Monday, March 23, 2009 - Posts
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Sometimes events occur that make me feel as though I live in a nation of strangers. My fellow citizens plunking down $24.8 million to see a Nicolas Cage movie (Def: A crummy action thriller in which the willfully hackish actor sports a thinning helmet of strange hair while simultaneously saving the world and confounding viewers who remember When Peggy Sue Got Married, Leaving Las Vegas, or even The Rock) is such an event. But that's exactly what happened this weekend when Cage's "the time capsule predicts the future!" thriller Knowing took the top spot at the box office, ahead of brotastic bromance I Love You, Man and Julia Robert's Duplicity. (Are we bummed that Newsweek guy turned out to be right or what?)
This is not the first time an obviously execrable Nicolas Cage movie has opened big (See National Treasure and National Treasure: Book of Secrets), so his success cannot be blamed entirely on the economy, which has been boosting Americans' already endless patience for shlocky films. No, some moviegoers must still really like this guy. I don't get it. He gives me the creeps. Not just minor that-person-keeps-giving-me-weird-looks creeps, but an Oh-lord-I-think-that's-half-a-cockroach-in-my-grilled-cheese creeps. In other words, Mega Creeps.
Cage, a once-serious, seriously weird, Oscar-winning thespian last gave acting the old college try in 2002's Adaptation and has since made much progress crafting a B-movie résumé Bruce Campbell would be proud of. What happened? His transformation, from caring about what he does to so obviously not caring about what he does, plus additional oddities like the hair and the fact that he named his son Kal El (Superman's birth name), adds up to a persona I find freaky and unsettling even while it's saving the world in escapist action movies. But, hey, $24.8 million don't have these same qualms. Can someone please explain?
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Emily and Jessica,
I was very interested in reading Sandra O'Connor's interview in the New York Times Magazine, and I wish she had elaborated more on why she doesn't call herself a feminist. I've never been comfortable identifying as a feminist, but neither do I like the implication that I'm anti-feminist. To me, abortion has always been something of a litmus-test on that front. If being anti-abortion means I can't be part of the club, well, so be it.
But it goes beyond that. Sure, I want women to have equal pay and equal access to education and jobs, and protection from violence and domestic abuse. Yet I still end up with the nagging feeling that feminists talk about women having more opportunities and choices available to them, but are mostly supportive only of those who make the "right" choices—having a career, for example—or focus on the right priorities. (I get a hint of this from Jessica's post, when she says that the pro-life movement and even the cardio-striptease phenomenon have "co-opted the language of empowerment and feminism.") The quest for universal day care, for example, ignores the fact that providing such programs for working families will doubtlessly punish with a higher tax burden those single-income families in which women have chosen to stay at home to raise the kids.
That does not mean I feel a need to be recruited or won over by a cadre of well-meaning feminists who want me to change my mind about how I identify myself. I'm quite content to live in not-quite-a-feminist limbo. So, Emily, to answer your question, maybe it doesn't matter.
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Emily, I've been mulling over your question all morning: Does it matter that Sandra Day O'Connor won't call herself a feminist? My gut instinct is that actions speak louder than words, and as a feminist I would vastly prefer better work policies for women than widespread embrace of the term. But I suspect that O'Connor's reticence to self-identify as a feminist is for different reasons than later generations' reaction to the word.
Though you say that Sarah Palin doesn't call herself a feminist, she actually flip-flopped on the matter: She initially called herself a feminist to Katie Couric but refused to label herself when interviewed by Brian Williams. She's even a member of a organization called Feminists for Life. I suspect that deep down, Sarah Palin does think of herself as a feminist, and that's precisely why I think women of later generations may be uncomfortable with the term: Its meaning has become completely muddled.
So many things have co-opted the language of empowerment and feminism—from the pro-life movement to cardio striptease classes—I wonder if women of generations X and Y are afraid to call themselves feminist because that self-definition is more confusing than illuminating. Sandra Day O'Connor may have been defining herself in opposition to the bra burners, but today's young women don't have such a clear-cut foil.
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Hanna and Dayo: Ouch. Imagine if Michelle Obama had been caught breaking ground on her victory garden in her mommy jeans and a plaid shirt. “What a Hag!” the headlines would read. “E-I-E-I-No!” She couldn't show arms. She couldn't wear pearls. So she opted to do what all women do when they have no good fashion choices: She wore plain, skinny, well-fitting black clothes and hoped her wardrobe would fade out behind the 23 fifth graders from Bancroft Elementary School with their shovels and wheelbarrows and puffy coats. No such luck.
The Obama crop isn’t just slated to “delicately garnish the plates of dignitaries.” The plan is to send produce along to Miriam’s Kitchen, a local soup kitchen. This is a nice small lesson in stewardship and compassion that’s been spun as elitist and anti-feminist and inauthentic and out-of-touch because that’s how we talk about nice small gestures. Maybe there really is nothing to wear for those occasions on which one can do nothing right.
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Asked if she calls herself a feminist, Sandra Day O'Connor demurred to Deborah Solomon in the New York Times Magazine this weekend. That shouldn't surprise me—O'Connor is a rock-ribbed, ranch-girl Republican, even if she drove the right wing of her party crazy when she was on the bench. Still, her disavowal struck me as one of the more drily amusing examples of women who are pioneering, ball-busting feminist icons but not feminists. Maggie Thatcher comes to mind. Who else—Sarah Palin?
You could try to dismiss SOC's declining of the label as a generational tic brought on by the reflexive (though false) image of bra burning. But it's more likely that Justice O'Connor, ever timely, is giving voice to an enduring reluctance among moderates and conservatives to identify with the political movement to increase opportunities and equity for women, even if that's what their life's work, in fact, stands for. Is this just a tic, nonetheless—actions speak louder than words—or does it matter?
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Hanna, I agree in part with your assessment of the nation’s general judginess when it comes to feminism and FLOTUS fashion—but think it’s totally valid to critique Michelle Obama’s choice of attire when it comes to planting what’s essentially a victory garden for the nation.
In black boots, a black sweater, and the obligatorily cinched waist, Obama looked great, but absolutely unfit for the task at hand. I know plenty of women (myself included) who would rather wear a cute outfit than dungarees, especially when there are cameras around—but the posh outfit seemed only to underscore the posh surroundings and the sense that this vegetable garden was more photo op than a testament to the FLOTUS’ farming fetish.
Herbs from this garden will delicately garnish the plates of dignitaries and assorted diners at the White House. Maybe some of that lettuce will make it into the first daughters’ sandwiches. But this ain’t subsistence farming (see this intriguing NYT video essay for what a real victory garden looks like). So was the outfit a) a calculated middle finger to mores that expect a woman to have a green thumb? b) A naked push to look fab for history? Or, perhaps c) a glimpse of Obama as a model in her own public service ad campaign—dressed to the nines, as we expect mannequins to be—but selling a product she would never use? Maybe all three, but c) is anything but revolutionary.
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I've been in Britain for a week now and really should be accustomed to the idiosyncratic standards of the mainstream U.K. press, but nevertheless I was surprised to wake up Sunday morning to hear the announcement of reality-TV star Jade Goody's death lead the BBC newscast. (This on Radio 4, the Beeb's flagship "intelligent speech" channel.) A Monday-morning trip to the corner newsagent confirms that Goody has received the full Princess Diana treatment—Stephen Fry, whose connection to Goody seems to have been appearing on a chat show with her "a year or so back" provided a very convenient sound bite, calling her "a kind of Princess Diana from the wrong side of the tracks." All the tabloids devote their covers to the "news" of Goody's death, as do several of the broadsheets. (The Times relegated Goody to a small reefer in the margin of its front page, but it stuck with the prevailing mood of ghoulishness by splashing a photograph of Sylvia Plath with her baby son Nicholas under the headline "Sylvia Plath's Son Commits Suicide.")
Although I grew up in a tabloid-reading British home, I'm shocked by the papers every time I come back here. The red-top tabs now seem to be pretty much devoid of news, with 95 percent of the paper devoted to stories about reality-show contestants, members of third-rate singing groups, and footballers' wives. And as the Goody treatment shows, the broadsheets are by no means immune. (Lest you dismiss the tabs as marginal nonsense, remember that the combined circulation of Britain's five "quality papers" is less than that of the Sun, the most popular tabloid.)
What seems weird, though, is that almost all the tabloid targets are female. Perhaps it's an odd corollary to the children's book phenomenon in which girls will read about boys, but boys won't read about girls: Male tabloid readers will happily flip through pages of fluff about pretty young female celebs, as will women readers, but readers with Y chromosomes won't hand over 30p for a paper full of stories about celebrity studs.
Of course, the American press isn't altogether immune, either. I notice that the New York Times has done more stories on Jade Goody than it has on Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, the party that won 62 seats in the 2005 British election.
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