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.

Close to home there is a coffee stand, station, hut, whatever you call it across the street from a gas station and next to some car window retailer. The coffee joint is called “Bikini Hut” and it brags that the women, err, “girls” in there are wearing bikinis. Baristas in bikinis, basically. I get gas at the local station and I always see a parade of trucks and stereotypically macho beat up cars driving up to the window. I thought the embarrassment of actually going to a place that advertises that their female workers are working in two-pieces would be enough but apparently not for these gentlemen. I got a glimpse of one of the women working there and she looked like she was in high school. And judging by the time of day, she probably was in high school. And to skeptics, when I was in high school I remember a classmate who was a senior working at Hooters so yes, those places are staffed by people that still have to have their parents’ permission when missing school. Now people tell me I look like i’m in high school but the point is that you have a place of business where you pay for coffee and slobbering all over some woman with your eyes. I wonder if the women working there, when nobody’s at the window, cover up and wear a bathrobe only to take it off when a customer drives in. If you think about it that way, it is very literally, like a coin-operated strip club. Except with this you get something to drink.

As I was telling my co-worker this, she, from Chile, tells me that there is a place there called “Coffee and Legs” where women are dressed in a similar manner. She said that originally the owner only hired stereotypically attractive women and made them wear shorter and shorter skirts to promote the “image” of the restaurant. As time went on, they wore less and less and it didn’t hide what it was selling.

I know we have our Hooters, our Cowgirls Inc. bars (a local bar that, after the success of the film Coyote Ugly, hired women to not wear a whole lot and do choreographed dances on the bar tables) and our “Daisy Dukes” restaurants but seriously, is this getting even worse? Proponents of these places say that they’re safe and harmless because everyone knows these are for “adults” (read: men) and that it’s Ok to have certain things that are for adults only. Critics of these types of places usually talk about having a “family friendly” place to which the proponents again say “I already told you, we aren’t trying to bring in the Johnson Family here, go eat at the Olive Garden.” And while i’d agree that there are some places that are and should be kept “adult only” like bars and upscale restaurants for obvious reasons, the existence of these invading the space of restaurants and other services under the guise of being “just a nice smile to look at as you get your coffee” is just bullshit. If you want to look at a naked woman or a near naked woman, go to a strip club (and the issues there with sex-work and strip clubs is an entire different issue which I won’t get into here). The idea that this type hiring and business practice is in any way acceptable in our society I think indicates just how used to the idea we are of associating women’s bodies and viewing women’s bodies with commodity, with sale and consumption hinged on the almighty dollar (and tip money, as tip money places the buyer in a position of authority over the worker, the “performer” in that sense).

My cousin works at a Barista at the giant coffee corporation. Most people would say she’s an attractive person and as such, she tells me “I always have the most in tips” while her male co-workers do not get much. Now, unlike the Bikini Hut, she actually keeps her clothes on and she has no interaction with the customer beyond saying the name of the drink and then handing it to them. The point is that she’s good looking so she gets tips from dudes that think tipping her more than they usually would (if at all) is going to get them a date or impress her. She does her job and her getting more tip money by virtue of people taking an eye to her is a comment on how we reward beauty with money and attention. She isn’t, however, put into a position by her workplace to blatantly use her body and herself to get more in tips and to attract customers. Are there some who would go out of their way to buy a coffee at the place my cousin works at? I’m sure it’s happened. But unlike the Bikini Hut (where, let’s be real, you’re only going there to look at a woman), she is second fiddle to the company and the product, not the other way around.

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.

Remember the urinals that were made in the shape of a woman’s mouth? Now this.

[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.

[From S.I.]

“Paula Creamer LPGA star, on why she picked golf over cheerleading when a scheduling conflict forced her to choose at age 12: ‘My dad asked me if I wanted to cheer for other people or have people cheer for me.’”

This goes back to the Steve Nash post a while back. Why on earth are girls brought up from a young age to be cheerleaders? Let’s be serious, that’s not a sport. Yes, I know it takes physical fitness and coordination and teamwork and yes I know they have competitions between schools but that’s completely artificial. The actual cheerleading, the cheerleading that we all see on TV is of, you know, football and basketball teams. Cheering men on as they make the big bucks and play in the stadiums with crowds in the seats. Why should we deny that to girls growing up?

[Rant time]

When I worked in social services, an old co-worker of mine who used to work in a treatment facility for teens said that one of the most disturbing parts of the job was having young girls try and “mount” him whenever he, as a figure of authority in the facility, would try and mediate conflicts or just try and talk to them. “[Some of them] were so screwed up mentally that they responded to just me being a guy and trying to talk to them as that they needed to have sex with me.” I didn’t ask, but I think it was safe to assume that he, you know, didn’t actually rape them (as it would’ve been rape given the ages of the girls he was working with) because he knew that he had a job to do and when someone isn’t in a right state of mind, you do your job, you act professionally and you resolve the situation.

So let’s say you’re a bunch of male police officers behind a desk one night and a woman who is very drunk is waiting for a ride/taxi. She starts talking to you and coming up to your desk and crawling around, putting up her leg on the table and saying god knows what. I don’t care what she says or how she’s acting (unless she said something to the effect of “i’m going to kill you all”) you ask her to sit down and maybe you get her some coffee. You’re a police officer. Half of your job entails dealing with drunk people of some sort. If you’ve got a lot of spare time on your hands and if you want to be real nice, you drive the woman home yourself in your squad car. What you don’t do, is what these assholes did:

What’s especially infuriating is when the reporter asks, “Was she in any way a victim” and the police rep says “she participated…so…” Which is a “no.” Which is a nice way of saying “She started it, she deserved it, she’s the tease.”

Really? She wasn’t groped? They didn’t lift up her skirt? They didn’t’ act like police officers should’ve acted? They didn’t take pictures of her and send it to all of their friends? Who knows where those pictures are on the internet? They didn’t just sit there and let the whole thing play out for however long it did instead of getting her some coffee and driving her home?

There are only a few places in this world where 100% we are supposed to feel completely safe. And there are only a few people with whom we are 100% supposed to feel safe with and trust. The police fall into that category and a police station also fall into that category as well. I can hear the asshole YouTube and Digg critics now, “Dude…I so would’ve tapped that!” suggesting of course that the police are somehow virtuous for not gang-raping her right there in her intoxicated state. It reminds me of how ridiculous it is when we applaud men for NOT being batterers or NOT being rapists. Is that how bad things have gotten? We’ve come to the point of thanking the police for only “coppin a feel” a little bit and snapping a few pics when it could’ve gotten a whole lot worse should she have stumbled somewhere else? I don’t buy it.

I think there will be a tendency for a lot of folks who read this in the US to be all “well, that’s that backwards country of Mexico with all those latin machismo lover, of course there’s sexual harassment…but not in my country!” Which is bullshit because of the actual street/bus whatever you want to call it harassment/groping that does happen to women by men.