CNN just showed what is presumably a member of the Indiana delegation with a button, featuring a logo and picture of McCain and Palin along with the following: “Hoosiers for the Hot Chick.”
Since the Republicans have just discovered the concept of sexism, I guess we can understand if they are not yet up to speed on the whole “politically correct” thing.
(Wait, now that I think of it, political correctness was a Republican creation in the first place).
Update: Indiana’s WTHR television news has the story.
My two favorite takes so far on John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin for his running mate:
Stephen Colbert accuses nay-sayers of missing the significance of the moment: “A lot of people are saying that Sarah Palin is being used as a cheap political ploy. That is such petty cynicism. This is historic. For the first time in America, a woman has reached the highest levels of being used as a cheap political ploy.”
See his entire analysis here:
And Maureen Dowd is just happy that while reporting from the campaign trail, she can still indulge one of her “guilty pleasures”: watching “a vacuously spunky and generically sassy chick flick” — even if she already knows how this one is going to end.
In a more semi-serious analysis, Gail Collins yesterday summarized the big insult:
Over the last week, we have heard over and over and over that Tuesday was the anniversary of the day women got the right to vote. (They got it when a state representative in Tennessee, where the House was split on the ratification issue, changed his vote because his mother wrote him a letter telling him to shape up. That’s a story that I would love to get into, but, unfortunately, right now we have Sarah Palin to deal with.)
After that big moment of enfranchisement, women went through a long period in the desert where they had the vote but not much else. Then came the great revolutions of the 1970s, when all the assumptions about the natural divisions between the sexes were challenged. During that era, women could be excited and moved by symbolic candidacies that promised a better, more inclusive future, like Shirley Chisholm’s presidential race and Geraldine Ferraro’s presence on the Democratic national ticket.
This year, Hillary Clinton took things to a whole new level. She didn’t run for president as a symbol but as the best-prepared candidate in the Democratic pack. Whether you liked her or not, she convinced the nation that women could be qualified to both run the country and be commander in chief. That was an enormous breakthrough, and Palin’s nomination feels, in comparison, like a step back.
If she’s only on the ticket to try to get disaffected Clinton supporters to cross over, it’s a bad choice. Joe Biden may already be practicing his drop-dead line for the vice-presidential debate: “I know Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is a friend of mine, and governor, you’re no Hillary Clinton.”
Of all the things about Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running mate, that bother me, her identification as a “feminist” is not one of them.
Yes, I realize she is not a feminist in any authentically enlightened sense of the term and her feminism doesn’t make conservatives flinch even a little bit.
But I’m so tired of “feminism” being a dirty word, that I don’t mind a little misappropriation. It’s just too much fun to see Pat Buchanan defending McCain’s choice on MSNBC Friday night by gleefully shouting, “But she’s a feminist!”
Melich admits that, at Friday’s announcement, “Palin was energetic, warm and reminded me of all those earnest young women we feminists have been recruiting into the women’s political movement since the early l970s.”
But she sees McCain’s choice of her as simply a political “disguise”:
McCain hopes that by picking a woman he can show he’s open to doing things differently, but his selection is window dressing and insulting to anyone who knows that he opposes equal pay for equal work legislation and opposes a woman’s right to choose. And this is just part of the list of issues of concern to women that he doesn’t champion.
“MSNBC has put heavy emphasis this year on presidential election coverage (it has given itself the tag line “The Place for Politics”), and it has turned to Ms. Maddow frequently both as a guest and as a substitute for its most popular host, Keith Olbermann,” writes Bill Carter in The New York Times. “Mr. Olbermann’s emergence as the signature personality on MSNBC has led to its unofficial rebranding as the liberal alternative to Fox News, which is dominated by conservative hosts like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.”
In a story published in The Nation this month about Maddow’s unlikely career path, Rebecca Traister writes:
What’s remarkable about Maddow’s ascension is not its velocity — Hurricane Katrina made Anderson Cooper in less than a week — but the shifts in media it may demarcate. Maddow is one of the few left-liberal women to bust open the world of TV punditry, which has made icons of right-wing commentators like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. Unlike her beautiful, bilious conservative female counterparts or the cocksure boys-on-the-bus analysts, however, Maddow didn’t get here by bluster and bravado but with a combination of crisp thinking and galumphing good cheer. Remarkably, this season’s discovery isn’t a glossy matinee idol or a smooth-talking partisan hack but a PhD Rhodes scholar lesbian policy wonk who started as a prison AIDS activist.
All of which raises a crucial question: does Maddow’s unlikely success, reliant on her ability to defy cliché and categorization at every turn, signal a move in punditry away from the thuggish and the angry and toward the lucid and sophisticated? Or has her powerful charisma and canny career management allowed her to break the rules — without actually breaking a mold?
Plus: We also learn of a new public television show to focus on — wait for it — world news …
When Brian K. Vaughan’s science fiction comic epic Y: The Last Man began several years ago, Christine was right on it, praising its “mature and complex look at gender politics.”
Brought to life by Pia Guerra’s stunning artwork, Vaughan’s vision reveals the great potential of both the science fiction and comic genres. As Vaughan says, “Good sci-fi is always about our world rather than some far-flung future.” And he has created a subtle but very relevant political statement.
Well, it’s nice to know that such a vision can find a wider audience. Check out Douglas Wolk’s glowing review in Salon of the concluding volume of the series — just released in June — calling it the end of the “wittiest, most entertaining story about gender in recent memory”:
Vaughan gets a lot of mileage out of speculating about what would happen if all men really did vanish from the Earth: Vatican City, for instance, would become a mausoleum, and so would the floor of the Tokyo stock exchange, but the Israeli military would be just fine. Long-distance commerce would be a disaster for years, thanks to the highways being blocked by enormous pileups caused by half of all drivers abruptly keeling over. Australia, as one of the few countries that allowed women to serve on submarines, would rule the waves. Supermodels would be forced into new lines of work, like driving a garbage truck full of men’s corpses. (America’s next top undertaker!)
But “Y” isn’t an argument about what really would happen if the men were all transported far beyond the Northern Sea, or even a bildungsroman, as much as it is a wickedly clever satire of patriarchal culture. It’s a story about men and the chaos and ruination they’ve brought to the world, in which all the “male” roles are played by female characters. There are ferociously funny little riffs on women getting by on their looks, “man-to-man” conversations, “women and children first,” men as protectors and women as protected, women as sexual temptresses of men, men asking women to smile, “proving one’s manhood,” and practically every other kind of awful gender essentialism.
Vaughan has gone on to write for ABC’s “Lost” and even for the “Buffy, The Vampire Slayer” comic series — and there’s a “Y” movie in development. So expect to continue seeing the world through his unique lens.
I posted last week about on the power of rumors in this year’s presidential campaign — about how this old-fashioned tactic has taken on new meaning in the digital age. Two subsequent articles have done a great job of explaining the reasons why and how rumors work.
In a New York Times op-ed, Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, experts on how the brain processes memory, discuss how a false rumor — such as that Barack Obama, a Christian, is a Muslim — is very hard to get out of your mind, even after you have been presented with and recognize the truth. Scary stuff:
The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.
This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.
It’s a mind-opening read.
And from another angle, Matthew Mosk of the Washington Post discusses the latest work on political rumors by Danielle Allen at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton (yeah, it’s the free-wheeling genius think tank that was once the research home of Albert Einstein). Allen, an expert in the “the way voters in a democracy gather their information and act on what they learn,” became obsessed with how the rumor of Obama being a Muslim — specifically, the chain e-mail about it that became viral — began and spread.
Every summer, it seems, I go through my Liz-Phair-regret phase. It’s probably because on our near-annual roadtrips, Liz Phair’s first three albums — “Exile in Guyville,” “Whip-Smart” and “whitechocolatespaceegg” — are still, to this day, in heavy rotation in the car’s CD player.
Besides being full of fun, quirky and complex music, they are powerful and risky feminist statements. And that’s not because they explicitly promote some agenda of empowerment — but because Phair deftly picks at life’s complexities; she is full of desires and doubts, strengths and weaknesses.
My love of these albums made Phair’s sudden but deliberate and self-aware attempt at pop stardom (by eliminating the quirks and dumbing down the lyrics) all the more devastating. It’s been awhile since she made that transformation in her fourth album, “Liz Phair” (2003), and boggled the minds of fans and rock critics alike. If you want to revisit that cultural moment, see the vitriolic critiques by Mim Udovitch in Slate or, from one of her early advocates, Greg Kot in the Chicago Tribune.
What makes this summer’s regret phase particularly poignant is that Liz Phair seems to be going through it as well. Or at least that might be a pop psychologist’s take on her 15th-anniversary reissue of “Exile in Guyville” and the accompanying tour in which she plays the entire album. Greg Kot uses the opportunity to revisit the past himself, while Jim Derogatis of the Chicago Sun Times saw her kick-off concert at the Vic Theater and, well, didn’t like it.
While Phair might be trying to make up for some lost time, she still doesn’t seem to fully “get it” — to realize her own contradictions.
The following is a new article by Steve Schwartz, published in the “sights” section of PopPolitics magazine. Schwartz reviews and contextualizes the “John Adams” miniseries, which has just been released on DVD:
In one of the final scenes of HBO’s seven-part miniseries “John Adams” (available now on DVD), the former president, nearing 80 years old and grieving after the passing of his wife Abigail, visits Boston’s Faneuil Hall to view John Trumbull’s iconic painting of the Founding Fathers signing the Declaration of Independence.
The truculent old man offers his verdict directly to the artist: “It is very bad history.” Adams proceeds to explain that there was no single moment where the delegates ceremoniously affixed their signatures to the document; instead, they were doing so throughout the summer of 1776, while scurrying in and out of Philadelphia.
“You would not deny the artist a certain … license?” Trumball pleads with Adams, to no avail.
“Don’t let our posterity be deluded with fictions under the guise of poetical or graphical license,” admonishes Adams.
Of course, the writers and producers took their own creative license with this memorable moment. As David McCullough wrote in his Pulitzer-prize winning biography that inspired this miniseries, “What Adams thought as he looked at this painting will never be known.”
I focus on this scene not to criticize the fabrication but to use it as a handy reference point to illustrate the virtues of this series. It serves to remind us that good history can be presented in all of its complexities based on its own merits.
Watching Michelle Obama on “The View” (watch it yourself while it lasts), you see all her very admirable strengths — and you see a predictable campaign strategy emerging. As Jodi Kantor and Michael Powell over at The Caucus put it:
The virtue of a show like this is clear — not only is there a fair dollop of politics, it’s a very useful forum for a candidate, as they can talk about Third Rail topics such as race in a chatty, just between us fashion… . A smart place to roll out the non-makeover makeover.
That’s not to say the discussion isn’t full of shopping tips, a pantyhose debate, motherhood, etc — all the post-Hillary-”standing by my man” safe stuff that allows us to know that Michelle is, first and foremost, a woman.
And of course, not a dreaded feminist. That was made clear long ago, in an early 2007 interview with the Washington Post: “You know, I’m not that into labels. So probably, if you laid out a feminist agenda, I would probably agree with a large portion of it [...] I wouldn’t identify as a feminist just like I probably wouldn’t identify as a liberal or a progressive.”
“The View” appearance, though, certainly reveals that, when she wants to/is allowed, Michelle can be a great, measured spokesperson for the Obama campaign on a variety of substantive issues. Like her husband, she has an uncanny ability to seem like she is never breaking a sweat, no matter what she is asked. And she absorbs other viewpoints with a friendly smile and talk of diversity and a transcendence of party politics.
Basically, she’s really cool — someone, as I’ve said before, with whom everyone (black and white, woman and man) wants to hang.
Let’s just hope she isn’t confined in this new/old role — and she’s able to makes some enemies.
Yes, make enemies — a great indulgence in a campaign season but a potentially profound way to show leadership and demonstrate that true “change” will requires sacrifice and will inevitably be, at times, unpopular. That sense of non-negotiable values is what made John and Robert Kennedy moral touchstones for a generation.
So if someone calls her out on her supposed lack of patriotism or her supposed racial antagonism or if someone turns her intelligence and self-confidence into negative “manly” qualities, she shouldn’t just say they are “lies,” which they are. She herself should use the opportunity to lead us into needed conversations about the power of dissent and the complicated history of race and gender in America.
On eve of what might be the end of the Hillary Clinton candidacy (Obama should, at least, have ensured himself a majority of the pledged delegates after the primaries in Kentucky and Oregon on Tuesday), my joy is mixed with both bitterness and regret.
While I am a happy Obama supporter, I’ve waited too long for this day to come, and I am resentful of the way Clinton has dragged out this primary process for what I can see as nothing other than self-absorbed reasons at best. Her race-baitingthroughout the campaign worsened my already low opinion of her campaign tactics.
But I have been regrettably silent in this space about the disturbing misogyny that has permeated much of the media’s coverage. To do a little make-up work, let me point you to a YouTube video that is a very effective primer to the conversation:
The words of Edward R. Murrow and the fictional Howard Beale are a little much, but the pattern in the clips is devastatingly clear.
The overwhelmingly male pundits and the pontificators couldn’t get a handle on how to talk about a powerful and prominent woman on the campaign trail. They fell back again and again on numerous stereotypes — from the nagging wife to the emotional wreck — instead of taking her seriously.
Marie Cocco (The Washington Post) and Connie Schultz (The Capitol Times) have articulated the sad consequences of the media’s gendered coverage extremely well.
E.J. Graff, though, might have the most substantial critique of a media that systematically refuses to recognize women’s worth. Although her revealing research doesn’t explicitly reference the present campaign coverage, it goes a long way toward explaining it.
It’s been two decades since “Pretty Woman” made prostitution seem cool — a path to self-esteem and self-empowerment — and I have rarely seen, outside of academic journals and hard-hitting documentaries, such an effective puncturing of that cultural myth as I read today in an opinion piece by Anne K. Ream and R. Clifton Spargo of the Chicago Tribune, who were inspired by the media’s recent treatment of Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the prostitute who famously serviced the former Governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer.
Of course, the glorification of prostitution began long before “Pretty Woman,” but as Ream and Spargo point out, since that film hit the big screen, the myth-making has reached ridiculous extremes — from “Pimp and Ho” nights at clubs to “Turning Tricks” pole-dancing at gyms.
And that’s not even mentioning TV shows like HBO’s “Cathouse” — “where a Nevada pimp and his ‘girls’ are portrayed as one big, happy, sexually uninhibited family.” That show and others “are an ode to the joys of being sexually serviced by women.”
I realize we need to be careful not to condemn sex workers for their choices — which are often made from a very limited list of options. But we need to make sure we don’t end up justifying a system that ultimately devastates women’s lives.
Ream and Spargo rightly note, “Our cultural fascination with and glamorization of pimping and prostitution do not make for a kinder and gentler sex trade.” And they go one to cite statistics — from 90 percent of prostitutes having been victims of childhood sexual assault to jaw-dropping mortatily rates:
A comprehensive 2004 mortality study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and conducted by the American Journal of Epidemiology, shows that workplace homicide rates for women working in prostitution are 51 times that of the next most dangerous occupation for women (which is working in a liquor store). The average age of death of the women studied was 34.
Yet somehow it’s almost conventional wisdom that prostitution, if done right, can be a savvy career move and an avenue to self-fulfillment:
Nowhere was this more clear than on a recent edition of “Larry King Live.” During an interview with Natalie McLennan, the woman who allegedly trained Dupre at the escort agency New York Confidential, King asked, “Do any hookers ever marry their johns?”
“They do!” she exclaimed, telling King the tale of a fellow “girl” who “went on a date with a client and then we never saw her again. It turns out that they met and they fell in love and she never returned. It’s a real sort of Cinderella, ‘Pretty Woman’ story, you know. Which is I think . . . just a fantastic story — ”every girl’s dream.”
For the vast majority of women working in prostitution, however, the reality is less fairy tale, more grim fable. But who wants to let that get in the way of a good story?
This is one of those dominant cultural narratives that we must do a much better job of resisting.
I’m quoted twice in Jennifer Parker’s abcnews.com story about the significance of the presidential candidates’ theme songs. It’s a nice, wide-ranging piece about how the candidates are tapping into pop music to add a boost to their campaigns.
Of course, I had a lot more to say than what Jennifer was able to quote. So I thought I’d use this space to expand on my comments — specifically on why Hillary is the only candidate to use female artists and why the songs prove yet again that Republicans lean heavily on a very limited rugged individualist, hyper-masculine narrative.
The only notable songs from the campaign trail are Hillary’s — and that’s not because Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5″ is a hidden work of literary genius. It’s because Hillary is the only candidate from which we hear a female voice (with the exception of Obama invoking Aretha). That might seem obvious, but it’s actually counter-intuitive.
For awhile I felt that Hillary was going to lengths (and the media was complying) not to make gender a part of the campaign. Learning the Pat Schroeder lesson, she rarely showed emotion. Going further back, moreover, she had long been positioning herself in the Senate (until her infamous vote endorsing the Iraq War became unpopular) as a defense hawk. No one was going to accuse her of being “soft.”
So for her to make the music of Parton and Gloria Estefan a central part of her campaign rallies — and to choose a song from Big Head Todd that focuses on how a woman is changing the world — is an intriguing choice.
So I dropped in on the new TV series based on the “Terminator” movie franchise: “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.” And the usual lowest-common-denominator limitations of broadcast TV are certainly present. Everyone is “hot” (even the freaky and geeky kids at John Connor’s high school) — and many of the characters feel trapped in stilted, predictable dialogue.
Despite these shortcomings, however, the ideas that motivate the narrative are so compelling that they more than make up for the sloppy execution — at least for now. Sure, the TV series and movie franchise use well-worn science fiction tropes — from time travel to machines becoming conscious and rebelling against their creators. But they make them fresh in such a way that both the movies and the TV show are more about the instability of modern identity than a more primal fear of technology. They deftly explore what makes us human and what human qualities might become our collective downfall.
It helps, of course, when explorations of identity aren’t afraid to present a realistic portrait of men and women. Unfortunately, as many critics have been pointing out, the waifish actress Lena Headey in the TV series isn’t very believable as Sarah Connor — who, as portrayed by a well-built Linda Hamilton in the movies, has gained a gritty, muscular physique over the years as she has constructed a guerrilla resistance force of sorts aimed at dismantling the machines that will otherwise lead to the apocalypse.
Check out the comparison pictures here. The PR shot of Headey handling a gun, especially when juxtaposed with an action shot of Linda Hamilton in T2, is particularly disturbing — echoing a phallic fetishization of women and guns that makes it look like an ad in Soldier of Fortune.
As members of the Sarah Connor Charm School and other feminists have noted, Linda Hamilton’s portrayal of Sarah Connor was an iconic inspiration for many women who rebel against the dangerous and debilitating standard of beauty in American culture. Unfortunately, when put in the context of images of women in music, magazines, advertising, TV, films and elsewhere that have come to dominate the cultural landscape in the last couple of decades — a virtual body image apocalypse, you might say — she feels like the last real woman we’ve seen.
My, how time flies. It was seven months ago that Don Imus made his remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team and found himself on the receiving end of a considerable amount of heat from a wide range of critics. Now Don Imus is returning to the airwaves in New York City, and he is in negotiation with RFD-TV.
So after being away for eight months, being the subject of considerable criticism, and collecting $20 million for his troubles, the I-Man will return. I am already feeling the Christmas spirit.
As someone who believes in freedom of speech, I can’t object to Imus’ return to radio. No one has to listen to him; radios have a tuner and an off-switch.
I do have one suggestion for the I-Man: Make your first guest interview Isiah Thomas. Imus and Thomas could engage in an interesting discussion of “bitch” and “ho” and the race-appropriate use of such words. And Imus might want to invite Madison Square Garden Chairman James P. Dolan to come along. It would be interesting to hear Imus apply his skilled interviewing techniques to the likes of these men.
Thomas and his employer, Madison Square Garden, recently lost a major lawsuit for sexual harassment. The suit was brought by Anucha Browne Sanders, a former executive at MSG. She was awarded $11.6 million, to be paid by MSG. Thomas, Dolan and All-Star player Stephon Marbury were all named in the suit.
In the course of the trial, Isiah Thomas admitted that he called Ms. Browne Sanders a bitch, and said that it was more acceptable for a black man to call a black woman a bitch than it would be for a white man to do so. For his part, Marbury testified that he had sex with a team intern in a truck following a group outing to a strip club. It is, of course, a well-known principle of management that there is nothing else quite like a visit to a strip club to build organizational unity.
Fall Out Boy just wants to be your boy. Everybody’s boy. While most of the band’s career has focused on infiltrating the bedrooms of every young woman in the world, their new album, “Infinity on High,” makes a bid for broadening their boyfriend base into an entirely new realm: the gay market.
Bassist/songwriter/propaganda mastermind Pete Wentz gives interviews to The Advocate, makes out with boys, and picks fights with homophobic moms at concerts. There’s an overall absence of personal pronouns on the new record — a big shift from their bloody-brilliant last album, “From Under the Cork Tree” — and I’m sure that this savvy business boy left things intentionally gender-neutral so that gay guys can come on board.
But as Miller’s discusses, it’s a calculated, commercial come-on. “Who are these boys,” he asks, “and what do they want from us?”
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CNN just showed what is presumably a member of the Indiana delegation with a button, featuring a logo and picture of McCain and Palin along with the following: “Hoosiers for the Hot Chick.”
When Brian K. Vaughan’s science fiction comic epic 
Every summer, it seems, I go through my Liz-Phair-regret phase. It’s probably because on our near-annual roadtrips, Liz Phair’s first three albums — “
What makes this summer’s regret phase particularly poignant is that Liz Phair seems to be going through it as well. Or at least that might be a pop psychologist’s take on her 15th-anniversary reissue of “Exile in Guyville” and the accompanying tour in which she plays the entire album. Greg Kot uses the opportunity to 
It’s about time.