The Old School Lunch

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.

Pretty interesting.

I’m kinda surprised that it’s the Big H doing this. I wonder if other schools do this and if so, it took Harvard to finally make it in the press? Is this even press worthy?

[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’ve always liked Steve Nash and this just adds to reasons to root for him:

“Nash invests in women’s soccer league” - “I’m really excited to play a role in bringing professional soccer to North America,” Nash said. “As a father of twin girls, I’m especially pleased to help young women around the world realize their dreams of being a pro soccer player can indeed come true.”

And also because it gets really, really old reading about athletes investing in restaurants and nightclubs over and over.

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.

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!