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The anti-choice contingent descended on Washington, D.C. last Thursday and Friday, and I am confident in saying the average age of those attending was less than my 23. The combination of the sheer fact that these protesters were children – literally, though I’m sure the mental definition extended to some of their chaperons – and the continued opposition by the movement to any “abortion reduction” strategies (as if the “we want abortions banned or we want nothing at all!” strategy that isn’t just shooting yourself in the foot) only further illustrates for me that the people who proclaim themselves “Pro Life” have no concept of the lives they would affect. I don’t expect a child (and we are talking children, the groups I saw were no older than 16, and at times definitely no older than 12) to understand the nuances of the pro-choice movement, the arguments for ownership of one’s body and personal volition and the many complicated, individual situations that can arise involving a woman + pregnancy. So I sure as hell don’t expect these children to understand “pro life” in any more complex terms than “don’t kill babies, it’s wrong,” though the social and political implications of what they’re trying to enforce are vastly more complicated.
That said, today’s article in Newsweek about anti-choice advocates daring to commit the heresy of pushing for abortion reduction (while still, I’m sure, wanting a total ban at the end of the day) is kind of heartening. It is, I hope, something that can bridge the gap between some people on the anti-choice side, and some on the pro-choice. Because, despite the “Stop the Abortion Agenda” stickers that were ever so popular Thurs/Fri, there just isn’t any such thing. No one who is pro-choice wants a woman to have an abortion. We want her to have the option of having a (safe, legal) abortion. And though I doubt “safe, legal and rare” will become the mantra of those on the right pushing for abortion reduction, they might, at least, come around to resembling something that really is “pro-life” – both “pro” for babies, so they are conceived and born into healthy, supportive and loving situations, and for those women who would much prefer not to get pregnant in the first place than have an abortion.
EDIT: Just brought to my attention via Jezebel, the Vatican calls Obama arrogant for the repeal of the gag rule that previously prevented overseas funding for anything that even breathed the word abortion ever. According to Archbishop Rino Fisichella, this particular flavor of arrogance is “the arrogance of someone who believes they are right.” The Archbishop went on, “What is important is to know how to listen, without locking oneself into ideological visions with the arrogance of a person who, having the power, thinks they can decide on life and death.”
That strikes me as funny, good sir, because I’m pretty sure that’s what the Vatican and all those who subscribe to its ideological visions have been up to since… forever? Only I guess you’re just right, not arrogant because you <i>think</i> you’re right and imposing your worldviews on others to damaging and sometimes fatal consequences. Right? Right.
Pardon my frustration, but I’m always confused with how the woman in these equations, if the religious right ever considered her a person to begin with, suddenly stops being a “life” herself.
I posted a few days ago about Ellen DeGeneres as the new face of Cover Girl. Today, Jezebel addressed the suggestion that Cover Girl’s choice of representatives is more pandering than progressive. Says a commenter on Jossip, also quoted in the Jezebel article:
“Unfortunately, I think describing P & G as ‘progressive’ is a bit naive. Cover Girl is among the least expensive of major drugstore cosmetics; one could easily argue that marketing to black women is a cynical attempt to make poor people buy their cheap product. Are KFC and McDonald’s progressive because they use black people in ads? As for being ‘gay-friendly,’ I think the fact that Ellen DeGeneres has a popular daytime talk show with the right kind of demographics is why she’s in their ads. Capitalism trumps prejudice every time, if the price is right!”
First, I think the comparison between Cover Girl’s marketing and McDonald’s is unfair. Cover Girl has used the same “easy, breezy, beautiful” taglines and design to all their advertisements, regardless of whether the model in question was black or white. McDonald’s tactics, however, see a marked difference depending on the race of the people in their ads. (Though I can’t for the life of me find the ad with the black grandson praising his Southern grandma for her down-home cookin’, only to find it’s from McDonalds. My crack team is scouring YouTube.) That, my friends, is pandering. Representing your product in the same manner regardless of a model’s race, age, weight or sexuality is not. And you know, right now, with how little such a thing really is happening, it is progressive.
In regard to Ellen being chosen because of her popularity, regardless of her sexuality – isn’t that a good thing? A woman was chosen for her fit with the brand image and the perceived sellability, dare I say her qualifications, rather than some inherent trait that really has no bearing on what sort of person she is. Now the latter would have been pandering. (Hmm, and vaguely reminiscent of a certain VP nomination.) But her sexuality being neither a contributing nor detracting factor, something that the company neither shied away from nor wanted to exploit – progress! And, with the current popular attitude towards gays, maybe even progressive.
I’m sensitive about a lot of things, but I can’t find a reason to call foul on Cover Girl for this one.
Though I am loathe to link to anything with ‘OMG!’ remotely near the title, I just heard from Yahoo’s pop culture blog that Ellen Degeneres is the new face of CoverGirl. It won’t make me buy their makeup, but it’s still pretty awesome that a major cosmetics company is using a 50-year-old lesbian woman (and damn funny lady) for their spokesperson. Truly times have changed, and for the better.
But my favorite part of the article, quoting Ellen: “I am here to set the record straight right now. I am not pregnant. It just turned out to be a bump. I went and had it checked out.”
Bless you Ellen, for being a glimmer of sanity in that vast universe of tomfoolery and nonsense.
I saw The Women this Saturday. Though reviews are generally abysmal, I will offer my qualified recommendation to the contrary: The Women isn’t good. But it isn’t bad. And if you’d like to see more movies with female protagonists, and more movies aren’t solely about those women’s relationships with men, give The Women your money. Hollywood will not respond to petitions or politics or all the bloggers in the world. But it will respond to cash. If The Women makes a reasonable chunk of change, then they’ll try it again, and maybe next time it’ll be good.
The film revolves around four friends: Mary, the do-it-all suburbanite (Meg Ryan), Sylvia, the magazine editor (Annette Bening), Edie, the frazzled, fertile mom (Debra Messing), and Alex, the hot, edgy lesbian (Jada Pinkett-Smith). (I was unaware the last was a trope of chick flicks, but maybe this is The Women trying to break the gender barriers of movie genres.) The four live in the control environment of “upper class,” where the mundane concerns of day-to-day are neatly solved by money and the hired help, allowing the film to have pinpoint focus on other (but not frivolous!) problems. One you probably guessed from the previews: Mary finds out her husband is cheating on her. The other is Sylvia’s futile quest to bring intelligence and substance to the women’s magazine she’s recently come to helm. There are incremental perturbations of mother/daughter problems, the betrayal of friends, etc.
The main failing of The Women is that it could have landed so many solid blows – but it pulls its punches at best, or just never goes for it at all. The Sylvia’s struggle to bring quality content and writing is opposed time and again by the establishment – airbrushed actresses, diet tips, and appeals to our worst emotions. She fails (realistic), quits (understandable), but for all her passion has nothing to say about it in the aftermath. The closest she comes to criticism is when she’s talking to Mary’s daughter, who wants to be skinny like the models in her magazines – to which Sylvia only says, “No one looks like that. They’re all airbrushed.” Mary fails worse in reassuring her daughter, however. Her daughter is 12, a stick, and when she refuses a cookie on the grounds that it is “too many points,” Mary only laughs amusedly then goes back to prepping for her little garden party. Then, of course, Mary gets into a messy almost-divorce with her cheating husband, and sort of forgets about her daughter’s weight obsession, because of course her daughter won’t be even more driven to gain control over some aspect of her life while her parents’ relationship is disintegrating in a most ugly fashion around her.
Ultimately, none of these issues – seeing the impotence of one’s passion towards a laudable goal, tweens suffering poor body image because of pictures better qualified as drawings than photographs – are very important because the characters live in the magical world of wealth. Much like money allows them the luxury to dwell on such problems, money, apparently, can also sweep them all away. Sylvia will launch her own magazine and do whatever she likes regardless of profits, and Mary’s daughter will follow in the footsteps of her mother and grandmother, buying hair-straightenings and face lifts to bring her nearer to that fictional image she never stops admiring.
The one hit the movie never took, and I really wish it had, was men’s culpability in the messes that are personal relationships. They get credit for not playing the blame game on men, which I think is what a lot of people assume “girl power” and “feminism” are, but in ducking that they were equally unfair – since men weren’t the evil overbearing monsters ruining everything, they’re impotent, barely culpable for their own actions. In the whole cheating scandal, the mistress Crystal (Eva Mendes) is blamed much more than the unfaithful husband. Even when he’s forced to move out, trying to make amends all the while, Crystal comes by his place on a daily basis – but it’s hardly his fault, or so his daughter claims, saying “I don’t think he even likes her. He’s just lonely.” Of course, he’s lonely! He can’t help having a mistress, he’s just a sad little man. It is strangely Crystal that offers the only fair and balanced view of the situation, saying when Mary confronts her, that husbands don’t get stolen. They go willingly. But then Crystal is a self-obsessed, money-grubbing home wrecker, so is likely not meant to be the film’s vessel of wisdom.
But even if the movie isn’t as good to women as it could be, as hard on the problems it presents as it might have been, and contains its fair share of stereotypes, it’s not anywhere near as bad as the rest of Hollywood. These women are able to pursue the lives they want – and what they want isn’t shoes, or wealth, or men. And if they must live in a world of financial freedom to have that luxury, at least that freedom seems to come from their own efforts, and not from the benevolence of the men in their lives.
What’s a movie, $10 and two hours of your life? A small price to pay for the chance at women of real substance on the silver screen.
If the fact that Japan has gone through two Prime Ministers in the last two years is any indication, it’s not the easiest job. The domination of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) since the 50’s and general public disinterest make politics, from this layperson’s standpoint, an even more bureaucratic and thankless job than usual. So even if I’m not a big fan of the LDP (particularly Shinzo Abe, but let’s focus), I’ve got to give props to Yuriko Koike, who’s just thrown her had in the ring for the newly open PM position. If she won, she wouldn’t just be the first woman to hold the position – she’d be the first to try.
As best put by Koike herself, “Hillary used the word ‘glass ceiling’ … but in Japan, it isn’t glass, it’s an iron plate.”
Now I love Japan. I’ve studied the language, I’ve lived in the country, I want to go back. But part of loving a place is taking the good with the bad, and Japan’s big ‘bad’ is the pervasive sexism. It is, from an outsider’s perspective, partly cultural – in English some people might split hairs about ‘woman’ just being ‘man’ with a prefix, but in Japanese ‘husband’ uses the symbol for ‘master’ and ‘wife’ the symbol for ’servant’. If that kind of thing is in your own language, in how you have to communicate with people, it’s a little hard to escape. The other part is that there’s a sort of unspoken acceptance of the way things are. If no one does anything, nothing’s going to happen.
That’s why someone like Koike could make a difference – by her quotes, albeit translated, she seems like one BAMF. And as Dodai on Jezebel discussed this morning, the more women are in charge the less people hate the idea of women in charge. It’s not going to be an easy job for Koike, but I hope it’s one she gets a shot at. Even if her office time isn’t much better than her predecessors, she’ll still have set up the Jaws of Life on that iron plate.
Japan’s new PM will be chosen on September 22.
An anti-choice* billboard in Freeport, IL was vandalized Joker-style.
Part of me wishes people wouldn’t do shit that reflects badly on those who want their cause to be heard seriously and maturely in a public forum (as the billboard in question is trying to prompt emotion, not logic, I hope you all realize I’m talking about the pro-choice side here. Also, PETA could stand to quit throwing paint on people if they want anyone to listen to their talking points).
Another part of me delights in $400 being drained from an organization trying to dictate my uterus.
But vandalism is bad, kids, and the anti-choicers have more money than we could ever drain spraypainting billboards anyway.
*”Pro-life” is a misnomer and I won’t use it. Not that they don’t support life, but the name suggests those who aren’t “pro-life” are somehow against life. Last I checked, pro-choice meant you got to choose – and one of those choices is having that baby. So I say anti-choice, because supporting life is not exclusive to that side, but eliminating choice is.
