Global Crisis

One definition of feminism: A critique of the gendered nature of power in a given society and a series

Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa  in 'Mad Max: Fury Road' (2015). She holds a rifle and is in front of an armored truck. Courtesy of Warner Brothers Pictures

of actions stemming from that critique.

In Mad Max Fury Road, as I wrote about in my new review from Vice, those actions involve writing "We are not things" on the harem floor and escaping in a WAR MACHINE with Imperator Furiosa to try and reach the Green Land.

Let's just say that the escape does not go smoothly.

This was my first feature movie review. I actually went to a theater and sat in a room mostly filled with other critics, most of whom knew each other. I, being gregarious, introduced myself to a man who turned out to be Brian Tallarico, editor of Rogerebert.com. While my piece is an essay about feminism and movie history, he's written a great proper review for you to read. 4 out of 4 stars, so you can see he liked it too.

Mad Max is iconic, despite the failings of the third movie. My friend Sean, who is a bit older than me, saw the first two movies repeatedly as a teenager. He wrote me, "Our generation had the horror of Cold War gone wrong put squarely in front of us. Upbeat David Bowie videos had mushroom clouds in them, vigilantes were frequent TV heros, and Max Rockatansky showed us what life in the new world was going to be like."

It generated a huge wave of future nostalgia. Even now, there is a Society For Creative Anachronism-like group that gathers on Wasteland Weekend, recreating a future that hasn't happened yet, souping up cars, making costumes, and presumably consuming two-headed lizards for sustenance.

And now, we have a movie that at its core contains all the great elements of the first two Mad Max films - motion, cars, chrome, costumes, horror, death, disease, and hope. And there's a literal patriarchy (Immortan Joe and his sons) that needs to be smashed.

We are not things, say the women, and they prove their agency by what follows.

A SMALL SPOILER FOR MAD MAX 4 FOLLOWS. IT'S NOT A BIG DEAL AS IT'S SOMETHING THAT DOESN'T HAPPEN

John Scalzi once wrote an essay about Ellen Ripley. Sadly, the essay is down, but over at his blog, he writes, [Note - Scalzi sent me the correct link to his essay and I fixed it here] "I talk about who is the best female science fiction film character in history (you should be able to guess from the picture and headline) and why that’s actually a problem for science fiction film — not for the character herself, but what it means for the genre."

UPDATE - Scalzi also sent me a link to this piece on Ripley "paving the way" for later heros.

No.

No no no no no.

Also no.

According to a piece in The Telegraph (a right-wing British newspaper. Do Not Link used here), here's how to fight body image issues among girls:  A doctor and author says teachers should ask boys to tell girls what boys find attractive. Then girls will realize that boys like girls with some fat, because of evolution and child breeding. And all the girls who fit within those new standards of beauty will feel great.

1. It is true that people find many body types attractive and that the single-type of female beauty betrayed [Edit - I meant portrayal. I'm leaving this Freudian slip in] is not the sum total of "what is attractive."

2. This is a terrible idea.

Here's the key quote:

To fight a “neurosis” amongst school girls on body fat, teachers should get boys to tell girls what they find attractive, including other qualities beyond pure looks, said Aric Sigman, author of “The Body Wars: why body dissatisfaction is at epidemic proportions”.

He said it was important that teachers picked boys from an older year group because girls look up to them and they are not direct peers so it would be easier to talk about body image issues.

“It would be helpful for them to explain that what they find attractive is not just physical qualities but also qualities like caring, the sound of a girl’s voice and her body language.

Science stuff follows.

This is fine in a way, except that it reinforces the patriarchal notion that what girls should be concerned about is to what extent they are or are not attractive to boys. Attractiveness remains the key arbiter of personal worth.

Instead, the way to fight body image issues is to de-legitimize the male gaze as the arbiter of what is and is not "good."

The notion that a girls' body exists to be attractive starts very young, the minute we call a girl baby pretty and put a pink hat on her (while the strong boy gets a blue one). I wrote about this issue when she was in pre-school, almost two years ago, on the occasion of her winning a "best dressed" award.

The other day, then, I arrived at after-school to find my daughter in a big loose school t-shirt because her pants were a little saggy. The teacher said that she "didn't want Ellie to fell uncomfortable." I guarantee you that Ellie didn't feel uncomfortable until the teacher told her that having too much of her body showing was something to feel uncomfortable about. My daughter is five. She does need to learn about privacy, but making her feel ashamed of part of her body being visible is not the way (in this case, the issue is two-fold: She doesn't have enough of a butt to hold up pants, and the tie had become snagged and wasn't re-tying).

I asked them, very politely, to let me know if there was a problem with her clothes and not to intervene directly in that way again, and discussed body shaming. And you know what, her feminist teachers were probably very upset, because they don't see the way they replicate patriarchal culture through these kinds of little micro-aggressions.

And we, of course, went out to buy more pants with better elastic waistbands.

Micro-aggressions matter. They build up over time, in tiny ways. I find the particular stresses of raising a girl in our culture to be very tiring, but I try to push back against the grain and hope it helps.

CS: I would urge people, especially young women, to check out the local laws in your state for cyber-bullying because I think a lot of times crimes are being committed and people don’t know.

So Curt Schilling, baseball hero, conservative activist, and failed video-game designer, discovered internet misogyny recently when awful sexual comments were directed at his daughter. He first applied a typical patriarchal response, which is to threaten to have them killed, but then decided to use internet shaming instead.

As he details here in his own post, "The World We Live in Man It Has Changed" (more on that title in a second) and in this interview (and elsewhere), he tracked down who some of these people were, where they went to school and worked, and applied his celebrity to getting them fired or expelled. Win one for the good guys?

The world can be a pretty lousy place, and every so often a conservative like Schilling encounters hate in a way that makes it impossible to blame on welfare, or Obama, or reverse racism, or whatever. Here, directed at his daughter, Schilling had a clear target and used the tools at his disposal to exact revenge.

There are issues here - the defense of the white daughter by the powerful father plays deeply into purity culture, but overall good job. I hope Schilling sticks with this issue, and extends his support to women who aren't athletes, who aren't white, who aren't poor, who aren't Republicans.

Here are my questions for Mr. Schilling:

1. Will he now become an anti-GamerGate activist? To my knowledge, despite being in the industry, he said nothing before this last week, with silence speaking volumes.

2. He says use law enforcement, but Brianna Wu (who praised Schilling) has documented how ineffectual law enforcement has been. Wu, at PAX this weekend, pointed out that Schilling used celebrity to shame people, rather than relying on law enforcement. But since we aren't all famous sports heroes, we need universally accessible law enforcement solutions. Will Schilling advocate for other people?

3. Will he extrapolate from this experience to think about broader consequences of misogyny, patriarchy, the sexualization of woman, and rape culture?

My guess is no, maybe, and no, but I'm prepared to be surprised.

What really interests me is the failure of conservative empathy - the ability to try to think hard the experiences of others, to empathize, and to work broadly for change - not just change that benefits you and yours. Every so often, conservatives encounter something in their family that they can't ignore: harassment as happened to Gabby Schilling makes her dad fight internet misogyny. Will Schilling, then, generalize to think about patriarchy and misogyny? Will he fight for equal pay? Equal rights? Transgender rights? Anti-discrimination laws? Sexual abuse of homosexuals. And so forth - will he follow the path from his single experience as Gabby's father to seeing the general pattern and work to correct it?

Signs point to no. Here are two other examples:

When Rob Portman's (Republican Senator from Ohio) son came out as gay, a few years later, Portman began to support gay marriage rights. But has he extrapolated from that to other kinds of discrimination? To other kinds of rights? To using the power of government to fight discrimination? Not to my knowledge - Portman has shifted his views to the extent that it benefits his son and no further. There's no bigger result that would emerge from deeper empathy.

Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (Republican rep from Washington State) has a son with Down syndrome. I've spoken to her press secretary a lot and to other people who know her, liberals and conservatives alike, and I knot that McMorris-Rodgers is genuinely driven to use the government to make this country a better place for her son Cole - and my son Nico too. But she's still voting against universal healthcare. She's still part of a Republican congress that is trying to defund SSDI, under the guise of "good poor vs bad poor," and "good disabled vs bad disabled."

There's no generalization of principles or application of empathy, because to do so would threaten a core epistemology. You'd become a social justice warrior. You'd become a liberal.

So I'm happy Schilling is protecting his daughter. If it moves the needle in terms of online harassment just a little, that will be a good thing. But 1) What took him so long? and 2) How far will he go with his newfound realization?

I suspect not very far, because as you see from the top, he's unaware of how deeply his many privileges inform this successful response. Because when women, especially women of color, go to law enforcement or to the press or to companies employing harassers, they DO NOT get the kind of respect that he gets. And tomorrow, when he's forgotten this issue, the harassment will continue.

Open a new browser window and do an image search for boys. Here's what I got.




All but two images in the first four rows are, in fact, boys (there are two adult male actors in row three).

Now do the same thing for the word "girls."


It's breasts and butts and lace and sexualized poses. Around image 40 or 50 you start to get the occasional actual child (from girl clothing ads), but as far as I scroll down, it continues to be mostly sexualized images of adult women.

Now there are plenty of other issues here in terms of race and body type and so forth, but right now I just to focus on the gender and age issue. 

I spend a lot of time writing and being concerned by the constant sexualization of girls throughout their whole lives, in fact even before they are born. I call it cradle-to-grave sexism.  Every time someone makes a "better get a shotgun" to an expectant father of a girl, it reinforces the idea that the whole job of the father is to control his daughter's sexuality. Every flirty doll intended for children. Every shirt about dating or getting money from daddy or otherwise linking sexist perceptions of adult behavior to children. Every "sexy" Halloween costume for girls. It's endless. here's the word "girls" itself. There are no girls. There's no room for a girl to just be a child.

And here we see that even the word "girl" has been locked within this sexualized framework. Even the word!

And unlike when there's some sexist product we can fight or boycott or protest, I have no idea what to do here. This is not Google's fault, but rather the aggregation of use and links and imagery flung up on the page. I have no solutions today.

[Note: This post was inspired by a friend, J., who was talking about gender pronouns with her daughters, and thought Google might help. Google instead showed this].

COLLEEN McCullough, Australia’s best selling author, was a charmer. Plain of feature, and certainly overweight, she was, nevertheless, a woman of wit and warmth. In one interview, she said: “I’ve never been into clothes or figure and the interesting thing is I never had any trouble attracting men.”

The writer began the obituary by saying, basically, that she was unattractive and fat, but men still wanted to have sex with her and she was fun to be around.

This is, of course, sexist - it suggests that the first judgment of a woman must be to what extent she was or was not attractive to men.

We've been through this before. It reminded me (and no doubt many others), of the New York Times obituary of Yvonne Brill, rocket scientist. It began (it has since been edited, but the public editor commented here):

She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said.
But Yvonne Brill, who died on Wednesday at 88 in Princeton, N.J., was also a brilliant rocket scientist who in the early 1970s invented a propulsion system to keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits.

Here it's not to what extent did people want to have sex with her in general, but her maternal skills in the kitchen and child-rearing.

I wrote about Brill a few years ago when I put together a piece for CNN on the sexism my daughter was encountering as a four-year old. I wrote:

When the rocket scientist Yvonne Brill died in March,The New York Times celebrated her as the maker of a "mean beef stroganoff" and "the world's best mother." When my 4-year-old daughter, Ellie, a wildly creative and interesting girl, finished a year of preschool last week, her teachers gave her an award for being the best dressed.

This is cradle-to-the-grave sexism, always judging women by their appearance and the extent to which they do or do not conform to the gender roles assigned them by patriarchal norms. No accomplishment is as important as whether they were attractive. And read this explanation by the Times' obituary editor on Brill.

“I’m surprised,” he said. “It never occurred to us that this would be read as sexist.” He said it was important for obituaries to put people in the context of their time and that this well-written obituary did that effectively. He also observed that the references in the first paragraph to cooking and being a mother served as an effective setup for the “aha” of the second paragraph, which revealed that Mrs. Brill was an important scientist.

And the writer himself:

The writer, Douglas Martin, described himself as “just so full of admiration for this woman, in all respects.”
“I was totally captivated by her story,” he said, and he looked for a way to tell it in as interesting a way as possible. The negative reaction is unwarranted, he said — a result of people who didn’t read the obituary fully but reacted only to what they saw on Twitter about the opening paragraph.
It hasn’t changed his mind about how he wrote it: “I wouldn’t do anything differently.”

For these two male writers (I'm guessing white male, but I don't know them), the backlash was a surprise and unwarranted. They just wanted a good, "aha!" That, too, is a bow to patriarchy. Mother AND rocket scientist, aha! You never saw that coming, as most scientists are terrible mothers, and vice versa (the article suggests). The use of the surprise there reinforces the idea that such achievements are unusual.

Blank Gravestone. Blah.

Language matters. Internet writers are having one of those interminable debates in which successful white male writers say that telling them that language matters is really mean and fundamentally useless anyway, while tone policing feminist discourse down to silence. I'd refer them back to "how to be an ally," but I think step 1) Listen, is not really in their wheelhouse.

So instead we look at these obituaries. Fabulous, successful, women who cannot be remembered except through the context of patriarchal gender roles.

Yesterday, a video on catcalling went viral. Today, Hanna Rosin at Slate wrote a piece on how the editor edited out the white guys, making it a long string of black and Latino men harassing a white woman.

The video is a collaboration between Hollaback!, an anti-street harassment organization, and the marketing agency Rob Bliss Creative. At the end they claim the woman experienced 100 plus incidents of harassment “involving people of all backgrounds.” Since that obviously doesn’t show up in the video, Bliss addressed it in a post. He wrote, “we got a fair amount of white guys, but for whatever reason, a lot of what they said was in passing, or off camera” or was ruined by a siren or other noise. The final product, he writes, “is not a perfect representation of everything that happened.” 

I see this a lot. I hear it from the "Oh, I'm a humanist, not a feminist crowd." I hear it from the "I don't see race, just humans, crowd." I hear it from the "We need equality, not special treatment or affirmative action, just equality" crowd.

Such positions deny the inherent power dynamics at play in society.  Only those who are dominant can afford to be blind to them. Only those who are dominant can afford to shrug off editing out all the white guys and saying - well, what matters is the message about street harassment.

This video enables all the men who harass women in other ways to look at this and to feel smugly superior. It enables the cry, "Not all men," when the answer is Yes, all men.

All men. I am a feminist. I define feminism as a critique of the gendered power dynamics that govern our societies and then commitment to actions based on that critique. But I am not perfect. I am raised in a sexist culture. I am steeped in sexist media and messages. And sometimes, I do something sexist. Maybe I turn to look at a woman walking by. Maybe I don't intervene when "the guys" are chatting about a woman in a social space. Maybe I act in sexist ways in which I am not even aware.

I try to own it, to think hard about my actions, and to apologize if appropriate (often, the apology becomes another form of microaggression). I try to be intentional and aware and to do better, acknowledging the problems and the challenges.

That's why this video, though effective, may do more harm than good. Through editing, surely not intentionally, it suggests that street harassment is not a white-guy problem. Intentional doesn't matter. Only results count.

I write a lot about privilege and I have a lot of privilege. I've long argued that it's important to be very thoughtful when writing about academic labor while tenured, gender while male, race while white, disability while able-bodied, and so forth.

When writing about a given power dynamic, I often have the power by virtue of my race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, etc. And yet, I really do want to engage on these important issues. What to do?

My response was to come up with some guidelines, writing first about gender (my rules for male feminist discourse) then academic privilege. In the wake of #UCSB, I've been watching men talk, even men who take the label of feminist, perhaps especially men who call themselves feminists, who could really use these rules.

For example, here are two posts on Charles Clymer, who has said some amazingly offensive things in pursuit of his perfect male feminism. Some of the issues here aren't new, but they have re-emerged in recent days. Here's one particularly telling quote:

"Stephanie, I'm going to let you in on a little secret that, apparently, no one has had the guts to tell you up to this point in your life: having a vagina does not grant you magical powers of perception and nuance anymore than my penis magically blinds me from the horrors of the world.

This may, I guess, have some truth in it. Our genitalia does not necessarily determine our degree of knowledge. And yet, our gender identity does position us on various power spectra that come into play here.

So for Mr. Clymer and anyone else who need it, it feels like it might be a good time to revisit my rules, with a few revisions.

1. Don't talk at all. Listen for awhile. 
2. It's not about you (it's about the people with less privilege)
3. It's sometimes about you (i.e. it's very important that men talk to men about rape)
4. It's always about them, so amplify their voices.
5. When you speak, don't expect gratitude and take criticism graciously.