The Old School Lunch

What irritates me the most about anyone who criticizes women’s fighting (whether that’s boxing of MMA) is the “I love women too much” line of thinking. They say that even though women can fight, we as men just don’t want to see our baby’s momma get mangled (or mangle someone else) in the ring. This sort of baloney chivalry is a complete bag of crap because if men really didn’t want to see women physically beaten to shit day in day out, they’d say something about the rates of men’s violence against women. They’d go all Michael Vick on athletes who beat their wives, not their dogs. They’d beat the shit out of men who rape women. They’d raise awareness to the rates of sexual assault in high school. But do they? If they are, I don’t hear about it.

Gina Carano crushes the nail on the head when she (to paraphrase) says that men can’t have fighting as a gender. If fighting is to be seen as a vocation, a lifestyle, how do you designate that solely to men? Men have been trying to “own” and place their completely bogus stamp on every vocation that is of any worth to people. Men don’t want to be seen as cooks, as women are seen, but they’ll be seen as high paying chefs to the stars. Men don’t want to be seen as teachers, like the elementary school teachers stereotyped as babysitters but they’ll take the high paying, illustrious professor jobs. Men don’t want to be seen as nurses, only doctors, men don’t want to be seen as maids, only janitors, the list goes on and on. The point is this is both a cultural gender stereotype thing and also a money thing. There’s big, growing and young money in MMA and when men say they don’t want women involved (like men’s golf tours, where the biggest paychecks are) it’s another way to disenfranchise women and put them at an economic disadvantage.

If you start to hear men complain and attack women’s fighting, what you’re really hearing is men fearing that they won’t be the high draw with the biggest purse.

I have almost my entire music collection on my iPod and when at the gym, unless I make a playlist I put the thing on shuffle. Sometimes instead of skipping to tracks I want to listen to, I just listen to whatever comes on.

One song was Jermaine Dupri’s “Coming Home With Me” which I remember being huge when I was in high school. I’ve listened to this song hundreds of times but some of the lyrics only struck me at that moment.

The general plotline of the song (rap songs have plotlines?) is that JD, being the popular dude that he is, is at a club and he meets a woman there. They return to his place and he proceeds to tell her a few things first before they have sex, which he admittedly videotapes. Then, because he’s JD, he says right when he’s done he’s going back to the club to get another woman in the sack. Another rapper has some lines but it’s just stupid shit (not that JD’s isn’t) so I won’t go into it.

Now first let’s look at the chorus:

Now if I buy you a drink and you drink it up
Then, uh, you goin’ home with me (and all my niggas say)
And if you talkin’ at a party and we talk too much
Then, uh, we goin’ home with me
Now if you came with a friend that don’t wanna do my man
Then you need to give her your keys
Tell her to call you tomorrow or give you a beep
Cause tonight, you going home with me, ya heard?

There are several offensive things about this. Of course there’s the whole idea that if he’s going to lay down some dollars for a drink, that woman better lay down with him. And then there’s this whole thing of “we’re hitting it off and let’s get down to business. But wait, you can’t do shit unless your friend nails my pal over here and if she doesn’t, tell her to hit the bricks.” Now I can say this is pretty common in a lot of rap songs. Jadakiss talks about it in “Ride or Die Bitch” (which was another popular song in high-school) but there he talks about how a woman is so great because she “don’t have no problem hittin’ us all.”

But anyways, back to JD.

Now, is it because my name’s Jermaine? no
It’s all about how I kick my game, you know?
I just flow with it, spend a little dough with it
Entertain, before you know, I’m in your brain doing my thang
Tellin’ you how good you smell
Send you up for a drop top cruise through the A-T-L
Now when they tipsy, it’s risky, you don’t know what you facin’
Fuck around and end up like Anthony Mason
So I let’em know a few things before we leave
Like, “it’s true, I tapes damn near everything”
So don’t even think about lyin’, baby
Or try baby, to set me up for rape cause it’s all on tape
Where you said put the cake
How you fed me the grapes
What I did with the ice that made you shake, shake
Now when the night’s over and the girl is gone
I’m back up in the club singin’ the same damn song

My bolds there. Of course what he’s saying here is, “listen, now that i’ve got you all drunk, we’re going to have sex and i’m going to videotape it too because you women lie when you’re drunk and have sex. You cry rape because i’m famous and you think you can scam me.” So yes, seriously, this is actually spoken in a song.

All this, in a what was then a popular club song. This is, I believe, some of what people are talking about when they say “rape culture.” Agents of rape culture, songs like this, on varying levels tell folks that women lie about being raped, that women who say they’ve been raped are just after money and are drunk idiots who don’t remember the night before.

I don’t think this hurt JD’s image very much as he’s still making music. But then again, you can video tape yourself having sex with an underage girl (and then claim it was your lookalike brother) and still sell albums so I guess it’s not much of a comment.

The next song up was Kanye West’s “Stronger.” Now I love a lot of his music. I think his production did to music what Timbaland did with Aaliyah (and what he’s doing now with JT) but Mr. West also does some very dumb shit as who else would rhyme “Klondike” with “blonde dyke”?

i don’t know if you got a man or not,
if you made plans or not
god put me in the plans or not
i’m trippin’ this drink got me sayin’ a lot
but i know that god put you in front of me
so how the hell could you front on me
there’s a thousand you’s there’s only one of me
i’m trippin’ i’m caught up in the moment right?
this is louis vuitton dime night
so we gon’ do everything that kan like
heard they’d do anything for a klondike
well i’d do anything for a blonde-dike
and she’ll do anything for the limelight
and we’ll do anything when the time’s right
ugh, baby you’re makin’ it (harder, better, faster, stronger)

So the same old rap shit about how he’s such a stud and yada yada but then he manages to get in there that since he’s famous and this woman/women will do anything to get a piece of that spotlight, they’re going to have sex.

Oh wait, wait, that’s not even to mention how he thinks God himself is (at least in this story) drawing the cards so he meets this particular woman. And when he says “so how the hell can you front on me?” he’s really saying, “It was God’s plan for me to meet you so you better put out.”

Sometimes I wish he’d just zip it and not say anything like some of the other producers. Or, at the very least, just say what everyone else says and keep it to how much of a prize catch you are and how you really want this one (sometimes multiple) woman like Pharrell.

In two words, he’s right.

Other Black athletes have been saying this to varying degrees but none of them have been the darling of the public eye like Griffey. When hot-heads like Sheffield and Milton Bradley say it, people just think they’re batshit crazy. It’s like if Carmelo Anthony started talking about racism in the NBA. Nobody believes you unless you have a spotless record. And while Griffey has had his moments, for most people he’s still The Kid. Maybe it’ll get people to start talking. Will it affect change? I doubt it. We did see, after all, the Houston Astros trot out in #42s while having no Black players on their squad. Which makes the Oakland A’s seem like the UN.

She said there was no love in her heart,
Cause one day a rapist attacked her and broke that all apart,
She said there was no way to fix it or to cover her scars,
Then one day a guy came along and probably could help her start,
He was sincere, made her believe it was safe, for her to trust again,
Before long she was cool with giving hugs to him,
Knew that it was right, cause something was wrong,
The alarms in her mind didn’t tell her he didn’t belong,
There was no..

This is the first, I don’t know what you call it, stanza or something from Lupe Fiasco’s song “Intruder Alert” on his sophomore album, The Cool. I’ve listened to the whole song (and if you listen to it, the entire song is not about the above story) and i’m still not sure how I feel. It seems like women song-writers and artists talk about domestic violence and even sexual assault from time to time but you almost never hear a man go into that area. Even if this comes off as lacking some sort of authenticity, I think it’s pretty consistent to his general style of music writing. Whether he’s successful in getting his point across, is up to you. In his debut album, he talked about sex-workers, white supremacists, drug dealers and tries to get the listener to sympathize with everyone on some level. In any case, I guess it takes some guts for him to write these kinds of lyrics, include these kinds of stories on such a popular album.

Is like this.

I like Mahalo Daily and though I haven’t been watching as regularly (if you can’t tell as this episode is a bit old) I like what they cover. Veronica Belmont wont be at the helm and if this guy’s turn at the mic is any indication, it doesn’t look good.

If you don’t watch the video, i’ll summarize his douchebaggery. He’s at the Wizard World convention and he walks around interviewing folks, making jokes, etc about comic books and the like. Now if there’s one thing about comic books that’s similar to the world of video/computer games, it’s the idea that women and girls, you know, don’t belong. The story goes that women don’t read comic books nor they do write, draw or play any part in the creative process. This jackass does a good job of reinforcing that in his casual sort of way by first remarking how there are no women or girls there and when he finally stumbles upon one, he jokes that she must be lost and instead was probably looking to go to the Staples center. To cheerlead or watch the basketball game right?

Though it’s a short clip, he then manages to find some woman in a bikini so he can offer her his robe and ask if she’s cold. And that’s it. I guess I should be happy that he didn’t hound some woman there and ask her all sorts of questions about “what’s it like to be a woman comic book reader?” but maybe they just left that on the cutting room floor.

[I wrote this originally as a “test piece” for a blogging job I applied for. It’s been a while and I haven’t heard back so I’m guessing they didn’t like it. Which, with hindsight, shouldn’t be surprising because as I take a lot of shots on a so-called “progressive” cause and their blog is meant to be, in all ways, “progressive.” Anyways, here it is because writing about those 8 teens beating up that one girl is just too much to write right now.]

If there are two things that generate mass numbers of page-views and trackbacks on the internet, it’s naked women and, well, naked women using their bodies as a form of protest. A recent New York Times article on a vegan strip club in Oregon suggests that the performers there are indeed protesting against animal cruelty and promoting a vegan (or vegetarian) lifestyle (only vegetarian food is served to the largely male patrons and the performers are asked to abandon their leather chaps and feather scarves).

As their owner, Johnny Diablo, told the times, “My sole purpose in this universe is to save every possible creature from pain and suffering.” Except Diablo, shockingly enough, isn’t the one naked and dancing for singles at Casa Diablo’s Gentlemen’s Club which also happens to not be doing so well in business.

So instead of just flat out paying to objectify a woman, you can now pay to gawk at a woman while scarfing a meatless snack and knowing that she’s wearing (or not wearing) only 100% pure cotton.

But for what the vegan strip club doesn’t attract in business, it pushes the public conversation (or at least the Oregon conversation) yet again to what animal rights groups like PETA have made famous for so long. When it comes to drawing attention to animal abuse or promoting a vegan or vegetarian diet, naked female bodies draw attention and apparently it’s worth the price admission. And by “admission” I mean putting to reality the Penthouse’s idea of women.

Take, for instance, some of the most “dugg” Digg.com links regarding anything “PETA.” It should be no shock that pages like “Eva Mendez Nude PETA Campaign ad, WOW!” garner massive hits while a general image search on Google for “PETA” would have you thinking that you accidentally typed in “Playboy.”

You could say the way PETA advertises it’s message is “unusual” or even “controversial” but then again, is it? The formula: Strip women naked or nearly naked, have them parade around or sometimes sit in cages (like the animals they say are suffering) to attract attention. Sound familiar? It should. After all, it’s the male-dominated mass marketing of everything from alcohol to TV shows and popular “horror” films that wrote the book on how to use women’s bodies and the image of women in pain or captivity to sell, sell, sell.

But wait, don’t PETA’s ads also feature naked men? And don’t they also advertise in other ways? Yes, but if the debacle that is naked sushi taught us anything, it’s that having a few naked men getting spicy tuna rolls plucked off their bodies doesn’t exactly make it less degrading that so called “naked sushi models” are almost exclusively women. In other words, in the context of our culture which objectifies women like one’s salary depends on it, having men involved (sushi), trying to recruit men for the cause (general vegetarianism or veganism) or getting men to notice that the women baring it all are beautiful despite what Hollywood says (Suicide Girls), isn’t enough. And as anyone who has promoted any sort of event on any college campus will tell you, if you’re getting most attention from a bullhorn and loud music at the local square, your handing out of flyers at the southeast wing of the Sciences library doesn’t make the bullhorn (and music) any less irritating.

And until animals rights activists drop the act and not their clothes, the conversation will, unfortunately, continue to be largely about how Eva Mendes posed nude (WOW!) and not about how Eva Mendes is speaking out against cruelty to animals.

[How hard is it to be a movie critic for a newspaper? Apparently not very hard.]

North Country has been out for a while and I just got around to seeing it.

And it’s easy to see why it gets a lot of cheap attacks from movie critics because it follows Charlize Theron’s Oscar winning performance in Monster. Take this review, for example, from Portland Tribune critic Dawn Taylor:

Charlize Theron gives an admirable performance as Josey Aimes, a fictionalized version of the woman behind a pioneering class-action lawsuit that won millions of dollars for 14 women who had suffered appalling treatment on the job at a Minnesota mine. But it’s a performance that sadly flounders, because it’s wedged smack in the middle of a movie that fails horribly at telling a human story.

After leaving an abusive spouse and moving in with her parents (Richard Jenkins and Sissy Spacek), Josey is pleased to get a good, albeit grueling, union job at the mine. But as soon as she arrives, she finds that for the female workers it’s a veritable carnival of misogyny Ñ catcalls, insults, dirty words smeared in feces on the women’s locker room walls, offensive items hidden in lockers and lunchboxes.

With each successive indignity, one waits for Josey to grow a spine and fight back. And, finally, in typical American fashion, she does Ñ she quits her job in tears and then sues the company. Very empowering, that.

With the exception of some terrific work by Frances McDormand and Sean Bean as Josey’s supportive friends, every frame of “North Country” bangs you over the head with its demand that you see it as a Very Important Movie. It’s not. It’s just an overblown, overlong soap opera about a woman who never learns how to truly stand up for herself. But oh, that scent of Oscar is delicious, isn’t it?

Taylor conveniently forgets to mention the physical and sexual assault that women in the film faced. I don’t know how one forgets a pretty brutal scene in which Theron’s character is thrown to the ground and then a male mill worker lunges on top of her and then sexually assaults her, but I digress.

My biggest beef with this shit review is that Taylor says that the film is a story about “a woman who never learns to stand up for herself” because “she quits her job in tears and then sues the company. Very empowering, that.”

Again, if you actually watch the film you’ll notice that Theron’s character tells the other men to stop, talks to the supervisor about it (who immediately tells her to basically shut up), talks to the other women about banding together and talking to the “Boss” of the company and when they’re scared for their jobs and afraid of retaliation, she goes to talk to the boss herself. Again, like the supervisor, she’s told to “shut up and quit if you have a problem.” At this point, I believe, she’s physically and sexually assaulted in the aforementioned scene and then she quits. And yes, she quits in tears, which the reviewer suggests is the character just being too emotional.

Then she moves to sue the company and after some struggling with the other women and men in the company, a class action is formed.

I don’t know what the reviewer thought would be Theron’s character standing up for herself. What was she supposed to do? Take a gun and shoot the men there? Talk to the HR person there about the sexual harassment laws and workplace policies? Oh, that’s right, most of those policies weren’t there until after the class action…

Taylor is what I would call one of those folks who is so joyously cynical about people suing other people that she’s willing to call bullshit on anyone who does. Since she offers no other suggestions for “standing up” we have to assume that she seriously meant something like “blow the entire place up with a massive gas leak” or “just hurl sexist comments to men and slap them on the ass or grab their balls.” Because, you know, that will put the offending men in their place! That’ll change things!

That’s not to suggest that I think it’s pointless for women, when on the receiving end of sexist insults and comments, to say sexist insult and comments back to men. It is however, a completely bullshit “take it and if the kitchen’s too hot for you then get out” type of mentality. It also suggests that the culture men have created where that type of verbal abuse goes on is completely acceptable and, of course, normal.

On the former blog, one of my earliest and most popular posts for some reason was something I wrote about Natasha Bedingfield and specifically, a song that she had talking about how she’s single and she doesn’t have a problem with it in this cosmo/teen-vogue boyfriend=self-worth society. I know to some folks it’s cheesy/doesn’t matter as she’s a pop singer and she’s hugely successful but I’ve always liked her stuff and her new album (Pocketful of Sunshine) which was released in the US today is great as well. Say what you will but after working and talking to hundreds of young girls and boys, I know that (and I know i’m not making some startling discovery here) self-esteem is a huge issue for young girls in particular.* If our modern media systems tell young girls that basically, as Jean Kilbourne says, women shouldn’t have pores (among other disturbing things), then you can damn well bet that “the pretty girls” shouldn’t have freckles either. I know it’s a metaphor, which is why it works so well, but compared to a lot of the other crap out there, i’m glad that there’s at least someone who has consistently (and I mean consistently) been a positive female role model in music while sticking a giant middle finger to the men’s magazines that want her to pose for their covers.**

*I’ve written about this before but i’ll briefly say it here. The parents that I talk to when they tell us why they want their daughters enrolled in the program they always specifically say self-esteem. They almost never say this for boys. Do boys have problems with self-esteem? Of course they do, but it says something when it’s to the point where mothers and parents will be so specific as to say so and use thatword.

**According to her wiki, she refuses to do men’s magazines shoots. Go NB!

[One of the trailers shown before Cloverfield]

If this is supposed to be our generation’s “The Karate Kid” then we are in trouble.

I don’t like the growing popularity of Mixed Martial Arts. But on one hand, I guess that popularity takes away from the audience of WWE and TNA wrestling which is good. But WWE and TNA were/are bad because they of course emphasize the tough guise model while crafting misogynistic, homophobic and racist storylines. MMA meanwhile cuts the crap and just goes straight into fighting which is actually real. And that should worry people. Part of the large cultural worry with wrestling was kids doing backyard wrestling and killing themselves, not the overarching cultural message sent to boys and girls. When the stakes are higher and MMA is real and kids are now wanting to train to do all of these things in real life, then yes the worry about backyard MMA won’t so unfounded anymore. But it’s not as if there aren’t any media implications. There just doesn’t seem to be as much because MMA is still growing. And as it grows and advertisers and investors start to catch on, it’ll be interesting to watch if it continues to go down the boxing macho trash talk big title fight route or if the new media Don Kings of today turn MMA into some mutant form of the WWE where they realize that they can draw bigger crowds and make more money by turning it into a soap opera. In either case, I think unfortunately MMA is here to stay. Barring several athletes dying straight in the ring, I don’t see this going the way of some sports fad and for that we’re worse off.

I knew Rush Hour 3 was going to have the usual stereotypical Asian folks do this, Black folks do that jokes (”You can’t be Black, there’s a height requirement!”) but I didn’t know it was going to have an awful scene where the Chris Tucker “Carter” character goes on to berate and say how he would’ve beat a woman if she really was a man.

Spoiler Alert.

Basically, Carter is making out with this attractive woman with medium length hair (the reason for me including this detail will become relevant later) and they’re about to have sex. A fight breaks out and their party is interrupted. Later, it is revealed that a special clue is tattooed onto the head of the woman and she takes off her wig (which of course reveals that she’s nearly bald). Carter freaks out at the sight of her not having practically any hair and starts ranting about how he “kissed a frenchman.” He goes on in hysterics about he is “Brokeback Carter” even though the woman clearly says that indeed she is a woman. Carter isn’t so sure about this and asks Li (Chan) to “check the equipment” and says that if they do find male genitalia, there they’re going to “beat his ass.”

So what does this tell the young kids watching this? The young girls? Boys? That the “right” sort of gender identity looks like this? That, if you’re a girl, you better not try to shave your head or else you’ll be mistaken for being a boy and if you do ask out that boy in your math class, you might deservedly get your ass beat? That, if you’re a boy, it’s OK to police around gender conformity because girls and women have to look like this in order for you to see them as women? That it’s OK to use physical violence or the threat of physical violence to police people around?