facing a lifetime alone without a family…. It’s terrifying.” 

oversentimentality and an utter lack of realism are staples in Hollywood, so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at Sean’s swift and absurd transformation—or at the about-faces of Samuel, Gil, and George. But the fact that all these men end up relishing the notion of fatherhood—and that even Opposite’s pragmatic Lucia has an unplanned pregnancy of her own and simply assumes she’ll carry to term, whimsical though that is—demonstrates more than just a cinematic penchant for a happy ending. Such plotlines naturalize the choice to parent, making abortion seem incomprehensible. What better way to handle one of the most heated contemporary sociopolitical dilemmas than to present streams of couples who conceive by accident and routinely ignore their reproductive choices? Hollywood can then have its plots completely risk-free. What with talking fetuses, soft-focus lenses, and abortion as a theoretical possibility only, anti-choice propagandists could hardly do it better.  

Eve Kushner is the author of Experiencing Abortion: A Weaving of Women’s Words (Haworth). She is also a film fanatic.

The Ambition Condition

Anna Clark — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Perhaps you know about Emily Gould’s cover story, “Exposed,” in the New York Times Magazine last May. Even if you didn’t take in all 8,002 words on the former Gawker editor’s gains and losses from blogging about her personal life, it would be hard to miss the criticism of the piece elsewhere. From the Huffington Post to the Philadelphia Weekly to an untold number of blogs and listservs, the backlash challenged the magazine for peddling narcissistic Dear-Diary diatribes as a worthy journalistic cover story. 

“Exposed” garnered 1,216 comments on the Times’ website before the magazine shut them down less than 24 hours after the article went live. The cause? Overwhelming negativity. Whatever the valid faults of Gould and her article, the attacking comments were unmistakably gendered. “Attention whore,” was one favorite catcall. “Get over yourself, sweetheart,” advised a commenter. Another scoffed, “You are just a stupid little girl”—a comment 67 others recommended. What’s more, the comments were full of parental advice offered as if to a 10-year-old and intended to steer the writer away from, well, writing: “Don’t you have important things to do?”; “Like your tattoos, I’m fairly sure you’ll regret all this by the time you get into your 40s”; and, “You really want to find some meaning?… Go to the local VA hospital and volunteer to spend a week changing bedpans and rewrapping dressings. Or try teaching English as a second language to a new immigrant...or read to the blind.” 

And then there was this one: “I suspect that one day, when a stalker appears in this girl’s life (you can’t call her a woman), she will have no idea that she brought it upon herself.” 

Yep, it’s all the fault of the “girl” writer who put herself out there. Add the Gould Incident to the uneasy history of ambitious women writers told that they have nothing of worth to say.  

It’s not news that popular culture breeds the idea that women with ambitions of any type other than domestic are doomed to misery and cruelty. Bette Davis and Anne Baxter essayed the archetypal tale in All About Eve (1950), in which Baxter’s title character is an ingénue with Broadway ambitions who manipulates her way into the life of Davis’s Margo Channing, a revered and aging stage actress. Once Eve connives her way into taking Margo’s leading role, betraying those who helped her, the film concludes with Eve admiring herself in the mirror, holding one of Margo’s awards. What a bitch, we’re left to think. 

In a more contemporary portrait, the film Stranger Than Fiction features Emma Thompson as an accomplished author trying to complete her next great novel—and living the life of an eccentric, ill-kempt, chain-smoking hermit. And in films like Network and The Devil Wears Prada, ambitious women are portrayed as manipulative ciphers who choose business politics over personal relationships, their gloss of success only barely covering a core of desperate loneliness. 

So goes the equation of female ambition with selfishness and unhappiness. But the translation of this old story into the world of writers takes a curious turn. 

Anyone who’s stepped into a literary community—readings, performances, writing workshops, mfa programs—will testify to the disclaimers that issue regularly from the mouths of women writers in particular. “This is just something I thought I’d try,” and “I’m not really a poet, but…” are words regularly uttered even by those who made drastic life changes in order to carve out time to write. I prepared for months for a major fiction contest in college, for instance, which I entered five years in a row, claiming to others each time that I just “threw something together.” Later, I applied to a single mfa fiction program, and told no one until I got in. I just didn’t want anyone to know what I wanted most. Perhaps I was preparing for failure: If I said openly that I not only wanted to be a writer but that I worked hard at it, my ambitions could be judged against external rewards—and easily dismissed when I missed out on them. 

There’s no simple gender indicator for the weird fusion of insecurity and ambition, of the feigned nonchalance and quiet competitiveness that’s common in writers of all sorts. But these traits are complicated by the cultural caricatures of ambitious women and the uneven historical patterns that have dictated whose talent is rewarded and whose isn’t.  

Whether they write novels or cover stories or op-eds, even the most talented women writers often aren’t validated in the same way that their male counterparts are. While there are few Neanderthals who would publicly say that the byline gap in literary journals and periodicals is due to the fact that women can’t write as well as men, the usual justifications include shrugging dismissals like, “We don’t get enough quality submissions by women.” When I pointed out the 5:29 byline ratio of the fall 2006 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review on my website, for instance, the journal’s editor, Ted Genoways, commented on the post that, “Unfortunately, the disparity in our issues is, I think, more reflective of a symptom than a root cause; there simply seem to be fewer women who are freelance journalists, travel writers, and political pundits—three areas that now largely compose our editorial content. As a result, the good ones are in high demand and often out of our price range.” 

The byline gap closes in the bookstore: Women publish fiction, poetry, and nonfiction at a rate that’s representative of their actual numbers. But this is no meritocratic utopia—women’s writing is often met with dismissive assumptions. This is why female authors often disguise themselves with pen names and ambiguous initials. From George Sand to George Eliot, Isak Dinesen to E. Nesbit, P. D. James to James Tiptree Jr., there’s a long history of women writers who have used disguised names to realize their ambitions. Even J. K. Rowling—the best-selling author of all time—adopted a neutral moniker on her way to success: Before Harry Potter became a phenomenon, Bloomsbury, Rowling’s publisher, asked her to use initials to reassure the target audience of young boys who might be reluctant to pick up a book by “Joanna Rowling,” a female author. 

Ambition is a slippery creature in the lives of writers of all genders; no one is safe from feeling uneasy about affirming one’s literary ambitions, and insecurity is the devil of anyone who faces a blank page. But the thing is, women are more likely to be justified in doubting themselves. Yes, a woman is less likely to win the Nobel Prize in Literature: in 106 years of the prize, only 11 winners—about 10 percent of the total—have been female. In the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction’s 60-year history, female authors have snagged the award 27 times. Shaking out 57 years of the National Book Award for Fiction reveals a mere 15 female winners. As for journalists, the gender gap indicates that women are far less likely to land their stories in the nation’s top magazines and newspapers. Likewise, in the digital world, political candidates made a point of stopping by the YearlyKos conference last summer, headlined by a prominent progressive male blogger, but were absent from the BlogHer conference, which drew top women bloggers together.  

And so on. 

Furthermore, to even say that you want to write lasting novels, garner hundreds of thousands of blog hits, or handmake a chapbook is to expose yourself to the “who are you to think you have anything to say?” sort of pummeling that Gould received. It can be tempting, then, for women in particular to write quietly and hope that the work will speak for itself. But by not owning up to her ambitions—whether they are in the public or private realms—a writer feeds the machine that discounts the aspirations and talents of all women writers. The silence is implicit support for editors who claim that their byline disparity is because women don’t want it enough. It sets an example for other writers that ambition is something to be ashamed of. Though it might be the last thing in the world she means to do, by keeping her intentions for her work hidden, a female writer allows others to make assumptions about her work, and to decide where it will and will not go. 

Obviously, there are plenty of women writers who aren’t shy about declaring what they want for their writing. Jacqueline Wright, a Los Angeles playwright, told me: “Perhaps because I just turned 40, the need to look like I don’t work that hard [on my writing] seems absurd. I do work hard at creating my plays, as well as finding homes for them and some money for me.”  

There are certainly other variables that might explain away tentativeness in a woman writer—like perfectionism, unfamiliarity with a medium, or worry that she will be seen as careerist or—in the case of nonfiction writing—elevating her opinions above others’. Deborah Siegel leads workshops for writers who want to translate their academic research into accessible books for the larger public. Rather than expressing uneasiness about ambition, Siegel says that women scholars in particular need to hear that “going public with their ideas and making their writing more ‘pop’ doesn’t mean selling out.” 

Siegel adds that the individual struggles of women writers have public reverberations. “If women scholars and advocates who aspire to a public voice shy away or sit back and wait to be discovered, we’ll continue to live in this echo chamber where the same three male pundits make the rounds on the Sunday-morning talk shows and the same 10 guys keep publishing op-eds.”  

The narrative our culture creates about the writers it treasures and those whom it merely respects shapes who is and isn’t admitted into the literary canon, to say nothing of who publishing houses deem marketable. Take a recent interview with novelist and essayist Gore Vidal in the U.K.’s Independent that called Vidal “the last surviving giant of American literature’s golden age.” Aside from implicitly brushing aside the still-flourishing likes of Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison, the article only reifies how a writer’s persona may be more crucial than his or her work. The headline summarizes it neatly. “Gore Vidal: Literary feuds, his ‘vicious’ mother and rumours of a secret love child. / He slept with Kerouac, hung out with Jackie O and feuded with Mailer.” Whatever the value of Vidal’s writing, it is, for the moment, beside the point. The details of his biography contribute to the value the culture puts on his work.  

Oates and Morrison are respected, awarded, and published at a rate that is comparable to Vidal’s, of course. But without his persona, will they ever be as embedded in the narrative of literary and cultural history? There’s nothing inherently wrong with Vidal’s colorful biography being entangled with his literary worth. What’s problematic is that the individuals who are validated in this way are so frequently ones who fit into a hypermasculine “literary lion” caricature: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Harold Bloom, Langston Hughes, Jack Kerouac, Richard Wright, Hunter S. Thompson, John Gardner. Their contemporary digital counterparts might include Matt Drudge and Markos Moulitsas.  

Historically, there’s been little room for women in that public story. And for whatever their writing is worth—and some of it is fantastic; some of it is, well, not—these “lions” were told in a thousand ways (fawning reviews, profiles in leading magazines, awards) that their voice matters. Whether or not they always believed it themselves is beside the point.  

Meanwhile, the tradition of women writers is full of ambitions hidden or thwarted. Emily Dickinson’s younger sister was the first to discover her poems; the first collection was published four years after the poet’s funeral. Zora Neale Hurston—who once wrote to her patron, Annie Nathan Meyer, “Oh, if you knew my dreams! My vaulting ambition… I dream such wonderfully complete [dreams], so radiant in astral beauty. I have not the power yet to make them come true. They always die. But even as they fade, I have others”—died in poverty with all her books out of print. Even Dorothy Parker, who published copiously in her lifetime, was prone to disclaimers that convey the same tentativeness of so many writers who apologize for their work before they share it: She suggested “Excuse My Dust” as her tombstone epitaph, and her obituary in the New York Times featured this statement about her poetry: “I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.” 

The first Master of Fine Arts program was founded at the University of Iowa in 1936. Over time, women writers nurtured their ambitions there and at other programs around the country. Today, women writers dominate mfa programs and journalism schools, reveling in a space for their work that once didn’t exist. Their ambitions are encouraged, and often funded. But there’s a difference between being a “student writer” and a working writer—as is apparent in the uneven welcome offered to our culture’s better-known authors. 

Rather than replicate the established patterns of literary stardom of Vidal and company, we can create a new landscape. We can make new ways to have a public voice through writing, one that writers of all genders might welcome, and that, being mostly outside of it, women writers are in a unique position to create.  

What might this alternative literary landscape look like? Artificial hierarchies of genre and “seriousness” would not define it, and it wouldn’t glamorize a writer’s substance abuse, domestic abuse (as in Mailer’s case), and prejudices as evidence of can’t-be-contained artistic genius. Instead, writing from any medium, by any writer, would be welcomed and read with a generous mind. Online, in print, or out loud, its words would determine its value. To get there, though, we must consider the assumptions about our own ambitions, our own reading habits, and our expectations of literary value. 

Which brings us back to Emily Gould, who had the opportunity to respond to readers in a Times-hosted online q&a after the publication of her controversial article. When asked if “the tenor of the posted comments [is] going to change what you write about, or are you going to dismiss the opinions of hundreds of NYT readers and keep on with that blog of yours?” Gould contended that one source of the negativity was that “blogging has democratized and devalued writing, which used to be the exclusive province of professional writers. Now that anyone with five free minutes can start a blog, it’s unclear who gets to call himself a ‘writer’.”  

We might consider the democratization of online writing not as a devaluation, as Gould suggests, but as an enhancement. Considering that the existing literary canon has excluded or remained ambivalent to an untold number of voices, why wouldn’t it be cause for celebration when that trajectory changes? While our alternative literary culture would be misguided to consider the Internet its sole saving grace, we might trust the vibrancy of the Internet to push our narrow definitions of who gets to call herself a “writer” in ways that influence print and spoken-word cultures as well.  

It would be a mistake to simplify the ambitions of writers, particularly female ones, as solely measurable by big-time accolades, fame, or presence in mainstream media. There are those, after all, who pursue writing after a career in another area. There are those who return to writing after decades away from it. Many who write simply want to express themselves or create something beautiful. Being uninitiated into the culture of “literary lions” and not winning public accolades doesn’t denote a lack of ambition; it’s simply writing to a different standard. It may be a part of the creation of our alternative to the traditional literary culture. 

Any writer might feel trepidation about introducing her or himself as a “poet,” or avoid admitting to wanting to win a literary prize. But we must change the game so that when women writers publicly pish-tosh their ambitions as being pipe dreams, they no longer have reason to believe that they are.  

Anna Clark lives and writes in Detroit, Mich. Find her online at http://isak.typepad.com

Beauty Secrets

Kyla — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

From the pages of every mainstream women’s magazine—between the list of 43 things every confident woman knows and the six-week ab-blasting plan—the ads beckon. Conditioners enriched with vitamins vow to make each strand 10 times stronger. Undereye concealers containing white-tea antioxidants claim to combat the cellular damage that deepens those oh-so-unsightly dark circles. Pricey foundations promise to rejuvenate the face at the molecular level with the new Pro-Xylane compound, carefully extracted from Eastern European beech trees. These days, more and more personal care products are promising to harness the power of nature to beautify us from the inside out. Makeup doesn’t merely make us look good, we’re told—now it’s good for us, too.
 

There’s more to the trend than just a general increase in health consciousness and green chic. These marketing maneuvers are, in part, calculated responses to consumers’ growing desire to soap up and make up both safely and ethically. And who can blame them, when news outlets buzz with scary facts and figures? Consider the headlines from last fall, when the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics—a coalition of environmental, health, and women’s advocacy groups—had 33 name-brand lipsticks tested at an independent laboratory. The results were unsettling enough to wipe the glossy grin off anyone’s face: Fully one-third contained lead at levels exceeding the FDA’s o.1 ppm (parts per million) limit for candy. The Personal Care Products Council, the trade group representing more than 600 of the beauty biz’s biggest names, responded by insisting that any suspect substances in their products occur at quantities too small to cause harm—even if the medical community agrees that there’s no such thing as a “safe” blood level for the highly toxic metal. But the widely reported lipstick story may be one of the milder manifestations of products that mix beauty with danger. When it comes to cosmetics, women’s health is getting the kiss-off. 

Makeup menaces are nothing new: Some Elizabethan enchantresses died for their love of white lead–laced face powder, and Victorian vamps used deadly nightshade to lend their eyes an alluring glow. But today, when a $50-billion cosmetics industry has replaced apothecaries and home brewers, we expect the FDA to protect the public from dangerous beauty aids. Yet while its name might lead us to think otherwise, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act gives the FDA far more regulatory power over food additives and drugs than over cosmetics; the agency isn’t authorized to approve cosmetic products or ingredients before they hit the shelves. Manufacturers are under no legal obligation to register with the FDA, file data on ingredient safety, or report injuries caused by their products. The European Union has banned 1,132 known or suspected carcinogens, mutagens, and reproductive toxins from use in cosmetics, but only 10 such chemicals are banned in the United States, leaving us with mercury in mascara, petrochemicals in perfumes, and parabens in antiperspirants. And just as none of the offending lipsticks’ labels indicated the presence of lead, the FDA allows potentially hazardous chemicals like phthalates—industrial solvents linked to birth defects in boys’ reproductive systems and premature puberty in girls—to slip into ingredient lists under the umbrella term “fragrance.”  

This lack of oversight allows the cosmetics industry to create its own definitions of safety. The prevailing standard is to test new products for short-term reactions—that means your foundation is deemed safe if it doesn’t turn your skin green when applied as directed. But the trials reveal nothing about the long-term effects of daily exposure or the combined interaction of multiple products.  

It gets worse. Only 11 percent of the 10,000-plus ingredients used in personal care products have been assessed by the Cosmetic Ingredient Review, the safety panel established and funded by the Personal Care Products Council that—conflict of interest be damned—is the primary source of information for the FDA’s Office of Cosmetics and Colors. The industry touts the CIR as a scrupulous safeguard that renders outside oversight unnecessary, but in the more than three decades since it was founded, the panel has deemed a scant nine ingredients unsafe. And manufacturers aren’t even under any obligation to follow the CIR’s recommendations—one of the nasty nine, the likely carcinogen hydroxyanisole, is still found in Porcelana skin cream, for instance.  

Our worries about such chemicals have actually become a boon to corporations. Sales in the natural and organic sector have seen double-digit growth annually for at least the past five years, far outpacing the industry as a whole. The last two years alone have seen L’Oréal, Colgate, and Clorox pay hundreds of millions to acquire such natural-beauty stalwarts as The Body Shop, Tom’s of Maine, and Burt’s Bees, respectively. But more than a few cosmetics manufacturers are playing fast and loose with terms like “organic,” a word that can legally appear on personal care products containing only 1 percent certified organic contents. Some companies even use the chemical definition of the word rather than the agricultural one, so any ingredient containing carbon-based molecules gets the label. Other benign-sounding buzzwords, like the ubiquitous “natural,” can be slapped on anything, since the FDA doesn’t regulate their use in beauty marketing.  

Cosmetics ads that co-opt such language seek to assuage safety concerns while capitalizing on them, convincing buyers that the two concepts aren’t just compatible, but codependent—thus commercials for phenol- and paraben-filled ChapStick croon, “Healthy lips should never go naked.” Elsewhere, a burgeoning number of “cosmeceuticals” promise to deliver that therapeutic vitamin E deeper via nanoparticles, but their health claims are similarly skin-deep. The FDA says nanoparticles exhibit “increased chemical and biological activity,” and preliminary research in this largely uncharted field suggests that, when nanoized, even ordinarily benign ingredients might catalyze dna and organ damage. Yet companies like L’Oréal—which ranks sixth among U.S. nanotechnology patent holders—are filling their products with nanoparticles before the safety data comes in, often without giving notice on the label.  

Such marketing moves have been fueled by intensifying scrutiny of the cosmetics industry by mainstream media. A LexisNexis search reveals fewer than 10 stories about potential health hazards posed by cosmetics in U.S. newspapers in 1997; in 2007, there were more than 100, with feature stories running in the New York Times, the L.A. Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post, not to mention television, public radio, and online coverage. But while magazines like Ms. and Pink have run in-depth reports on cosmetics-safety issues, the mass-market women’s glossies have largely sidestepped such discussions. And when they do address safety, they usually forgo systemic issues such as regulation and marketing for a strictly are-they-or-aren’t-they-dangerous approach. One can guess what verdict is most often delivered.  

Consider “If Looks Could Kill,” an article from the March 2007 issue of O magazine that describes the CIR as “a group of scientists and physicians responsible for assessing the safety of cosmetic ingredients in the United States”—failing to mention that the panel reviews only a small fraction of ingredients, conducts no testing itself, focuses almost exclusively on short-term reactions, and is funded by an industry trade group with a vested financial interest in dispelling safety concerns. The piece quotes the panel’s chair, who states, “Any and all potential carcinogenic ingredients in hair dyes were removed from the market years ago,” and reinforces his words by noting that “manufacturers voluntarily removed” coal tar derivatives from hair dye decades ago. In fact, coal tar derivatives are still used in hundreds of hair colorants—especially in darker dyes aimed at women of color—and multiple recent studies have shown a significantly increased risk of bladder cancer among women who use the dyes frequently, as well as the stylists who work with them.  

In other words, not much has changed since the late 19th century, when Ladies’ Home Journal publisher Cyrus Curtis made it clear that readers were not the magazine’s real customers, querying an audience of advertisers, “Do you know why we publish the Ladies’ Home Journal? The editor thinks it is for the benefit of the American woman… The real reason, the publisher’s reason, is to give you people who manufacture things that American women want and buy a chance to tell them about your products.” With some of the industry’s lowest subscription prices and highest production costs, today’s women’s magazines are still totally dependent on advertising revenue. But devoting two-thirds of their pages to ads isn’t enough when it comes to courting cosmetics companies. Magazines like Allure and Essence actually conduct market research for them, and the expectation that such glossies will provide complementary copy is a given—if they don’t want to suffer the same punishment Ms. did when its brief report about congressional hearings on hair-dye safety in the late 1980s prompted Clairol to withdraw all its ads. In this context, even vaguely critical articles may be considered a threat to such ad-heavy publications’ survival, especially since cosmetics represent the top magazine-ad category in the United States. 

Though women’s magazines may be giving cosmetics companies a free pass, there is evidence that the special status enjoyed by the industry is being challenged. On January 1, 2007, the California Safe Cosmetic Act of 2005 went into effect, forcing cosmetics companies to disclose when products contain any ingredient on governmental lists of harmful chemicals. This landmark legislation also authorizes the state to launch its own investigations into ingredient safety and requires manufacturers to supply their health effects data. Other states are following California’s lead: In December, Minnesota became the first state to ban mercury from cosmetics, and similar legislation is currently in committee in Washington.  

Such developments put the Personal Care Products Council on the defensive. As a 2005 Breast Cancer Fund report revealed, the trade group spent $600,000 lobbying against the California bill’s passage. Hoping to divert web surfers from the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics website (safecosmetics.org), the trade group even launched the similar-sounding cosmeticsaresafe.org to claim that California’s cosmetics were already “the safest in the world.” The Council has also expanded its pr team, hosted “Fragrance Days” on Capitol Hill to ply legislators with Armani and Dior perfumes, and last November jettisoned its old name, the Cosmetic Toiletry and Fragrance Association. With the name change came a new slogan (“Committed to safety, quality, and innovation”) and a new neutral-sounding website geared to consumers (cosmeticsinfo.org) that touts the safety of cosmetics—even as the lengthy disclaimer disavows any claim to the completeness or accuracy of the site’s assertions. Safety comes first in the Council’s new catchphrase, but the group’s resistance to all nonvoluntary regulation makes it hard to believe it has nothing to hide.  

Ironically, the charitable cause of choice for the major cosmetics companies, from Avon to Mary Kay to Revlon, just happens to be breast cancer—the now-famed pink-ribbon campaign was first popularized by an Estée Lauder insert in Self magazine. It’s a state of affairs that leads to some mighty mixed messages. For almost two decades, the Personal Care Products Council has sponsored the American Cancer Society’s Look Good…Feel Better campaign, which offers free cosmetics kits and beauty workshops to patients who’ve undergone chemotherapy and radiation. This program has inspired many a feel-good story in mags like Women’s Wear Daily and takes an empowering mantra as its tagline: “For women in cancer treatment. And in charge of their lives.” But being in charge of our lives should also mean being able to make informed decisions about the products we buy. While many women surely appreciate the program, they might also “feel better” knowing that their free makeup bag doesn’t contain ingredients known to be carcinogenic—and knowing that the American Cancer Society’s near-silence on environmental causes of cancer doesn’t have anything to do with the financial support it receives from cosmetics companies and chemical corporations.  

The cosmetics industry may be trying its best to avoid transparency, but concerned women now have more tools to help them slice through the spin. Thanks to the Internet, it’s easier than ever to find information on the polysyllables in tiny print on the backs of bottles and tubes. The Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep database compares the ingredients in more than 30,000 products against 50 toxicity and regulatory databases, and even Wikipedia offers links to peer-reviewed studies on ingredient safety. Watchdog groups like the Organic Consumers Association out products that are natural in name only, and grassroots organizations like Teens for Safe Cosmetics are lobbying legislators for tougher laws. And there are heartening moves from within the industry as well. Six hundred companies have signed the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics compact, pledging to remove toxic chemicals from their products, and in May the consumer-advocacy nonprofit Natural Products Association announced that a new seal will soon start appearing on products that are made from at least 95 percent natural ingredients and that are free from ingredients suspected of carrying human health risks. Such developments offer hope that the cosmetics industry can one day be forced to recognize that women’s health merits more than just lip service.  

Jacqueline Houton is a writer and editor who lives in Cambridge, Mass. She recently earned her Master’s in Writing & Publishing from Emerson College.

Shelf Lives

Kyla — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

In the 1976 cross-country race film The Gumball Rally, the late, great Raul Julia rips off his rearview mirror and tosses it over his shoulder, saying “What’s behind me is not important.”  

He didn’t win the race.  

Maybe that’s because what’s behind us actually is important. Feminist literature and history did not spring fully formed from Betty Friedan’s and Naomi Wolf’s pens and word processors; they have had long, complex, and often buried lives. The six works profiled here, ranging from once-famous titles to all-but-unknown works, were dead-on portraits of the state of women when they were written in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, but they still resonate with readers today. Themes like race and the women’s movement, gender and identity, and body politics are evergreen; discussions of these topics still roil in books, on blogs, and in person. And while mainstream feminism may not be grappling with issues like separatism these days, the passion, politics, anger, and truth contained in these books can inspire us to burn as brightly as these authors did.  

The Women’s Room 

Marilyn French, 1977 

What it’s about: The Women’s Room is a relentlessly bleak look at marriage and women’s powerlessness in prefeminist America, especially for those of us raised on cable reruns of I Love Lucy. Main character Mira’s marriage proves to her that the real benefit of the institution is men’s, both as an expectation and an outcome of male dominance. (“You don’t have to rape her or kill her; you don’t even have to beat her. You can just marry her.”) After her husband leaves her, Mira attends graduate school at Harvard, taking comfort in a close circle of friends and, along the way, in love and physical passion. The narrative takes us into the social upheaval of the 1960s, and its women come to unfortunate ends—early in the book, a woman quite in her right mind is institutionalized; at its end, one of the book’s strongest characters dies in a police shoot-out during a political protest. 

When it was published: The Women’s Room was born into a golden age of feminist literature that included everything from Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch to the anthology Sisterhood is Powerful to Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. Despairing as it was in its outlook for women who threw in their lot with men, The Women’s Room was a sharp, clear battle cry. In his 1977 New York Times review, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote that “the best compliment I can pay it is that I kept forgetting it was fiction. It seized me by my preconceptions and I kept struggling and arguing with its premises…. The Women’s Room is a book that women are going to read to relive the stories of their lives. I only wish that it contained some small comfort for men.” It made the bestseller lists shortly after its publication, and remained there through November 1978. 

These days: It’s a great time to reread The Women’s Room. For its 30th anniversary, Virago Press reissued it with a new introduction by French. She admits that some of the novel’s strength has been leached from its bones, but The Women’s Room still has the power to outrage simply in the telling of its story. The chapters on Mira’s pregnancy and the birth of her first child, in particular, offer a chilling perspective on the paternalistic treatment of women with regard to their own bodies—which, if you look closely, doesn’t depart all that much from today’s conservative/fundamentalist line on women’s physical sovereignty. 

Why you should track it down: Because it’s not yet historical fiction. Because it’s still a good read. Because we still need shelters to protect battered wives. And because our current sociopolitical landscape reminds women daily of the fragility of some of the gains we have come to accept as rights. Consider this: The anniversary edition of The Women’s Room with French’s introduction is available in England, but not in the United States—American publishers simply weren’t interested.The Women’s Room may seem overly pessimistic and depressing to young women today, but it pays homage to those who paved the way. —Evelyn Sharenov 

Up Your Ass

 Valerie Solanas, 1965 

What it’s about: You know Valerie Solanas best as the woman who shot Andy Warhol. What you may not know is why she shot him: The art world’s master manipulator lost one of only two copies of the manuscript for Up Your Ass, a play Solanas submitted to him in 1965. The play—which Warhol found so obscene he initially thought Solanas was a cop involved in an undercover sting—follows a day in the life of prostitute Bongi Perez and her interactions with everyone from a pair of drag queens to an uptight uptown matron. Bongi, who proclaimed herself “queer” long before the word was snatched back from homophobes, is clearly Solanas’s alter ego—a funny, foulmouthed lesbian who’s “so female, I’m subversive.” Up Your Ass excoriates male-female power dynamics with rim-shot dialogue—when remarking, for instance, that she entices potential clients with a seductive fan dance, Bongi notes that it’s a “modernistic fan dance. I use an electric fan.”—and pulls no punches in its assessments of what male-identified women put themselves through for love. (Let’s just say it involves a dinner party and some turds.)  

When it was published: It wasn’t. While she waited for Warhol to produce Up Your Ass, Solanas appeared in a few of his movies and self-published The SCUM Manifesto, a scathing, satirical letterbomb that famously began, “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore, and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.” The publisher Olympia Press soon offered an advance for a novel based on the screed, and in 1968 capitalized on Warhol’s shooting with a published edition of The SCUM Manifesto.  

These days: Up Your Ass was exhumed from piles of papers in Warhol’s Factory after both he and Solanas died; the manuscript ended up in Philadelphia’s Warhol Museum. The play itself was presented for the first time in 2000 by renegade San Francisco theater company George Coates Performance Works, in a performance featuring an all-female cast and set—tongue firmly in cheek—to a karaoke score featuring Patti Smith’s “Because the Night” and Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness.” Coates chose to cast women in all the roles to underscore the idea that all gender is performative, an idea given voice in Up Your Ass long before it was the stuff of women’s studies and queer theory. Paul Ben-Itzak wrote of the production, “Where much proto-feminist theater and dance these days, by artists young enough to be Solanas’s daughter or even granddaughter, is just so much screaming, Solanas delivers her punches with constant hits to the funny bone as well, making any sexist accusations of ‘man-hater’ secondary.” The Village Voice’s Alisa Solomon marveled that “Queer theory has nothing on the boundary-smashing glee of Solanas’s dystopia, where the two-sex system is packed off to the junkyard.” 

Why you should track it down: Solanas was a few sandwiches short of a picnic, it’s true, but Up Your Ass was also remarkably prescient about what would become the defining issues of feminism’s second and third waves, while poking mordant fun at them. (Listening to two women discussing the difficulty of juggling marriage and career, Bongi remarks, “Trickier to combine no marriage and no career.”) Solanas was hailed as a quintessential radical by the likes of Robin Morgan and Florynce Kennedy, and though she was too much of a wild card for any organized feminist movement, Up Your Ass serves as a document of intent, a look at social structures with an eye simultaneously for the absurdity, the humanity, and the hope for change. —Andi Zeisler 

Blood and Guts in High School  

Kathy Acker, 1984 

What it’s about: An avant-garde experimental novel, both highly philosophical and crudely pornographic, Blood and Guts in High School defies typical categorization and subverts traditional literary ideology. The novel traces the life of Janey Smith, reportedly 10 years old at the opening of the book. After the meltdown of her sexual relationship with her father, Janey moves to New York, joins a gang, and is subsequently kidnapped and sold to a Persian slave trader who keeps her in prison and teaches her to be a whore. The book’s plot points transcend the literal and instead function as larger symbolic statements about the role of women in society. “We all live in prison. Most of us don’t know we live in prison,” says Janey, who escapes from her own because she gets cancer; she then goes to Tangiers and wanders around the desert with Jean Genet. In the end, Janey dies—but in true Acker style, it’s not quite the end. 

When it was published: It was deemed obscene by South African and German governments, and was subsequently banned in both countries. Hannibal Lecter, My Father, the 1991 collection of Acker’s early writings, contains court transcripts of the 1986 obscenity trial in Germany in which Blood and Guts was deemed “harmful to minors”: The hearing featured a perplexing interrogation of Acker’s politics, with judges ruling it “remarkable” that she called herself a feminist.  

Acker, who once worked as a stripper, was part of a school of thought which stated that women have their own sexual desires  and that part of liberation from patriarchy is to liberate women’s bodies and express their sexual freedom. By focusing on male power, Acker exposed the  oppression and disintegration women face in society, language, and  culture and the struggle to express sexuality outside of patriarchal power. Yet Acker always maintained her stance as a feminist, and most academic study now focuses on the way she gave voice to subjects often silenced in our culture—among them abortion, rape, incest, and the war on women’s sexual desires.  

These days: Acker died of breast cancer in 1997, but Blood and Guts is still in print and available from Grove Press, and it remains the most widely read of all Acker’s work; it was recently listed in the 2006 compendium 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. With the recent publication of two books of critical essays on Acker (2005’s Devouring Institutions and 2006’s Lust for Life), there’s been a re-examination of her influence on contemporary literary forms. 

Why you should track it down: Blood and Guts remains relevant  to current feminist examinations of desire and gender identity, and was an expression of the pioneering sex-positive movement which gave voice to these ideas. Traces of Acker’s influence can be found in the work of Michelle Tea and other queer feminist writers. The postmodern literary godmother of all gender-deviant feminist writers, Acker celebrated all the journeys we go through in search of a place outside patriarchy’s control. By smashing ideas of literature, she smashed ideas of what a woman was supposed to say, think, feel, and do. In short, she was punk as fuck, and her work should be kept alive. —Jyoti Roy 

Woman Power: The Movement for Women’s Liberation 

Cellestine Ware, 1970 

What it’s about: Despite the back-cover copy, which moves from sensationalistic (“marching women! who are the new feminists? what do they want?... men are the enemy”) to Cosmo-esque (“learn how the women’s liberation movement is going to affect you: your sex life, your marriage, your children, your whole life”), Woman Power is not an outrageous, titillating read—unless, that is, you’re the sort of person who thrills to tales of internecine feminist feuds. Unlike many other early publications of the second wave, Woman Power is neither manifesto nor anthology. Rather, it’s a primer on the politics and practices of women’s liberation, with an astute analysis of the nuances of the various factions of second-wave feminism, the role of black women in the movement, and the legacy of 19th-century feminism.  

When it was published: The women’s liberation movement was just a few years old, but it was already complex (and apparently sensational) enough to warrant this mass-market paperback. Radical women had only recently defected from both the more reform-oriented National Organization for Women and the sexist New Left to start articulating their vision of radical feminism, by which they meant “the eradication of domination and elitism in all human relationships. This would make self-determination the ultimate good and require the downfall of society as we know it today.” 

These days: It’s taken as a truism that black women were alienated from second-wave feminism. While many were (and with good cause), it’s well worth remembering that very early on, some second wavers did grasp the disconnects between the rhetoric of women’s liberation and the realities of many black women’s lives—and offered up ways to reframe the nascent feminist movement to include black women. It’s also crucial to remember that among the earliest organizers of the women’s liberation movement were a handful of black women like Ware, a founding member of the influential New York Radical Feminists. 

Why you should track it down: It’s true that Ware’s analysis of the ideological differences between various factions of radical feminists, women’s liberationists, and liberal reformers goes into a level of detail that others may not find as fascinating as I do; it’s also true that a number of historians and feminist veterans have covered the same ground in subsequent, more readable volumes. But Ware’s eyewitness, on-the-ground perspective of the quickly morphing movement is immensely valuable, and her ability to analyze a movement in motion is admirable. She doesn’t shy away from pointing out WLM’s liabilities and shortcomings either, as aptly demonstrated in her assessment of the relationship of black women to feminism. Plus, how can you not admire the woman who penned the awesome phrase “Kick out the jams doesn’t apply to the jelly roll”? —Rachel Fudge 

The Black Woman: An Anthology 

Toni Cade, 1970 

What it’s about: I was born in 1970, the same year Essence magazine launched and a revolutionary book was published. It was called The Black Woman: An Anthology, edited by Toni Cade (later Toni Cade Bambara). The cover of the paperback I own features a beautiful sister with a serious afro meeting the reader’s gaze—a hint at the powerful critique of capitalism and its stepchild, racism, to be found within. Writers such as Nikki Giovanni, Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde spoke out in The Black Woman—about the Pill, about raising children in the ghetto, about sexuality, and about what it means to be a woman in the civil rights/black power movement and black in the women’s liberation movement.  

When it was published: It was a big deal—the first mainstream moment for black women to voice their discontent with the racism of the women’s movement and the sexism of black power. Marcia Gillespie, who later became the editor of Ms., was the 25-year-old managing editor of Essence in 1970, and remembers that The Black Woman became her personal bible. “I must have read it a dozen times,” she recalls. “That book gave us voice. Bear in mind that until that book the voices defining the Black experience during this period had primarily and overwhelmingly been those of men. This book not only affirmed the importance of the female experience, it defied prevailing notions about who we were and were not as women, and announced that we were going to speak for ourselves from that point on.” 

These days: Bambara died of cancer in 1995; The Black Woman was reissued with a new introduction by Eleanor Traylor in 2005. Elsewhere, other anthologies such as This Bridge Called My Back and But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies have picked up on the themes first explored in the book.  

Why you should track it down: Like Sisterhood is Powerful, The Black Woman is part of the early women’s liberation archive, but has never quite gotten its due in the mainstream world of publishing or women’s-studies courses. Crack its cover and find some of the very earliest analyses of multiple oppression, theories that were the starting point for what some call third-wave feminism. —Jennifer Baumgardner 

We Who Are About To  

Joanna Russ, 1977 

What it’s about: We Who Are About To is Gilligan’s Island in space, with a cranky, artsy, drug-toting intellectual as the protagonist. When eight regular folks get stranded on an impossibly distant planet, seven of them are determined to survive the traditional way—through repopulation. Our heroine, the eighth, isn’t having it: As the lone holdout against a nascent patriarchy, she resists their efforts to “ru[n] into the brush yelling Colonize, Colonize!” Her efforts to reason with her cohorts (mostly by pointing out that they’re all doomed anyway) quickly morph into something more desperate and genocidal. And though she succeeds in freeing herself from a life of forcible maternity, her fate—pondered in the second half of the book—isn’t exactly a happy one.  

When it was published: As sci-fi writer L. Timmel Duchamp noted in a 2006 article in the New York Review of Science Fiction, “The Women’s Liberation Movement was alive, and if not entirely well, still kicking some serious ass.” Duchamp goes on to say, “When I first read We Who Are About To in 1978, I burned with its anger, I gloried in its defiance.” Though set in the distant future, Russ’s novel was very much about women in her own day—how and whether they should control their own bodies; how and whether they should compromise with their society.  

These days: Health problems have left Russ less than prolific, though she still writes plays, essays, and feminist monographs like 1998’s What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism. Russ’s earlier work tends to be marginalized in the sci-fi world, and, as a feminist, she’s marginalized most everywhere else. We Who Are About To was reissued in 2005 by Wesleyan University Press with an enthusiastic introduction by Samuel R. Delaney—another gender-conscious sci-fi wunderkind whose public profile only vaguely outlived the ’70s.  

Why you should track it down: In We Who Are About To, Russ captures all that is fundamentally intolerable about any social grouping—if you’ve ever felt that you couldn’t stand the people in your home or office or nation for one more instant, this will be an extremely satisfying book. But, at the same time, the book is a meditation on how dependent we are on civilized society, and what it costs to dispense with it. As a result, the story is both cathartic and depressing. If you build your feminism on the charred bodies of the past, where does that leave you? Happy or sad, free or not free, sort of where you started but not quite? Read We Who Are About To and decide for yourself. —Noah Berlatsky 

The Great Cover-Up

Kyla — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

In an era when it’s possible to turn on the television on any given night and see a clutch of bikini-clad women crawling over their male prey (ABC’s The Bachelor), a sex-toy demonstration (HBO’s Real Sex), or a 9-year-old showing off her moves on her parents’ personal stripper pole (E!’s Keeping Up with the Kardashians), Wendy Shalit’s assertion that modesty has made a comeback seems a little, well, optimistic. Shalit has been beating the drum for women to reclaim their maidenly ways since 1999, when she published the screed A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue. Among other things, the book argued that social phenomena like coed college dorms and comprehensive sex education stripped women of their modesty, leaving them vulnerable to casual sex, not to mention rape and depression. Shalit’s latest book, Girls Gone Mild, returns to the subject matter bearing a new accusation: namely, that feminism—particularly its youth-focused third wave—has confused sexual promiscuity with political freedom, leading to an epidemic of plummeting self-esteem in young women. But today, she argues, there are moral heroines to be found in a new generation of young women who reject pole dancing, stripping, and other “bad girl” antics as being liberating. 

According to Shalit, this emerging group of “modest young gals” wants nothing to do with third wave shagging and snogging because, they say, revealing clothes and premarital sex are actually disempowering. These young women who’d rather wear turtleneck sweaters than low-rise jeans are the real revolutionaries, Shalit claims. And she calls these so-called sex radicals the fourth wave.  

That women are bombarded with messages telling us, “Take off your clothes and have casual sex; it’s empowering!” is old news. What’s different this time around is that Shalit adds feminists to the pop-culture mix. She blames third wavers for corrupting the notion of “girl power” to mean “young women [should] sleep around for the sake of feminism and ‘positive sexuality.’” But feminists aren’t the only ones at fault for our slutty state of the union: Shalit also accuses misguided professors, progressive teachers, and permissive parents of steering girls wrong. (Shalit puts Bitch on the hot seat, too, for what she calls the magazine’s predictably unwavering support for the sexually aggressive girl.)  

By contrast, Shalit sees herself at the helm of a nascent Britney backlash, an emerging trend encouraging decorum in dress and demeanor. Along with cohorts like Dawn Eden (author of The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On) and Laura Sessions Stepp (who wrote Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both), Shalit’s new-modesty boosterism tells women that sexual freedom should not be linked to equality—and that casual sex, risqué wardrobes, and even cursing are serious social problems.  

The modesty movement makes some good points about the effect a hypersexual culture can have on women’s well-being and sense of self. And it’s hard to argue that corporations and pop-culture products that reduce women and girls to consumers of constructed sexuality—from Bratz and Club Libby Lu to The Bachelor and Age of Love—are deeply problematic. But by claiming that modesty is the only solution, and by overlooking long-term feminist efforts to expand both women’s access to sexual pleasure and the right to say no, the new-modesty hucksters are doing women no favors.  

Simply put, Shalit and her pals keep the onus on women and their behavior, while giving men a pass—something that won’t surprise anyone who read A Return to Modesty, in which Shalit demurred that, gosh, if women weren’t so immodest, men wouldn’t rape them, would they? These binary arguments are really just gussied-up versions of the double standard that judges women differently from men. They are exclusively about female modesty, and say nothing about the male entitlement that has brought, say, strip clubs and porn into the mainstream. It seems crucial to note that modesty, now as in the past, is considered only a women’s issue: Girls and women are charged with being the gatekeepers of what’s sexually appropriate, but what’s judged inappropriate is measured by the effect it has on men. Scratch the surface of the modesty movement’s claims, and what shines through is the moralizing and shaming of women’s sexuality.  

And that raises the question of whether there can be a mainstream movement toward modesty that doesn’t hew to a slut-prude binary. Without addressing this larger feminist issue—which Shalit, Eden, and Sessions Stepp utterly fail to do—it doesn’t seem like there can be. If we refuse to acknowledge that judgments about women and modesty come from an extremely narrow-minded, controlling view that has more to do with punishing female sexual agency than with modesty itself, all we’re doing is restating that good girls don’t, bad girls do, and each gets what’s coming to her.  

To wit: In July 2007, 23-year-old Kyla Ebbert was told by a Southwest Airlines flight attendant that she wouldn’t be allowed to travel unless she first changed out of her miniskirt, tank top, and sweater. A second Southwest passenger, Setara Qassim, also came forward with her story of being told in June 2007 to either fix her racy outfit or get off the plane. In the end, both Ebbert and Qassim were allowed to fly the sartorially judgmental skies only after covering themselves with blankets. The modesty authorities were all over the story; on her blog, Dawn Patrol, Eden wrote that Ebbert “was no doubt weaned on the V-Monologues brand of feminism” and advised the Hooters waitress that, rather than suing Southwest, she “should be paying them out of gratitude for showing you the truth of what you are doing every day—treating yourself as a walking commodity, and others as consumers.” 

To make sure we’re behaving properly, the modesty sexperts say, we should keep it in our pants and act like we mean it. Otherwise, we risk giving away our power, explains Sessions Stepp. But this view means we get the same two labels to choose from when it comes to what we wear, how we love, and the ways we express our libido: sluts or prick teases. Player-haters or hos. What about exploration, learning from our successes and mistakes, and finding our own way to the sexual liberation that lies beyond the binary? 

A brief history of modern modesty: At the turn of the 20th century, “bad girls” could be arrested and institutionalized on the basis of reputation alone. These bad reputations came from hanging out with a tough crowd, staying out all night, frequenting the dance halls, or getting caught in a hotel room with a man. New ideas in science, law, and medicine were viewed through the lens of the moral fervor that was then sweeping the country. Conventional wisdom held that women should be the models of wholesome and righteous good living, and that everyone else would follow this lead. Women were thus put on a pedestal, charged with responsibility for taming men’s passions and maintaining the purity of the home. When, in the early 1900s, young women—in particular, working-class women—started partying in public with men, some people saw the mingling of the sexes as leading to long-overdue personal fulfillment. Others saw in these loosening relations an impending social breakdown. Sound familiar? 

We have a long history of trying to manage and organize our sexual fears and desires. The messages about modesty that were historically spread via churches, schools, and local communities are today also spread over the Internet. But the messages themselves have changed little—and each exhortation to women to lengthen their skirts, cross their legs, and keep their eyes down has nothing to do with curbing men’s assumed access to women’s bodies, and everything to do with controlling women’s freedom and sexuality. 

A quick Google search these days yields evidence of an interest in rejecting short-shorts and tiny tops that cuts across religion, fashion, and commerce. Pure Fashion “is a faith-based program that encourages teen girls to live, act, and dress in accordance with their dignity as children of God” (purefashion.com). The program, sponsored by Regnum Christi, an evangelical, apostolic Catholic movement, invites young women ages 14 to 18 to learn how to become confident leaders and messengers of purity and virtue. Pure Fashion’s eight-month Model Training Program promises to teach teens the modest arts of public speaking, manners and social graces, hair and makeup, and personal presentation, in ways that are “trendy but still tasteful.”  

Then there’s Ladies Against Feminism, a conservative Christian organization (tagline: “Promoting Beautiful Womanhood!”) that sells “Modesty Rocks” T-shirts on its eponymous website. And ELIZA, a slick, beautifully designed fashion magazine for teens and 20-somethings, was “created for women who want to be stylish, sexy, and engaged in the world while retaining high standards in dress, entertainment, and lifestyle.” The magazine’s MySpace page features links to hundreds of model-pretty, ostensibly modest young women and their fans, and its editors have appeared on the likes of Good Morning America and Fox News to discuss how parents and tweens might buck the tide of skimpiness and embrace modest fashion.  

David Feingold, a Modern Orthodox Jew, points out that for religious girls and women—whether they’re Jewish, Mormon, Muslim, or any other denomination—having more fashion options is a blessing. “Until recently, if you wanted to buy modest clothes it was really a challenge. My neighbors were buying their daughters Amish clothes online. Which is fine unless you’re not Amish. Then it just looks weird.” Feingold and his neighbors can now go to Funky Frum, a site that caters to observant-but-still-fashionable Jews and whose appeal extends to nonreligious women. There’s also Marabo, a chic, fresh clothing line for Muslim women, and Modest by Design, which bills itself as “clothing your father would approve of.” Shade, a Mormon-based clothing company founded in 2004 by 32-year-old Chelsea Rippy, has already seen its sales top $8 million.  

But to hold these companies up as signaling a new guard, as Shalit and her cohorts do, is really creating a false sense of how ascendant the modesty movement is—and the degree to which rampant immodesty has brought it about. Shalit, in a move that seems to contradict the thesis of her own two books, situates the value of a woman squarely in her sexual mores: She equates virginity with virtue and assumes that a woman who has sex doesn’t respect herself. Given that that’s her starting point, she seems entirely too quick to assume that everyone who dresses modestly does it for the same reason, and, likewise, that everyone who doesn’t is morally poisoned. It’s not exactly a nuanced approach, but it’s one that she’s stubbornly grasping for dear life. In fact, there are plenty of reasons that women embrace modest clothing. Religious codes. Sun sensitivity. Fashion subcultures. And—though Shalit and company seem to think it doesn’t exist—personal inclination. What’s most wrongheaded about the mod squad’s polemic on who does and doesn’t need modesty is their sweeping equation of modest clothing with moral purity—to say nothing of their generalizations about where immodesty comes from.  

Modestyzone.net, a website Shalit created in 2005, is for young women who are “tired of power struggles between the sexes,” a place they can come to “believe in the possibility of real intimacy.” Like Shalit’s books, the site’s implied message is that modesty is a direct result of moral virtue, and is therefore the only path to intimacy and fulfilling relations. Modestyzone brims with huffy (and inaccurate) accusations like, “The unspoken message of Our Bodies, Ourselves is clear enough: As long as [a girl] remains a virgin, she remains completely asexual.” But, as in A Return to Modesty, most of Shalit’s misgivings about crotch-flashing starlets and tween-sized thongs are placed on an ideology that has little to do with creating these things—call it the “feminists made me pole dance!” argument. Over and over, feminism—rather than a larger culture with a long history of both objectifying women and commodifying sex—is blamed for pressuring girls and young women into short skirts, casual sex, stripping, and general promiscuity.  

Among those singled out by Shalit are Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, longtime campus speakers and authors of the books Manifesta and Grassroots. In Girls Gone Mild, Shalit plays fast and loose with her characterizations of the activists’ message, misquoting the two as equating “‘dancing at a strip club’ with ‘volunteering at a women’s shelter’ in its potential to ‘radicalize women in a positive way.’”  

“What we actually said,” clarifies Baumgardner, “is that whenever women are together alone it can be a radical space. I certainly never equated strip clubs with a rape crisis center. But the fact is that they are both women-only spaces and women do organize and help each other in both places.” 

Both feminism and the pro-modesty movement share common goals—among them, the insistence that women should be free from sexual objectification. You’re as likely to hear a critique of Girls Gone Wild in a women’s studies class as you are in a Christian home-school setting. Both feminist websites (like http://Feministing.com) and modesty blogs (like http://fearlesslyfeminine.blogspot.com) link to a video from Dove’s Real Beauty campaign called “Evolution,” which uses fast-forwarding and time-lapse techniques to demonstrate how much work goes into transforming a model from a regular girl to an ad-ready stunner. And both feminists and modesty boosters have applauded girls like the ones who organized a “girlcott” of Abercrombie & Fitch’s “Who Needs Brains When You Have These?” t-shirts. The big difference is that, unlike the modesty movement, feminists are interested in both critiquing the hypersexualization of women and in positing that women’s sexual agency, whether inside of or beyond heterosexual marriage, can be positive. Feminists like Ariel Levy have pointed out quite convincingly that girls are sold a vision of empowerment that’s more about a commercial version of sexuality than an authentic one. But Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs didn’t argue for more female modesty, but for more sexual options—and not just options that make somebody else a buck. 

There’s a lot to like about the idea that a few more yards of fabric might give us a wee illusion of privacy in our tell-all world. But the answers to our questions about sexual agency don’t lie in silencing feminists or forcing modesty on young women who don’t want it. Nor does the modesty movement really represent a greater number of options. At its core, it still leaves women with the same old tired twosome: Check Box 1 for Madonna; Box 2 for Whore. What’s more, as Anne K. Ream wrote in a recent article on modesty in the Los Angeles Times, it creates a disturbing new spectrum of ways women can be blamed for things like sexual harassment and abuse. “It’s not a lack of female modesty but a sense of male entitlement that leads to sexual violence,” Ream points out. “And the idea that women can change men’s behavior by changing our clothes is not only disconcerting, it has been debunked. As millions of women know all too well, no one ever avoided a rape by wearing a longer skirt.” 

Indeed, expecting women to be responsible for tending to both their own and an entire country’s worth of men’s sexual mores seems an awful lot to ask, but it’s exactly what Shalit wants. The modesty movement is at its heart an essentialist one: Men are sexual brutes, and women must keep them in line with crossed legs and high necklines. (Not surprisingly, Girls Gone Mild and Modestyzone don’t bother to ask what effect the mod/slut binary has on young lesbians.) Its justifications keep women’s bodies and women’s sexuality—especially young women’s sexuality—at the core of female identity. Forget about focusing on achievement, dreams, and education (although the modesty movement claims that by removing pressure to hook up, they are providing this opportunity for young women). When it comes to the modesty movement, women are primarily the sum total of their sexual bodies. These arguments let people “innocently” talk about modesty and still think about women with their clothes off.  

Encouraging modesty and policing women’s physical presence and sexual expression are very different things. And, in the end, neither Shalit nor Eden nor Sessions Stepp are offering a critique that differentiates the two. There’s nothing wrong with giving a shout-out to a clothing company that acknowledges that not every teen girl wants to look like an escapee from the Playboy Mansion, but to ascribe “goodness” to a turtleneck and moral turpitude to a miniskirt is to ignore the multiple sources from which girls and women draw identity, sexuality, and agency. The modesty movement can cover up their moralism with simplistic reasoning, but all that ensures is that it’ll be just another trend.  

Shira Tarrant loves to talk about modesty and other options with her students at California State University, Long Beach. Her newest book is Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex and Power (Routledge).

Dumb & Getting Dumber

Kyla — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

In 2004, every corner of popular culture was populated by men in crisis, and I don’t just mean George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney. We had men in trouble, men in triumph, men in uniform, men on the cross, men in squarepants; men being men with other men, talking about masculinity—what it is, how to have it, keep it, get it, make it last. We might even call it the Year of the Man, but the response to such a title could reasonably be, So what’s new? Isn’t every year the year of the man?

Yes, it is. And every year is the year that masculinity is declared to be in crisis, requiring lots of help from the church, the government, the media, and Dr. Phil. And yet 2004 in particular—an annus horribilis for politics, world peace, and atheism—was notable for the way questions about masculinity dominated the media. Whether it was Bush and Kerry squaring off in the presidential debates over questions about who was more capable of killing Iraqis; or photographic reports of military prison guards in Iraq forcing prisoners into blatantly sodomitical postures; or images of a bleeding, suffering, masochistic Jesus in The Passion of the Christ; or Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church in Sideways competing for the Most Unworthy Male to Find a Totally Hot Chick to Love Him Award, we had no choice but to sit up and notice new dimensions of male domination. These new dimensions include the incorporation of massive amounts of homoerotic imagery, explicit depictions of male-on-male violence (a defense against the homoeroticism), and, oddly, the performance of male stupidity. It’s been a creeping trend, this exaltation of bumbling men on the big screen (Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber, Adam Sandler in just about any Adam Sandler movie), the small screen (the hapless husbands of According to Jim, King of the Hill, and of course The Simpsons), and—most disturbingly—in real life.

Since the start of George W.’s first term as president, Americans seem to be increasingly enamored of the heroic couplet of men and stupidity. As the most recent election proved, playing dumb means playing to “the people”—who, apparently, now find intellectual acumen to be a sign of overeducation, elitism, and Washington-insider status. As many critics have pointed out, no one is more of a Washington insider than Bush, a former governor, the son of a former president, and the brother of the governor of Florida. Even so, W. has made his populist version of stupidity a trademark. The man who can’t pronounce “nuclear” has sold himself to the public as a down-home guy, a fun bbq pal, a student privileged enough to go to Yale but “real” enough to get only C’s—in other words, a genial buffoon who’s a safe bet for the White House because he doesn’t try to befuddle the populace with facts, figures, or, god forbid, ideas. His latest opponent, Kerry, was fluent in French, well educated, well spoken, and therefore highly suspicious on all counts. It’s telling that one of the questions asked of the voting public by pollsters wasn’t about the candidates’ integrity or knowledge, but about which one voters would most like to share a beer with. As a culture, we no longer want a president who’s smarter or more visionary than we are; instead, we want a frat brother.

Stupidity in women, as we know, has often been expected and acceptable in this culture, and some women cultivate it because they see it rewarded in popular icons like Jessica Simpson. Female stupidity can make men feel bigger, better, smarter; and it, in turn, can make many women themselves feel desirable. But what is the appeal of the stupid man, and why does the representation of male stupidity not lead to the same kind of disempowerment many women experience? Stupidity in men has historically been represented in the media as charming (Jerry Lewis), naively disarming, and comforting (George W.).

Male stupidity is, in fact, a new form of machismo, and it comes—perhaps not surprisingly—at a time when alternative masculinities have achieved some small measure of currency. Feminists, transgender and butch activists, and drag kings have all demanded more from masculinity in recent years, and have lovingly and creatively re-envisioned it without past levels of misogyny and sexism. So just when some of us in queer culture presumed that it was finally safe to divorce masculinity from men, male masculinity has risen up again, like the seed of Chucky (or not, since apparently Chuck’s seed in the new movie is quite queer!). Yesteryear’s swaggering macho is this year’s stumbling, bumbling male; omniscience is replaced by idiocy, irony is replaced by literality. As is often the case, we’ve seen the shift illustrated most boldly in the celebrated films of the past few years.

In 2003, for example, one film laid out with great precision the new role for women in a new world of male dominance. And what should have signified as an ironic trope all too quickly became a literal manifestation of gender roles: In Pedro Almodovar’s critically acclaimed masterpiece of misogyny, Talk to Her, two talented women lie in comas and then become wallpaper while the unappealing and unremarkable male leads flirt and coo across their mute and prone bodies. While the male leads are exposed as flawed, deceptive, conniving, even criminal, the film still focuses on their complexity and leaves the women inert, simple, silent. Stupidity, in other words, passes as complexity and male complexity requires, again, female simplicity.

In 2004, most of the new masculinities on display in film intensified the link between aesthetics and misogyny, combining homoeroticism, male bonding, and masculine pathos in a potent stew designed to tug at the heartstrings of the women who love too much and slay the critics in the process. A primo example is Alexander Payne’s universally acclaimed Oscar hopeful Sideways, which pairs up nebbishy, intellectual loser Miles (Paul Giamatti) and preening, faded actor Jack (Thomas Haden Church) and turns their stag-week odyssey into an exploration of wine, women, and wisdom—with the women providing access to first the wine and then the wisdom. On the surface, the movie seems to be exposing male vulnerability, making a spectacle of male stupidity, and anatomizing male arrogance, but in the end it’s no different from any other buddy movie; the movie’s smart ugly guy–dumb cute guy pairing recalls male couples from George and Lenny to Cassidy and Sundance.

The bare-bones plot of Sideways claims to be telling a different, more “human” story about men and masculinity than your average buddy-bonding narrative. On a weeklong wine tour to celebrate Jack’s impending wedding, the men use Miles’s oenophilia as an excuse to drink endlessly. Miles wants to drown his depression over a failed writing career; Jack wants to get laid before he has to sign away his sexuality to marriage. Miles is depressed, physically repulsive, and clearly an alcoholic, while Jack is past his prime, dumb, and blatantly on the make. None of this impedes their chances of getting lucky, though, and the two gorgeous, interesting women they meet up with are drawn to them for no obvious reason.

Just 10 minutes into Sideways we know we are in the presence of a really likable guy when Miles casually steals hundreds of dollars from his aged mother. In a film about working-class men, or men of color, such a scene would indicate the fundamental criminality of the character. In this film, though, the scene is just fine shading in what critics embraced as a heartwarming and complex portrait of two men stumbling together through their midlife crises. In his Chicago Sun-Times column, Roger Ebert suggests that this “human comedy” succeeds because it shows “us” that “women can love us for ourselves, bless their hearts, even when we can’t love ourselves.” Other critics swooned over the movie’s ability to show men in a warts-and-all light. But while it’s true that Miles and Jack are utterly flawed characters, and while director Payne frequently hits the mark with his close-up focus on the loneliness and humanity of all the film’s characters, Sideways is so enamored of its heroes’ flaws that it elevates those flaws into a form of appeal. Personality defects that would mark other kinds of characters (a woman, a gay man, a lesbian, a person of color) as dangerous function to make these men more interesting and more real. In fact, the message of this alleged masterpiece is that men, like wine, get better with age and have to mature to just the right moment before they are opened up and enjoyed. And the message to women, those creatures who stand outside Ebert’s “human comedy,” is basically this: If you stand by your young man through his alcoholism, philandering, sexual-confidence crises, and general anxiety, he will suddenly blossom into…a drunken, philandering, impotent, anxious older man. Jackpot!

I suppose the reason otherwise intelligent critics love this film is because it seems to portray men and masculinity differently than the top-gun blockbusters do. In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis argues that Miles’s appeal lies in his flaws and his obvious struggle to achieve acceptable modes of masculinity, writing that “without struggle and pain, Miles wouldn’t be half the good and decent man he is, though he certainly might complain a little less, venture a little more.” Other critics, like J. Hoberman of the Village Voice, speak admiringly of Miles’s “humanity” and Payne’s comic genius. But few recognize that the so-called humanity of a Miles or a Jack almost always comes at the expense of a woman. Miles’s whole trip is unknowingly sponsored by his mother, from whom he steals the money; and Jack’s lesson in maturity comes at the expense of Stephanie, the vineyard worker who falls in love with and believes Jack when he says he’s ready to move to the wine country for her, as well as at the expense of his fiancée, who has no idea what his stag week involves. And Maya, the compelling object of Miles’s desire, is having a midlife crisis of her own—she’s just been through a divorce and is looking for new purpose in her life—but her role is only to prop up Miles’s fragile ego, tell him she likes his rejected 750-page manuscript, and comfort him as he hurtles through his weeklong bender.

The men of Sideways are really just older, more critically lauded versions of the hapless losers who have always populated teen comedies—the geeky strivers of Sixteen Candles, the libido-crazed pals of the American Pie franchise, or the blindly hedonistic Jesse and Chester of Dude, Where’s My Car? (Perhaps the film should have been called Dude, Where’s My Pinot Noir?) And like the dudes, the bros, the Jim Carreys and Adam Sandlers and George W. Bushes, the stupider and more pathetic the male heroes become, the more they are loved by exceptional women.

One film of 2004, and one film only, had the courage to reveal the new, flawed-and-vulnerable masculinity for what it is: a version of the old, invincible John Wayne masculinity. Spongebob Squarepants: The Movie tells a gripping tale of an old king who loses his crown (I smell an allegory here), an old crab who loses his business to a bottom-feeder, and a brave young sponge who, with the help of a pink starfish named Patrick and a princess mermaid, sets the world of Bikini Bottom straight.

Or is that gay? With the Wall Street Journal and other serious media abuzz with the news that the beloved Spongebob, a mainstay of children’s tv, has found a following in gay communities, the film’s creators have recently had to tackle the question of whether the cartoon is gay. Let’s review the evidence: Spongebob and Patrick are inseparable; Patrick appears toward the end of the movie in fishnets and stilettos; on their journey to find the king’s crown (and become “real men”), Spongebob and Patrick find themselves in a leather bar but disappear to the men’s room together; they are chased by a big leather daddy on a motorbike and secretly want to be caught by him; they show much more interest in each other than in the pretty mermaid; and, last but not least, their final ride back to Bikini Bottom comes courtesy of David Hasselhoff’s ass. As Hasselhoff speeds across the ocean with the little fellows, he looks back at them fighting over his ass and says, “Hey guys, go easy on me back there!”

But more important than Spongebob’s sexual proclivities is the film’s explicit discussions of the difference between boys and men, which take on a very different tone than the angsty dialogue of Sideways. Spongebob and Patrick understand that their quest to recapture the king’s crown will supposedly transform them from boys to men. But the film hilariously pokes fun at the archetypal rendering of this rite of passage, and actually makes boyhood look more complicated, more empathetic, more flexible than the forms of manhood modeled by adults in the story. Spongebob ultimately tells boys that it’s okay to be a boy rather than a man, that manhood is exploitative and competitive, and that business and pleasure, in the end, depend upon figuring out new ways to access the responsibilities of male adulthood without the violence and injustice that so often accompany it. Spongebob and Patrick know that manhood is just a bad combination of confidence, bullshit, humiliation, and Viagra; rather than acquiesce, the two friends set out to make fun of it while representing boyhood as a kind of in-between space free of the performance anxiety and anger that orbit the adult male and fuel his fear of failure. Enlivened by a critique of fast food, capitalism, the monarchy, and nepotism, Spongebob Squarepants: The Movie makes a daring pitch for a softer, more absorbent masculinity.

Savvy viewers know that Spongebob’s sexuality is crucial to his character. When asked about the character’s queeny tendencies, creator Stephen Hillenburg told E! Online News that he thinks of his depictions as asexual, rather than gay, but he admits that they—Spongebob in particular—are “special…weird” and kind of “oddball.” Some call it oddball, but some might say Spongebob’s “softness” connotes a very particular genre of “odd.” But in a year when even action-hero cartoons like The Incredibles pivoted on male midlife crisis, when the governor of California called his legislative opponents “girlie men,” when the white male vote put Bush back in office after a disastrous first term—in such a year, any male icon, gay or straight, who’s not trying to bolster his masculinity is worth a second look. In this new year, let’s hope we can find and insist upon some compelling alternative masculinities—and that a few straight women can find it in their hetero hearts to insist on more from the straight or sideways men they love.

Judith Halberstam teaches at USC and is writing a book on intellectual life in the U.S. titled Dude, Where’s My Theory? She is the author of Female Masculinity, The Drag King Book, and, most recently, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives.

Editors' Letter: Taste & Appetite

Kyla — Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0500

From the ancient Greeks to the current Queer Eyes, the cocktail of knowledge, ideals, aesthetics, and manners that makes up the concept of taste has served as a tireless organizing principle for a class-based society (and really, is there any other kind?). Like all organizing principles, taste is a construction rather than a law of nature: It’s almost impossible to say why, for instance, we believe it’s in good taste to put flatware in a certain order, or in bad taste to wear vinyl pants to your cousin’s wedding.  

But tastes mutate over time, thanks in no small part to fashion (chain mail: the new cashmere!), as do our means of achieving those standards of taste. Nothing captures the intertwined natures of taste and appetite so well as the world of advertising. Advertisers have long clamored to help us define our tastes and, by extension, ourselves by positioning their products as the key to better, happier, more successful lives. According to the American cult of consumerism, you’re not just what you eat but what you drive, what you wear, which cell phone you use, whether you use Swiffer Wet or the regular old Swiffer. Cleverly tapping into our latent desires for transformation, this aspirational element of popular culture is deep-rooted and insidious, manifesting itself not only in the plugs for product that permeate almost every part of our environments, but in the entertainment we consume—which, in turn, consumes us. (See “Triumph of the Shill, Part One,” page 50.) 

The advent of reality television—and, more specifically, of the now-ubiquitous makeover show—has made for an advertising of taste and appetite that’s both more public and more prescriptive than ever before. Shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Extreme Makeover, and the strident, hectoring stateside version of What Not to Wear, as well as a new crop of home-makeover shows (see “Compromising Positions,” page 21), use the language of self-esteem and entitlement in their pursuit of the good taste implicit in an upper-middle-class appearance. When Carson Kressley, the queen Mary of Queer Eye’s Fab Five, proclaims, “We’re waging a war against bad taste, one straight guy at a time,” he’s talking not just about getting rid of a ratty futon and some questionable footwear, but also about the ways in which bad taste is putatively holding these men back from their rightful achievements: jobs, girlfriends, marriage, the ability to make mixed drinks. 

In the end, taste is frustratingly hard to pin down. It’s far easier to talk about our appetites, which ultimately are expressions of desire and yearning enacted on a literal gastronomic level (see “Eat Wave,” page 60), or subsumed into consumerist urges (see “Beauty and the Feast,” page 34)—and thus are all too visible. With taste, like pornography or beauty, we may not be able to describe it, but we all know it when we see it. Taste, perhaps, is what we aspire to, while appetite is what we consume—or deny ourselves. —Eds.

Beauty and the Feast

Kyla — Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0500

The first thing you see is food. a breastlike dome of cake towers at the top of the ad, frosted pink with a raspberry on top. “It’s like dessert for your legs,” declares the text, and just in case this copy wasn’t clear, below it a pair of cellulite-free gams balances a bottle of Skintimate After-Shave Gel in lieu of icing. A cartoonish, disembodied bald head floats in the background, licking his lips, orbited by three quotes: “In the shave aisle!,” “Soothe and moisturize!,” and “3 luscious flavors.” The unexclamated “flavors” reveals a strange equivocation in terms of hunger and beauty. This shaving gel is inedible and can hardly claim more than a “luscious” fragrance, yet the ad presents the product as a kind of snack for the skin, an external form of nourishment that offers the sensual experience of food without the sugar, fat, and shame so commonly associated with real-life eating.  

A glut of “flavored” cosmetics and those emphasizing the vitamins, proteins, and other elements of proper nutrition point to a new imperative in the beauty industry: physical nourishment through external consumption. These days, everything from drugstore staples to high-end status brands carry with them a food frisson. While some of these products contain actual edibles—the Body Shop, for instance, goes through 70,000 bananas each year to make its products—many others merely adopt names and descriptions that would be more at home in a cookbook or on a dessert menu. The Body Shop has offered a full line of epicurean options since 1976, from the aforementioned banana hair conditioner to kiwi lip balm to “body butters” scented with mango and papaya, complete with promotional copy that reads like a restaurant review, waxing poetic on the natural goodness and nutritive prowess of their ingredients. A boutique line of cosmetics called Fresh does a brisk trade in Milk lotion, Rice facial oil, and Brown Sugar body scrub, while the Philosophy line offers a set of body washes called “The Cookbook” that allows hungry bathers to lather up with Coconut Cream Pie, Blueberry Pie, and Key Lime Pie in what their ad copy calls “a guiltless indulgence.” 

Beauty-product ads pitch the food angle ad nauseum, and the exceptionally long shelf life of the trend proves they’ve tantalized consumers’ tastebuds. Still, there’s clearly more than just sales strategy happening here: By imbuing these products with the power to fulfill cravings beyond the realm of looking good, advertising reveals female desire en masse. Judging by the language of the ads and the scents of fattening, forbidden treats packed into plastic bottles and destined for every part of our bodies but our mouths, it would seem that women are, in a word, hungry—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. 

The physical hunger should come as no surprise. With the ideal body size shrinking to negative numbers and half of American women on a diet, thoughts about food claim an increasing amount of women’s time and energy. Though the diets currently in vogue may not be of the traditional Ladies’ Home Journal, lose-10-pounds-on-grapefruit-only variety, there’s been a recent surge in popularity of “health”-focused diets that are just as stringent. (No wheat. No chicken. For god’s sake, no carbs.) And while advertisers exploit images of food to attract the hungry consumer’s wandering eye, pictures of impossibly thin and relentlessly airbrushed models peer out from every newsstand and billboard, reminding her of the virtues of this abstention. Is it any wonder that so many women are feeding their skin and hair with the same treats they regularly deny their stomachs? 

Homegrown recipes for things like avocado hair conditioners and cucumber-slice eye depuffers have certainly been around since the invention of the slumber party, if not longer, but only in the last two decades have manufacturers mainstreamed the refrigerator facials of yore into neatly bottled concoctions that are chemically engineered to remind us of everyday food products—or, in the case of “natural” and “organic” beauty lines like the Body Shop and Lush, that urge you to rub actual food on your body and into your hair instead of ingesting it. 

Though nourishment needs to go in your mouth rather than on your face to do any good, cosmetic companies regularly enlist scientific and medical discourse to pitch their makeup and promote the myth of living skin—living, that is, apart from the woman to whom the skin belongs. 

The idea of living, nourishable skin first emerged in Estée Lauder’s 1982 campaign for its Swiss Performing Extract. The two-page spread featured a closeup of a model and a facing page of pseudocientific advertising copy, complete with an imitation fact sheet that announced:  

Now: Estée Lauder and today’s technology bring you super-rich nourishment.... Fact: Swiss Performing Extract is more than a moisturizer. It is a super nourishing lotion blended in the U.S.A. with natural ingredients including soluble protein: a substance plentiful in young skin. Fact: Science tells us this natural substance has outstanding capabilities. It penetrates right down to the base layer of cells to help promote resilience, good tone and to maintain optimum moisture balance…. Because makeup and moisturizers can’t do it all. 

The language and imagery of these ad campaigns recast female skin as an abstruse entity full of mysteries that science has only begun to unearth, a newly discovered passage to the internal body that asks to be penetrated and thus transformed. Much like the female body of traditional medicine, the skin is estranged from the woman, who must turn to science for understanding and maintenance. 

A year after Estée Lauder’s Swiss Performing Extract hit the scene, Lancôme advanced the so-called science of skin care further in an ad for Nutribel, a “Nourishing Hydrating Emulsion” billed as “a very important means of sustenance...for the moisturizing care and feeding of your skin.” The Nutribel ads treated the idea of living skin as a breakthrough—it had, of course, been alive all along, but its discovery was brand new. This meant that the skin had been neglected; other products were not meeting its needs, and it was hungry.  

Nutribel was introduced at a time when the average female consumer could easily believe in the hunger of her skin because her own hunger was undoubtedly growing stronger. Issues of Cosmopolitan from the early ’80s feature models far slimmer than their predecessors, while the advent of aerobics, NutraSweet, and meal-replacement products brought us images of women happily burning calories in pink leotards and purple leg warmers, a Crystal Light in one hand and a frothy glass of Slim-Fast in the other. 

Today, thanks in no small part to these pseudoscientific “advances” responsible for both NutraSweet and the medical language of cosmetics, we are more aware than ever of how our bodies stack up against cultural ideals, and appetites are raging in response. We are told to look to science as the day spa of our dreams, as though its ever-expanding technology only exists in service to the whims of beauty. Indeed, another societal hunger is at work in this approach: the hunger for faster, prettier, better living through chemicals. Even if scientists are taking their own sweet time to trot out the male birth-control pill, at least we know they’re plugging away at all hours to end the wrinkle epidemic once and for all. 

“Believe in beauty,” urges Lancôme. “Reveal sensational skin with pure Vitamin C. For soft, flawless skin.” In this 2003 ad for Sensation Totale, “a perfecting complex,” a model’s face and a luminous pink rosebud provide concrete evidence for the concept of perfection. A zipper is attached to the rose’s outer petals, half pulled down. Below it, the text coos, “A unique time-release reservoir of pure Vitamin C works with skin’s natural enzymatic activity to reveal healthy-looking, sensational skin.” So though the ad tells us little about just what this “complex” is (a cream? a serum? a gas?), we do know that, just as the rose-zipper reveals tender new petals, so the complex will reveal new skin—a face-zipper, if you will. The deliberate word sequence of “vitamin,” “enzyme,” and “healthy” cleverly mimics the natural process of digestion. The ad thus acknowledges true internal hunger just as it exploits socially imposed hunger for external perfection. Furthermore, the fulfillments of these hungers have been deemed mutually exclusive. Enter the sale. 

This cycle of self-denial and appeasement through moisturizing lotion is also enacted on an emotional and spiritual level. You might not have realized it, but your skin has needs, too. In a recent print ad for Dove Essential Nutrients Day Cream, a vitamin caplet—apparently formed by rainwater from a big green leaf at the top of the page—drops into a jar of cream. A block of pale, lowercase text floats tranquilly at the center, informing us that this potion is “made with a perfect blend of skin-loving nutrients plus vitamins, pure spring water, and green tea extract. It has what’s essential to moisturize skin so it can glow with health.”  

The inclusion of green tea and spring water implies purity and calm, while the simple visual scheme provides a sort of quiet, meditative space where one can contemplate the pressing metaphysical questions involved in moisturizing. The consumer’s emotional and spiritual longing is projected onto her exterior in simple yet convincing terms: The phrase “skin-loving nutrients,” for instance, transforms the skin into an entity both capable of digesting nutrients and extracting love and comfort from the experience, thus imitating a very human relationship with food.  

An ad for Estée Lauder’s DayWear Plus echoes this sentiment: “Wear DayWear Plus and your skin will thank you.” By using gratitude as shorthand for a state of beauty, the text evokes a complex give-and-take relationship between the consumer and her skin. Like a pet or a child, the skin is recast as a point of pride and responsibility; if its owner feeds and cares for it well, it will mirror her virtue to the world. 

Similarly, the connection between food and sensual pleasure is also played out through cosmetics marketing. In a typical ad, for Gillette Satin Care Shave Gel, an extraordinarily tall and slender model rolls around naked in a pile of citrus fruit. She smiles widely, her eyes closed in ecstasy, as if all that grapefruit were delivering a serious contact high: It’s hard to imagine anyone enjoying food more even if she were actually eating it. At her toes, the ad’s text reads, “Introducing Satin Care Citrus Infusion Shave Gel. Its zesty fragrance with moisture-rich skin nourishing vitamins leaves legs feeling soft and satiny smooth.”  

The ad would have us believe that the model is overwhelmed with pleasure at the mere idea of food, and it’s that idea that has proven so appealing to consumers. Calgon employs the same tactics in an advertisement for its Ahh...Spa! line. A model’s seemingly flawless skin covers most of the page, digitally retouched to glow with garish highlights. Below her is a row of various tropical fruits; beside her, a bottle of Nourishing Body Butter containing “Nourishing Fruit Complex with Mango Extract.” The slogan “Pleasures of the tropics, pampering of a spa” evokes sensual pleasure and loving care, all under the pretense of nourishment—if the customer can’t hope for such treatment, at least her skin can. 

Over time, the creation of hundreds of products for hair care, body moisturizing, body-hair removal, wrinkle fighting, and so on has compartmentalized feminine features like a Petrarch sonnet, alienating women from their whole selves and breaking them into parts that can then be scrutinized accordingly. The resulting insecurity behooves the cosmetics industry just as it did religious, academic, and professional institutions of the past. The beauty tower might topple if women were widely exposed to a more holistic approach to body maintenance—like, you know, eating vitamins and protein instead of slathering them on our legs, reducing stress through division of household tasks and improved childcare, and finding ways to attend to our bodies that don’t involve plucking, scrubbing, or loathing. 

Sadly, female hunger is rarely acknowledged outside of beauty copy. By transferring our human needs to our skin, advertising attempts to placate consumers with the notion that real satisfaction is only $10, $20, or $70 away. It trivializes our desires by making them a simple matter of appearance, denying the importance of what deeper needs lurk beneath our skin and inside our bellies. We are encouraged to bear our hunger like a shameful secret, lest our guilty pleasures become societal demands and incite real changes that can lead to satisfaction that goes beyond the corporeal. With their let-them-eat-body-butter take on our hunger, marketers continue to make it viscerally clear that where women are concerned, it’s still what’s outside that counts.  

Juliana Tringali is a freelance writer living in Oakland, Calif., and a firm believer in the healing powers of chocolate.

Editors' Letter: Issue 12

Kyla — Thu, 01 Jun 2000 00:00:00 -0400

“I hear there’s a bunch of angry women in town.”

this lovely sentiment was reportedly overheard on the street during Feminist Expo 2000, a global gathering over 7,000 strong that was held in Baltimore the first weekend of April. Other reactions to the event ran along the same lines: A reception bartender told the Washington Post that “My boss said they’re just a bunch of man-haters.” (Thankfully, she added, “But they seem real nice to me.”) 

Apparently the thought of a group of any number of women higher than, say, five translates into the idea that women must be out to bring down men. Not only a really egocentric notion—do groups of women have nothing better to do than plot the demise of individual males?—but one that feminists have been battling as long as there have been feminists. 

The attitude toward women’s anger—automatically viewed as irrational and/or a destructive force aimed at men—purposely discounts and obscures the fact that, indeed, there is cause for anger. The term “angry women” is so reductive that people who use it would likely be hard-pressed to tell you what these alleged women are so angry about. Expo attendees, as it happened, were angry about a number of things: the possibility of America electing a man who is proud of his status as one of the country’s most anti-choice politicians, for one; the Taliban’s brutally enforced gender apartheid, for another. About so-called honor killings, in which men murder women in their families with impunity for such misdeeds as talking to the wrong man or being raped. About the religious right. About wage inequality, racism, and pink-collar ghettos that make the sticky floor more relevant than the glass ceiling for most American women. But when people make flip references to “angry women,” we’re guessing they aren’t thinking about these things. (But if you are, we’d like to offer a few resources for you—check out our new section, Where to Bitch, on page 95.)  

For us, the weekend in Baltimore drove home the fact that the identity of a feminist, to the general public, hasn’t changed nearly as much as we’d like to believe—the caricature of the wild-eyed man-marauder still lives on. But within the feminist community, our identities are changing all the time, becoming more and more multifaceted and wide-ranging. As long as people retain a two-dimensional picture of feminists as irrationally angry, we need to strenuously ensure that our goals, ideas, and experiences keep diversifying and growing—in public. 

Forthwith, a collection of perspectives, passions, practices, perversions, preoccupations, and pet peeves that demonstrate just how polymorphous we feminists really are. —eds.

Editors' Letter: Issue 11

Kyla — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 -0500

“So, what do you think we should write the ed note about this time?” 

“Oh, I don’t know. Marketing? There’s a lot of marketing in this issue. Or we could print another butt-on-the-head photo.” 

“Yes, from our vast archive of them. But I was thinkin’ maybe discomfort would be a good topic.” 

“Discomfort? Explain.” 

“Well, like how editing so much of the stuff for this issue made us really uncomfortable. Some of it’s just so unpleasant—I’d never want to seem blasé about laser-lifted pubes [page 70]—and some is about some seriously hot-button issues. I mean, whether it’s paying someone to surgically alter your genitals or getting paid for access to them [pages 42 and 48], there’s a lot going on in this issue that’s bound to make our readers uncomfortable, too, in like a million different ways.” 

“But those are pieces that need the discomfort factor to make their point. And we don’t want to be all negative and apologetic in the ed note.” 

“It doesn’t necessarily have to come off as negative—I actually think the discomfort in this issue is a really good thing. When we talk about divisive issues like sex work, it’s visceral reactions to them that too often drive our intellectual conceptions—‘This makes me feel weird and I don’t want to think about it.’ In avoiding the discomfort, we duck really important questions.”  

“And hell, we should be uncomfortable when we realize what kind of insidious tv gets peddled to us [page 66], or when we find that we’re whoring ourselves in corporate jobs that spit us out when they’re done without so much as a ‘You were great, baby’ [page 38].” 

“Fuckin’ A [page 7].” 

“It’s very Martha Stewart—‘Discomfort. It’s a good thing.’” 

“And discomfort is something of a motif. Pregnancy is uncomfortable [page 34], Kira endured some serious insect- and illness-related discomfort [page 74], and the Bridget Jones hysteria most certainly makes me uncomfortable [page 60].” 

“And just hearing about Woodstock 99 was almost unbearably uncomfortable [page 32].”  

“I guess that’s it, then. We don’t want to belabor the point, after all.” 

“Right. In fact, maybe we shouldn’t even write the ed note.”  

“Fine by me. More Twizzlers?” 

Editors' Letter: Issue 10

Kyla — Tue, 01 Jun 1999 00:00:00 -0400

When we put this question into our reader survey, we expected a wide variety of responses. And we got them.  

“I write it/act in it”: 6 percent 
“I like to look at it”: 36 percent 

“It’s ok for other people, but it’s not my bag”: 30 percent 

“I don’t like it, but what other people do is their business”: 20 percent 

“I hate it and think it should be stamped out”: 10 percent * 

We already knew that a lot of you disagree with our pro-porn stance; in that, we got just what we expected. But a lot of you tried to draw that elusive line between pornography and erotica. “But erotica is a whole other issue,” “But I love erotica,” and “Erotic depictions of consensual sex are fine” are some of the comments made by people who “hate [porn] and think it should be stamped out.” 

Hmm. So porn is bad, but erotic depictions of consensual sex are good? Porn has plenty to do with consensual sex, as most of what’s on the shelves at your local smut shack or woman-owned sex emporium will testify. The value judgments imposed by the subjective division between porn and erotica mean, in essence, “What I like is erotica; what you like is porn.” They create a destructive dualism that hinders women in their freedom to find what they like. Yes, there are some bad apples in the porn bushel—some is violent, some has rape scenes. (And a lot of it is just plain bad or doesn’t appeal to specific tastes—which explains responses like “Tasteful or artsy ok” and “If it’s punk-rock-looking people”—but that’s a whole ’nother issue.)  

You’ll never find us defending porn that’s violent. But when we use “erotica” as a code word for “nonviolent,” “soft-core,” “woman-produced,” or any other adjective, we reveal that the porn/erotica division is nothing more than personal taste masquerading as absolute judgment—and it only serves to elide the very real and valid reasons that some porn deserves criticism. Instead of tarring all sexually explicit material with the brush that calls it offensive and degrading to women, we should draw connections between stuff that’s offensive for similar reasons (i.e., violent porn and serial killer movies—see page 26). Perpetuating equations like “porn=bad, nonconsensual, only for men” and “erotica=consensual, pretty, only for women” is just as problematic as the perpetuation of any other gender-based assumption. 

the porn question wasn’t the only one that provided such eye-openers. (We were comforted to see that some of us here at Bitch are not alone in our love of Martha Stewart Living or Entertainment Weekly, although, unlike us, some of you felt the need to apologize for this vice.) Your responses to “What do you think of those new Special K ‘Reshape your attitude’ ads?” were similarly surprising.  

They’re a wonderful attempt to boost women’s self-esteem and body image: 5 percent 
They’re a cynical pitch designed to placate consumer criticism of an earlier negative marketing campaign: 33 percent 

They’re just ads: 14 percent 

The fact that you’re a cynical bunch is not what shocks us. So are we, after all. But another 33 percent of you have never seen the ads; a full 11 percent reported that you either don’t own or rarely watch tv.* More than one-tenth of you not watching tv at all? Maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised—after all, when we talk about tv, it’s usually to complain about how the shows and commercials do nothing but advance tired old stereotypes of gender difference so as not to upset the tired old advertisers who bankroll the whole undertaking. It just seems to conflict with our perceptions of who our readers are—we kind of like to assume that you’re as tv-obsessed as we are. Now that we know the truth, well, frankly, we’re impressed with your ability to insulate yourselves so well. At Bitch hq, we recognize that tv is our enemy, yet we still give it our time and energy. Why? Maybe it’s the promise dangled (and in a few cases, fulfilled) by shows with strong women, bad-ass mamas, and complex chicks who manage to break the molds still imposed on actresses and their characters. Maybe it’s the endless potential for outraged critique provided by ads like the one for Special K. (Some of your responses delivered on this potential, our favorites being the succinct “Fuck those flakes” and the astute “The bottom line is ‘If you buy our cereal you will feel ______,’ except this time you will feel good about your body instead of becoming thin, beautiful, etc.”) Or maybe it’s just that we need to know when Dylan hits rock bottom for the nth time in his 90210 tenure. —eds.  

Oh yeah, one more thing: With all this ranting, we forgot to say thanks to everyone who answered our survey. So—thanks!

Editors' Letter: Orange

Kyla — Tue, 01 Sep 1998 00:00:00 -0400

we’ve taken a lot of shit from people who don’t like our name: readers who wonder why we’ve chosen an epithet to grace our covers, friends and family who took a year or two to be able to say it out loud (although they’re all incredibly supportive now, thank you very much), well-meaning folks who suggest that a simple name change might allow us to rake in the clams, people we meet at cocktail parties who clearly think we’re freaks.  

But we didn’t think it would cause problems getting a basic business necessity. Let’s back up a bit. We first knew something was up when more than a few people told us they thought the magazine had folded because they couldn’t get our phone number from information. Ever since we moved into our swanky (ha!) new offices, we’ve been paying through the nose for commercial phone service—which is absolutely no different from residential service, except that it costs significantly more and the people who work the customer service lines seem to be even denser and more surly. The one—count it—one perk of commercial service is to have the name of the magazine in the phone book and information so that potential subscribers, writers, and advertisers can call us up. So you can imagine our chagrin when people told us that we weren’t listed. Then we got a call from the Pacific Bell directory asking what we wanted for our White Pages listing. At last, we thought, they’re finally getting around to putting us in. Well, no. You see, when we called the nice lady back and told her to list us under “Bitch,” we were told that Pac Bell would not print obscenity in its directory, nor permit it in the 411 listings. 

We’ll spare you a complete account of the runaround we’ve gotten trying to solve the problem, the countless hours wasted wending our way through the voicemail system of the business service business office (not to be confused, of course, with the residential service business office). But one incident begs recounting: There was more than a note of righteousness in the manager’s voice as she explained that our listing would “offend” people; no, we couldn’t have asterisks between the B and the ch, and no, we couldn’t have hyphens. Ever more frustrated, we asked the manager if she didn’t think, since we were paying their exorbitant business fees, that they could manage a listing for us. She thought for a moment, then offered this brilliant solution: “Why don’t you get—[pause for thought]—you know, one of those books—a thororsus [sic!]—then you could find a word that sounds like your word, and means the same thing, and that could be your listing.”  

Now, we’re happy to address the question of why we chose the name we did: Some people may consider it an insult, but to us a bitch is an opinionated woman who refuses to back down, a woman who speaks her mind without worrying what others will think of her. And we’re thrilled to talk about why we feel it’s important not to shrink from a word just because some people consider it an insult: Every time someone is insulted by the word bitch, we are kept further and further away from a time when outspokenness will be accepted, even welcomed, among women. But Pac Bell didn’t want to discuss any of these things. They just wanted to label us obscene and be done with it.  

But obscenity is not so simple—this might be a good time to point out that not even the Supreme Court has come up with a definition that’s clear and easily applicable. The whole phone-listing thing may seem like a petty issue, but it reflects a larger societal anxiety about the social uses of language. Not too long ago, Glamour magazine ran a little piece entitled “Is bitch a compliment?,” which basically said that, while the word is used fairly commonly, and often in ways that suggest positive connotations, it will always be an insult until all its negative associations are somehow wiped from the linguistic slate. Um, hi—isn’t the point that continued positive usage would do just that? But Glamour is content, like Pac Bell, to label it offensive, obscene, or a lost cause and move on.  

The power of language—particularly of naming—is deceptively simple. Pejorative baggage doesn’t simply fall away from words when we want it to; if it did, we’d be a much more comfortable, less complicated society. By stealing that baggage away bit by bit, though, we can transform insults into badges of honor. But as any thief knows, in order to steal, you can’t be afraid to get close: By shying away from words while hoping they’ll lose their sting, or refusing to utter them, no matter what the context, the Glamours and Pac Bells of the world are simply preserving the attitudes that we are trying to surmount. —the Editors

Editors' Letter: Sex

Kyla — Sat, 01 Mar 1997 00:00:00 -0500

When I told people that this issue of Bitch was going to be devoted entirely to sex, the most common response was a sarcastic, “Oh, you mean as opposed to what all the other ones were about?” It’s true that we tend to spill a lot of ink about sex—and so I started to think about why.  

Sex is a favorite topic almost everywhere—but within the feminist movement, we don’t seem to be getting anywhere with it. There are two basic sides to the debate: old-school feminists who see porn as universally degrading and sex as a frivolous topic at best (and an oppressive one at worst); and a newer breed who explore the liberatory potential of sex and porn, and label their ideological opponents prudes. While sex-positive, pro-porn, anti-censorship feminism has emerged more and more into the mainstream, the terms of the debate haven’t shifted much within the past decade and a half. The landmark collection Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, which grew out of a controversial feminist conference in 1982, is still as relevant now as it was the day it was published. That says something about the quality of the authors and their theoretical acuity—but it also says something not quite so complimentary about the current state of feminist debate about sex. Reading Pleasure and Danger, one feels poised on the brink of argument and discovery. Its contributors have asked all the right questions and set us on paths to some answers. Why have we been unable to continue along those paths? Those on each side of the debate repeat their arguments over and over, each responding to oversimplified versions of the opposing view, further entrenching the discourse. Date rape has become recognizable and punishable only to have it made into a symbol of feminist overreaction. The nature of consent has been pondered only to provoke sarcastic comments on the need for written contracts before sex. Nadine Strossen defends pornography by misrepresenting Catharine MacKinnon; Ms. magazine assembles a fine group of articles on sex, gender, pleasure, and equality, and On The Issues responds with “How Orgasm Politics Has Hijacked the Women’s Movement”; Katie Roiphe throws up her hands and tells us all to get over it, as if ignoring rape will just make it go away. If anything, we’re moving backward simply through our stubborn refusal to go ahead. 

Meanwhile, mainstream representations of sex and sexuality are shifting rapidly, disconcertingly, violently. Sex is more contradictory than ever on tv, in movies, in magazines: There are out gay characters on tv, but their sexuality is so muted that they hardly ever even get to kiss; women in movies are actively sexual, but they still get punished for it; magazines grudgingly admit that women like sex, but still advise us to play passive-aggressive in order to get it.  

We need to speak women’s sexual truths—our own, not those that have been produced for our consumption—more publicly, more loudly, and more often. 

With this issue, we’ve pondered some of those mainstream messages and contradictions, and sought out people who are moving beyond them. Enjoy—because far too often, enjoyment is what gets lost in the debate. —Lisa

Editors' Letter: Puberty

Kyla — Sun, 01 Mar 1998 00:00:00 -0500

It’s a refrain we’re sick and tired of hearing: Feminism doesn’t speak to young women. Girls just aren’t interested in feminism. Self-proclaimed feminists lament it; non-feminists think it proves that feminism is not only unimportant, but outdated. This simplification of the concerns of girls may make for a good sound bite, but it begs for some serious examination. 

The fact is, young women are interested in feminism—or, if not in “feminism” as it has been defined to them, certainly in being able to move in the teen world free of gender-based judgments and restraints. Girls like Ariel Schrag and Ariel Fox, baby dyke cartoonist and budding entrepreneur, respectively, show through their own words and actions, as well as the success of each of their endeavors, that those who doubt feminism’s relevance to the young just aren’t looking in the right places (see pages 10 and 44). 

Puberty sucks, as any of us who’ve been there know all too well, and it’s a time when even a little dose of female-powered inspiration goes a long way. Pubescence and adolescence are the years when girls most need feminism’s support—as if we haven’t heard enough about the falling self-esteem and slowed academic progress that can be as much a part of a girl’s growing up as her first period. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Feminism—in the form of girl-positive media, high-achieving and happy-to-be-female role models, and honest explorations of what gender can mean in young women’s lives—can be a vital force for both social change and personal comfort. Sources of all these may be way too few and far between, but they can help girls realize that they matter, and help give them the tools to realize why sometimes they think they don’t. (By the way, this works at any age.) 

So go out and pick up a book by Norma Klein (see page 27) or Nancy Garden (see page 15), or a cd-rom from Theresa Duncan (see page 40). Find the voices that encourage you, that echo your own thoughts, that make you realize you’re normal after all. Then pass them along to a 12-year-old in your life. —The Editors

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Oakland, California | June 30

Santa Cruz, California | July 1

Highway 5 | July 2

Las Vegas, Nevada | July 3

Tucson, Arizona | July 5

Albuquerque, New Mexico | July 7

The New Mexico–Texas border | July 9

Austin, Texas | July 10

New Orleans, Louisiana | July 15

Atlanta, Georgia | July 16

Athens, Georgia | July 17

Asheville, North Carolina | July 18

Washington, D.C. | July 20

New York, New York | July 23­–26

Providence, Rhode Island–Chicago, Illinois | July 27–August 6

Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival | August 9–15

Highway 80 | August 17–18

Highway 80 | August 19

Highway 80 | August 20

Go Forth and Multiply

1

1a

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2

3

4

5

6

7

8

The Ambition Condition

Beauty Secrets

Shelf Lives

The Women’s Room

Up Your Ass

Blood and Guts in High School

Woman Power: The Movement for Women’s Liberation

The Black Woman: An Anthology

We Who Are About To

The Great Cover-Up

Dumb & Getting Dumber

Editors' Letter: Taste & Appetite

Beauty and the Feast

Editors' Letter: Issue 12

Editors' Letter: Issue 11

Editors' Letter: Issue 10

Editors' Letter: Orange

Editors' Letter: Sex

Editors' Letter: Puberty

Oakland, California | June 30 

Santa Cruz, California | July 1 

Highway 5 | July 2 

Las Vegas, Nevada | July 3 

Tucson, Arizona | July 5  

Albuquerque, New Mexico | July 7 

The New Mexico–Texas border | July 9 

Austin, Texas | July 10 

New Orleans, Louisiana | July 15 

Atlanta, Georgia | July 16 

Athens, Georgia | July 17 

Asheville, North Carolina | July 18 

Washington, D.C. | July 20 

New York, New York |  July 23–26 

Providence, Rhode Island–Chicago, Illinois | July 27–August 6 

Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival | August 9–15 

Highway 80 | August 17–18 

Highway 80 | August 19 

Highway 80 | August 20 

The Women’s Room 

Blood and Guts in High School  

Woman Power: The Movement for Women’s Liberation 

The Black Woman: An Anthology 

We Who Are About To  