Miss Representation

I hope I get to see this documentary soon:

Newest Miss Representation Trailer (2011 Sundance Film Festival Official Selection) from Miss Representation on Vimeo.

NY State Approves Gay Marriage Bill

I still feel a little burn from the turnaround in California with Prop 8, so I can only manage cautious optimism...but, nevertheless, this is very exciting!

From the NY Times:

Passage of same-sex marriage here followed a daunting run of defeats in other states where voters barred same-sex marriage by legislative action, constitutional amendment or referendum. Just five states currently permit same-sex marriage: Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont, as well as the District of Columbia.

At around 10:30 p.m., moments after the vote was announced, Mr. Cuomo strode onto the Senate floor to wave at cheering supporters who had crowded into the galleries to watch. Trailed by two of his daughters, the governor greeted lawmakers, and paused to single out those Republicans who had defied the majority of their party to support the marriage bill.

“How do you feel?” he asked Senator James S. Alesi, a suburban Rochester Republican who voted against the measure in 2009 and was the first to break party ranks this year. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”

The approval of same-sex marriage represented a reversal of fortune for gay-rights advocates, who just two years ago suffered a humiliating defeat when a same-sex marriage bill was easily rejected by the Senate, which was then controlled by Democrats. This year, with the Senate controlled by Republicans, the odds against passage of same-sex marriage appeared long.

Mad Men in Ms. Magazine

I'm very pleased to announce that the summer issue of Ms. Magazine, including an article I wrote about feminism in the television show Mad Men, will be hitting newsstands August 10th. My angle? Well, here's the title of my piece: "Feminism in a Mad World: Mad Men’s women remind us how far we’ve come, and how far we have to go."

Check it out!

I'll also be reviewing the first episode of Mad Men's fourth season, which airs this Sunday on A&E, for the Ms. blog. The review should be up early next week, so stay tuned.

Prepping for SATC2

Tomorrow night I'm going to a preview screening of Sex and the City 2 in Denver in order to write a review for Ms. Magazine's blog (which I will of course link to on this blog!). In order to prepare for being "Carried Away" (indeed), here are a few things of interest I came across on the interwebs this week that, for one reason or another, reminded me of the show.

First, I'm enjoying Alexandra Tweten's blog series on online dating as an "out" feminist over at the Ms. blog. Check out her most recent post as well as her previous posts.

Second, I just discovered Feminist Frequency's YouTube channel (via Sociological Images). Check out, for example, this great little video explaining the Bechdel Test for women in movies:



Lastly, I found Angela Bonavoglia's book review of Leora Tannenbaum’s new book, Bad Shoes and the Women Who Love Them compelling and incredibly apropos for a SATC-themed post. Bonaboglia writes,

At once fanciful (with illustrations by Vanessa Davis), disturbing, informative, understanding and preachy, [the book] is a captivating attempt to address the reality that many women—including feminists– insist on wearing “sexy” shoes but need some ground rules for how not to wreck their feet in the process.

What’s really interesting about Tannenbaum’s approach is the artful way that she pulls you in, empathizes, withholds judgment, then stuns you with her analysis.

She does this at the end of the book, after romps through chapters on what you should know about your feet, on “toetox” (cosmetic surgery of the foot), on the history of high heels and on the sex life of women’s shoes. Then, after gaining a reader’s trust, she asks, ever so gently, that the reader consider the “many parallels we can draw between Chinese footbinding and Western women wearing high heels.”

You can check out the rest of the article here.

Wish me luck at the preview tomorrow. I'm afraid it might be a mob scene!

Stand By Your Man?

My media column "Stand By Your Man?" on CBS's hit series The Good Wife is in this month's issue of Ms. Magazine, which will hit newsstands on May 25th! In this article, I discuss the show's eminent feminism and expound on its three strong female characters: Alicia, Diane and Kalinda.

And my article's not the only thing to get excited about in this issue of Ms (although, obviously, for me, it's what I'm most excited about):

In the cover story of the new issue, Ms. publisher Ellie Smeal reveals 25 key benefits for women in the new health-insurance reform legislation—some you’ve heard of and some you haven’t. Smeal also heralds the far-reaching gender-equity language in the bill.

A groundbreaking Ms. investigation into the anti-abortion extremist network surrounding Scott Roeder, who killed abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, raises doubt that Roeder was the "lone wolf" mainstream media has made him out to be. Investigative reporter Amanda Robb interviewed Roeder more than a dozen times to probe his longstanding involvement with the Army of God and justifiable-homicide advocates who promote the murder of abortion providers.

Also of note in the issue: A report on an upcoming class-action lawsuit that might force the military to face up to its sexual-assault problem once and for all; a story revealing the shockingly high rates of maternal deaths and illness in the developing world and what the U.S. can do to address the problem now; an on-the-ground look at life for women in Haiti’s refugee camps; and remembrances of Wilma Mankiller by Gloria Steinem and of Dorothy Height by Donna Brazile.

Want to join the Ms. community? Well, you can do that here!

Feminist Flashback #39

So Monday I flew to Germany, with a trip to Paris to come in a week, to visit friends and family, which is my excuse for my lag in posting this week's feminist flashback. That said, since I'm currently in Berlin--my favorite city in the world--I thought I'd post an appropriately germane (no pun intended) flashback this week.


AVIVA Berlin, an online magazine for women, turns 9 years old this month. If you can read German, you should check it out. I don't know much about the magazine, but they've got sections on Culture, Jewish Life, Women and Work, Book Reviews, Interviews, etc.--all woman-centered, of course. Plus, and most importantly, they share my name and should, I think, hire me. Who wants to help me start a campaign to get myself hired as their spokesperson? ;-)

Men, watch out! Lesbians are stealing your women!

A few days ago, my father directed my attention to an article by Mary A. Fischer in this month's Oprah Magazine. The article's entitled, "Why Women Are Leaving Men for Other Women," and my dad's of the opinion that Oprah's paving the way for her own coming out. (I'm not really one to speculate, but if I were, I would agree that she does spend an awful lot of time with that Gayle!)

Anyway, the article is moderately interesting, although it doesn't say anything earth-shattering and there are some problematic moments. FeministGal points out a few issues, such as Fischer's use of 'lesbian chic' as evidence of society's acceptance (rather than exploitation, a more accurate term) of lesbian relationships:

Lately, a new kind of sisterly love seems to be in the air. In the past few years, Sex and the City's Cynthia Nixon left a boyfriend after a decade and a half and started dating a woman (and talked openly about it). Actress Lindsay Lohan and DJ Samantha Ronson flaunted their relationship from New York to Dubai. Katy Perry's song "I Kissed a Girl" topped the charts. The L Word, Work Out, and Top Chef are featuring gay women on TV, and there's even talk of a lesbian reality show in the works. Certainly nothing is new about women having sex with women, but we've arrived at a moment in the popular culture when it all suddenly seems almost fashionable—or at least, acceptable.

Lesbianism is fashionable? Um. Yay? Also, I've heard that before (e.g. Laura Cottingham's book(let) Lesbians Are So Chic...: ...That We Are Not Really Lesbians at All and Linda Dittmar's article "The Straight Goods: Lesbian Chic and Identity Capital on a Not-so-Queer Planet," both written in the mid-1990s and a long time before the age of Katy Perry and Tila Tequila).

Fischer also points to a landmark 2004 study (referenced a few months ago in this New York Times Magazine feature) as evidence that female sexuality is more fluid than male sexuality. I don't know. I haven't read the study itself, but it seems that Fischer is vastly simplifying the results. Regardless, I don't have too much of a problem with the idea that women's sexuality is more fluid--stereotypical though it may seem. Who knows, maybe it's true? I have a much bigger problem with the conclusion Fischer draws toward the end of the article: that women who leave men for other women tend to be more attracted to butch lesbians, androgynous women or bois. She writes:

Ironically—or not, as some might argue—it is certain "masculine" qualities that draw many straight-labeled women to female partners; that, in combination with emotional connection, intimacy, and intensity. This was definitely true for Gomez-Barris, whose partner, Judith Halberstam, 47, (above right, with Gomez-Barris, left) says she has never felt "female." Growing up in England as a tomboy who had short hair and refused to wear dresses, Halberstam says people were often unable to figure out whether she was a boy or a girl: "I was a source of embarrassment for my family." As a teenager, she was an avid soccer player—not that she was allowed on any team. And her 13th birthday request for a punching bag and boxing gloves was met with the demand to pick something more feminine. "Throughout my youth," she says, "I felt rage at the shrinking of my world." Halberstam channeled her anger into a distinguished academic career and authored several provocative books, including, in 1998, Female Masculinity. It was during the past few years that she started calling herself Jack and answering to both "he" and "she."

With all due respect to Judith (Jack) Halberstam, whose work I really admire and whose own sexuality isn't really the issue here, it does seem a little reductive for Fischer to argue that most "straight" women tend to fall for masculine/androgynous women, and the article seems to come to some sort of unspoken conclusion that socially-sanctioned gender binaries (male as rational and female as emotional, for example) still play a role, even for women who fall in love with other women. This may be true for some people. It may even be more often true for straight women who date lesbians. But it's certainly not something I'd be willing to build an argument around.

Do you think female sexuality is more fluid than male sexuality? Do any of you who are gay, bisexual or heteroflexible want to speak to whether or not you tend to be attracted to more "masculine" or more "feminine" women? And what that might mean, if anything? Is this even something about which we can make generalized claims?

Lest I sound too grumpy, I think the article's mostly fine, especially for something published in a mainstream publication. What do you all think?

Glamour Magazine's Salute to American Icons

For Women's History Month and in honor of its 70th Anniversary, this month's Glamour Magazine includes a huge photo shoot of contemporary actors posing as some of the most well-known and influential women of the last seventy years, in an article entitled, American Icons: 7 Decades of Rule Breakers, Risk Takers & Style Makers. Since it's Glamour, there's obviously an emphasis on fashion, but I actually think the shoot is pretty great (although I would agree with Amy over at Appetite for Equal Rights that the inclusion of Carrie Bradshaw is a little weird...not that Ms. B isn't a style icon, but...yeah).

Anyway, you should check out the whole slide show, but here are a few of my favorites:

Hayden Panettiere as Amelia Earhart

Alexis Bledel as Rosie the Riveter

Chanel Iman as Althea Gibson

Odette Yustman, Spencer Grammer and Rumer Willis as the Women of Woodstock

America Ferrera as Dolores Huerta

Kate Winslet

With the exception of Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black's incredibly moving Oscar acceptance speech ("Most of all, if Harvey had not been taken from us 30 years ago, I think he’d want me to say to all of the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told they are less than by their churches, or by the government, or by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value. And that no matter what everyone tells you, God does love you, and that very soon, I promise you, you will have equal rights federally across this great nation of ours."), Kate Winslet's Best Actress win was my favorite moment of the night:




She's so poised and self-possessed for someone so young (33), and yet it's also clear how thrilled she is and how nervous and giddy and grateful. In case, I've always liked Winslet in a casual sort of way, but a series of factors have conspired recently to make me love her (not the least of which is her refusal to conform to standard conventions of Hollywood anorexia). In any case, I thought I'd share a segment from the cover article on Winslet from the the March 2 issue of Time Magazine (H/T Women and Hollywood):

In an industry that insists that most actresses remain giggly, pliable and princessy well into middle age, Winslet has somehow avoided that pigeonhole entirely. She doesn't play girls; she never really has. She plays women. Unsentimentalized, restless, troubled, discontented, disconcerted, difficult women. And clearly, it's working for her. Her two most recent performances — as Hanna Schmitz, the illiterate former concentration-camp guard in The Reader, and as April Wheeler, the anguished, rageful 1950s wife and mother in Revolutionary Road — have earned her two Golden Globes, a Screen Actors Guild prize, a British Academy Award (BAFTA) and her sixth Oscar nomination, a benchmark that no actor so young has ever before reached.

At 33, Winslet has become not only the finest actress of her generation but in many ways also the perfect actress for this moment. She's intense without being humorless. She's international in outlook (though raised in Reading, England, in a middle-class family of working actors, she now lives in New York City and won those Oscar nominations for playing three Americans, two Brits and a German). She's ambitious but cheerfully self-deflating, capable of glamour but also expressive of a kind of jolting common sense. She has a strong professional ethic, which she somehow balances with her domestic life (she and Mendes have a son, Joe, 5, and Winslet has a daughter, Mia, 8, from her first marriage — she takes both kids to school most days). And, cementing her status as an icon of the Era of New Seriousness, she really likes hard work. Assuming she's paid her taxes, are there still any openings in the Cabinet?

What are you favorite Winslet movies/roles? I especially love her in Heavenly Creatures (1994), her first major role, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), which is just generally an amazing film.

Super-feminist Obama to the rescue!

I posted a few days ago about Ms. Magazine's "This is What a Feminist Looks Like" Obama cover. Since then, a lot of blogs besides Feminist Law Professors (where I came across the cover the first time around) have shared their thoughts.

Some people love it. Some people hate it. And I feel pretty ambivalent. I definitely don't love it, and while I think that it's great that Obama has privately declared himself a feminist, I would like it a whole lot more if 1) this had been a public declaration and 2) if the magazine cover didn't implicitly suggest that Obama's come to save feminism (and you can't tell me that Superman iconography isn't explicitly about the idea of rescue).

In any case, check out these other posts discussing this cover and consider this post as a link round-up of sorts of all these varying opinions.


The original Feminist Law Professors post was, unfortunately, followed by what I think was an unnecessarily snarky and (I think) insulting response by Megan at Jezebel (thanks Laruen, for this link!) who claims that Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors and Amy Siskind writing over at The Daily Beast are the equivalent of P.U.M.A.s (Hillary-lovin', Obama-hatin' Democrats) and just "have their collective (organic cotton, sweatshop-free) panties in a wad." She concludes:

So maybe it's not so surprising they missed the point Ms. was trying to make in celebrating a President who supports so many of the policy issues that have been on the feminist movement's agenda, like wage equality and reproductive choice — it's still only the composition of his chromosomes that matter to some. I think that's called sexism, right?

If you like the cover, great, but I see no reason to be rude to those who have offered legitimate reasons why they think it's problematic.

As would be expected, Melissa McEwan over at Shakesville offers a much more thoughtful response to the cover:

That Obama has not regularly and unapologetically identified himself as a feminist makes this image problematic—as does the reality that, while Obama is clearly better on women's issues than the retrofuck lunkhead and his band of misogybag miscreants who've been leading the country the last eight years, he's not been what might fairly be deemed a leader on feminist issues.
[...]
Yet he's represented here as a superfeminist, which reinforces the same old narrative we see played out over and over again when it comes to men's participation in a "women's domain"—the women of feminism (or parenthood, or housecleaning, or rape prevention, or early childhood education, or nursing, etc.) are doing What Women Do, but the men who engage strongly in these areas are ZOMG SO SPECIAL AND BRILLIANT AND SELFLESS AND HEROIC!!!!11!

Rarely does an image so perfectly, depressingly capture this phenomenon, this reflexive tendency to over-reward men for doing what, in a just world, would be the bare fucking minimum to be considered a decent person.

On the other hand, Tracy Clark-Flory, over at Salon didn't really think anything of the cover initially, but understands the conflict:

When I saw the cover yesterday, I thought: Well, that's silly. Yes, we're all crossing our fingers that Obama is a superhero who will rescue our country, and his policies do seem basically feminist. But isn't it, I don't know, a little premature to declare him a superhero, particularly of feminism?

Then I considered that perhaps the intended message was simply that Obama, widely heralded as our nation's savior, also happens to be an undercover feminist. And then I moved along. But the cover has since sparked a feminist firestorm online.

In response to criticism, Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation and publisher of Ms. posted an explanation over at The Huffington Post, claiming

When the chair of the Feminist Majority Foundation board, Peg Yorkin, and I met Barack Obama, he immediately offered "I am a feminist." [...] But we are not giving President-Elect Obama a blank check. For our hopes to be achieved, we must speak out and organize, organize, organize to enable our new president's team to achieve our common goals. Ultimately, we must hold our leaders' feet to the fire or, to put it more positively, uplift them when they are caught in the crosscurrents of competing interests.

All that said, Jill over at Feministe loves the cover, as does Deborah at Girl w/Pen, and I respect both of their opinions a great deal, so it's by no means a cut and dry issue.

If you've found other posts about this cover or you've written one yourself, feel free to post links in the comments!

ETA: Again, care of Feminist Law Professors, this CNN video about the Ms.'s cover:

This is what a feminist looks like?

Um, Ms. magazine, I don't quite get this:



Are you trying to say that Obama qua Superman will save feminism? Oooh! Or is he going to save feminists from themselves? Or...or...maybe he'll achieve everything that feminists have been trying to achieve because he's...wait for it...Superman.

Perhaps within the actual magazine issue this baffling cover will become clear, but for now I'm flummoxed.

(H/T Feminist Law Professors)

All glamed up and nowhere to go?: Tina Fey in Vanity Fair

People who know me probably know that I have a bit of a crush on Tina Fey. ("Only a bit?" I can hear my partner ask incredulously upon reading this.) It's mostly an intellectual crush (that's what I'm telling myself), with a dash of wanting to be her and a sprinkling of finding her incredibly charming. Never mind. The point is, to say I'm biased would be an understatement, and I just want to admit that upfront, though I am going to try to be as objective as I can here.

There's been a little buzz recently because Fey is all sexed-up on the cover, and in the pages, of the January 2009 Vanity Fair. The article/interview, by Maureen Dowd, and its accompanying photos, taken by Annie Leibovitz, provide a more in-depth portrait of Fey than I feel we've heretofore seen, at least in a big-name publication. Fey is depicted as down-to-earth, a little proper, incredibly smart, snarky and self-possessed. However, she's also portrayed as someone who transformed in a matter of a few years from a slightly dowdy, chubby and "not fit for the spotlight" writer to a "sexy librarian," glamourpuss, superlative star. It's like Wonder Woman: one minute she's Diana Prince, supposedly awkward, unassuming secretary, and the next minute she's Wonder Woman, beautiful and superior in every way--a woman everyone wants to be (and have). Herein lies the problem, for some.

In the lengthy Vanity Fair interview, Dowd makes certain to signpost Fey's transformation. For example, she recalls a conversation with Fey's co-star Alec Baldwin:

Ah, I say, so you’re the one who encouraged Fey to wear so many low-cut tops, even though Lemon [Fey's character on her TV show 30 Rock] seems like the crewneck-sweater type. “There is Liz Lemon and there is Liz Lemon as portrayed by a leading actress in a TV show,” Baldwin responds with amused and amusing disdain. “It’s not a documentary. Tina’s a beautiful girl. We needed to get the pillows fluffed on the sofa and we needed to get the drapes steamed, and we needed to get everything all nice and get the presentation just right. Tina always played the cute, nerdy girl. Tina on the news, the glasses. There was not a big glamour quotient for her. Now there is.

On the one hand, Baldwin's unmitigated assertions that Fey needed to glam-up, no questions asked, are certainly problematic, though not surprising (remember folks, this is national television we're talking about). It's frustrating that television ratings depend in part on pretty actors--although, this does not just apply to women--and characters that are attractive on a surface level as well as being likable on a personality level (or, if not likable, at least someone with whom you can identify, love to hate, etc.). On the other hand, the idea that a smart, self-described nerd has become an (inter)national celebrity is kind of great. And, admit it, would you really say no to professional stylists and a Vanity Fair photo shoot? Probably not. If so, you're more principled than I am.

I kind of like the way Salon Broadsheet writer, Sarah Hepola, puts in it her short piece, The sexing up of Tina Fey:

Maybe you find this depressing (a brilliant comic mind inevitably reduced to shaking her cleavage). Maybe you find this empowering (a brilliant comic mind finally shaking her cleavage!). Either way, it only confirms what many of us have known for a long time: Tina Fey is one of the most fascinating celebrities out there right now.

Moreover, Fey's level of glamour on 30 Rock isn't anything to get too worked up about. In Vanity Fair, yes, she is definitely rendered sultry and hot (in an appealing, slightly geeky way that's Fey's trademark). But in 30 Rock? Sure, she's a beautiful woman, but her character isn't glamed up in any way that I can tell (despite Baldwin's insistence). At most she shows a little cleavage, but otherwise Liz Lemon wears casual clothes, appears to wear little or no makeup (thought obviously Fey has to be wearing makeup for the cameras), rarely wears heels or revealing clothing, and doesn't really style her hair (someone even went through the trouble of cataloging the style choices of Lemon as a character). The most dressed up I've seen Lemon is in the first few minutes of this season's premiere, an episode in which it was made clear over and over again that trying to be someone you're not is not going to end well.

Most importantly--and way more importantly than the fashion/glamour question, which I personally think is over-hyped in most considerations of whether people are suited for feminist role-model-dom--Fey's character Liz Lemon is feminist, and has clearly stated herself as such (and presumably so has Fey, though I've not seen any explicit mention--someone find one for me, please?). And while Lemon faces all those conventional/stereotypical third-wave feminist, career-woman problems (difficulty finding a decent boyfriend, desire to have children before she gets too old, fighting the old boy's network at every turn), she never contemplates giving up her career or settling for an asshole guy just so she won't be alone. Liz Lemon is definitely not portrayed as someone to pity, but someone with whom we can identify, even as we're laughing at and with her. And even in those moments when we're given license to laugh at her "feminism" (i.e. unwillingness to submit herself to patriarchal standards of beauty or society's expectations of female behavior), we're always provided with an equally amusing contrast (indicating that the way women are expected to act is pretty ridiculous, too):



All that said, it's one thing to talk about how Liz Lemon the character and 30 Rock the show embody egalitarian principles and espouse, under the guise of goofiness and through the veil of humor, a feminist ideology. It's another thing entirely to consider how Fey comes across in her Vanity Fair interview. On the one hand, Fey makes some astute observations about interpretations of her encounter with Governor Palin:

Around the same time, Fey saw an entertainment reporter on TV say that Palin had been gracious toward Fey, but Fey hadn’t been gracious toward Palin. “What made me super-mad about it,” Fey says later, “was that it seemed very sexist toward me and her. The implication was that she’s so fragile, which she is not. She’s a strong woman. And then, also, it was sexist because, like, who would ever go on the news and say, ‘Well, I thought it was sort of mean to Richard Nixon when Dan Aykroyd played him,’ and ‘That seemed awful mean to George Bush when Will Ferrell did it.’ And it’s like, No, that’s not the thing. This is a comedy sketch on a comedy show.” “Mean,” we agreed, was a word that tends to get used on women who do satirical humor and, as she says, “gay guys.”

She's totally right, and it's great that she has no qualms (not that she should) expressing her thoughts on the topic. Funny woman making fun of another woman = bitchy and mean. Funny man making fun of another man = hilarious. What's that all about?

On the other hand, in the interview, Fey talks about her horror at discovering her husband had gone to a strip club:

‘“I love to play strippers and to imitate them,’” says Fey. ‘I love using that idea for comedy, but the idea of actually going there? I feel like we all need to be better than that. That industry needs to die, by all of us being a little bit better than that.’”

I'm a little conflicted about this. Octogalore (in an excellent picking-apart of all the inconsistencies in the interview) interprets this to mean that Fey would never consider being a stripper, whereas I (and a few other commentors) read Fey's comment as not wanting to go to strip clubs (as she mentions in the previous paragraph her husband had done). Octogalore writes

Also, Tina prefers the idea of strippers “for comedy,” “to imitate them.” When someone’s a little more in need, maybe has fewer options for making the big bucks like Tina makes, and does things – maybe sometimes voluntarily and sometimes not – that make her appear to be a caricature of something other than the Republican VP nominee, that’s apparently good comic fun for Tina.

But Tina’s proof that the industry, for better or worse, isn’t going to die. Whether we are “better,” like Tina, or worse, like I used to be, or in Tina’s lexicon, much worse – there is still going to be a market for women using our sexuality. As long as that market offers better pay than other accessible markets for our skills, then economic equilibrium will dictate supply. Not Tina’s ideas about virtue.

While I agree with Octogalore for the most part, I think she might be a little harsh (not to mention that I'm still not convinced Fey didn't just mean that she's against going to strip clubs). I see a difference between believing, as Fey suggests she does, that stripping is degrading to women (which I, for the record, don't actually think is necessarily the case, though it can be) and being willing/wanting to play up your own sexuality a little bit for the camera (be it photographic or televisual). Not that these two things aren't at all related, but the parallel can't be seamlessly drawn.

In the end, this is probably something I have to give more thought. How accountable can we hold our celebrity idols/role models for the contradictions in their own beliefs? I'm eager to hear your thoughts. Do you think 30 Rock is a feminist show? Do you think Fey playing up her sexuality negates her standing as a feminist role-model? Do you think Fey is being judgmental and hypocritical about women using their sexuality and is, hence, a "bad" feminist? And how do we decide what makes a good or bad feminist?

How desperate are they?

Is it just me or does anyone else find the most recent TV Guide cover (a fold-out double cover, no less, like a centerfold) problematic? I could probably spend an hour trying to qualify why it bugs me so much but I'm not sure it's worth the effort, and I probably would just be stating the obvious. Or, isn't it obvious?

(click to enlarge)

What do you all think?

This posting brought to you by a very different sort of desperate housewife, courtesy of Simone de Beauvoir:

In this insanity the house becomes so neat and clean that one hardly dares live in it; the woman is so busy she forgets her own existence. A household, in fact, with its meticulous and limitless tasks, permits to woman a sadomasochistic flight from herself as she contents madly with the things around her and with herself in a state of distraction and mental vacancy. And this flight may often have a sexual tinge.

'Bitch' and 'Chicks Rock' P.S.A.

Two Public Service Announcements from Fourth Wave:

1. Help Save BITCH Magazine. If you can donate, please do. If you can't donate, spread the word. BITCH is a non-profit, feminist magazine, and this may be their last issue:



2. The Women's Mosaic has started a new blog, Chicks Rock, which is dedicated to providing a space "for women to share their experiences related to diversity and personal growth." Check it out, comment and maybe even consider becoming a guest blogger.

Plus, a couple bonus links:


* A great article pondering why there aren't more superheroine movies ("And why not start with the superwoman who was sent here to bring a feminine--and feminist--perspective to the fight against evil? It might take Wonder Woman's Lasso of Truth to make studio executives own up to the fact that 41 years after she first made it on the screen, they're still afraid of Diana Prince.")
H/T don't ya wish your girlfriend was smart like me?

* Stephen Colbert on the McCain campaign's tactics of silence, diversion and hypocrisy


H/T Appetite for Equal Rights

Tyra Banks for President!

In my journey’s through this months phone book size fall fashion magazines, I ran across a curious photo spread. Harper’s Bazaar cover girl Tyra Banks is featured in the role of Michelle Obama along with a male model playing Barack Obama, and two girls as the Obama daughters. Now fashion photos are often a bit odd, especially the ones on Ms. Banks’ Top Model, but this one seemed particularly strange. See the photos here.

Why is Tyra Banks playing the role of first lady and not Madame President herself. Fashion photography is all about fantasy anyway, not to mention Hillary Clinton who let us remember was pretty close to being the Democratic nominee for the Presidency. The spread seems especially odd now that Sarah Palin is the Republican candidate for Vice President, which of course Bazaar could not have predicted. It seems odd to have Tyra type cast as Michelle Obama, when the accompanying article focuses on her as a smart business woman: "what's cool about Banks, who now earns an estimated $23 million a year, is that she was never too cool to be commercial. By doing so, she hasn't just broken borders — of ethnicity, of cynicism, of fashion cliché — she has broken ground." The article goes on to note that "Banks has traded in her pretty for something far more compelling: a voice in the culture." Banks talks in the article about her own career, and her efforts to build a career after the runway. The interviewer, Laura Brown, also asked Bank's about the role of the first lady:
"If Banks ever reached the highest office in the land, she would dress the part. 'I'd wear a V-neck shift and a two-inch heel. Even if the president were taller, I would keep them low. Otherwise it gets a little too sexy.'"

Maybe I'm mistaken, but last time I checked first lady wasn't the highest office in the land, I can only hope that this wasn't a Freudian slip on the part of Bazaar, is First Lady the highest office to which women can aspire to in this country? It seems, at least for the next 4 years, first lady, and maybe vice president is all we will get. I also like Tyra's sartorial proscription to show deference to the faux-President. Pantsuits are notably absent from this shift-dress heavy collection of looks (more on this in upcoming posts).

How should our new first lady interpret her role?:
"A modern first lady, if she followed the Tyra prescription, would first smile. (Banks reportedly has a professional arsenal of 275.) 'Oh, I want her to not take herself too seriously,' she says. 'She'd need to know how to take a fierce picture but at the same time be able to eat fried chicken, have grease on her fingers, and be okay with getting photographed like that, too. I'd want her to feel like every child in America is hers — to have a true connection.' Her expression turns serious, then she winks. 'I would also want her to know how to beat her own face. That means do her own makeup. In the end, the first lady should be her man's rock and his boulder and his mountain. And she should be calling about 50 percent of the shots!'"
Only time will tell if the new first lady will follow Tyra's lead, but in the mean time it might have been nice to see Tyra playing the President. How would she dress then? This would certainly have been an instructive spread to women in politics as well as the workplace. Oh well, Harper's missed the boat, but I do appreciate more and more Tyra's style of presentation, while she often sounds like she has more than a few screws loose, she is honest and smart and at least tries to stand for something (even if it is a simple as the fierceness of women of all sizes, shapes, and colors) in this season of political pandering and vague promises. -V.P.