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.

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American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls issued a report Monday confirming what we all know: images of women and girls have become increasingly sexualized, and those images are virtually ubiquitous in American culture.

What is new, beyond the urgent tone and the remarkable thoroughness of the report, is the Association’s focus on the dire consequences that exposure to those images has on young women — “harming girls’ self-image and development.” We’re talking everything from eating disorders to lower test scores.

Even if you consider yourself aware of the problem, you won’t see purveyors of these images — the media and the marketers — quite the same way again. Sleazy would be an understatement.

Almost as noteworthy as the report itself is Stacy Weiner’s article on it — “Goodbye to Girlhood” — in The Washington Post. She nicely highlights the key issues in the report — but also provides some historical context, citing Diane Levin’s argument that much of the problem can be traced back to the deregulation of the children’s television in the 1980s — when product placement really began.

Weiner’s article also points to a way out: teaching media literacy. The article ends with Genevieve McGahey, a 16-year-old who has become empowered by her mother’s and her school’s commitment to educating her for the real world:

“It’s a little scary being a young girl,” McGahey says. “The image of sexuality has been a lot more trumpeted in this era. … If you’re not interested in [sexuality] in middle school, it seems a little intimidating.” And unrealistic body ideals pile on extra pressure, McGahey says. At a time when their bodies and their body images are still developing, “girls are not really seeing people [in the media] who are beautiful but aren’t stick-thin,” she notes. “That really has an effect.”

Today, though, McGahey feels good about her body and her style.

For this, she credits her mom, who is “very secure with herself and with being smart and being a woman.” She also points to a wellness course at school that made her conscious of how women were depicted. “Seeing a culture of degrading women really influenced me to look at things in a new way and to think how we as high school girls react to that,” she says.

The ground-breaking documentary series about the civil rights movement, “Eyes on the Prize,” is remarkable for many reasons — but maybe most importantly, it recorded, for future generations, the outrageously open racism of the South that persisted throughout the 20th Century. I can still remember Mayor Smitherman of Selma, Ala., in a nationally-televised news conference talking about agitators like “Martin Luther Coon — Pardon me, sir, Martin Luther King.”

Those type of statements are explicit reminders of a pervasive culture that has haunted African American lives throughout American history.

In this sense, I’m glad that NBA all-star Tim Hardaway went off yesterday when asked how he would deal with a gay teammate coming out on his team. He started with a sigh and said, “I would distance myself,” but he ended by saying, “I hate gay people. I don’t like gay people and I don’t like to be around gay people. I am homophobic. I don’t like it. It shouldn’t be in the world or in the United States.”

Former NBA player John Amaechi — who sparked Hardaway’s comment by coming out in an upcoming book — almost seemed relieved: “Finally, someone who is honest. It is ridiculous, absurb, petty, bigoted and shows a lack of empathy that is gargantuan and unfathomable. But it is honest. And it illustrates the problem better than any of the fuzzy language other people have used so far.”

The Amaechi story and the brief conversation it elicited was about to slip by us — like one of Hardaway’s patented cross-over dribbles. But Hardaway ensured that America — and the American man, in particular — will need to look itself in the mirror a little longer.

When Hardaway was at his peak as a player with the Miami Heat in the late 1990s, he defined “cool” in the NBA — both for his smooth play and smooth talking (Mike Greenberg, an ESPN morning radio host, would have Hardaway in the studio to teach him how to talk cool). In many ways he became an icon for what filmmaker Byron Hurt might call a “hip hop masculinity.” That masculinity, however, if full of contradictions.

Hurt explores the intersections between masculinity, sexism, violence and homophobia in hip hop in his latest documentary, “Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes,” airing Tuesday, Feb. 20, on PBS — which should be a must-see (the companion website for the film is itself a great resource).

I saw Hurt talk at the Feminism and Hip Hop conference a couple of years ago at the University of Chicago — and he was an inspiration. He discussed his work on his new documentary — and what he mentioned was not the great quotes he got from the hip hop luminaries he interviewed, but the silences and discomfort his questions evoked. Busta Rhymes and an executive from BET, among others, walk away from interviews rather than confront and take responsibilities for the representations of women and men they create and support.

While silence is its own statement, though, sometimes it helps when people like Tim Hardaway put the silence into words.

The last 10 days or so has seen a convergence of seemingly unrelated events which illuminate or cast a dark shadow around the subject of gender and sport. The most high profile of these events was the announcement by former NBA player John Amaechi that he is gay, an announcement tied to the release of a book. As it turns out, the revelation is only one occurrence in a cluster of discreet moments related to the topic of gender and sport and sexuality, a subject that is seldom dealt with in a graceful manner in our society.

The series of stories was presaged by a Feb. 1 story in The New York Times quaintly titled “At Home With Rene Richards” which appeared in the Home Section. Richards, while playing on the Women’s Tennis Tour in 1976, revealed that she had once been a man, Dr. Richard Raskind. Some of you will remember the initial outrage that followed the announcement, and then the endless discussions of Richard’s sexuality and whether she was truly a man or a woman, and if she should be allowed to compete on the tour as a woman. In retrospect the entire tempest was archaic and something out of a lost civilization. Or was it?

The Super Bowl and the Snickers Ad would suggest otherwise. Several reactions surfaced over this commercial. First, there were objections that were voluminous enough for the Snickers people to pull the ad from further airplay. The complaints seemed to have been in two broad categories: those who objected to a “kiss” by two men on moral grounds, and those who objected because it made them uncomfortable. Either way it opened a window on the homophobia to be found in television land on the receiving side of the camera.

But wait there’s more. In the days since the Super Bowl there has been a rush to the Snickers website, an increase in traffic of 16 times the pre-ad traffic. The reactions have varied with descriptions of the ad as “stupid,” “homophobic,” and “homoerotic.” Whatever it may be, it certainly reveals some confusion among Homosapiens Americanus.

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First, it’s from the Guardian — so we have several British men we’ve never heard of. But, come on, George Michael in the Top 40? And the only reason you provide is that “he’s been writing songs that women love from 25 years.” I know he’s bigger over there on the island, but stop it. Just stop it.

For every inspired choice — such as Carl Djerassi, the “father of the pill,” at number 2 — you have two depressingly shallow ones — shoe designer Manolo Blahnik at 23 and botox-creator Alastair Carruthers at 49.

But nothing puzzles me more than number 4: Bill Clinton. Now, I’m one who thinks you should be impeached for making up intelligence rather than dalliances in the White House hallway, but that’s number 4, folks, as in only three people ahead of the guy who is best known for sleeping around on the country and his wife.

via Bill Crider

Growing up in Chicago, I used to get into “Sportswriters on TV” — one of the original sports commentary shows which are now ubiquitous on ESPN. Even though the show celebrated the cigar-smoking, curmudgeonly, old-(white)-boys’-club nature of sports reporting, at its best it provided one of the first mainstream arenas to put sports in a larger perspective — focusing on the social context as much as on the performances themselves.

Which is all to say I caught myself watching the “Sports Reporters” Sunday morning on ESPN. Theoretically a bastion for intelligent, reflective sports commentary amidst its more flashy (and presumably better-rated) counterparts like “Around the Horn,” the show regularly features at least two reporters/writers I actually respect: John Saunders and John Feinstein (Mitch Albom and Mike Lupica don’t do much for me).

But watching them struggle to discuss the implication of former NBA player John Amaechi’s “coming out” made me realize how small their sense of social context actually is. Feinstein did state the male locker room is the “most homophobic” place in America — and Lupica believed that the locker room would be the “last bastion” of homophobia in America. But none of them gave any reasons why that was the case — or any suggestion on how that might change.

To find that type of analysis, we need to look elsewhere — to one of my new (thanks HomeboyNet) favorite cultural critics, Mark Simpson, a British writer who appears frequently for American audiences in Out magazine. In an article this past summer, he coined the term “sporno” — which became one of the New York Times Ideas of the Year in 2006.

Writing from a distinctly European perspective, Simpson introduces the concept:

Sport is the new gay porn. Sportsmen on this side of the Atlantic are increasingly openly acknowledging and flirting with their gay fans, a la David Beckham and Freddie Ljungberg (the man who actually looks the way Beckham thinks he looks). Both of these thoroughbreds have posed for spreads in gay magazines … and both have welcomed the attention of gay fans because they “have great taste.” More than this, they and a whole new generation of young bucks, from twinky soccer players like Manchester United’s Alan Smith and Cristiano Ronaldo to rougher prospects like Chelsea’s Joe Cole and AC Milan’s Kaka, keen to emulate their success, are actively pursuing sex-object status in a postmetrosexual, increasingly pornolized world.

In other words, they’re not just sports stars, but sporno stars.

Simpson is at his best when he taking us through the visual imagery of advertising — and, since the article was published, he has tracked the presence of “sporno” on his blog. Although European audiences seem more accepting of the “sporno” image, it has appeared in American ad campaigns — such as this one from Hanes.

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Former NBA center John Amaechi has just become the first NBA player to “come out.” He details his life as a gay professional basketball player in his upcoming autobiography, Man in the Middle.

A few weeks ago, we had noted that the NHL had sanctioned a film about a gay hockey player, allowing the filmmakers to use actual NHL jerseys and logos.

Here’s to hoping we’ve got a trend on our hands.

The response from the NBA and its players, though, sends mixed messages.

On one hand, you have an enlightened response from Orlando Magic star player Grant Hill and the long-standing NBA commissioner, David Stern:

Hill, who said he didn’t know Amaechi when he was with the Magic, also applauded the decision to go public.

“The fact that John has done this, maybe it will give others the comfort or confidence to come out as well, whether they are playing or retiring,” Hill said.

NBA commissioner David Stern said a player’s sexuality wasn’t important.

“We have a very diverse league. The question at the NBA is always ‘Have you got game?’ That’s it, end of inquiry,” he said.

While that comment by Stern might not recognize that the league might need to play a more active role in creating and enforcing a tolerant atmosphere, its matter-of-factness feels good, in other respects.

But other players were less straightforward — veiling their homophobia in tepid responses about “trust” and “awkwardness”:

LeBron James … said he didn’t think an openly gay person could survive in the league.

“With teammates you have to be trustworthy, and if you’re gay and you’re not admitting that you are, then you are not trustworthy,” James said. “So that’s like the No. 1 thing as teammates — we all trust each other. You’ve heard of the in-room, locker room code. What happens in the locker room stays in there. It’s a trust factor, honestly. A big trust factor.”

Injured Philadelphia Sixers forward Shavlik Randolph acknowledged it’s a new situation.

“As long as you don’t bring your gayness on me I’m fine,” Randolph said. “As far as business-wise, I’m sure I could play with him. But I think it would create a little awkwardness in the locker room.”

News that Amaechi had come out surprised some players.

“For real? He’s gay for real?” said Philadelphia center Steven Hunter. “Nowadays it’s proven that people can live double lives. I watch a lot of TV, so I see a lot of sick perverted stuff about married men running around with gay guys and all types of foolishness.”

Even so, Hunter said he would be fine with an openly gay teammate.

“As long as he don’t make any advances toward me I’m fine with it,” he said. “As long as he came to play basketball like a man and conducted himself like a good person, I’d be fine with it.”

Sports, of course, is the greatest spectacle of manhood in American culture. Unfortunately, with athletes like Hunter in locker rooms, playing “like a man” requires walking a very narrow line.

From the No-He-Didn’t wire (thanks to Tha Doghouse): A high school basketball coach in Leeds, Maine, looking for some motivation at halftime, required his players to “put their hands down their pants and check their manhood.”

One player refused, and he was singled out.

Not surprisingly, the coach sees Bob Knight as his role model. Fortunately, unlike Indiana University, his school fired him immediately.

But idiots like that coach don’t need to look to other idiots like Bob Knight to justify their behavior. All they have to do is catch the latest advertising trend.

At first glance, this year’s Super Bowl ads appeared to avoid, almost entirely, the objectification of women that has been the hallmark of previous broadcasts. While the trend has been heading this way the last few years (reflecting, possibly, an attempt to appeal to growing female audience), as recently as last year we found plenty to talk about.

This year perceptive critics like Steven Johnson didn’t even mention any portrayals of women, noting, instead, that “the strangely dominant theme of the night’s ads was the undertone of violence.”

Gender, though, played a role throughout the night — even if it was hidden behind closed doors or behind role reversals.

The only company that took the old-fashioned route was Go Daddy. Even their ad, however, included elements of ironic self-awareness of the straight-up exploitation of their previous Super Bowl ads. A well-coiffed executive tells us about all the great parts of the company, but when he opens the door to the marketing department, it reveals a party of over-the-top excess, featuring their “Go Daddy Girl” from previous years as well as an assortment of ridiculous, offensive partygoers.

He notes that everyone wants to work in marketing, but then shuts the door before the ad comes to an end — symbolically admitting, perhaps, that we no longer can have that out in the public eye.

What we can have, however, are ads that mock masculinity — and by the ridiculous results of that role reversal, make the audience consider all the femininity they are missing.

The ad for the Chevy HHR, for example, featured, somewhat inexplicably, a bunch of topless men of varying ages writhing about a car full of young women. It was designed by a college student, Jessica Crabb, who won a Chevy-sponsored contest. Crabb said her motivation was to bring a rare female perspective: “We never get commercials that are for us — very rarely we do, especially with car commercials.”

Unfortunately, all it did was justify, by exclusion, all the ads that objectified women — which, while they might be offensive, were undeniably sleeker and just made more cultural sense. Crabb’s ad had simply no critical perspective through which we would question those cultural assumptions.

Another ad in a related vein was the Snicker ad featuring an unintentional kiss between two men who were working on a car. To re-assert their masculinity after the incident, they tear hair from their chests.

Again, without women, men are left awkwardly to exploit themselves. While homophobia might have provided the foundation for the humor (or were they actually mocking homophobia?), women were, once again, the absent presence.

Even without Go Daddy telling us, it was clear that women had not simply disappeared from the ads, they were simply being hidden in the marketing department, waiting to emerge more objectified than ever.

While the NFL is experiencing some success in attracting a female audience, we’re hoping they — and the commercial sponsors of the Super Bowl broadcast — do better than last year’s “Not-So-Super Representations of Women.” Check back here for our post-game analysis.

The image on the right is the promotional poster for a new film opening this week, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. I haven’t seen the movie or read Patrick Suskind’s bestselling book on which it is based, but my point isn’t to criticize the film itself. It is to condemn, once again, marketing that, in order to titillate its audience, fetishizes both parts of the female body (as opposed to seeing the body as a whole — with a head and mind attached to it) and the victimized, frequently bloodied and/or dismembered female body

The story of the film and the book concerns a man who murders virgin young women to preserve their scent, which he believes is the perfect perfume. The reviews of the film are somewhere between mixed and poor — but, it should be noted, almost every critic praises both its visual artistry and its courage.

Some might, in fact, argue that, far from endorsing the fetishization I condemn above, the film is actually about the danger of a man’s out-of-control sexual appetite. More than one critic, though, is disturbed by the lack of an internal check in the film — and see the visual artistry at the service of something rather sinister.

Violet Glaze of the Orlando Weekly writes: “As the body count of sexualized corpses increases (an indignity sharpened by the hypocrisy of staying above the navel to clear an R rating) Perfume starts to resemble an olfactory Peeping Tom minus the intellectual chops necessary to back up its atrocities. It’s a shame the rancid, misogynist undertone of lowest-common-denominator slasher porn overwhelms all its redeeming qualities.”

But, as I said, how the film ultimately deals with this issue is not really my concern here. The marketing of a film — or any narrative — often overwhelms the story itself, since most people likely will see the marketing out of context that sit through the whole work.

And the image the marketers use for Perfume (see it in live action on the film’s official website) follows a long and increasingly intense sexist advertising tradition.

First, seeing women as sex objects is nothing new, but in the last few decades advertising has increasingly dehumanized women by portraying them as animalistic or, as in this case, showing only an outline or just specific fetishized parts of the female body.

Consider how many fast-paced trailers for films and TV shows have what seems to be an obligatory random shot of a woman, usually with her head not in the picture, taking a piece of clothing off. To cite simply the example that flashed across my screen as I was writing this post, take a look at the last few moments of the TV spot for the upcoming Alpha Dog.

Sometimes this dehumanizing and fetishizing is “benign” — portraying women as dolls, perhaps — but it can also have a very creepy side, when violence against women becomes part of the appeal. See Christine’s earlier post on how this disturbing trend has infected television drama.

In the Perfume image, the blood-as-rose-petals seduces the casual viewer into this subtle but devastating system.

Note: I must credit About-Face, an amazing website whose goal is to “to equip women and girls with tools to understand and resist the harmful stereotypes of women,” with cataloging the most egregious advertising “offenders,” as they call them, a few of which I link to above. And it’s great to see that About-Face just launched a blog — so I’m sure they’ll be scooping me on this stuff soon.

And, speaking of scooping, I was surprised Bag News Notes — another remarkable website that analyzes popular visual imagery — hadn’t picked up on this yet (although their focus is usually the news). But, as you can see, they’ve been busy breaking down the visual imagery of a rich political week.

Anyone claiming that our educational system has become biased against boys in recent years must read Michael Kimmel’s “War Against Boys?” in the latest issue of Dissent magazine.

Kimmel recognizes that boys, on many levels, are not doing as well as girls in school — but broader factors, involving race, class and, most significantly, hypocritical cultural expectations, are to blame, not the feminist movement or a softening or “feminization” of our culture at large:

Countless surveys suggest that young boys today subscribe to a traditional definition of masculinity, stressing the suppression of emotion, stoic resolve, aggression, power, success, and other stereotypic features. Indeed, the point of such successful books as William Pollack’s Real Boys and Thompson and Kindlon’s Raising Cain is to expand the emotional and psychological repertoire of boys, enabling them to express a wider emotional and creative range.

How does a focus on the ideology of masculinity explain what is happening to boys in school? Consider the parallel for girls. Carol Gilligan’s work on adolescent girls describes how these assertive, confident, and proud young girls ‘lose their voices’ when they hit adolescence. At that same moment, Pollack notes, boys become more confident, even beyond their abilities. You might even say that boys find their voices, but it is the inauthentic voice of bravado, posturing, foolish risk-taking, and gratuitous violence. He calls it ‘the boy code.’ The boy code teaches them that they are supposed to be in power, and so they begin to act as if they are. They ‘ruffle in a manly pose,’ as William Butler Yeats once put it, ‘for all their timid heart.’

Kimmel, a professor of sociology at SUNY Stonybrook, has always been one of my favorite popular academics, able to speak eloquently to a wide audience while maintaining an academic rigor. His book-length study, Manhood in America, can at times simplify complicated historical issues but it is always at the service of making his research useful in the here and now. The implication of all his work — inspired heavily by Pollack, Thompson and Kindlon in recent years — is that we need to stop being so reactionary in our advocacy for boys and starting seeing them as real people — with complex desires that are buffeted between strong social and historical forces:

To many who now propose to ‘rescue’ boys … all boys are the same aggressive, competitive, rambunctious little devils. They operate from a facile, and inaccurate, essentialist dichotomy between males and females. Boys must be allowed to be boys — so that they grow up to be men.

But what boys need turns out to be pretty much what girls need. In their best-selling Raising Cain, Michael Thompson and Dan Kindlon describe boys’ needs: to be loved, get sex, and not be hurt. Parents are counseled to allow boys their emotions; accept a high level of activity; speak their language; and treat them with respect. They are to teach the many ways a boy can be a man, use discipline to guide and build, and model manhood as emotionally attached … [W]hat they advocate is exactly what feminists have been advocating for girls for some time.

With this perspective in mind, no place — in our popular culture, at least — is giving boys more respect than two television series — The Wire and Friday Night Lights.

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Just what you’ve been looking for. An in-depth analysis of the racial and hair-color politics of Christina Aguilera, Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson. Thanks, Cintra Wilson.

Thanks to a recent biography, I can offer a long-overdue shout-out to one of my favorite science fiction authors. Okay, I’ve only read one of James Tiptree, Jr.’s stories — “The Women Men Don’t See” — but it might be the story (from any genre) I retell most. To retell it, though, I have to reveal the ending — and that’s the best part. So just read it, okay?

Julie Phillips is actually getting a lot of positive and prominent press for her “rich” and “thoughtful and meticulous” biography. This is undoubtedly because of Tiptree’s gender-bending, but it seems worthy of the attention for a variety of reasons.

James Tiptree Jr. is — you guessed (something close to) it — Alice Sheldon, a complex, self-reflective woman who, once her true identity was revealed by enterprising fans, Phillips argues, never was able to capture the same directness and intensity of her earlier work under her pseudonym.

Despite being stereotyped as a boy’s genre, girls and women have always been a big part of the production and consumption of science fiction. The authors whose science fiction emerged in the 1970s — LeGuin, Lessing, Russ and others — were the most visible, but authors like Tiptree, Judith Merril and others were working under the radar since the pre-World War II Golden Age.

For more info on the feminist sf in the here and now, check out the Feminist SF Carnivals. And to let you in on a secret: PopPolitics will be hosting the next one. More on that soon …

In Britain, the United States and Canada, men account for only 20 percent of the market for fiction.  What are the cultural implications of this remarkable trend? Lakshmi Chaudhry of In These Times for one believes it’s a big, rather disturbing deal: "Don?t look now, but we may be headed back to the 19th century, when the
novel was considered a low-status, frivolous, pastime of ladies of
leisure, unfit for real men." 

This is especially bothersome when conservative critics (and other book review editors and columnists) try to blame what they see as the dismal state of literature on women:

In recent years, various pundits have used this so-called ?fiction gap?
as an opportunity to trot out their pet theories on what makes men and
women tick. The most recent is New York Times columnist David
Brooks, who jumped at the chance to peddle his special brand of gender
essentialism. His June 11 column arbitrarily divided all books into
neat boy/girl categories??In the men?s sections of the bookstore, there
are books describing masterly men conquering evil. In the women?s
sections there are novels about ? well, I guess feelings and stuff.?
His sweeping assertion flies in the face of publishing industry
research, which shows that if ?chick-lit? were defined as what women
read, the term would have to include most novels, including those
considered macho territory. A 2000 survey found that women comprised a
greater percentage of readers than men across all genres:
Espionage/thriller (69 percent); General (88 percent);
Mystery/Detective (86 percent); and even Science Fiction (52 percent).

Stereotypes aside, the question remains, how do we get men back to their books?