Just a quick take here: for those who didn’t see it, check out The New York Times article on gay marriage in Mexico City that ran yesterday, here.
Last week, my sons participated in their school’s first school play—a charming production of “The Sound of Music.” While my fifth-grader worked the spotlight from the mezzanine, my 8-year old played one of the Von Trapp boys, appearing in the scene in which Maria dresses her charges in dungarees she fashioned out of floral curtains. (Yes, it was adorable!)
But let’s get right to the gender point here: Out of 150 kids who voluntarily signed up for the cast, only 20% were boys—and most of them were in the younger grades. While dozens of older girls donned nun’s costumes, only a handful of pre-teen boys participated. The fifth-grader who played the Captain enjoyed a hearty applause after hitting all the right notes in “Edelweiss,” but his male peers were in the audience, not onstage with him. When I asked other folks why this was the case, I heard that most boys were too busy with sports to commit to two weeks of rehearsals. Or, they just didn’t think being in the play was cool.
According to two professional directors who teach acting classes and orchestrate children’s productions in our community, the percentage of boys in our school play was actually rather high. At one local theater program, only 10 to 15% of six-to-eight-year old kids are boys. At another, a recent casting call for “Peter Pan” attracted over forty young thespians, but only three or four boys. Ultimately, the Lost Boys were played by girls.
What’s up with this? “It’s a societal thing,” says Dan Ferrante of the Westchester Sandbox Theater in Mamaroneck, New York. Traci Timmons, of the Bendheim Children’s Theater in nearby Scarsdale, surmises that when parents guide their sons’ extra-curricular activities, they usually prioritize sports over the arts, even if their boys show interest in creative activities. As boys get older, some dads fear a stigma of effeminacy or homosexuality often connected to men in theater. One positive sign is that sibling involvement can attract cross-gender interest. When brothers come to see their sisters perform, they want to be part of the excitement the next time around.
Parents are always hearing about the character-building benefits of team sports for kids of both sexes: they promote cooperation, persistence, self-confidence, healthy body awareness, the list goes on. True enough, but can’t the same be said for performing arts? Ms. Timmons argues that acting can enhance kids’ self-confidence, reduce feelings of social apprehensiveness, build literacy skills, and foster emotional sensitivity. For decades, feminists (and parents in general) have rightly fought to ensure gender parity in athletics—but what can we do to increase boys’ involvement in the arts? Even the popularity of Disney’s “High School Musical”—in which Zac Efron plays a jock who eventually learns to love the limelight on stage as well as on the basketball court—doesn’t seem to have made much difference.
Kids’ free time is limited, and they can’t do it all. But it’s a shame that boys who would otherwise enjoy—and benefit from—theatrical pursuits avoid them because they’re worried that their friends will think it’s uncool or “girly.”
Next fall, Benji will move on to middle school—but Eli will be in fourth grade, and he’s already planning to be in the school play again. Rumor has it that next year’s musical might be “The Wizard of Oz.” I hope they won’t have to cast a girl as the Tin Man.
In January, tragedy struck the Los Angeles suburb of Manhattan Beach.
Investigators believe that 24-year-old Michael Nolin killed his girlfriend, 22-year-old Danielle Hagbery, because Hagbery was breaking up with him. Apparently, Nolin then committed suicide.
This murder-suicide story is tragic all the way around. We hear about situations like this all the time. But while the details of this case might still be fuzzy, one thing is for sure: The report published in The Daily Breeze perpetuates the worst of victim-blaming and misguidedly frames the issues.
The story headline reads:
Police believe romantic break-up fueled Manhattan Beach killings.
But romance and break-ups don’t cause murder. Violence and aggression do. Let’s revise and edit, shall we?
An accurate story headline would read:
Police believe violent aggression fueled Manhattan Beach killings.
But the problem doesn’t end with the headline. The article quotes Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s Lt. Dan Rosenberg who provides so-called tips to women on preventing their own assault.
I would insert a snarky “yawn” if the issue wasn’t so absolutely critical!
Daily Breeze reporters Larry Altman and Andrea Woodhouse quote Los Angeles Sheriff Department’s Lt. Dan Rosenberg as saying:
“Danielle Hagbery’s death should serve as a warning to other young women that they need to look out for themselves — such as not going to the boyfriend’s home — when a relationship goes sour.
“This is one more tragic end of a dating relationship where these young women should be aware of it,” Rosenberg said. “Ladies need to be vigilant when things go sideways with boyfriends.”
Seriously. Really?
I’m willing to accept that Lt. Rosenberg was well-intentioned but seriously misguided. And, if so, then Altman and Woodhouse are complicit in their equally misguided decision to include these “tips” in their article.
Badly informed comments such as Rosenberg’s perpetuate a serious problem: Blaming the victim for her own death. This profoundly shifts the attention from the real issue. Presuming it’s true that boyfriend Michael Nolin killed Hagbery before turning a gun on himself, the warning must not be directed toward victims.
Ladies don’t need to be vigilant. Murderers need to not kill.
If this was in fact an instance of “one more tragic end of a dating relationship,” then men need to be aware of their own potential for violence and prevent it from happening. The best way to end violence is for the violent person to stop. Prevention is the real solution.
On February 1, 2010 I sent a letter of concern to eight Daily Breeze editors and reporters, and to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. This letter called out the newspaper and the sheriff for what violence-prevention educator Jackson Katz calls linguistic shape shifting, where language obscures men’s responsibility for violence.
The letter of concern includes signatures from authors, professors, public speakers, advocates, and community activists, experts across the country who work in preventing gender-based violence and sexual assault.
The letter concludes by offering support: “There are plenty of community-based resources and educational materials on the subject of preventing male violence against women. Please do not hesitate to be in touch if you would like to avail yourself to our services and resources.”
To date, not one of the individuals or agencies receiving this letter have replied. The silence is deafening.
With the 6th and final season upon us, will Lost finally zoom towards a feminist future? With the number of female characters dwindling and the simultaneous deification of hetero white males, can feminist Lost fans hope for a satisfying island conclusion?
Previous seasons have been a mixed bag on this count.
Lost has many strong female characters, many of whom I could easily see wearing a “This is what a feminist look like” t-shirt. As noted by Melissa McEwan of Shakesville, an admitted Lost junkie, “Generally, the female characters are more well-rounded than just about any other female characters on television, especially in ensemble casts.”
Lost has often presented ‘gender outside the box’ characters, suggesting being human is more important than being a masculine man or a feminine woman. After all, when you are fighting for your life, ‘doing gender right’ is hardly at the top of you priority list.
While Jack and Sawyer try to out-macho each other in their love triangle with Kate, neither hold entirely to the Rambo-man-in-jungle motif. As for the women, they just might be the strongest, bravest, wisest female characters to grace a major network screen since Cagney and Lacey.
Though the island is certainly patriarchal, one could make a strong case that male-rule is not such a good thing for (island) society. Kate or Juliet would be far better leaders than any of the island patriarchs (and as some episodes suggest, would make great co-leaders - what a feminist concept!)
McEwan, in her discussion with fellow Lost fanatic, Brad Reed of Sadly, No!, agrees, stating “the show looks increasingly to be making an oblique but advanced commentary about the patriarchy.” As she argues:
“The Lost fathers (Benry, Widmore, Paik, Shephard the Elder) are archetypical patriarchs-rich, powerful, well-educated, well-connected, straight, and white, with the exception of Mr. Paik, who’s in the ethnic majority of his country of residence. It is within the battle among these patriarchs that everyone else is caught; it is to their whims, and their arbitrary rules and preferences, that everyone else is subjected. That’s clearly framed as Not a Good Thing, which rather suggests a feminist critique of the patriarchy.”
However, as the two hour season premiere revealed, one of the strongest female leads, Juliet, is dead. Kate is still rocking the strong-woman action, yet the fact remains that “We’re just about out of female characters to root for” (as Cara of Feministe points out).
This slow decrease in female characters means that a show that had more males to begin with has become decidedly testosterone weighted. Moreover, the (white) males left are being deified with Jabob/Lock/Richard/Ben all seemingly having godlike powers. This turn is all the more frustrating given that supposedly Kate was initially conceived as the island leader. Alas, as reported by Jill at Feministe, “execs thought that people wouldn’t watch the show if a chick was in charge, so they gave that role to Jack and turned Kate into one corner of a love triangle.” Grrrr.
The 30-minute season recap that aired last week kept implying women viewers are wooed by the romantic motifs that dominate many of the narrative arcs. Apparently ABC is unaware that women are interested in more things than romance (and shirtless hotties).
Sometimes the writers seem oblivious to the fact that women are more than man-seeking baby-making machines, too. Season five was particularly dire in this vein. Drawing on the Freudian ‘baby as penis replacement’ motif, Kate was depicted as trying to repair the loss of Sawyer with baby Aaron. (For more on this line of argument, go here.)
Yet, overall, Kate is arguably one of the smartest, most daring female characters to lead a contemporary mega-hit television series. Her back-story ain’t bad either - she was on that doomed flight as a result of fighting back against her mother’s abusive partner. And, though Juliet sometimes seems more focused on her various Romeos than on other matters, she heroically detonated the bomb that launched us into season six. Who knows, maybe this final season will launch us into some sort of feminist utopia led by Eloise Hawking or Rousseau. At the very least, let’s hope it doesn’t culminate with Kate all happily married and duly domesticated!
Please join me in extending a heartfelt welcome to our newest monthly blogger here at GwP: Natalie Wilson! As Heather mentioned yesterday, Natalie will be bringing us a monthly column called POP GOES FEMINISM, which will serve up feminist intersectional analysis of, you got it, pop culture. A literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author, Natalie teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in the areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture.She is author of the blogs Professor, what if…? and Seduced by Twilight. She also writes the guest column Monstrous Musings for the Womanist Musings blog. She is currently writing a book examining the contemporary vampire craze from a feminist perspective.
Her inaugural post for GwP, an offering under Heather’s GLOBAL MAMA column titled “The Mommy Myth that Will Not Die,” sparked a superlively conversation here, which I urge you to check out!
Welcome, Natalie! We’re so excited–and so lucky– to have you as part of the team!
Welcome back to guest poster Natalie Wilson—whose new column, Pop Goes Feminism, starts tomorrow!
It’s not about hating men, it’s about helping Haitian women
If one can wrangle any positive shards from the rubble that now pervades Haiti’s landscape, I would say that it would be the tremendous outpouring of concern and aid. Unfortunately, such concern tends to fade and aid donations shrivel once the media moves on to its next story.
Once the Haiti earthquake is merely a blip on the mental desktop of most Americans (like Hurricane Katrina before it), the situation for the majority of Haitians will not have changed for the better. Rather, especially for women and children, the situation is likely to be even worse than it was before. This is why some organizations are targeting their aid at women and children.
As reported by Tracy Clark-Flory, the “women and children” first aid model some organizations are taking makes sense due to the fact that women and children “are typically the ones most vulnerable in the wake of a catastrophe.”
Before the earthquake, Haitian women were already dealing with extreme poverty, lack of adequate healthcare, high rates of HIV/AIDS, and huge infant and maternal mortality rates. They live in a country that only made a rape a criminal offence in 2005, where at least 50% of women living in the poorer areas of Port-au-Prince have been raped. Haiti also has a serious child trafficking problem and huge numbers of girls working as domestic servants.
The global mamas of Haiti, as detailed by the International Childcare organization, “must cope with the fact that one in eight Haitian children never live to see their fifth birthday due to infectious disease, pregnancy-related complications, and delivery-related complications. In Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, many parents cannot afford to send their children to school, give them proper medical care, or even guarantee that their children will have safe drinking water.”
For all of these reasons, Haiti needs what Lucinda Marshall calls “Gender-Responsive Aid.” As she notes, “there are needs that are specific to women, particularly for pregnant women and mothers with new babies and the need to address the added vulnerability to violence that women face when government infrastructures are dysfunctional.” Yifat Susskind of MADRE explains that disasters are often followed by a rise in gender-based violence: “When men deal with very, very difficult stresses, one of their outlets is violence against women.”
In addition to the tendency for increased violence against women in the aftermath of a disaster (as also noted here), women are already economically disadvantaged in Haiti (due in large part to what is commonly known as the feminization of poverty). As noted by MADRE,
“…women are often hardest hit when disaster strikes because they were at a deficit even before the catastrophe. In Haiti, and in every country, women are the poorest and often have no safety net, leaving them most exposed to violence, homelessness and hunger in the wake of disasters.
Because of their role as caretakers and because of the discrimination they face, women have a disproportionate need for assistance. Yet, they are often overlooked in large-scale aid operations. In the chaos that follows disasters, aid too often reaches those who yell the loudest or push their way to the front of the line. When aid is distributed through the “head of household” approach, women-headed families may not even be recognized, and women within male-headed families may be marginalized when aid is controlled by male relatives.”
To make matters even worse, when the earthquake hit, Haiti’s Ministry of Women was holding a meeting—and nearly everyone there was killed or injured. (For the full story, see here). The loss of these women’s rights leaders is a severe blow to relief efforts throughout the entire country.
Despite all the reasons for gender-responsive aid, some have equated this approach with misandry—as in this article. Such spurious claims miss the point entirely and fail to recognize that gender-responsive aid benefits everyone, not just women. Gender-responsive aid isn’t about hating men, it’s about recognizing a gendered response to this disaster is necessary.
I am truly, truly happy again for the first time in years. Back where I should be, where everything about my body feels right. Running, running, and running some more.
Apparently, I’m not alone in this, and in the United States (as well as worldwide), we are experiencing another running boom. The first was in the 1970s, when people took to the roads in large numbers for the first time, and they are running in much larger numbers today. In 2008, 425,000 people finished a marathon, and marathons have become big business—travel destinations, boons for the economies of the cities and towns that host them. Participation is up from 25,000 people who finished a marathon in 1976:
Year Estimated U.S. Marathon Finisher Total
1976 25,000
1980 143,000
1990 224,000
1995 293,000
2000 353,000
2004 386,000
2005 395,000
2006 410,000
2007 412,000
2008 425,000 (record total) http://www.runningusa.org/node/16414
And that’s just the marathon—half marathons, 10Ks and 5Ks attract hundreds of thousands of others. So why a running boom, why now? I’ve got some ideas about this I’ll explore in future posts, along with the debate about how slow is too slow for a marathon time and whether the marathon should be primarily a competitive or participatory event. For a recent article exploring this issue, see the New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/sports/23marathon.html. This debate is part of a long history of such debates in the United States, whose sport governing bodies and sport educators have been divided on the question since the early twentieth century. Gender, and a claimed divide between male and female athletes, has been a major part of this debate—men are associated with the competitive model of sport, women with the participatory. This divide persists to some extent to this day, and I will be exploring the implications of this, along with the question of why certain sports are popular at certain times, and how this influences our body ideals. I’ll talk a bit about my own training, too, and its relation to my own ideas and feeling about bodies and gender.
My background: when I was younger, I was fast. I held the Arizona high school state record in the 1600 meters for 17 years http://az.milesplit.us/pages/Arizona_Track_and_Field_All_Time. I went to the University of Arizona on a track and cross-country scholarship, where I was competitive my freshman year, but so overtrained, injured, and burned out by my sophomore year I was ordered by my doctor to stop. I stopped competing, kept running on my own, but more slowly, and took up weight training, progressing over the years to competitive power lifting and specializing in the bench press, where I was ranked 11th in the U.S. in my weight class for a lift of 235. My body, as you might imagine, was completely transformed, from a skinny, slightly muscular 120 pounds to a dense, extremely muscular 150 pounds.
I’ve written about this elsewhere, but what I haven’t written was how unnatural it felt to be like that, what a Frankenstein’s monster I experienced that body to be. At one point I was so stiff I couldn’t turn my head to the side, and it hurt so much to run and I had to do it so slowly that I stopped altogether. When I discovered that the closest I could come to touching my toes was to barely touch the tops of my knees, I knew I had to do something about this and took up ashtanga yoga—an intense, demanding form of practice that follows the same forms each time and takes anywhere from ninety minutes to two hours to complete: http://www.kpjayi.org/ Ashtanga changed my morphology again, and after six years I was down to 135 and the creaking cement that had been my chest and shoulders was finally starting to crack.
Then came the mid-life crisis moment, for me the occasion of my 45th birthday last September. In July I decided that I was tired of worrying about aging and the wrinkles on my face, and I was going to do something about it. In the (il)logic of my world, this meant dropping back down to my college weight and body fat percentage (120 pounds and 12 percent), and I bought one of those diet and exercise journals where you record each calorie you ingest and each you burn, along with the relative percentage of carbohydrates to proteins and fats. That did it, and by my birthday I was down to 123 and 11.7 percent. So I’m giving myself a break on that last three pounds.
What I didn’t expect was that at this lighter weight, running felt good again. I started back slowly at first, running only once a week, a six miler on Sundays. By August I’d added some track work, and by November was up to a ten miler on Mondays, a six miler on Fridays, and at least four miles on each of two other days, meanwhile maintaining my ashtanga practice. By December, I’d gotten a Polar heart rate monitor, and was completely, utterly hooked, back in the that running world I’d lived in from 1979-1983, except with a lot more technology attached. With a HRM you can measure not only your heart rate, distance and calories, but your speed, cadence, altitude changes, and pretty much anything else you might like to know. By January, I’d signed up for a marathon in June, another in October that is 26.2 miles straight up hill the entire way and climbs 6,000 feet, and had started to look forward to my runs the way you look forward to whatever activity it is that you love the most, at home in my body in a way I’d never been. Insane by most standards of sanity, clearly.
What are the implications of this changing body, changing activity slate, changing mind? For me, for you? How is the way we experience our bodies in physical activity a function of gender? What are your current physical training regimes, your backgrounds? I will explore these issues in future posts, and welcome your comments on any of these issues.
If in NYC, join me at this year’s Memoir-a-thon sponsored by Brooklyn Reading Works! It’s the first time I’ll be reading with my hubby, graphic designer/writer Marco Acevedo. Deets:
Memoirathon at The Old Stone House (Third Street & Fifth Avenue in Park Slope), Feb 11 @ 8pm
And a note from the organizers about this year’s theme:
A lot of New Yorkers have their own recession story to tell, whether it’s from the past year, the past decade or the accumulation of a lifetime.
During this year’s Memoir-a-thon, you will get to listen to the personal reflections and insights on how some writers have managed to survive, preserve their sanity and even have fun during hard times.
You’ll be amazed to discover just how resilient and resourceful people can be, while still managing to find humor, cause for reflection and even gratitude, in some of life’s most challenging situations.
Whether you found the past year “the year you’d like to forget” or “the year of positive thinking”, you will be inspired and entertained by tonight’s lineup of writers who talk about infinitely new ways of being.
Lori Rotskoff (of “Beyond Pink and Blue” fame!) has come over for a visit and work session today and we are sitting here digging up treasures like this — just had to share:
Yep, that’s Michael Jackson. As Lori’s 8 year old son said to her after seeing this, “I guess Michael didn’t learn the message of the song.”
Calling all girls studies scholars and advocates for the National Women’s Studies Association 2010 conference in Denver, Colorado. The Call for Proposals specifically invites folks doing work on girls (and many other areas–see the Call for full details) to submit proposals.
DIFFICULT DIALOGUES II
November 11-14, 2010 Denver, CO
Proposal Submission Deadline: March 1, 2010
Program Co-Chairs: Beverly Guy-Sheftall, NWSA President and Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies, Spelman College and Vivian M. May, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies, Syracuse University
About the Theme
In response to wide demand, NWSA 2010 builds on conversations that began in Atlanta at the 2009 conference. Difficult Dialogues II will explore a range of concepts and issues that remain under theorized and under examined in the field of women’s studies.
NWSA 2010 identifies several thematic areas in which ongoing and new difficult dialogues are urgently needed:
Hope to see you there!
