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Target Women: The Rise of the Sexist Media Stunt

Kjerstin Johnson — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:08:01 -0500

You’ve probably never heard the term “cheetah,” but that’s okay—no one else had, either, until New York Observer reporter Spencer Morgan coined the slur last December. A cheetah, according to Morgan’s trend piece “Rrrowl! Beware Cougar’s Young Niece, The Cheetah,” is a thirtysomething single woman who’s “discovered that getting a man [is] no longer as easy as it once was.” Her biological clock is ticking and her desperation for a real relationship is getting more pathetic—and, to Morgan and the cronies he quotes in the story, more comical.

If you’re wondering why a leading New York City newspaper published a bogus piece of “news” about women past their prime, the answer is simple: The Observer was using the Sexist Media Stunt, a now-classic bit of media bait, to draw in readers and revenue.

Sexist Media Stunts reinforce stereotypes about women under the guise of being “provocative.” Of course readers are going to get pissed about an article comparing adult women to predatory jungle cats—that’s the whole point. The writer, and often an editor, then responds to ensuing outrage by claiming their SMS was an attempt to “provoke debate”—though dollars to doughnuts the “debate” being exploited is a tired stereotype about women that’s been disproved decades ago. And it’s a one-two punch when publications (and readers thrilled to see their misogynist worldview reflected in the media) are quick to accuse detractors of tweaking out on political correctness. A sample comment from the Observer’s website: “Spencer—and editors—seriously, in a country where one in four women will be the victim of some form of rape in their lifetime, often acquaintance rape, you actually thought this article was—what? Entertaining? Clever? An object lesson?”

But cheetah hunting wasn’t the only Sexist Media Stunt in December: That month’s Details magazine trumpeted “The Rise of The Hot Jewish Girl,” announcing that ladies of the tribe are “the ethnic fetish du jour.” The article’s thesis was little more than a declaration that Judaism has more to offer than just loudmouthed Dreschers with big schnozzes, and it sang the praises of conventionally pretty Jews like Natalie Portman and Rachel Weisz. December also found the website of Marie Claire UK running a post titled “Do All Women Make Bad Bosses?” Despite a reputation as a quasifeminist women’s publication, Marie Claire UK asked, in all seriousness, “Is there a reason why men make beter [sic] bosses, or do you feel passionate about waving the flag for lady leaders?”

Women’s magazines are notoriously prone to performing the SMS. Perhaps you recall the September 2007 Cosmopolitan article, “A New Kind of Date Rape,” in which professional moral panicker Laura Sessions Stepp invented the term “gray rape” and insinuated that women who drank were complicit in whatever sexual violence befell them. And in its brief lifespan as a standalone website, Slate’s Double X was a veritable X Games of Sexist Media Stunts, manufacturing daily controversy by disparaging feminists in blog posts with titles like “Whine, Womyn and Thongs: How Feminism Has Failed.”

Exploitation and hyperbole are mainstays of mass media, obviously, and sexism has always been so prevalent in mainstream media that it can be difficult to ascertain whether it’s being deployed as a sales tactic, or just business as usual. But with the media industry in freefall, Sexist Media Stunts appear to be on the rise as a means of grasping, however transparently, for both money and relevance. “Serious” media outlets, like the Observer, steal a page from the tabloids with attention-grabbing headlines and content predicated on misogynistic stereotypes; even ostensibly progressive media outlets pile on. The Huffington Post, for example, has made waves with a series of blog posts called “The Big Picture,” which show blown-up photos of celebrity faces, inviting readers to examine the quality of their skin. [Full disclosure: I am a former employee of HuffPo.] Whether in print or online, the misogynist message is always the same, but the packaging for each media outlet is finessed in such a way to make the degrading and humiliating statements about women not look entirely out of place. The women-bosses post, for instance, couched its misogyny in language that implied the writer and editors were just looking out for their female readers in the workplace.

It’s typical for Sexist Media Stunts to be intellectually barren—they aren’t meant to be “serious” journalism. (At press time, Morgan’s latest Observer investigation was on women who cry in public.) All that matters are pageviews or newsstand purchases. So do yourself—and all women—a favor, and pass on by.

Forever Your Girl

Kjerstin Johnson — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 18:13:06 -0500

Call it a feminist coincidence: Two books published in 1963 examine gender, sex, and marriage, but arrive at diametrically opposite conclusions. In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan complains that “the only passion, the only pursuit, the only goal a woman is permitted is the pursuit of a man.” Meanwhile, Helen Andelin’s Fascinating Womanhood urges women to embrace that primary passion, because it leads to ultimate fulfillment and complete happiness. We all know how The Feminine Mystique changed the world for countless women. But Fascinating Womanhood, while lesser-known than Friedan’s polemic, has had its own powerful impact on notions of women and their potential.

Like the bestselling how-to guides for would-be wives that followed in its wake—The Rules, The Surrendered Wife—Andelin’s Fascinating Womanhood told women what they wanted, and then explained how to get it. Its central thesis asserted that the most essential gender difference is that “love is more important to a woman and admiration is more important to a man.” According to Andelin, nothing motivates men more than pride, and nothing causes them more suffering than a blow to it; men’s need to be admired is so overriding that they cannot endure criticism or even rational conversation—which is why she informs women that “it’s better to surrender your point of view to a man than to win an argument.” Instead, men must be manipulated. They might realize that they’re being manipulated, but as long as this manipulation is perpetrated by saucy, pert, childlike women, men are okay with it.

The means by which women manipulate men into loving, desiring, and protecting them are familiar: FW envisions women as weak, dependent, submissive, selfless, and in need of protection from a laundry list of dangers enumerated by Andelin. There’s “abduction and rape, sometimes followed by brutality and murder,” as well as “vicious dogs, snakes, a high precipice, a deep canyon, or other dangers of nature,” and even “unreal dangers” such as “strange noises, spiders, mice and even dark shadows.” Women must also sympathize with their husbands’ difficulties while never expecting sympathy in return, because a woman who reveals the truth about her emotional life risks injuring her husband’s fragile pride by forcing him to see that he is not always an ideal mate.

Now in its sixth edition, Fascinating Womanhood has sold more than 2 million copies. Over the years, the book has grown from less than 200 pages to more than 400, with most of the additional pages featuring testimonials from women whose miserable marriages were saved once they began following the book’s advice. The most substantive differences between the first and latest edition are not additions but deletions: Even so committed an antifeminist as Andelin could see that revisions were necessary to make the work more palatable to modern women, despite her advice to live according to antiquated notions of femininity and family.

Gone from the most recent edition, for example, is the promise that the book will teach women “how to get what you want out of life, until man becomes both master and slave,” a line that made too explicit FW’s underlying message: Personal dignity, ethical responsibility, emotional maturity, and intellectual growth aren’t as important as bedroom roles of master and servant so profound that they shape every aspect of a marriage. Also 86ed is the part where Andelin urges women to purposely botch household chores so men feel capable, needed, and amused as they correct their wives’ mistakes. (“If it is the furnace that needs fixing replace some of the parts backwards or fail to get it running at all.”)

What remains unchanged about Fascinating Womanhood is its baseline equation of femininity with the performance of—if not the actual state of—eternal youth. When the book was first published, this expectation was par for the course: In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan summarizes a 1960 issue of McCall’s magazine by noting that “the image of woman that emerges from this big, pretty magazine is young and frivolous, almost childlike; fluffy and feminine; passive; gaily content in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies, and home.”

To Andelin, the only problem with the magazine and with Friedan’s analysis is that the image of woman is almost childlike. Andelin recommended that women become explicitly, intentionally childlike, writing that “childlikeness is one of the most charming traits taught in Fascinating Womanhood.” And Andelin’s legacy is still very much in effect—not only for the adherents who blog about the book’s wisdom or enroll in online “Marriage, the Fascinating Way” classes offering personalized advice on how to act like a little girl, but in the female infantilization enthusiastically embraced by popular culture.

We’re not talking merely about the obvious examples, like sexualized schoolgirls in kneesocks and supershort kilts, or dumb-bunny stereotypes like The Girls Next Door. Childlike women are also the prevailing romantic heroines in movies, TV, and beyond. Not unaware of the very earnest and sober ways women are still told to cultivate what even Andelin acknowledges is a “ridiculous exaggeration of manner” so as to appear “cute, pert, saucy...trusting and innocent,” Nathan Rabin of the Onion AV Club coined the term “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” to describe the wild-yet-innocent cutie-pie who uses her childlike delight to entice some young male sad sack into a candyland of cutting work and skinny-dipping. From Natalie Portman in Garden State to Kate Hudson in Almost Famous to Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, Rabin asserts that the archetype “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” Furthermore, Rabin argues, these movies make clear that “the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype is largely defined by secondary status and lack of an inner life. She’s on hand to lift a gloomy male protagonist out of the doldrums, not to pursue her own happiness.”

But Andelin insists that a “fascinating woman” finds happiness precisely by assuming a secondary status and lacking an inner life. Being infantile, manic, pixie-ish, and dreamy is not just a cute way to act in movies; in Fascinating Womanhood, it’s posited as an important ingredient in attracting a mate, which is the most important element of female happiness.

Nowhere is this idea more abundant in current pop culture than in the Twilight franchise. Bella Swan can’t properly be called manic, since mania is defined by wild mood swings and Bella is almost uniformly morose. But she has the pixie-dream-girl part down pat, what with her accident-prone fragility, her halting speech, her separateness from others, and her inability to participate in what most of the world knows as reality. And the extent to which the relationship between human Bella and vampire Edward depends on her childlike weakness—and his power to simultaneously threaten and protect her—is one of the more striking aspects of the series.

Bella and Edward

Bella’s fragility and the protectiveness she arouses in him are things that Edward mentions often. He initially wants to feed on her; but, just as Andelin would predict, when he senses her vulnerability and admiration for him, his bloodlust is tamed, and he feels a burning desire to rescue her from would-be rapists, runaway vehicles, and vampires more vicious than himself. Meanwhile, Bella’s overriding desire to be with Edward is complicated by the fact that she is human—and therefore aging—while he is undead and ageless. Edward would rather she retain her humanity than her youth, but Bella is desperate to become a vampire before she turns 20, so she can spend eternity as an adolescent. New Moon, the second book in the series, begins with a nightmare in which Bella has grown old: She’s gray and wrinkled, while Edward is still a gloriously handsome 17-year-old. Despite the repeated assertion that Bella is mature beyond her years, she gauges her compatibility with Edward primarily on physical age, and is dismayed by each birthday—even spending life as an eternal 18-year-old is too old, because it’s one birthday older than Edward.

When she finally does become a vampire shortly before turning 19, Bella is thrilled to realize that she will be childlike for all eternity, a teenage bride and mother cocooned in a tiny family circle for the rest of her existence. Sounds fascinating, right?

Indeed, Bella would have been the perfect Fascinating Womanhood case study. The book freely scorns women who “insist on believing that really sensible men, the kind they admire, would be repulsed instead of attracted to…a childlike creature” who stomps her foot and threatens to tattle to her husband’s mother when he misbehaves. It also suggests that women foolish enough to hold this misconception implement the book’s advice, then judge its aptness by men’s reactions. (Fun fact: Helen Andelin and Twilight author Stephenie Meyer are both devout Mormons who graduated from Brigham Young University, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the two women are prone to glorifying female submission and male strength.)

And there’s no need to worry that a skeptical woman won’t be able to be harness her pouty inner infant. Says Andelin:

It’s part of being a woman. Remember, it was not long ago you were a little girl, when these traits were natural to you.... When a woman matures there’s a marked tendency for her to lose this childlike trait, especially when she gets married. She somehow feels that now she must grow up, without realizing that men never want women to grow up completely. Truly fascinating women always remain somewhat little girls, regardless of age.

Fascinating Womanhood exhorts women to develop childlikeness in several key areas: Childlike Anger (“When you are angry”), Childlike Response (“When he is angry or cross”), Asking for Things, Childlike Joy, Childlike Trust, Outspokenness, Changefulness, Youthful Manner, and Youthful Appearance. But can a woman who, unlike Bella, must age physically and mentally still retain all these qualities? Andelin died in 2009, at the age of 89. The biographical note at the back of the 2007 edition of Fascinating Womanhood lauds her “storybook marriage” of almost six decades to Aubrey Andelin, a dentist and real-estate developer who himself wrote a marriage manual, Man of Steel and Velvet, first published in 1981; the Andelins raised four sons and four daughters and had 60 grandchildren.

We don’t know whether the fascinating Mrs. Andelin remained childlike and dreamy even as she approached 90 years of age. It might seem that our culture, with its obsession with youth and abhorrence of age, would be unable to produce an alluring, flirty octogenarian. But just as the tenets of FW can be located in the newish crop of Manic Pixie Dream Girls, so too can they be seen in the enduring cult movie Harold and Maude and its beloved elderly heroine.

The puritanical Andelin would be horrified by the hedonistic Maude, with her penchant for stealing cars, nude modeling, and extramarital sex, but that doesn’t change the fact that Ruth Gordon’s Maude is a Manic Pixie Dream Crone who exemplifies Andelin’s prescribed childlike behaviors, with the exception of “childlike anger.” Seventy-nine-year-old Maude never becomes angry: She reacts to men’s anger by smiling sweetly and purposely misunderstanding them. When a policeman trying to make sense of her admission that she is driving a stolen vehicle with no driver’s license says, “Let me get this straight,” Maude replies, “All right, then,” and drives away while shouting, “Nice chatting with you!”

As for her relationship with 20-year-old Harold, Maude is no cougar: Her seduction of Harold occurs not because she offers him adult opportunities, but because she offers him a childhood—the chance to do things like turn cartwheels on a hillside or wander through a field of daisies. She instructs him to be “impulsive” and “fanciful”; her joie de vivre is so infectious that it enables her young paramour to “feel like a kid,” an experience he has heretofore missed out on. Maude even claims the youthful role of life’s cheerleader, standing up and shouting, “Go, team, go! Give me an ‘L.’ Give me an ‘I.’ Give me a ‘V.’ Give me an ‘E.’ L-I-V-E. LIVE!”

Harold and Maude

But her cheering is in service of someone else’s life: Despite the fact that she’s healthy, passionate, and vibrant, Maude takes her own life on her 80th birthday. She justifies the act by asserting that 80 is an ideal age to die: “Seventy-five is too early,” Maude tells Harold, “but at 85, well, you’re just marking time and you may as well look over the horizon.”

But the real reason for Maude’s suicide is that it leaves Harold not just richer and wiser, but unencumbered. Maude’s willingness to disappear ultimately serves male development and autonomy. Her embrace of Harold and discarding of her own life are just what is needed to transform the formerly morbid, macabre boy—and that, of course, is also the ultimate goal of Fascinating Womanhood. “In a miraculous way, when you accept [a man] at face value, he is more likely to change,” writes Andelin. In fact, she adds, a childlike woman’s appreciation of and admiration for a man, regardless of whether he deserves it, can “transform a man from an apparently stupid, weak, lazy, cowardly, unrighteous man into a determined, energetic, true, and noble one”—as well as a man ultimately alive to life’s fascination, and therefore youthful and vibrant in ways other men may never be. This is what Maude’s childlike love of and trust in Harold accomplishes, and what Manic Pixie Dream Girls do for the heroes of their films.

What this demonstrates is that womanhood is never fascinating for its own sake. The story of a fascinating woman is always, ultimately, about the man who wants to protect her: his power, his leadership, his happiness, his security, his growth. Fascinating Womanhood ends by informing women that its teachings will make them happier, then stresses, “You are in a precarious position as the wife. You can build or destroy him.” Thus, the book’s focus is revealed: A good woman’s job is to support and nurture a man who takes little responsibility for his own character.

And that focus reveals the appeal of Fascinating Womanhood: It offers women the illusion of power. Not authority, since they can’t make anything happen except through manipulation, and not control, because they can never take charge of any situation. But working behind the scenes, they can, if they’re sufficiently patient, subservient, sympathetic, timid, innocent, pert, and childlike, get the man and the life they want—or should want, if they’re real women.

Sure, the flip side of this philosophy is that every failure and disappointment in a marriage—lousy sex, lack of communication, poverty, and infidelity—is ultimately the wife’s fault. But shouldering all the responsibility for those failures is preferable for some women to admitting that they don’t find domesticity fulfilling, or married the wrong man, or have a marriage so dysfunctional that the only way to find happiness and peace is to leave it.

Not only that, but the illusion of power remains eternal, because the fascinating woman never ceases to be who she was as a child; she has always had the power to manipulate the men around her, men who are just as immature as she is—also by design. The fascinating woman and the Manic Pixie Dream Girl must never grow up, because that way, men never have to grow up, either. Peter Pan might lose most of his hair while his beard goes gray, but at heart, he’s still a little boy, and his companion in life reflects that: She’s not Wendy, but Tinkerbell. The “dream” supplied by Andelin, Bella, and the Manic Pixies past and present is one of a Never-Never Land where, although we cannot stop time, we can do without sobriety and reasoned maturity, and where a childlike fascination with the whimsical and fanciful is the way out of, never into, every nightmare of crisis and grief.

Holly Welker has an MFA in nonfiction writing and a PhD in English literature from the University of Iowa. Her work has also appeared in Best American Essays and the New York Times.

Hitting the Small Time

Kjerstin Johnson — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:15:09 -0500

Perhaps you’ve heard of 10-year-old Alec Greven, the author of a series of self-help tomes like How to Talk to Dads and How to Talk to Santa. The wee guru has appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, the Today show, CNN, The Tonight Show, and Good Morning America. In December 2008, Twentieth Century Fox announced that it had optioned How to Talk to Girls, Greven’s first book and the one that launched his brand.

It’s easy to see why the media has glommed on to Greven: He’s adorable, nonthreatening, and he doesn’t yet have any frown lines to show up in HD. He’s bright, but he stumbles charmingly over his words. He’s not going to freak out Meredith Vieira by talking about string theory, or intimidate viewers by solving complex math equations on air. And he’s hardly the only boy wonder out there.

Other tyke titans who’ve arrived in the past year or two include 14-year-old conservative pundit Jonathan Krohn, who was the hit of the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference and had a weekly spot on WBAL in Baltimore, Maryland, and 17-year-old media producer Daniel Brusilovsky, the founder and CEO of Teens in Tech Networks, which boasts 274,000 Twitter followers. Then there’s 13-year-old aspiring restaurant critic David Fishman, whose adventures in eating were profiled in the New York Times; he’s since had his story optioned by Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels. Arlo Weiner, the 8-year-old son of Mad Men creator Matthew, is a pint-size dandy whose style savvy has landed him two GQ fashion spreads. And 11-year-old journalist Damon Weaver scored an interview with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden for his elementary school’s TV station; he’s since been profiled himself by both Anderson Cooper and Time magazine.

Arlo Weiner's "favorite outfit." From GQ

The media has always loved a smart kid, but there’s a difference between the young Grevens and Weavers and the more “traditional” child prodigies that we’re used to. These tyros aren’t graduating at age 12 from Loyola University in Chicago and attending the Pritzker School of Medicine by age 15, like Sho Yano, or schooling chess opponents three times their age, as Bobby Fischer once did. Rather, today’s boy wonders make the media rounds with their opinions on sophisticated but slippery subjects, such as fashion or politics. And like many an adult media maven, they thrive largely on hype.

Alec Greven’s How to Talk to Girls, for example, began as a school project that became a human interest story for a local TV station. The producers at the Ellen DeGeneres Show caught wind of the young pickup artist, which led to a contract with HarperCollins. No doubt, Greven is a smart, personable child, but he’s also the creation of a hungry horde of daytime talk shows, headline writers, and publishing conglomerates, all looking for telegenic flesh.

Alec Geven on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, February 2008

Greven is probably about as qualified as anyone to write about smooth talking—it’s not something we certify or offer advanced degrees for. Though self-styled adult experts would probably cite life experience as crucial to social success, can we really say that Greven’s advice isn’t any better than, say, that of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus author John Gray? Moreover, we could set Jonathan Krohn against Glenn Beck in a battle of conservative hot air, and invite Arlo Weiner to a style-off against Rachel Zoe, but how would we measure who was more proficient? Like their adult counterparts, these mini-moguls are largely creatures of the media, manufactured and sustained by it, and ultimately more talking head than whiz kid. And the fact that they’re all boys—and, with the exception of Damon Weaver, all white—isn’t coincidental to their success.

Almost all our cultural paragons of early achievement, real or fictional, are boys: the Doogie Howsers, the Mozarts, the Bobby Fischers, the Jimmy Neutrons. Throughout history, and in much of the world today, we have poured more resources into cultivating the talents of males than those of females, thus giving them more chances to shine. Even at a day-to-day level, this is true: Parents and teachers refer twice the number of boys to gifted programs than girls, a fact brought to light in Peggy Orenstein’s 1994 book Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap.

Dr. Anita Gurian, executive editor of the NYU Child Study Center’s website, offers an interesting point: “The identification of gifted children often begins in third grade, a system based on the belief that enrichment programs are best instituted at this age. This practice, however, penalizes young gifted girls who are often outstanding in early childhood.” Gurian notes that girls often read, talk, and start counting at an earlier age than boys do. In preschool, they generally do better on iq tests. But experts speculate that by the third grade, girls may have already internalized the message that socially, it’s better to conform than to stand out, in academics or elsewhere. And the same reluctance of girls to step into the academic spotlight also hampers the progress of those who might want to become media stars; after all, visibility is part of the job of these young Krohns and Grevens.

Invisibility has been the lot of talented girls and women through history. Seizing the spotlight takes brashness and a willingness to step outside the parameters of traditional femininity and display ambition, ego, and a thirst for recognition—and, at least before the advent of child beauty pageants and reality TV, girls have rarely been encouraged by their elders to do that.

Take Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn: Born in 1805, Fanny was a gifted pianist and received a solid education in musical composition. At age 12, she wowed a private audience by playing the 24 Preludes from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier from memory. She had been given the same musical training as her younger brother, Felix, and was acknowledged to be as talented as he was. But since, at the time, respectable girls stayed out of public life, Fanny’s father barred her from performing in public or from publishing her compositions.

Writing to his then–14-year-old daughter in 1820, Abraham Mendelssohn broke it down: “Music will perhaps become [Felix’s] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament. We may therefore pardon him some ambition and desire to be acknowledged in a pursuit which appears very important to him, because he feels a vocation for it.”

So Felix was urged to embark on what became an illustrious musical career. He performed his first public concert at age 9, and became a prolific composer. (Modern audiences may know him best for his Wedding March.) Fanny, by contrast, followed her father’s wishes: She married painter William Hensel in 1829 and became a housewife. Aside from some songs that Felix issued under his name (with his sister’s permission), most of the 500 works Fanny Mendelssohn penned remain unpublished.

The attitudes that caused Fanny Mendelssohn’s family to devalue and hide her gifts remain with us. The complicated question of whether to allow a bright kid into the public eye (and to set the child—and his parents—up for a profitable future) becomes thornier when female sex gets added to the mix. To put it another way: If 9-year-old Alexandra Greven wrote a book called How to Talk to Boys, would we find her whip-smart, charming, and hip? How would headlines about a female “Little Pickup Artist” play? Precocity in a boy means one thing—in a girl, it means quite another.

Indeed, the media acts like a peer group, often punishing girls who stick out. Consider young Tavi Gevinson, the upstart fashion blogger who’s the notable exception in the modern media boy’s club. Gevinson describes herself as a “tiny 13-year-old dork that sits inside all day wearing awkward jackets and pretty hats,” but the witty prose and sophisticated photos on her blog, Style Rookie, have attracted the attention of Women’s Wear Daily, the New York Times Style Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and New York magazine’s fashion blog, The Cut.

Tavi Gevinson, image taken from her blog

The reaction from adults? Many of the same people who fawned over little Arlo Weiner’s morning coats and velvet trousers have disdained Gevinson with terms like “gimmick” and “novelty.” Others have accused her of having grown-up help; Elle’s Anne Slowey, most notably, snipped to The Cut, “She’s either a tween savant or she’s got a Tavi team.” In the same piece, Lesley M.M. Blume of The Huffington Post bristled at getting sartorial advice from a child: “I think it was insulting enough when we were expected as adult women to take our fashion cues from Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.”

The backlash against Gevinson has also extended to her parents for possibly exposing the tween blogger to hurtful comments and even online predators. In one Associated Press story, Addie Swartz, CEO of the media company B-tween Productions, stated: “I personally feel that it’s not safe to have a child who’s 12 or 13 have a blog and I wouldn’t want my kids to do that.” Negative comments generated by posts on The Cut propelled Gevinson to take a small break from her site. But her father, a teacher, told the AP he believed that kids were resilient: “I have a lot of confidence in [Tavi] and in most kids, if not all kids, that they can figure it out if they have good guidance and caring people working with them.”

As for Gevinson’s male media-star counterparts? Well, the boys don’t have their toughness questioned, but then again, they don’t encounter much scrutiny in the first place. No one has asked whether David Fishman’s solo adventures in New York City restaurants expose him to predators. And Alec Greven doesn’t currently have a girlfriend, but no one seems to hold it against him. If anything, interviewers have treated him with, well, kid gloves. Most of the transcripts seem to go like this:

Q. Wow, you’re 10 years old?
A. Yeah.
Q. And you wrote this book?
A. Yeah.
Q. Wow.

No morning news personality wants to make a youngster sob live on television, of course, but Greven hasn’t been given a reason to so much as sweat. The chat shows and general-interest magazines seem delighted because these boys are boys. Sure, they answer questions about foie gras and designer clothing—but the fun thing about them is that they’re children talking about foie gras and designer clothing.

Greven, Weiner, Weaver, and the others are, despite the suits and book deals, just kids. What tickles Vanity Fair and Good Morning America about these wunderkinder is not their genius—again, it’s not like they’re tinkering with particle physics—but how adeptly they parrot the grown-up world, how well they play at being us.

If they do mirror our society, perhaps it isn’t surprising that the composition of this precocious group skews boy-ward; it’s hard enough for a woman, let alone a girl, to seize the spotlight for reasons other than her looks and sex appeal. And when faced with a young female like Gevinson, whose ambition and bold vision challenge notions of modest girlhood, perhaps it’s not shocking that adult reactions range all over the place.
Or finally, maybe we’re all juveniles in this picture, elevating some kids to popularity, and pressuring others to conform. Because based on how we play with the Alecs, Jonathans, Damons, and Tavis, making adults out of children makes children out of us.

Mindy Hung is a writer living in New York.

Control Womb

Kjerstin Johnson — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:51:37 -0500

Want to get pregnant? There’s an app for that. Want to not get pregnant? There’s an app for that, too (and no, it’s not condoms). Want to know why you’re so damn moody? There’s—yep—an app for that. They could be considered the Our Bodies, Ourselves for the tech-savvy women of the 21st century: iPhone applications that inform women about the workings of their bodies without actually engaging with flesh and blood.

Currently, there are more than 20 applications available to users either anxious to conceive or hoping to avoid being the next featured woman on TLC’s I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant. Period Tracker Lite (free) enthuses that “[it’s] the SIMPLEST period-tracking app and now, it’s CUTER than ever!” FemDays ($6.99) “stores all your womanly observations in one place.” iPeriod (currently on sale for $1.99) markets itself as perfect for “a busy woman.” And iMensies ($1.99) bills itself as a “stylish app” that allows women to “look at an entire year of your menses, moods, and symptoms with the touch of a finger.”

The apps generally work like so: You enter the date of your last period and your estimated cycle length. A calendar appears with a series of markings and codes, depending on which app you’re using, as well as places to note your flow, temperature, mood, and even “love connections.”

(It’s unclear if this last is a euphemism for sex or just for making eyes with someone at a bar.) Petals ($1.99), whose parent company, eNATAL, is an Internet-based prenatal care system used in many U.S. hospitals, organizes your information with fallen petals to indicate menstruation and a full bloom to let you know you’re ovulating. iPeriod uses hearts and stars to designate where you are in your cycle, and yellow faces with smiles or frowns to guess how the hormonal shifts have you feeling. (The mood-awareness features of the apps, it’s worth noting, don’t allow for the user’s personal descriptions—rather, you’re prompted to pick from a list of options, including “angry,” “exhausted,” and “weepy.”)

These applications are essentially all technologized versions of the Fertility Awareness Method (FAM), one of the oldest forms of family planning. Instead of using pills, patches, or rings, with fam women count the days of their cycles with cycle beads (check your mother’s—or grandmother’s—closet) and/or charting on a calendar changes including cervical position, mucus, and basal body temperature. FAM offers numerous advantages: It’s nonhormonal, can be used by individuals with religious concerns about contraception, and—perhaps most important—makes women aware of their fertility patterns. (That said, FAM has disadvantages, too—charting cycles requires significant time and effort, and it doesn’t protect against STIs.)

So are these friendly, smiley-faced, flower-bedecked technotools a women’s-health revolution on par with the Pill, allowing us to manage fertility cheaply and easily? In theory, maybe. But there are several practical and theoretical drawbacks, starting with functionality.

When I downloaded an app called Fertility Friend, for instance, it crashed my iPod Touch (the non-AT&T-user’s iPhone) and refused to open for three days, leaving me guessing where exactly I was in my cycle. It then returned as Free Menstrual Calendar, which perhaps should indicate something about its usefulness as a fertility friend.

Futhermore, for the applications to be as accurate as possible, a woman needs to know the length of her menstrual cycle and luteal phase (the second phase of the menstrual cycle, which occurs after ovulation). Several apps, including iPeriod and Period Tracker, assume a luteal phase of 14 days; though that’s the average, for many women it can range from 10 to 16 days. Thus, if your luteal phase is shorter or longer than the app’s average, the ovulation days it predicts won’t be correct. The only way for a woman to
truly know the length of her luteal phase is to understand things like basal body temperature and “egg-white” cervical mucus—assessments that, at least for now, are best taken with a thermometer and a clean finger, respectively. And indeed, apps that claim to offer “everything you need!” for charting and tracking your cycles are awfully quick to shrug off their technical shortcomings. Nurtur, which is happy to be a “fast and efficient” program that “won’t get you bogged down with details,” nevertheless disclaims that its fertility predictions “should be used for educational purposes only.”

None of which is likely to tamp down the enthusiasm of users like MillvilleMom, who gushes in her review of Free Menstrual Calendar, “I love this app. Got pregnant in two cycles with it.” It’s as though the application itself was responsible for her pregnancy, and she’s relinquished her own agency in the process.

Nor are the inherent technical shortcomings likely to stem the tide of menstruation-predictor apps that have an entirely different audience: men. Yes, there’s a whole new crop of apps that use the mood-predictor features of menstrual apps to clue men in on just how whiny and irrational their ladies will be at any given time. Though PMS Buddy is marketed to men and women, its tagline (“Saving relationships, one month at a time!”) is a clue as to its target demographic.

Meanwhile, Menstrometer is targeted specifically to men as the “most significant invention since the invention of screw-top beer,” given that it lets men know when, as its creators write, “Aunt Flow [sic]” is coming. The description for Menstrometer on the iTunes site bills it as the “secret weapon to understanding and pre dicting the mood of your partner,” but issues a “safety warning” that under no circumstances should you “reveal the Menstrometer” to your partner. You know, because women on the rag are crazy and will cut you.

Menstrometer user David indicates in his featured testimonial just how useful it can be for men to understand their relationship based on something as traditional (and misogynistic) as blaming women’s menstruation: “For me, the Menstrometer started out as a funny little app, but I soon found myself consulting it frequently to find out whether I had actually done something wrong. It’s a life saver [sic].” A review of PMS Buddy by another chap further reveals how these apps perpetuate the myth that menstruation makes all women moody and irrational: “It is a huge advantage being able to anticipate a womans [sic] emotional times at home and work. Works great and is easy too.… The longer I’ve had this the more I appreciate the heads up it gives me!”

When it comes to these apps, we can’t throw the digital baby out with the bathwater. Some of them do work for women who want to avoid pregnancy, think more consciously about their bodies, and have more informed conversations with their partners and doctors. But it’s worth wondering if handy period and fertility trackers are just another example of women’s bodies becoming more technologized at the expense of actual women having actual knowledge, control, and understanding of them. In turning the female reproductive system into little more than a collection of numbers, symbols, temperatures, and moods, these apps commodify natural processes and suggest (despite their legal disclaimers) that busy women don’t need to bother with listening to their own bodies.

It doesn’t help that the companies who create the majority of these applications have nothing to do with women’s health. Winkpass Creations, for instance, the company responsible for iPeriod, offers such apps as Knot Guide (step-by-step directions for creating 78 different knots), Dog Dodge (a game in which you steer a virtual pooch around fire hydrants and cats), and “Beer Run” (an app that guides you to the nearest suds shop). Given that Winkpass promotes itself as the creator of “innovative apps for tomorrow,” it’s a wonder they haven’t combined some of these apps. Of the hundreds of reviews of apps like iPeriod and Fertility Friend, very few of them mention the body; the majority of posts concentrate on the wonders of being able to predict the arrival of one’s period without any comment on how the prediction occurs. They may be useful tools, but in order for these apps to offer the freedom and agency they promise, it’s up to users to look at what’s behind the petals, hearts, and smiley faces.

Bree Kessler is a PhD student in environmental psychology, and an adjunct professor in urban studies at Hunter College.

Senex and Sensibility

Kjerstin Johnson — Sun, 06 Mar 2005 14:05:09 -0500

From the machismo of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone to Woody Allen’s nebbishes and the teenage fantasies of the Porky’s and American Pie franchises, manhood in all its flavors is a staple of the silver screen. Writer-director Wes Anderson is clearly fascinated by the subject too, yet over the course of his four films he has turned his lens on one specific aspect of masculinity: the balance between boyish and manly behavior necessary for the health of not only the individual male but also the culture he embodies.

A few reviewers have acknowledged this by mentioning, if only in passing, Anderson’s penchant for father-son or mentor-protégé relationships, and Anderson himself has confirmed it. In a 2001 Los Angeles Times interview, he credited director James L. Brooks—who helped him find the funding to turn a short film into his 1996 debut feature, Bottle Rocket—with inspiring his filmic exploration of mentors. Each of Anderson’s four features involves a relationship between a young man and either his father or a man who is old enough to be his father: wannabe thief Dignan and crime boss Mr. Henry in Bottle Rocket; 10th-grader Max Fischer and his industrialist friend/rival Mr. Blume in 1998’s Rushmore; favored child Richie Tenenbaum and his irresponsible father Royal in 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums; and airline pilot Ned Plimpton and the titular marine-life documentarian he suspects is his father in 2004’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Those simplified labels, however, are inadequate to describe the mutual give-and-take of the pairs.

A mentor-protégé relationship implies that only one of the two will be inspired to grow, but—with the possible exception of Bottle Rocket—this isn’t the case in Anderson’s films. The excesses of Max Fischer’s boyishness, for instance, are tempered somewhat by his relationship with Mr. Blume, but the latter’s staid, successful-adult-male life is brightened by traits he picks up from Max. Even Royal Tenenbaum, the one true father among Anderson’s many protagonists, is hardly the epitome of male parenthood; after all, his eldest son, Chas, acts more like a grown-up than Royal does. Nearly all of Anderson’s characters, not just the inevitable young man–old man pairs, represent the struggle between boyish and manly traits that forms the core of each of his films—a struggle that’s evident not only in the plots, but in everything from set design to soundtracks.

Each of Anderson’s films follows the exploits of a character who acts from within the framework of a preadolescent boy. At that age, kids play around in a kind of trial-and-error fashion with adult roles, both with peers and in their fantasies. As if they are frozen in this growing-up phase, Anderson’s protagonists are a boy’s patchwork approximation of what it means to be a man. Since being a good husband or father is not considered exotic or important, those roles are shunned in favor of masculine personas that connote adventure (the criminal, the deep-sea explorer, etc.) and the accoutrements of such personas: hand-drawn maps, uniforms, birdcalls, secret nicknames, and insider jargon.

Unlike older teenage boys, Anderson’s four key protagonists—Dignan, Max, Royal, and Steve—aren’t obsessed with girls; when they do on occasion turn their attention to females, their courtship is aggressive and maladroit. Their thoughts center less on romantic relationships than on how they might become men in the eyes of other men. This boyish atmosphere so suffuses Anderson’s films that some critics have accused him of being precious. But it’s worth arguing that, by so evenly matching the yearning to be a real man with extreme examples of actual grown men, like oil and vinegar shaken together, he creates a more piquant aesthetic than either extreme could provide on its own.

At the risk of getting too heady, one way to look at Anderson’s work is to see it as the depiction, over and over again, of the reconciliation of two Jungian opposites that are halves of a healthy whole, on both an individual and a societal level. On the one hand, there is the puer archetype, which is linked with boyishness and youth and is characterized by a self-absorbed yet visionary playfulness. On the other hand, there is the senex, or old-man, archetype, whose devotion to tradition, structure, and organization can be both a positive, cohesive force and an unyielding obstacle to necessary change.

It’s clear that Anderson favors the former archetype: One clue is that his films deliberately resemble children’s stories, both visually and narratively. On both the Rushmore and Royal Tenenbaums DVDs, Anderson cites the goal of a fable or storybook feel as influencing his use of a wide lens and his removal of references to contemporary pop culture, events, and the real cities in which he films. (Or, in the case of New York, where The Royal Tenenbaums is set, the elimination of familiar landmarks and the creation of new ones, like the 375th St. Y, to facilitate the sense that it takes place in both this world and another.) This feeling of childlike simplicity is enhanced by Anderson’s narratives and cinematography. Each film is a chain of perfectly centered shots that culminates in a slow-motion ending featuring nearly all of its key players.

Anderson clearly values the trappings through which children first learn about themselves and the world. That he’s using them in films for adults reveals his bias toward youth. One of the most pervasive yet subtle themes in his films is the illustration of the difference between the concepts “play” and “game” in a way that makes the former far more attractive. Young children partake in imaginative activities to acclimate themselves—at their own, experimental pace—to the adult-controlled world around them. Since it’s self-directed, play among children subjects each to the others’ whims. (In a flashback in The Royal Tenenbaums, the childlike Royal is shown shooting his young son Chas in the hand with a BB gun during a hunting game, despite the fact that they’re on the same team.) But games, to which children shift as they get older, involve externally imposed rules and goals; they’re training for the competitive, structured world of adult interaction. Many of the funniest moments in Anderson’s films involve characters who seem to be stuck between these two developmental phases bickering over the proper rules to a social game—think of Ned and Klaus, Steve Zissou’s first mate, having trouble agreeing when their gentlemanly tiff has ended. While he shows the pros and cons of both play and games, Anderson’s sympathy obviously lies with the former, for not only do his protagonists engage the world playfully, he himself treats filmmaking as a game whose rules he can make and break at will.

The very first scene in Bottle Rocket (cowritten, along with Anderson’s following two films, with star Owen Wilson) introduces Anderson’s signature man-boy iconography: Twentysomething Dignan crouches behind a bush and signals to his friend Anthony with hoots and a handheld mirror. Anthony, with his doctor’s permission, uses roped-together sheets to “escape” from a mental hospital where he’s been staying voluntarily to deal with exhaustion. What had made him so tired, we later learn, is the prospect of leading the predictable life of leisure his middle-class affluence allows. A third friend, Bob, is so well off he’s resorted to growing a marijuana crop in his backyard to experience the thrill of risk (or so we presume, since we never see him getting high).

Although they owe their economic positions to their parents, Anthony and Bob can be seen as symbols of the trade-off entailed in making it as an adult male: the accumulation of material wealth for a numb, conformist existence. By hanging out with Dignan (whose lower class status is sketched out in two lines: “You know there’s nothing to steal from my mom” and “How’s an asshole like Bob get such a nice kitchen?”), they’re not slumming, but rather reconnecting with their youth, when their future as men seemed full of possibilities. (The rigidity of what manhood really turns out to be is personified by Bob’s violent, condescending brother John, aptly nicknamed Futureman.)

Mr. Henry, the savvy criminal and mentor to whom Dignan eventually leads his friends, dresses down Futureman when he mocks his brother’s childlike activities. Declaring “The world needs dreamers,” Mr. Henry defends the friends’ boyish actions and anticipates the future roles of Max, Royal, and Steve. This canny older man has his protégés pegged; they, however, misunderstand his attentions, lost as they are in their fantasy that he’s elevating them to the status of real men. Mr. Henry, who’s more criminal than their preadolescent mind-sets can allow, robs Bob’s house while the trio are off bungling a robbery of their own. Dignan, who ends up in jail as a consequence, forgives Mr. Henry, in the offhand manner of a boy whose emotional connection to a shared pursuit dissolves as soon as it mutates into something new.

While his idol schemed, Dignan had planned as he thought a grown man would, with 5-, 25-, and 50-year plans for himself and Anthony that are comically idealistic. After rising up the crime ladder, he anticipates things like “Going legitimate with Mr. Henry,” “Establish goodwill in the community,” and “[Make] anonymous donations.” Eventually, he writes, “Keep working, keep developing, no more crime,” then follows up with the telling warning “Remain flexible.” By the end of the film, this flexibility still defines Dignan, while Mr. Henry hasn’t deviated from his one-note adult nature.

Picking up where Anthony and Bob left off, Rushmore’s Mr. Blume further fleshes out the idea that adult masculinity leads inevitably to ennui. The millionaire is introduced telling the prep-school boys at Rushmore, his alma mater, to “take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in your crosshairs and take them down.”

His own money has certainly not bought him happiness, and in an early scene he’s shown cannonballing into the swimming pool at his sons’ birthday party, then holding his breath at the bottom. Mr. Blume’s young friend Max, for his part, has grown more mature by the end of Rushmore—but for the only youth symbol in Anderson’s films who actually is a boy, it’s a natural progression.

In Rushmore, Anderson paints in clear, bold strokes the idea he’d sketched out in Bottle Rocket; by contrast, The Royal Tenenbaums shuffles the pieces to create a cubist exception that proves the rule. Though Royal Tenenbaum’s personal journey seems like a background motif in the film, the character functions like a detective in a house of games, bringing to the attention of both his children and the audience the oppressive nature of adult structures and rules. It’s significant, for example, that Royal begins to break through to Chas, his son and the film’s resident senex character, in the family game closet, and equally significant that the time he spends with his young grandsons involves gambling, shoplifting, and racing.

With Margot Tenenbaum, though, Anderson remixes his own formula. She’s the first female main character in an oeuvre that includes very little casting of women and girls at all—even for background roles, like bookstore and hotel employees, whose gender wouldn’t seem to make a difference. It would ruin Anderson’s aesthetic to emphasize a female character in the same manner he does his men, so Margot is characterized as an outsider—she’s Royal’s adopted daughter. Margot allows Anderson to suggest that his young man–old man theme is applicable across genders. (To a lesser extent, so does the journalist Jane Winslett-Richardson in The Life Aquatic , whose arc from fluster and disillusionment to a stronger sense of autonomy parallels her changing attitude toward Steve’s boyishness.) Everyone can relate to the struggle to balance conflicting parts of themselves, especially the urge to play around with roles and rules as one chooses, and to uphold them and reap their rewards.

With The Life Aquatic (cowritten by Noah Baumbach), Anderson leans harder than ever on the idea of play: Not only is his filmmaking style more playful than before, but, for the first time. Anderson’s protagonist actually acknowledges his boyish condition. This occurs at the film’s climax, after Steve has watched the long-sought jaguar shark pass by his submarine. Though he had planned to harm the shark to avenge the death of his friend, he begins to cry. One by one, each of the boat’s other occupants reaches out a hand to touch him. He then places one of his own hands on Jane’s pregnant belly. Until now, Steve has only spoken flippantly of her pregnancy, so this gesture almost seems like a non sequitur. The two lines of dialogue that follow seem just as random, but they intend to address the heart of the matter: “In 12 years, he’ll be 11 and a half,” says Jane. Twelve was the age at which Ned, who just a few scenes earlier died in Steve’s arms, had written him a fan letter, essentially saying Steve was his role model for growing from a boy to a man. When they met as adults, however, Ned was in many ways more of a “man” than Steve. Thus the film resolves itself symmetrically, when Steve replies to Jane, “That was my favorite age.”

The Life Aquatic ends with Steve sitting beside his first mate Klaus’s young nephew Werner outside the theater where his documentary is screening. He tells Werner, “This is an adventure,” lifts the boy to his shoulders, and walks down the stairs to his ship, leaving behind the fish-shaped award by which grown-ups have validated his boyish pursuits.

Anderson’s projects, as meticulously yet playfully constructed as they are, seem to urge viewers to come to terms with our unacknowledged opposites, especially the aspects of ourselves that can best rework the world. The filmmaker may be moving on (his next project—a stop-action adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s book The Fantastic Mr. Fox —still straddles childhood and adulthood but will, if it sticks close to the source material, grapple far less with how men reconcile these worlds), but we can always follow his example, employing youthful tactics to subvert the ossified old-man elements in both ourselves and the world around us.

Jim Burlingame, a boyish man, is writing a book on aesthetics and his life in Olympia, Wash.

Break Me Off a Piece of that Breakup Song

Kjerstin Johnson — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:21:02 -0500

No one pays attention to breakup songs until they need them. When you first hear one you are probably not interested; you are probably turned off by its utter depression, and so you skip ahead to the next upbeat track, something with shouting and hand claps in the chorus, something for happier people.

Fortunately for you, the dirge you just flitted by is secreted away and catalogued in the depths of your mind's ear for your future employ. Months, years, possibly hours later, the shit goes down, and you are so sad. And you’re searching, searching. You’re pretty sure the only thing that will make you feel better is listening to something that makes you feel…sadder.

Why does one crave the wallow? I do not know. But one does. You want full immersion in the dissolution. You don’t want to just take the language courses. You want to go live in the country of origin; you want to stay with a host family.

Enter the breakup song to function as a vessel, a vehicle, a holding pen. It is the sauna where all your emotions gather after work and sit and talk shit or breathe deeply and with each action make themselves hotter and sweatier until there is such frenzied perspiration you are crying on the outside, probably alone in your car. The breakup song serves a very specific role in the triage of heartbreak. I’m not saying it’s healthy to delve and wallow—but I am saying everyone I know does it, so let us honor the sad, slow breakup song for the fucked-up and necessary friend it is.

The best breakup songs tap into thousands of years of romantic tradition: the questioning, the regret, the disappointment, the moaning. That last bit is tricky—the moaning should sound like pain. It should not, ever, sound like sex—that would be cruel. (The Jackson 5’s “Who’s Loving You” is a fantastic example of painful, nonsexual moaning, which makes sense given that Michael was 11 at the time it was recorded.) Such songs strike you as though they have borne witness to the ascent and decline of many dimensions of your personal relationship.

And, in fact, we relate to breakup songs as though they were written specifically for us because, in a way, they were. I have never been nominated to speak on behalf of ASCAP songwriters, but I think the breadth of classic heartache anthems is so great because when songwriters purge and process their own romantic ends, it is natural and just to fall back on time-tested traditions and ride the wave of common tragedy: We are crying; we want to make you cry. And to do that, we try for what has made all of us cry. Lucinda Williams is a most adept channeler and purveyor of The Good Hurt, and has been for decades: The longevity of her romantic grief is enough to make you wonder why she keeps getting into questionable relationships—when you are not busy silently thanking her for doing so. (Update: The other evening I saw footage of Williams getting married onstage at one of her shows. She looked very happy. I am confused and worried for the future.)

You know why else breakup songs will always have their glory? Because at the end of a relationship there is an anthology of songs you will no longer listen to, ever. It won’t be dramatic—you will just subtly, steadily avoid them because your methods of self-preservation are tailored to evade the past and its stinging, sweet memories while embracing the present and future of solitary pain. You will throw away mix cds; while in the car you will adroitly handle the radio dial and straddle the pauses between songs, willing an almost telepathic sense for what is next. Hearing the first few chords of any number of songs will churn your insides. You will grow resolute in your abstinence and stalwart in your avoidance. Waiting in the wings like stage moms, breakup songs are ready to hold and lightly stab you, marking the transition from one type of membership to another—albeit with kazoos instead of trumpets.

We are grateful for these mood crashers for the same reason we might question their perversion: They keep us rooted in the heartache. These songs allow for introspection and the full acknowledgment that something very important has ended. They are imperative for counteracting the moments of distraction and dissociation and recklessness we engage in post-breakup, when we crank loud, good-time, watch-how-I-don’t-give-a-shit music and we go out urgently looking to forget. Those thumping beats are terrible for decision making. Many, with their deceitful powers, help encourage the premature release of emotions and attachments. If ever you wake up or come home from wherever doing whatever with whomever, feeling even more terrible than you did before, managing not a clean, pure sadness but rather the dirty, sleazy kind, you might consider a retreat to your coping pocket to re-collect yourself in the honest light of a good thing gone. Take a sweet, mournful song as your companion. Blow on a kazoo.

Thao Nguyen's Wallow-worthy Breakup Mix

1. Karen Dalton "Just a Little Bit of Rain"
2. Prince "When You Were Mine"
3. Jackson 5 "Who's Loving You"
4. Lucinda Williams "I Envy the Wind"
5. Karen Dalton "Something's on Your Mind"
6. Magnetic Fields "The One You Really Love"
7. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles "You Really Got a Hold on Me"
8. Songs: Ohia "Just Be Simple"
9. Neil Young "Harvest"
10. Cowboy Junkies "Blue Moon Revisited"

Oh Yoko!

Kjerstin Johnson — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:16:57 -0500

Who is Yoko Ono? She is one of the most famous figures in the world, yet also one of the most misunderstood, enigmatic, and, at times, vilified. Quite often, what we think about Ono says more about us than about the artist herself. Do we want to know her, or are we content with myth and stereotype?

For most of her career, Ono has been carelessly marked by the culture at large–as the harpy who broke up our beloved Beatles, the shrieking voice behind those unlistenable records. But what do our images of Ono say about our understanding of otherness? What do they say about art? Or icons? Truth? Transformation?

To coincide with the September release of Ono’s new album Between My Head and the Sky, Bitch asked 20 well-known musicians, writers, visual artists, and scholars–some who have met or worked with Ono, some who know her only through their admiration or critique of her work–for their thoughts on how one woman has come to stand for so much.

Who is Yoko Ono? This is exactly who we think she is...

1. Hated
What happened to Yoko, the degree of hatred that was directed at her, the blame that fell on her for breaking up the Beatles—which struck me as an absurd accusation even as a very young girl—frightened me terribly. I very much felt she was hated because she was a woman artist. She had John’s ear; if anything, he wanted to earn her respect as an artist. This came through very clearly in all his statements and in their body language.

She was the type of person I most wanted to be—yet she was hated. I found this very discouraging. I too wanted to be a conceptual artist, but I didn’t want to be hated. I too wanted a partner with whom I could work, but didn’t want to be seen as the evil controlling woman, as she was (and Linda McCartney, too, for that matter). Her fate seemed intimately connected to my own, and I wanted her to be accepted.
—alice elliott dark, novelist

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2. Courageous
The most surprising thing about Yoko Ono is her courage to be positive. [She] turns negative power into positive power, and it’s very akin to martial arts…. You take the oppositional, negative death energy, and you transform that into a life force. She doesn’t attack back; she just changes the ground of the criticism.

To her, it’s simply an art of coping. She had to cope with negativity. She had to cope with the murder of her husband. She had to cope with being virtually disowned by her family. She had to cope with being considered a breaker-up of the Beatles. She had to cope with being considered an unserious artist because she was working in art forms that didn’t have any commercial value. And she coped, and [not] by retreating. She coped by persisting in creative vision.
—alexandra munroe, senior curator of Asian art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and author of Y E S Yoko Ono

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3. Radical
I first encountered Yoko Ono when I was a teenager. I thought she looked cool. I saw pictures of her all in white with the black hair, and I thought she was really chic and intriguing.

I did a talk on Yoko in Minneapolis during her “Y E S Yoko Ono” exhibition in 2001, and I was listening to the boxed set that she put out, just going through and listening to it CD by CD. I forget what song it is, but it’s John just [playing] feedback guitar with Yoko’s voice, and it’s one of the most radical things ever. It would be amazing if people could really hear John Lennon playing this. And her lyrics were so pro-choice; they were very ahead of her time.

When I saw “Cut Piece,” she just looked so vulnerable, and it was almost like a foretelling of what would happen when she became involved with John. People obviously wanted to remove her mask.
—kim gordon, artist and musician

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4. Offered Sacrifice
Back in the ’60s, I was peripherally involved in a Fluxus concert evening at the Carnegie Recital Hall in New York where Yoko did several pieces, [including] “Cut Piece.” People began lining up to cut little pieces of her skirt or sleeves or strands of hair as souvenirs, or artworks, if you prefer. Everybody was very respectful, [and] Yoko remained impassive, without any change of expression.

The atmosphere changed to dark and unpleasant when several young men who were obviously not members of the art community started taking off large parts of her skirt and sweater, disclosing her bra, and getting back on line after each of their cuts. They couldn’t stop laughing. I recall Carolee Schneemann going up to one of them and slapping him in the face, which didn’t faze him one bit. He was after Yoko—the offered sacrifice.

At the point where one of the grinning guys went towards her bra strap with the scissors, Yoko made a slight gesture towards the wings, and the curtain immediately closed on her before her breast could be revealed. The piece was over. Obviously, when you let the audience into the artwork, you can’t always predict the result.
—eleanor antin, performance artist, filmmaker, and installation artist

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5. Visionary
“Cut Piece” was astonishing. It was an extremely dangerous piece, especially in the moment when it was done, because there was no sense of feminist presence or barriers. She could have been stabbed. Vile things were in the air then, so she was challenging those very dark impulses in this vulnerable position—and that was the indelible power of it.

Yoko is a determined visionary, and now she has a huge fortune to work with, and every possible international art connection would want to be associated with her. It’s a strange, anomalous personal history. She was ignored. She was marginalized. She was vilified. And she’s become golden.
—carolee schneemann, multidisciplinary artist

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6. Groundbreaking
As a female artist who has dated guys in bands and often been accused of being “a bad influence” on them, I have clung to the knowledge that amidst the sexism and unfairness of her mainstream portrayal, Ono has still managed to radiate joy and hope.

Ono’s installation art, especially the work she’s made that deals with death and mourning, has profoundly affected me. Like many people my age, I have lost many friends, some to AIDS, some to drugs, and far too many to suicide. Having no public space to confront these losses has been a source of pain in my life, and Ono’s work gives voice to this pain by recognizing these losses in the context of communal life.
I do not know any other contemporary artist who has remained as relevant in so many different eras. She clearly doesn’t give a shit about maintaining status in the art world, receiving awards, or being recognized. She simply wants to make smart, inclusive work that makes the world a better place. Waking up in New York every morning makes me happy, knowing she is waking up here, too.
—kathleen hanna, musician

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7. Self-Aware
Yoko often mentioned in interviews that she felt that an Asian woman was seen as a dragon lady or an obedient slave—nothing in between the extremes. There were countless racist remarks in the press, especially after the breakup of the Beatles, but she has overcome it over many years. She has made a great contribution in changing the world’s view of Asian women in general. She has consistently projected an image of a self-aware, confident, creative, and strong-willed woman.
—midori yoshimoto, associate professor of art history, New Jersey City University, and author of Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York

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8. Unshakable
I was 19 and working as an art handler at the Miami Art Museum. The first exhibition I helped install was “Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s,” a survey show that included Ono’s “Cut Piece.” I was blown away by the quiet, unshakable disposition of the artist in this vulnerable situation.

Ono’s work became an emblem of everything I hoped feminism would be: unapologetic and forward thinking. Her work, along with that of theorists like Judith Butler, ignited my feminist curiosity. I began to understand the freedom that comes from the fluidity of nonidentification, and the possibility of breaking free from the societal constructs imposed on [us] from all sides.
—anat ebgi, curator and co-owner of The Company, a project space in Los Angeles’s Chinatown

____________________
9. Misunderstood
I don’t think most people realize that [Ono] was an important artist from a heavy, powerful family who was making her mark long before she met John Lennon.

Over the years, people have come to realize that—ongoing Yoko jokes aside—she really can’t be held responsible for Lennon’s actions. He was obviously seeking an escape from his identity in the Beatles, and he found it in her.
—emily haines, musician

____________________
10. Exciting
I fell in love with the Beatles when I was still a child, so I learned about Yoko before I had any conscious misogynist or feminist prejudices. I have a general visceral memory of being told that she was a strange artist who did “performance pieces” where people cut off pieces of her clothes—that this is how she and John met. I found this very sexy and exciting. Even as a preteen, I got what she meant by that piece, and it made me like John more that he loved an interesting woman. I wanted to go to parties where people did weird stuff like that. Yoko probably introduced the ideas of conceptual and performance art to small-town Midwestern girls like me.
—evelyn mcdonnell, author and editor of Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop, and Rap

____________________
11. A Bridge
I first heard of Yoko when she began going out with John Lennon. That would’ve been the first time I heard her, too, as a backing vocalist on The White Album, on “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” where I thought her voice sounded silly, and “Revolution No. 9,” where she was spooky. You didn’t hear Yoko’s music on the radio, and I never knew anyone who owned any of her records. In the mid-1980s, I got a copy of Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, originally released in 1970. It blew my mind. Everything John Lennon had said about how innovative she was suddenly made sense. It was raw, punky stuff, with the most amazing vocals. I like to say Yoko Ono is the bridge between the Velvet Underground and Patti Smith.
—gillian g. gaar, author of She’s a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll

____________________
12. Contested
Yoko was someone my parents [Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles] knew as younger artists, but she didn’t come to Fluxus events. She and John were in their own hybridized art/pop world during the late 1960s and ’70s.

There was a special sadness in the house when John died, but my sense was that [my parents] didn’t feel close to her any longer. People—maybe especially Fluxus artists, who work in a relational vein—drift apart when the creative link no longer feeds a social connection. It does not follow that there is bad feeling between Fluxus artists who have drifted away from each other.

When I say Yoko is “contested,” I mean that because I think Fluxus is perhaps best understood as a community of people with different ideas and practices whose connection to each other is real and sustained—a voluntary association—it matters that her social relationship to other Fluxus artists diminished substantially with time. That she is the most famous Fluxus artist seems to me deeply ironic given this social drifting. She seems to prefer to appear as a solo artist even when there are large Fluxus exhibitions.
—hannah b. higgins, academic, writer, and author of The Fluxus Experience

____________________
13. Wise
Growing up in Fargo, North Dakota, I don’t think I really thought much about Yoko Ono until 1980, when Lennon was killed. I accepted the conventional wisdom that she was sort of this avant-garde nobody, and he was one of the greatest musicians and cultural figures of all time. I had no concept of how a) misguided and b) misogynist that theory was, due to my own youth and lack of consciousness.

One piece of her work has special philosophical importance to me: the “Y E S” piece. You climb up a white full-size ladder in a gallery and written on the ceiling in tiny letters is “y e s.” You can’t see the word from the ground—you have to climb. It’s so simple and yet so powerful. As a feminist, learning to say “yes” (not just “no”) has been a huge turning point for me. It indicates to me how truly creative, wise, and tapped into life and joy Yoko was and is.
—jennifer baumgardner, writer

____________________
14. Witch
She’s a witch, she’s a bitch, and she’s done great work despite media demonization and unfair female and ethnic stereotyping.
—the guerrilla girls, art activists

____________________
15. Brilliant/Alone
Yoko has suffered more than most people understand. Her father was often absent; she was 12 when she fled to the mountains of Japan with part of her family, escaping the bombings in Tokyo but learning about Hiroshima and Nagasaki; she attended college in the United States in the 1950s when the Japanese were vilified; her passionate art was ridiculed as too “expressionistic”; her daughter was kidnapped by her second husband; she was ostracized by the public as the “dragon lady” for putatively breaking up the Beatles; she struggled with Lennon on drugs; she and Lennon were threatened by the CIA with his deportation; she witnessed his murder, and so on.

The result: Yoko feels alone and sometimes trusts others to “handle” her and her art for better or worse. Nonetheless, Yoko inspires me. She is a brilliant, poetic, tough role model who is forthright with herself and brings that honesty to
her art.
—kristine stiles, professor of art and art history, Duke University

____________________
16. Freak
In December 1968, the Rolling Stones staged a concert, “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus,” that was filmed for television. The Stones were the headliners, but the most famous musicians on stage performed with an impromptu supergroup called The Dirty Mac that included John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Mitch Mitchell.

Several minutes into their performance, Lennon beckons Ono onstage. She joins them, but she seems shy and apprehensive. However, when the band moves into its next number, which was later listed as “Whole Lotta Yoko,” Ono delivers banshee-like wailing that made Janis Joplin’s vocals sound like the blandest pop.

It’s fascinating to watch the reactions of the male musicians onstage with her. Lennon behaves as though her singing is no more unusual than, say, Mick Jagger’s strut, while the others try their best to maintain their composure. I don’t think one could find five more uncomfortable minutes of ’60s rock.
—alice echols, associate professor of English, gender studies, and history, University of Southern California, and author of Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975

____________________
17. Mother
Yoko actually had the [potential to] negate John Lennon’s talent, and the preoccupation with that is fascinating. It has a lot to do with just the fear of women, the fear of the feminine. You have a group, the Beatles, that’s coming out of a postwar experience, [after the] Second World War, and then you have the woman who’s breaking up the structure of four. Yoko, being Japanese, would be seen as the enemy. There’s a lot of anger directed to the feminine breaking up the masculine group, and that fear is not about the fear of those particular individuals…. [It] speaks to a lot of different issues, [including] wanting to have time stand still, but also the fear of being engulfed by the mother, the feminine principle.
—karen finley, performance artist

____________________
18. Elder
Yoko was not taken seriously before John’s death. Afterwards, she was portrayed more sympathetically. There was prejudice against her as an Asian and a foreigner and as a woman artist, especially as an avant-garde, experimental artist. Fluxus was not respected for many years, and her reputation improved when Fluxus, as a movement, was taken more seriously. Women artists who survive to an old age sometimes have a reassessment of their artwork take place, and that has happened in her case. She is taken more seriously now in the art, performance, and music context.
—susan bee, artist and editor

____________________
19. Uniter
I saw Yoko Ono perform at the Museum of Modern Art in 2004 or 2005. This was my first direct contact with her. She gave everyone in the audience mini flashlights that said “I love you.” Standing alone onstage, she began flashing a large flashlight out into the audience, spelling with light the words “I love you.” She then instructed the audience to echo back, flashing “I love you.” Had I heard this described and not been there, I might have assumed it was an oversimplified gesture full of sentimental goodwill. However, the performance was potent, powerful in its simplicity—a unique choreographed moment that asserted ideas of social unity and love.
—jen denike, photographer and video artist

____________________
20. Me
Yoko in hot pants, at antiwar rallies: classic proof of her bona fide iconoclast ways, mixing sex(iness) and politics—no hippie-feminist-activist Earth shoes, please!

Before I got her brilliance, I used to resent her, even though it wasn’t her fault that I got called “Yoko” in the late ’60s. Just when I was trying hard to pass as an all-American girl, this racial slur was outing me as an Asian before I was ready, before I became yellow and proud. It also maddened me to be mistaken for Japanese—not that racists care about these distinctions, especially when there’s historical bad blood between Koreans and Japanese.

You can call me Yoko now.
—yong soon min, artist and associate professor of studio art, University of California, Irvine

Ellen Papazian is a writer whose work has appeared in About Face: Women Write About What They See in the Mirror (Seal Press) and The Long Meanwhile: Stories of Arrival and Departure (Hourglass Books). She wrote a column on books for the Bitch blog and can be found at ellenpapazian.com. To read Ellen's Q&A with Yoko Ono, pick up a copy of Art/See.

Veiled Threat

Kjerstin Johnson — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:40:06 -0500

Since 2006, the elusive guerrilla artist known as Princess Hijab has been subverting Parisian billboards, to a mixed reception. Her anonymity irritates her critics, many of whom denounce her as extremist and antifeminist; when she recently conceded, in the pages of a German newspaper, that she wasn’t a Muslim, it opened the floodgates to avid speculation in the blogosphere. If her claim of being a 21-year-old Muslim girl was only partially true, some wondered what the real message was behind her self-described “artistic jihad.”

In her online manifesto, PH declares that she “acts upon her own free will” and is “not involved in any lobby or movement, be it political, religious, or to do with advertising.” The Princess insists that, like the ape-masked Guerrilla Girls and Mexico’s balaclava-clad Zapatistas, by being nobody, she is free to be anybody. But as liberating as this anonymity may seem, it does leave her work open to conflicting—and occasionally unflattering—interpretations. On the popular blog Art21, critic Paul Schmelzer points to Princess Hijab’s work as an example of right-wing street art, surmising that her motivation is to cover the “shame of omnipresent (and often sexualized) ads.” Another blogger, Evil Fionna, argues that if Princess Hijab were acting as a fundamentalist Christian, her work would be recognized as “religious extremis[m]” that demonizes women and makes them ashamed of their bodies. And a commentator on the anti-Islam site Infidel Bloggers accused the artist of urging women to submit to the “tyranny of Islam.”

These observers also allude to the uncanny similarity between the work of Princess Hijab and that of conservative religious groups that have historically used less literal hijabizing to police the female form. In Saudi Arabia, the 80-year-old government agency known as the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice is tasked with, among other things, blacking out bare skin wherever it shows up. In line with Sharia law, women in the pages of magazines, on billboards, and in other public images are painstakingly covered up: Katy Perry may be sporting high-waisted hot pants and a tiny top on her cd cover, but once the Committee gets through with it, she’s garbed in a long-sleeved shirt with matching leggings. (The group, notorious for beating up men and women engaged in “immoral behavior,” have also made headlines for banning Valentine’s Day and restricting the sale of cats and dogs, lest they be used by men to attract women’s attention.)

And in the U.K. in 2005, the activists behind Muslims Against Advertising (MAAD) began daubing blobs of paint on the underdressed models in street ads for the likes of Dove and Wonderbra, and in some cases ripping down the posters altogether.

The ongoing conflict over hijabs in her home country does give Princess Hijab’s work an inescapable political context, or what she calls a “shade of provocation.” France’s hijab debates first erupted in 1989 when three high-school girls were suspended after they refused to remove their Islamic headscarves at a school in a suburb of Paris. Successive years of controversy led to former President Jacques Chirac passing a bill in 2004 banning “religious symbols” in schools on the grounds that they clashed with France’s cherished notions of secularization; more recently, President Nicolas Sarkozy upheld the ban on burqas and headscarves in public spaces, stating, “The burqa is not a religious symbol, it is a sign of the subjugation, of the submission of women. I want to say solemnly that it will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic. We cannot accept women in cages, amputated of all dignity, on French soil.”

But Princess Hijab insists that anyone confusing her work with that of either conservative culture-jammers or Muslims supporting freedom of religious expression is missing the mark. “My work supports right-wing radicalism like Taxi Driver support cabbies. I’m using the hijab for myself.” And looking through her catalog of work, neither label seems right. If her goal really is to cover up the skin-flashing women in ads, then why leave slinky legs on display underneath the painted-on hijabs? And if she’s aiming to make a statement about the dignity of Muslim women, why hijabize male models in Dolce & Gabbana briefs with shoulder-length chadors, leaving their tanned, oiled abs and legs even more preposterously exposed?

In fact, Princess Hijab asserts, her dressing up of billboards is a symbolic act of resistance meant to reassert a “physical and mental integrity” against what she calls the “visual terrorism” of advertising. Arguing that the human right of expression has been displaced by publicists, advertisers, and the machinery of capitalist, commodified culture, she offers that, “My work explores how something as intimate as the human body has become as distant as a message from your corporate sponsor.”

“Like that poster of Farah Fawcett,” she continues, “with her teeth clenched in fear above her perfect polyester swimswuit. When she revealed her cancer, we had to see her and her body as something capable of tragedy. It’s that sort of re-humanization that I aim for with hijabization.” Princess Hijab later admitted that this example, and equating wearing the hijab with physical suffering, was a clumsy one, but wanted the point to stand: Her work attempts to remove the hijab from its gendered and religious context and convert it into a symbol of empowerment and re-embodiment.

Equally central to her work is the goal of social equality. She notes that, in France, “You’re always being asked your origin, which religion you follow. It’s something that is very French, actually; you don’t see it in New York or Berlin.” Hinting that she is a racial outsider in France, Princess Hijab states that she is never taken at face value, but instead pushed into a homogeneous social group and then judged by a corresponding set of stereotypes. With stratification by gender, religion, place of origin, and sexuality, she asserts, comes groups that are closed off from one another’s experiences. Even during her time at university, she recalls her modes of expression being explained away by her origins: “I would be told [that it was] ‘natural,’ given my background, that I would work on [one] topic and not on another. I felt trapped.” But by highlighting everyone’s potential “outsider” status by imposing the hijab on public figures, PH asserts that she is “trying to create a connection with and between people.”

Back when Princess Hijab was believed to be a Muslim, blogger Ethar El-Katatney of Muslimah Media Watch noted, “I’d actually love it if it turns out she’s not a Muslim, because it lends credibility to the idea that the dislike of being exposed to ‘visual aggression’ is not necessarily rooted in religious belief. Fed up with women being used to sell products, hijabizing ads could be a way to ‘take back’ women’s rights to their bodies.” Indeed, in Princess Hijab’s marked-up art, the headscarf is an agent not of covering but of exposure—of the oppressive nature of the advertising industry, of the displacement and disempowerment of women who are repeatedly told that they are not good, skinny, beautiful, sexy, or rich enough. It’s work that owes much more to Adbusters or No Logo than to the Taliban.

Though Princess Hijab’s work has gained international notice, like much street art it still actively resists a simplistic reading. And that she uses such a contested icon to wreak artistic revenge on the dual constructs of advertising and social prejudice means her work is ultimately as much about the interpretation of others as it is about her own intent. “People are confused by me,” admits PH. “Some say I am pro-feminist, some say I am antifeminist; some say I am pro-Islam, others that I am anti-Islam. It’s all very interesting—but at the end of the day, I am above all an artist.”

Arwa Aburawa is a freelance journalist based in the United Kingdom.

Ladies First

Kjerstin Johnson — Sun, 09 Jun 2002 14:59:25 -0400

It was 1984. Ronald Reagan was running for reelection and Phyllis Schlafly—conservative gadfly, ardent foe of the Equal Rights Amendment, and self-identified “little homemaker”—was presiding over a fashion show at the Republican National Convention in the sweltering heat of a Dallas August. As a giant eagle ice sculpture dripped water off its tail feathers, Mrs. Jack Kemp, Mrs. Trent Lott, and Mrs. Jesse Helms sidled down the runway in furs and jeweled gowns to the cheers of 1,300 Republican women. The announcer then displayed a three-foot pachyderm made of mink, cooing, “For those of you who think you have every kind of elephant.”

A scene like this doesn’t need much help parodying itself. But Schlafly had a little boost from some of her most dedicated “followers”: the Ladies Against Women (LAW). Outside the fashion show, a group of ruffled, frilled, and flounced women (and a few men) in white gloves and pillbox hats passed out a Consciousness-Lowering Manifesto that, as the Washington Post reported, included such action items as “Restore virginity as a high-school graduation requirement” and “Eliminate the gender gap by repealing the Ladies’ Vote (Babies, Not Ballots).” LAW welcomed new recruits, but only if they brought pink permission slips signed by their husbands.

LAW members would continue their genteel hounding two days later outside a prayer breakfast held by President Reagan. They set up an ironing board bearing the slogans “Born to Clean” and “Ban the Poor” and held a bake sale—featuring Twinkies priced at $9 billion each—to help reduce the deficit. “You have to sell a lot of Hostess Twinkies to raise $200 billion,” explained LAW founder Mrs. Chester Cholesterol (a.k.a. Gail Ann Williams), prim in her white hat. She had decorated her pink dress with buttons declaring “I’d Rather Be Ironing” and “Tupperware Preserves the Family.” Bake-sale customers could choose among a Lysol pie, Easy Cheese, Cool Whip, and assorted Hostess products.

Virginia Cholesterol holds a press conference, 1988

These are just some of the instances of ladylike havoc that LAW wreaked upon Republican administrations in the ’80s. The brainchild of a San Francisco theater group called the Plutonium Players, LAW was born when a local progressive radio station recruited the group to publicize a rally; the performers decided to invent a “Rally to Stop the Peace” endorsed by fake organizations such as Reagan for Shah and Mutants for Nuclear Power. After the press began calling Williams with questions about Reagan for Shah, she invented a spokesperson for the group: Virginia Cholesterol, devoted wife
of Chester. The Plutonium Players didn’t stop there.

From its humble beginnings, LAW evolved into both a national network of feminist guerrilla performers and an original stage revue. The group became a visible political force, heckling the Reverend Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority and riling pro-life protestors with signs that read “Sperm Are People, Too.” Other chapters sprang up, like the Southern Ladies Against Women (SLAW) and the Canadian Ladies Against Women (CLAW), sharing the original group’s witty irreverence and over-the-top performance/ lampooning of conservative femininity. Republican women wanted to cling to their pearls and wifely status? LAW would outdo them, claiming that “you’re nobody until you’re Mrs. Somebody.” Schlafly and her ilk opposed the ERA? LAW responded with a campaign for its own ERA—the Equal Restroom Amendment—and launched a campaign to “weed out uppity women” through the establishment of the HULA Committee (the House Committee on Un-Ladylike Activities). Their Ladyfesto moved to abolish the environment because it “takes up too much space, and is almost impossible to keep clean.” And they advocated “procreation, not recreation,” asking, “Where did so many gals get the idea that s_x is supposed to be f_n? It’s time to close your eyes and do your duty!”

An early '80s sperm-rights advocate at the San Francisco Gay & Lesbian Freedom Day Parade

LAW had a soft spot for Schlafly and her hard-ass überhousewifely ways. With her organization, the Eagle Forum, Schlafly had mounted a successful 10-year battle against the ERA, helped ax attempts to get government funding for abortion in cases of rape or incest, and campaigned against equal pay for equal work. Coupled with her fondness for Nancy Reagan–style red, her hysterical hair, and her self-proclaimed status as the “best-known advocate of the dignity and honor that we as a society owe to the role of full-time homemaker,” these activities made Schlafly LAW’s perfect patron saint. The group even modeled a character after her: Phyllis Le Shaft.

The real Phyllis was not pleased. “They made idiots of themselves,” she told the Associated Press. “Nobody knew what they were trying to say. They dressed up foolishly and behaved in a childish way. If they had a point, no one got it.”

Disgruntled pro-lifers, conservatives, and religious righters—as well as delighted feminists, environmentalists, and other progressives—would beg to differ; to this day, LAW’s influence can be seen in the steal-the-master’s-tools-and-paint-his-house-paisley tactics of such groups as Billionaires for Bush (or Gore), Adbusters, the Barbie Liberation Front, and the Biotic Baking Brigade, among many, many others.

But where is LAW now? They haven’t been too active since the ’80s: There was a CLAW sighting at International Women’s Day 2001 in Winnipeg. LAW appeared in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on March 31, 2001, providing entertainment for the League of Women Voters. And a few pictures and a copy of the Ladyfesto are on the web. But it seems that today, more than ever, there oughta be a LAW. What would Virginia Cholesterol and her gal pals say about W.’s plan to scrape single moms off the welfare rolls and into marriage? Or Laura Bush’s newfound love for Afghan women’s rights as a justification for military action? Or her violently ugly handbags? There’s so much to do—burqas to be trimmed with fur, chastity-belt fittings to be arranged for high-schoolers, bake sales to be run for Enron executives. So tie on your aprons, put on those pearls, and get busy, LAW—fixing this mess is definitely a job for a lady.

Why Don't We Do It on the Road?

Kjerstin Johnson — Fri, 05 Oct 1990 14:52:20 -0400

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.

Slinky-dressed, jazz-club glory

Nomy as Roy and Michelle Tea as a Flesh Thresher groupie

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 irresistible 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.

Laurie and I chow down

Jane of the sindswept tresses

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.

Learning some line-dancing in Buffalo

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.”

Ali with the infamous vibrator

The view from the Tribe 8 mosh pit

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.

From the Archive: Wack Attack

Kjerstin Johnson — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:08:00 -0500

We were under attack. It was late on an August night. I was trying not to come down with a cold and just about to go to bed. But I was also guest-blogging at Feministe that week, so I logged on to check my e-mail and moderate comments one last time before I turned in.

I was already overwhelmed. I’d done my fair share of blogging, but never before on a site with so much traffic or such active commenters. Between writing timely posts, separating the trolls and spammers from the innocents in the moderation filter, and trying to maintain a civil debate between polarized commenters on my threads, I was marveling that anyone could do this week in and week out and still keep a day job.

Then I got word that a loosely organized cybermob known as Anonymous was attempting to crash feminist sites, including Feministe, flooding comments sections with misogynist rants and threatening feminist bloggers with rape and other violence. This had happened before, but never with such organized force. No one was sure which systems would hold and which would fail; we didn’t even know which site would be attacked next. Privately, we worried about our safety and strategized about how to defend our sites and ourselves. Publicly, we decried these attacks in blog after blog. We knew our attackers wanted to silence us, and we refused to give them that satisfaction.

It turned out that we were wrong. Wrong about what their goals were and wrong about what our response should have been.

A little background I lacked at the time: Anonymous was not formed to carry out an antifeminist agenda. Anonymous exists to create hostile chaos on the web—or, as Anonymous itself likes to put it, to produce “lulz.” Lulz, a corrupted form of “lols” (chat-room speak for “laughing out loud”), at its simplest translates to “laughs.” It’s used by a group of websites and message boards that are dedicated to a very particular brand of humor. What brings on lulz? Teenage suicide attempts, obscene experiments in Photoshopping, and anything else that will get a strong reaction of shock or outrage from someone. In the past year, Anonymous’s activities have included posting a fake BDSM ad in Craigslist’s Women-Seeking-Men Casual Encounters section, and then publishing the responses, photos, and e-mails of every man who responded; attacking and successfully disabling several white-supremacist websites; and hacking the account of a popular young woman on YouTube in order to replace her videos with their own sexually violent ones and to issue damaging and embarrassing communications on her behalf. As this piece went to press, Anonymous was making national headlines with an attack on the Church of Scientology’s site. One of their many mottos is, “Anonymous: Because none of us are as cruel as all of us.”

When they turned their attention to feminist websites, their goal was not, in fact, to silence us. Just like a schoolyard bully, Anonymous was out to get a reaction from us and brag about it. But also like a bully’s actions, their attacks had real and damaging consequences for us. So react we did.

Even as the attacks were happening, there was much debate within the feminist blogosphere about how to respond to them. Part of the issue was that some people had greater knowledge of Anonymous than others, but it went deeper than that: While Anonymous’s targets may be random, their methods are not. The culture of lulz is saturated with juvenile, racist, misogynist, and homophobic language and imagery. They use “fag” and “faggot” as blanket insults against each other and everyone else, even appending it to other words to make compound insults (like “newfag” for a newbie). They make jokes about raping your mother, and define rape as, among other things, “commonly known as black sex (as that is how it is traditionally done in Africa).” They even use the term “image raep” (wacky spelling and intentional typos being another hallmark of the Anonymous community) to describe one of their favorite methods for trying to take down a website: using a program to automatically reload any and all images on that site over and over until the monthly bandwidth for that site is used up and the site host is forced to take it down.

So when they decided to get some lulz out of feminists, they didn’t exactly have to work hard to find the strategies that would piss us off the most. In addition to launching what’s known as “distributed denial of service” or ddos attacks, in which the goal is to use up the bandwidth of the site or otherwise interfere with it technically so it can no longer be accessed by readers (“image raeping” being only one of numerous ways to accomplish this), they flooded comments sections and bloggers’ inboxes with hateful rants and threats of violence:

Heart, this is horrible. I’m sorry that this is happening to you. These people want nothing to do but to hurt you and your cause. I feel for you.
In fact, I want to feel you now. I’d like to tie you down, take a knife, and slit your throat. I’d penetrate you over and over in all orifices, and create some of my own to stick myself in.

They zeroed in on one particular blogger, whose online name is Biting Beaver, posting her home address and calling for Anonymous members to kidnap her son and place damning phone calls to her neighbors and her local police.

These attacks were hardly taking place in a vacuum. They came only months after violent, gendered threats on technology writer Kathy Sierra made international headlines when they blossomed unchecked on popular and respected tech blogs, even going so far as to include her personal address and phone number, and ultimately causing her to withdraw from public speaking and shut down her blog. They came less than a year after the law-school website AutoAdmit was sued for supporting a culture in which female law students were systematically harassed and threatened in discussion threads that invited commenters to vote on the relative hotness of nonconsenting women, discussed some women’s daily routines in terrifying detail, and threatened to “hatefuck” them when the women dared to object.

Female bloggers writing on not-explicitly-feminist sites, even progressive ones, knew that no matter what topic they were addressing, comments would inevitably devolve either into discussions of their fuckability, or of their extreme status as “feminazis.” And, according to a 2006 University of Maryland School of Engineering study, female-named chat-room users got more threatening and/or sexually explicit messages than male-named users—25 times more, in fact. The phrase “blogging while female” had already entered the cultural lexicon, and every feminist blogger knew it.

So, though coolheaded techies familiar with Anonymous suggested we ignore them until they went away, most of us were angry and scared, sick of being angry and scared, and ready to take a stand. We would never consent to being bullied or silenced in “real life,” and we weren’t going to take it online either.

But what does “not taking it” look like online? It’s nearly impossible to find agreement. Reporting threats and harassment to authorities is much easier said than done in a world where identities are invented with the click of a key and making one’s location untraceable is second nature to a seasoned cyberstalker. Add in the global jurisdiction issues that plague most Internet crime, and a law-enforcement infrastructure that in many instances discounts women’s claims in the physical realm, let alone online, and there’s not a lot of justice to be found through official channels.

Meanwhile, the personal toll on bloggers was mounting. I was losing sleep and getting sicker worrying about my safety and the safety of the site, to the point where I missed two days of work. A blogger who declined to be named for this article pulled out of a conference appearance because she didn’t want to sacrifice her anonymity. Mary Borsellino, who runs the site Girl-Wonder.org, one of the first sites to be attacked, hit a more serious breaking point: “Health-wise, the attacks were yet another stress in a stressful workload—I ended up in the emergency room because my body stopped coping with my weariness, and I became very ill.”

These costs are common when women are attacked online. Sierra’s widely publicized case, aside from causing her to quit blogging, ultimately led her to fear leaving her house. Jill Filipovic, a house blogger at Feministe and one of the targets of the AutoAdmit threads, has sought therapy to help her cope with the stresses of online attacks and their aftermath. Even veteran techie and pop culture writer Annalee Newitz confesses that after a particularly ugly comment thread about her weight erupted on Slashdot she responded by losing 15 pounds.

And the systemic costs are just as troubling. A Pew Internet & American Life Project study reported on in the Washington Post in April 2007 found that the number of Internet users who took part in chats and discussion groups plummeted from 28 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2005, due to women dropping out in response to “worrisome behavior in chat rooms.” When the Anonymous attacks hit, many bloggers scrambled to install comment moderation, beef up their online aliases, and improve their privacy settings on social-networking sites like Flickr and Facebook.

This naturally resulting defensiveness not only takes time, energy, and skill, it also squelches discourse and makes it harder to organize for change. “I would have loved to have established some sort of private e-mail conversation between Biting Beaver, Heart, Kathy Sierra, and other feminist and female bloggers who have faced harassment,” says Filipovic, “but that becomes difficult when the first logical reaction to harassment is to hide all of your personal and contact information, and to immediately distrust strangers who contact you.”

So what’s a web-savvy woman to do? Some see the very fear created for women online as the greatest danger, and advise women to disengage from it at all costs.

“Women are often told to be more afraid of things like [online threats] than men are. It’s part of a culture that wants to keep women from being part of the Internet community,” says Newitz. “It’s propaganda. There’s going to be that tiny percentage of time when a guy who’s being a wanker turns out to be a serious threat, but that’s always going to happen, whether you’re on the Internet or walking down the street. Most of the time, these are tactics used to intimidate women into being afraid to speak out online. I just don’t want to have any of that. I’d rather take the risk.”

Her colleagues working in tech fields tend to agree. Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency, a consulting group that helps companies strengthen communities online, advocates “taking it like a man”: “The ‘boys’ get harassed, threatened, bullied, etc., every day and just brush it off. They concentrate on the positive feedback (or those who are successful do).”

But “taking it like a man” is easier said than done when we not only don’t get attacked the way men do online, but also have different real-life contexts for understanding those attacks. Many women have already been victims of sexual and other violence long before they start speaking out online, which makes it nearly impossible for some to just “brush off” explicit threats, no matter how infrequently anyone makes good on those threats. (For the record, everyone I spoke with for this article agreed that online threats are almost never acted upon in real life.) It’s a heck of a lot easier to “take it like a man” if you’ve got the life experience and privilege of, well, a man.

Women of color have it particularly bad, as they’re attacked racially as well as sexually in ways that painfully mirror real-life experience. Jenn Fang, author of the blog Reappropriate, describes her experiences online:

When I participated in a popular APIA [Asia & Pacific Internet Association] forum…feminist voices were shot down by male participants who threw around words like ‘whore’ and ‘slut’ within their counterarguments. In another forum, men angry that I am unabashedly partnered in a stable, eight-year-long interracial relationship have accused me of ‘loving to suck white dick,’ having ‘daddy issues,’ and worse. They re-posted photos of my loved ones (that I used to host on this site to share with real-life friends) and made racially and sexually derogatory remarks about the people in them, including mean-spirited mockery of my boyfriend’s mother. I no longer host personal photos for this reason. Still others have e-mailed me hateful judgments and presuppositions of my personal life while assuming materialistic, superficial motivations for all Asian-American women. In all these behaviors—commonly received by many women in cyberspace—it is the woman and her experience that becomes decentralized; even in assaulting us, male aggressors shift the focus from a female blogger’s feminism to a denial of her self-worth based exclusively upon the men in her life. It is certainly enough to make any sane woman question why she exposes herself to such treatment.

What’s more, not publicly discussing the ways we’re being harassed and intimidated online isolates the women who are most vulnerable from both community support and the know-how necessary to fight back. Even those who advocate ignoring harassment as the best defense acknowledged that the attention paid to attacks on women online in the wake of the Sierra case has helped women with similar problems find each other and begin to work on solutions.

Lisa Stone, cofounder of the conference and online community BlogHer, advises women to make like the Amish and shun cyberharassers, but concedes, “If there is a silver lining to the recent attention given to online attacks on prominent women, it’s that many women now know they are not the only ones receiving this kind of abuse.”

What the cacophony of opinion and experience suggests is a nuanced response, with consideration given to each situation, the people involved, and the perception of the risks at hand. “As a general rule, I’m a proponent of speaking out and shutting down those who harass, threaten, and attack people online, but context matters,” says Filipovic. “The AutoAdmit attacks are a good example—I knew about them for months and assumed that if I just didn’t respond, they’d go away. They didn’t; in fact, they escalated. When I finally responded with a post on my blog and had a bit of a back-and-forth with the commenters, the attacks initially escalated further but then petered out. I think a lot of people who leave comments on message boards like that can forget that they’re talking about real people who may be reading their words. Once you humanize yourself, some of them will knock it off. Others, of course, will just become angrier, but that’s the risk you take.”

Of course, in the case of Anonymous, that’s exactly what happened. Nearly every blogger who condemned the attacks became a target, because a reaction they could laugh about was exactly what Anonymous was after. (I’ll very likely be their next target once this article makes the rounds. Hi, Anonymous!) And the public debate between those who argued for ignoring them and those who argued against silence at any cost just amused them further.

There are some pieces of advice, though, that cut across situation and opinion. Here are a few principles upon which nearly everyone I spoke with agreed:

1. Don't Silence Yourself.

Even the staunchest advocates for ignoring harassment support this stance, because they want women to keep writing online. Do whatever you need to do to feel safe, but don’t quit. Your silence gives every fearmonger and troll a thrill of victory. The more women who insist on being heard online, the better place the web will be for feminist voices.

2. We Must Change the Culture Together

Hold offending sites accountable for the culture they create, and if they refuse to respond, shun them in favor of sites that welcome women’s voices. Report the identities of attackers to authorities whenever possible, and shame them online whenever practical. Pressure media outlets to cover online attacks on women as a serious issue without contributing to the culture of fear that leads to the silencing of women. Call on the men who claim to be our allies to do this work alongside us, and hold them accountable for moderating their spaces responsibly and for reading and linking to women bloggers at the same rate they do men. Join a group that’s concerned with these issues, such as the feminist bloggers’ listserv (contact here) or Take Back the Tech. Make this their problem more than ours.

3. The Best Defense is Good Tech.

If we’re going to be challenging the cyber–status quo, it pays to be technologically prepared. Says Kevin Andre Elliott, who writes as Thin Black Duke and suffered heinous racial attacks when he dared to speak out against Anonymous, “I kept up on [Anonymous’s] boards for some time, and I remember at one point many of the members were lamenting that Biting Beaver and Heart were just too web savvy for them to effectively do what they wanted to do. That made me smile.”

There are many ways to protect your site from attack and shut down offenders before they start, including hosting your photos separately from your blog (so that “image raep” techniques don’t work), and hosting your site on a feminist-friendly ISP like MayFirst, which understands the political as well as technical issues involved and will work with you to keep your site safe on your terms.

4. Better Together.

Another way to stay protected is to blog in a group—that way you can share responsibility, support each other, exchange knowledge, and have greater coverage when it counts. Girl-Wonder.org’s Borsellino learned this lesson the hard way:

The moderators had been dealing with threads full of pornography for hours and hours—they had the power to delete the threads, but not to ban the posters. Only I, as the sole admin at the time, could do that. Needless to say, there are a lot more people with admin powers on the boards now! It’s monitored 24 hours a day, every day. The site was taken over by amazing people while I recovered, and so in the end it was a major boon for the site. But for me it was a huge cost, one I wish I hadn’t had to pay.

Several activists have floated the idea of forming a Tech Defense Force, available to help with preventive measures as well as to respond to female bloggers under attack with crucial tech knowledge and support. But without funding, it’s hard to imagine it coming together, as the radical techies required for such a project are already overstretched with good works and good work.

In the end, it’s no easier to imagine an Internet without misogyny than it is to imagine a world without misogyny. We’re working on it, but it’s going to take a long time to get there. In the meantime, as Borsellino puts it, “We’ll just get better at fighting back.”

Jaclyn Friedman is a writer and performer. She wrote about the online attacks on Kathy Sierra in Bitch no. 36.

Ladies' Camp Rock

Kjerstin Johnson — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 17:53:20 -0400

You only have to look to the history of Star Trek– inspired music—ranging from surf-punkers No Kill I to the Klingon heavy-metal band Stovokor—to see that fantasy and science- fiction fans have made music devoted to their obsessions for generations. Nothing in the history of fandom, though, can compare to wizard rock, a thriving subculture of musicians and fans devoted to Harry Potter–inspired rock ’n’ roll. But don’t let the name fool you: It’s witches, not wizards, who dominate this scene.

More than half of the hundreds of musicians and the vast majority of wizard-rock fans are girls and young women; “wrockers” write and produce their own records, organize hundreds of concerts each year, create and sell their own merch, and participate in social justice and charity work.

“From the get-go, I think the majority of our fans were teenage and college-aged girls,” says Paul DeGeorge, who, along with brother Joe, began writing and performing as Harry and the Potters in 2002. “And then as wizard rock started to grow, it seemed like a lot of those girls were like, ‘Well, I can do that, too.’”

For girls and women, the attraction to wrock is about more than making music: Women have also been largely responsible for cultivating the community. Freya Fridy, editor of Wizrocklopedia, wrock’s online hub, notes, “There is someone for everyone to relate to. Tying it in with your real life isn’t that difficult, even though it’s a completely different world than ours.” More important, though, wizard rock provides a supportive and noncompetitive space. “The whole DIY aspect of the community lets people try it out without feeling pressured,” says Fridy.

But plenty of DIY communities, especially within the indie music scene, are male-dominated and less than female-friendly. The difference in wizard rock is the sheer number of women and girls making the music, and the extraordinary amount of encouragement wrockers and fans provide each other. Many men who are involved in wizard rock actively support their female peers, and the vast majority of wrock music avoids demeaning or stereotypical treatments of women.

Wizard rock has also paved the way for Twilight rock, a small but growing collection of musicians and bands devoted to making music inspired by Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling series. Mostly made up of solo acts and acoustic bands who sing from the perspective of the novel’s many characters, Twirock is overwhelmingly (and, given the book’s fan demographics, unsurprisingly) dominated by women. Katie Parr of the band Bella Rocks! says, “Obviously, Twirock is a branch of wizard rock. We’re still in our young stages, but we are related to them in almost every way.” But Twilight rock doesn’t seem to have the momentum that wizard rock had at the same time in its history, leaving one to wonder if Twilight’s female-dominated readership hinders the growth of its fan-based musical movement.

Most wizard and Twilight rockers will acknowledge that the treatment of women in their source materials is problematic, and some wrockers have also raised questions about gender issues in the scene. While the majority of wizard rockers are women, the biggest names in the movement tend to be male groups, including Harry and the Potters and Draco and the Malfoys. For the most part, all agree that this is a function of age and opportunity: These are well-established bands who can tour and promote themselves full time. But when Tina Olson, who performs as DJ Luna Lovegood, raised questions on a popular wizard rock Facebook group about gender issues—why, for instance, so many headliners are male and why many popular female groups tend to replicate mainstream standards of beauty—many wrockers responded defensively, and some even suggested that raising questions about gender and popularity was antifeminist. By and large, most wrockers are adamant that questions like Olson’s simply shouldn’t be put to their community.

And sisterhood is not quite as powerful for female Twirockers as it is for wizard rockers. Although there’s no open feud, and a few wizard rockers even have Twirock side projects, Twirockers are often received in the same way that the public tends to characterize all Twilight fans: as screaming, silly girls. And wizard rock and Twilight rock rarely share the same stage. A recent AccioCon convention attempted to bring the two fandoms together and featured musicians from both movements, but it was not enough to convince wrockers that Twirock is as meaningful and community-minded as wizard rock.

Still, there’s something very powerful happening here. The short-term result of these movements is a growing collection of music for young women written by their friends and peers, as well as an ongoing discussion about the role of women in the stories that inspire them. The long-term legacy, though, could end up being something altogether bigger: As these women wrockers move beyond the worlds of fandom, they’ll take their musical and entrepreneurial skills with them, and that just might equal some awesome, real-world magic.

Tammy Oler is a fan of fandom and a frequent contributor to Bitch. Find her at tammyoler.com.

Feast of Burden

Kjerstin Johnson — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 17:59:06 -0400

Ivy doesn’t look like most performers in mainstream pornography. Then again, the thousands of viewers who have logged on to watch her YouTube videos or look at her photo sets aren’t seeking mainstream adult entertainment. While most porn stars and pinups show off their tits and ass, Ivy shows off her big belly, the body part fetishized in the niche genre of feeding porn.

Photos and videos on websites like BigCuties and BBW Pinups show scantily clad, obese women packing away pastries, chowing down on cheeseburgers, and feasting on fries. In one video, Ivy performs calisthenics until she groans and wheezes. Then, after looking off-camera for reassurance, she begins to gorge on powdered donuts while exaggeratedly and sensually licking the powder from her fingers and rubbing her stomach, still gasping for breath. Where traditional porn emphasizes largeness in breasts and penises, feeding porn eroticizes the quantity of food women like Ivy can consume, as well as the combination of pleasure and pain that comes from consuming it.

If, as Laura Kipnis suggests in her 1999 book Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America, pornography serves as a repository for images and ideas expelled from society at large, feeding porn seems inevitable. As we all know from shows like Half Ton Teen, 650-Pound Virgin, I Eat 33,000 Calories a Day, and even the new reality-dieting show Dance Your Ass Off, in a society accustomed to fanatical diets and fastidious exercise regimens, few things provoke fascination like obese bodies.

And given the rich historical parallels between food and sexuality, one can’t help but consider this literal food porn a symptom of women’s repressed sexual and physical appetites. Historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg noted in 2000’s Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa that in Victorian bourgeois society, what a girl or woman ate was thought to reflect not her taste buds but her character, and appetite became less a biological instinct and more a social tool. The culture condemned indulgence in rich, “sensual” foods like meat and candy, thought to stimulate sexual urges, and lauded female frailty and appetitive renunciation. Today, Western culture still widely associates dieting with self-mastery and obesity with laziness and overindulgence. And the innumerable commercials for “light” versions of fattening foods, which encourage women to indulge—but just a little!—are proof that the offensive association between food, femininity, and morality is still in effect.

To publicly eat when you’re already fat might be one of the most transgressive behaviors available to the modern woman. And though feeding pornography eroticizes the pain of overeating, it also emphasizes a certain possibility for female pleasure that is decidedly antagonistic to the heteronormative model—in other words, there’s no penis necessary. (In his essay on porn in the book Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession, anthropologist Don Kulick suggests that feeding pornography is a rejection of the penis as the “ultimate bestower of rapture.”) Feeding pornography also reconfigures depictions of female pleasure when it offers obese bodies as visual “proof” of female sexual fulfillment: If eating is sexy, the body of a 400-pound woman itself is testament to her satisfaction—no stagy wailing or sheet-clutching required.

But while the presence of obese bodies in porn could be encouraging and radical under different circumstances, feeding porn’s gender dynamics undercut that potential. Even in the absence of a phallus, men are central to the eroticized dominance and submission that’s performed in feeding pornography. A “feeder” (usually male) encourages the “feedee” (usually female) to gain weight, often literally placing the food in her mouth. The ultimate (if generally unattained) goal of the relationship is for the feedee to become immobile, and this eventual incapacitation is fetishized: Feeders get off on the idea that their feedee might one day become too “satisfied”—and too obese—to move, thus making them completely dependent on their feeder. It’s an extreme manifestation of the idea that masculinity in men involves eroticized dominance over women.

The feeders who, off-camera, forcibly coax a female performer like Ivy to gorge posit themselves as masters on whom she is dependent for instruction and encouragement. It’s different from much of traditional porn only in the poundage: By performing a relationship of overt dependence, the men who create such videos—and the viewers who identify with them—claim the female body as a site for male domination and control; if the woman happens to enjoy it, that’s secondary. In the end, the producers and consumers of feeding porn fail to acknowledge that the female performers really are big, beautiful women, and not just big mouths to feed and big bodies on whom they can imagine perching naked with a box of donuts (as one YouTube commenter does). Feeding porn takes the frat-house idea that some women are just too fat to be fuckable to literally massive proportions. And in fetishizing consumption that makes women
too big to move, the genre makes it hard to look at the pleasure on their faces and not see the violence that follows quickly behind.

Jessica Hester is a student at the University of Chicago, where she studies English and Gender Studies. This is her first contribution to Bitch.

Is Meghan McCain the new heartbeat of the GOP or the new headache?

Kjerstin Johnson — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 18:02:13 -0400

You may know her as John McCain’s cute, blonde, 24-year-old daughter, whose site, McCain Blogette, may have been the first campaign-trail travelogue to dish about its author’s favorite cosmetics and love of Tupac. You may have seen her appearances on The Rachel Maddow Show or Politically Incorrect. And you may have heard about her kerfuffle with conservative columnist Laura Ingraham, who made fat jokes about the young McCain, to which she responded in a Daily Beast column titled “Quit Talking About My Weight, Laura Ingraham.” What you may not know is that Meghan McCain is currently being shined up as the new face of Republican politics in a time when that party is grasping wildly at relevance. She’s pro-God, pro-gun, pro-life, and pro-military—but, as she’s constantly pointing out, pro-sex and pro-gay as well. Two writers ponder the polarizing upstart.

Love her!

As we all know, the Republican Party is currently experiencing an identity crisis: With no real leader since last year’s presidential election, Rush Limbaugh and the far-right wing seem to be growing ever closer to taking over the party. Moderate Republicans are feeling alienated; the party base is shrinking; and with a recession, two wars, and countless other problems, it’s time to revitalize the two-party system.

But almost no one in the GOP has been willing to challenge the far right except Meghan McCain. Using hip, liberal-leaning websites and youth-friendly social-networking platforms, McCain is reaching out to younger Republicans and confronting the ills that plague the Republican Party.

In a controversial March 2009 column in the Daily Beast, McCain argued that the GOP needs to reject calls from überconservatives like Limbaugh and Ann Coulter to “purify” the party. “I think most people my age are like me in that we all don’t believe in every single ideal of each party specifically. The GOP should be happy to have any young supporters whatsoever, even if they do digress some from traditional Republican thinking.” She revisited the topic on a May episode of The Colbert Report, telling Stephen Colbert the party needs to change its tone on LGBT issues: “I do believe the Republican Party can be a safe place for the gay community…. If you go to the basic belief of the Republican Party, if you want to keep the government out of your life, why can’t that include [gay] marriage?”

And while she’s at it, MMC thinks Republicans should wise up and realize abstinence-only sex education programs just aren’t enough, writing in another Daily Beast column, “The GOP Doesn’t Understand Sex”: “If we can’t discuss birth control in addition to abstinence, and in a nonjudgmental way, kids will continue to make bad choices for lack of having access to informed, safe options.”

Not everyone loves a political whippersnapper, but even as a liberal Democrat myself, I’m nursing a serious crush on McCain, who’s got charisma her father could only hope for. Unsurprisingly, there have been numerous calls from the likes of Limbaugh for McCain to pipe down and leave the party. Still, as right-wing politicians and pundits wring their hands and whine over the future of the GOP, McCain is emerging as an intelligent, funny, confident young woman who loves her party and wants it to succeed. If the Republican Party doesn’t want her, maybe she should start her own.
—Danine Spencer

Shove her!

You’re darn tootin’ the Republican Party finds itself leaderless right now—who wants to grab the helm of a ship adrift in a sea of shit? But yes, Meghan McCain seems pretty convinced that there is a way to marry a liberal philosophy on social issues with classic Republican ideology. The problem is, she’s wrong.

Before we get to how she’s wrong, let’s explore how McCain envisions this cozy coupling of lefty-righty politics. Via various media outlets, McCain has been hammering home her I-contain-political-multitudes message with a steady cadence. She perhaps best summed up who she is in a recent speech to the Log Cabin Republicans, in which she proclaimed:

I am concerned about the environment. I love to wear black. I think government is best when it stays out of people’s lives and business as much as possible. I love punk rock. I believe in a strong national defense. I have a tattoo. I believe government should always be efficient and accountable. I have lots of gay friends. And yes, I am a Republican.

Putting aside the fact that McCain somehow equates wearing black and having tattoos with liberalism, let’s concentrate on sentence no. 3. This sentence, along with the tenets of fiscal conservatism and relying on a free market to correct social ills, embodies classic Republican philosophy. It’s commendable that McCain is vocal in her criticism of the GOP’s current incarnation, which prioritizes hellfire-and-damnation histrionics at the expense of pretty much everything else. But that doesn’t mean the party’s laissez-faire ideology is compatible with advancing the social issues—gay rights, sex education that goes beyond abstinence-only, the environment—to which McCain is apparently so attached.

Gay marriage is a good hypothetical case study: Let’s say McCain gets her wish, and the GOP powers that be decide to “stay out of people’s lives,” and not give a shit who marries whom. It still wouldn’t be enough. History has shown us that rights need both enacting and protecting, and that requires legislative muscle, and that in turn requires—somewhere down the line—a government that cares enough to act. Whether or not Republicans are capable of caring about anyone other than rich white men is arguable, but even if they did, their core principles would dictate that they not act. Let the chips fall where they may, they’d shrug.

The problem is, sometimes the chips fall and it gets dangerous. Back in 1998, in Laramie, Wyoming, Matthew Shepard was beaten, pistol-whipped, tortured, and left for dead, tied to a buck fence. He died five days later, and his assailants used the “gay panic” defense in court, claiming they freaked out because he hit on them. More than 10 years later, Wyoming—and many other states—has no substantial hate-crime laws.

And this is what McCain doesn’t get. When violence is at hand, and when people can’t feel safe in their own country, active government is called for. That means not just passively waiting for rights to spring up out of thin air, but actively pushing for them via legislation and government involvement. The history of this country has proven it: Would the civil rights movement have succeeded without Brown v. Board of Education and its ensuing laws? Would the marchers and protesters and school integrators have survived without the National Guard troops guarding their flanks? Sometimes justice requires a symbiotic effort on all fronts; neither the grassroots movement nor its governmental counterpart could have made it without the other.

I’m guessing that’s not what goes through the minds of McCain and her many faithful queens in the Log Cabin Republicans. I’m guessing that, for her, it feels very brave and progressive to take on Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh via Twitter, or to assert that she’s “pro-sex” on The Colbert Report. But all McCain is really asking for is a much larger tent, full of even more people her party will be all too happy to ignore.
—Jonanna Widner

The Rachel Papers

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

Get your own - Open publication

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.  

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. 

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.  

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.  

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.  

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.

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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

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 