Taking a break from a piece I’m working on to pour through vacation pics (thanks for sending, Dad!). I can’t believe I was in Wyoming only a week ago! This is me in Teton National Park, right before I went for a swim. Hey, if ever you’re looking for a great B&B in Teton Valley, check out the Wilson Creekside Inn. The proprietess serves up some mean John Wayne eggs.

This morning I was a guest on the final airing of The Lisa Birnbach Show, along with Gloria Feldt, Courtney Martin, and, by phone, Gloria Steinem. I was honored to be flanked by the Glorias and Courtney, and our intergenerational conversation about feminism was a great practice run of the panel we’re putting together and taking on the road. I accidentally said “damn” (as in “Women become more radical with age, but I also know lots of damn radical young women”) on the air and then immediately wondered if you are allowed to say “damn” on the radio.

Though we all looked hot in our celebratory pink feather boas, it was a sad sad day, as GreenStone Media, the show’s short-lived parent company, is closing down. Lisa (pictured above) is a witty, wise, charismatic talk radio host who makes you feel like you’re chatting in her living room. She’s had some incredible guests, mainstream and radical activisty alike, and she has great shoes. The idea and existence of GreenStone — talk radio for women — held such promise. I know Lisa will land on her feet, and wherever she goes will be damn lucky to have her. Oops. There I go again.

Goodbye, GreenStone. Thank you for having me, and thank you, most of all, for trying. We’ll miss you like crazy.

That patterny background was just really starting to get to me. Thanks to stuff I learned at BlogHer last month, I’m streamlining a bit, too. Hope folks like the new digs?! Construction is still underway, so feedback is most welcome!

I can’t decide if I want to go see Nick Salamone’s new play, Hillary Agonistes, or not. Interesting comment in Patrick Healy’s piece about it in the NYTimes: “[T]he iconography of Mrs. Clinton, like the woman herself, seems to have been around forever.” In truth, I think the iconography was around before the woman herself.

All eyes may be focused on Hill these days, but meanwhile, the number of women in political leadership seems to have once again leveled off, according to research findings cited in an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

[A]lthough women hold a quarter of all seats in state legislatures, “we’ve hit a plateau,” says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics, a public-policy institute at New Jersey’s Rutgers University.

The bottom line: While women will cast about 53% of the votes in November 2008, based on the past two presidential elections, their share of elective offices seems to have leveled off at about one in six at the federal level, and one in four in the state capitals.

The reason for the slowdown, according to the article? Simple. Women remain less likely to run for public office than men:

They first need to be recruited and assured of their qualifications, research shows. “Women tend to run because they’re concerned about an issue; they don’t wake up thinking they want to be governor the way men do,” says Jeanne Shaheen, a former three-term governor of New Hampshire who is now the director of Harvard University’s Institute of Politics.

Regardless of what we think of Hillary Clinton, it’s time to tackle the confidence gap, ladies, and take a page from Hill’s book. But wait – does this mean the external obstacles are all cleared up? Inquiring minds want to know.

(Thanks to Marco for the heads up.)

So I’ve just started reading
Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid by feminist sociologist (and lesbian mother of two) Lisa Jean Moore and I tell ya, someone over at NYU Press had a wee bit of fun writing her flap copy. “Moore offers a penetrating exploration…” “Sperm Counts examines the many places sperm rears its head.” And of course, the subtitle. But my favorite is the fact that there is a drawing of a squiggly little sperm positioned at a slightly different spot on every single page and if you flip through the book real fast, the sperm seems to swim. Try it. It’s fun.

On the serious side, this looks like an incredibly well-researched and captivating read. Moore looks at children’s birds-and-bees books, forensic transcripts, porn, and sperm bank brochures to offer this biography qua cultural history of modern-day sperm. Check out Thomas Rogers’ seminal interview with Moore over on Salon. I’ve got a suggestion for the sequel: Egg Matters. More to come. Ok ok, I’ll stop while I’m ahead.

My take on Wendy Shalit’s Girls Gone Mild is now up over at The American Prospect Online. A teaser:

“Unrequited Love: Musings on Girls Gone Mild”

Author Wendy Shalit wrongly blames lenient baby-boomer parents and third-wave feminists for the hyper-sexual culture that surrounds young women, and in doing so loses potential allies in her nascent “modesty movement.”

Had Wendy Shalit not adopted the tone of a beleaguered conservative, blaming feminism for turning young women into sluts, I could have gone with her all the way. She’s not like those modesty-advocates of yore who fretted that women’s liberation would result in coed bathrooms, and then went on to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment. She’s different from the rest….

…As the American Psychological Association notes in a May 2007 report, there’s a paucity of research on the sexualization of girls, and there’s certainly a need for more. Shalit’s reliance on the experiences of those who email her is beyond questionable, but she nonetheless peppers her prose with some solid statistics that make you want to run to your local toy manufacturer and stop them before they put Slutty Elmo on the shelves. She emphasizes girls’ agency and activism. Among the book’s heroes are the girls from Pittsburgh who orchestrated a successful “girlcott” of offensive t-shirts sold by Abercrombie and Fitch with catchphrases such as “Who Needs Brains When You Have These?”. Shalit’s desire to incite positive social change is admirable — and genuine.

But Shalit giveth, then taketh away. Her tactics are gratuitously divisive. After celebrating said young activists, for instance, who were hailed by third wave feminists as inspirational, she uses these girls to trump up the so-called intergenerational divide on modesty. She also loses progressive allies in the fight against the pornification of the girls’ toy aisle by giving a free pass to advertisers and corporations. And she loses feminists young and old by conflating the inappropriate, premature sexualization of girls under age 18 with the entire project of sexual revolution….

For more, click here.

I’m back from WY, back in the city of polluted air and garbage on the streets that, for better or worse, I love. But this cheered me up:
Nominations are now open for one of my favorite young feminist projects going down these days, The REAL hot 100. Riffing on Maxim’s Hot 100 list, the annual Real Hot 100 list shows that young women are “hot” for reasons beyond looking good in a magazine. By featuring this list of young women from around the country doing incredible things in their every day lives, they’re battling the popular notion that all young women have to offer is outward appearances.

The annual list, declare the smart hotties/hot smarties beyond REAL Hot, is just a first step. Through the Real Hot 100 network, nominees and winners can combine their resources, share strategies and join forces to further their social causes and to affect real change.

So…Do you know a smart, savvy young woman who represents the intelligence, drive and diversity of young women today? Is she breaking barriers, speaking her mind and making the world a better place? Look around – she may be your best friend, your wife, your partner, your colleague, your sister, your student. Nominate her today!

Greetings from WY! I’m so excited Karl Rove resigned, but the lovely people I’m staying with are not. Potentially interesting breakfast conversation, as you can imagine.

Meanwhile, the ladies at MotherTalk have done it again. Check out the blog tour for Becoming Jane – which Elizabeth Curtis, Alison Piepmeier, and Consuela Francis so awesomely participated in here at Girl with Pen.

Guest post by Conseula Francis and Alison Piepmeier

Conseula Francis blogs at Afrogeek Mom and Dad. In her real life she’s an English professor with a James Baldwin fetish.

Alison Piepmeier blogs at Baxter Sez. She read Pride and Prejudice once…a long time ago…and has very lowbrow taste in movies.

Alison:
This film is an homage to birth control.

No, really—one of the subtexts that Conseula and I both noticed was the fact that, as a woman, your life is much more difficult if, as Jane Austen’s sister puts it, you’re having “a child every year. How will you write?”

How, indeed.

The homage to birth control is especially poignant because this film is—at least in its first half—unbelievably sexually fraught. And hot. It’s a shame that Conseula and I are both married to other people, because otherwise, we both would have gotten lucky after seeing this film. Whew.

Conseula:
Alison, as usual, is incredibly inappropriate. But she is right. “Becoming Jane” is ultimately about passion—passion for work, passion for life, passion for other people. And it is also about the sacrifices and responsibilities that often make a living a passionate life impossible.

Alison:
Although Conseula would like to take us into a more appropriate train of thought, I’m taking us back to the sex. This film did a great job of letting the audience experience the sexual tension in very subtle interactions—the unexpected meeting at a ball, a conversation ostensibly about literature in a private library. In fact, Jane and Tom’s first kiss, and what Conseula calls their “sneaky hand touches” are far sexier than many explicit scenes I’ve seen in other, less carefully controlled films.

And when Tom and Henry (Jane’s brother) take off their clothes to go swimming in the river after a very flirtatious cricket game, the audience gasped in delight.

Oh, and let me not forget to mention one of the sneaky—but not so subtle—sexy touches in the film happens in the first three minutes, when the Rev. Austen slides under the covers to go down on Mrs. Austen. I love that James Cromwell.

Conseula:
In addition to being incredibly sexy, though (and it was sexy—the actors portraying both Tom and Henry are nothing short of eye candy), the cricket scene also reveals one of the film’s primary themes: the restraints of propriety on 19th century women. As Tom and Henry race from the cricket field to the river, Jane and Countess Eliza (Jane’s cousin) are racing after them, just as alive, just as turned on by the freedom of it all.

But then the boys strip, propriety (as well as other things) rears its head, and Jane and the Countess head back to join the others. The audience is reminded that their freedom is severely constrained, particularly if they hope to marry well.

Alison:
One thing this film does very well is convey the sense, the experience, of those constraints. I could feel myself as a modern audience member searching for the loopholes, the ways that Jane could get out of those constraints and make exactly the life she wants for herself, find ideological and professional (and sexual) gratification. The film knew that I was looking for the loopholes and showed me exactly how they were all closed off for Jane—and, to a lesser extent, for Tom, as well.

Conseula:
It’s difficult to say more about the film without spoiling readers. Though we go into it knowing how the story ends, the journey is, nonetheless, worth it. Instead, I’ll talk about the people in the theater tonight.

We saw “Becoming Jane” at our local “art house” theater and the crowd was typical for such a venue. Well dressed patrons ordering pinot grigio to go with their popcorn. The audience was made up primarily of groups of women, seemingly bonded by their love of Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice (if the little squeals of delight that erupted every time an allusion to that novel was made is any indication). They were also a few dour looking men attendance, but they didn’t say much.

Alison:
Also, Conseula was the one black person in attendance. Which leads to this important sociological query: why do black people hate Jane Austen?

Conseula:
Given the fact that I actually went, willingly, to this movie and own the A&E production of Pride and Prejudice (Mr. Darcy!), I think we can’t make the sweeping statement that black people don’t like Jane Austen. Maybe they just don’t like pinot grigio with their popcorn.

*With all due respect to Lisa Johnson, whose book of this title is not about Jane Austen.

Guest post by Elizabeth Curtis

Elizabeth M. Curtis recently graduated with an M.A. in women’s studies from the George Washington University, where she wrote her thesis on blogging and the formation of feminist networks online. She blogs regularly at A Blog Without a Bicycle.

1. With Prejudice

When sitting in a theater watching the trailer for Becoming Jane in early July, I turned to my movie-watching date and observed, “That film cannot end well.”

My comment, which puzzled my companion at the time, was based on my undergraduate engagements with Austen’s novels in English seminars. Doing critical readings of Jane Austen’s leading ladies at a women’s college – what feminist literary theorist could ask for anything more, right? Studying Persuasion or film adaptations like Clueless or Bridget Jones’s Diary in my courses, though, quickly led me to conclude that I was not quite ready for scholarly critiques of my girlhood heroines and an author I idealized. I’m sure you can imagine the horror I felt when presented with a Lacanian reading of Austen’s novels as pathological and obsessive ruminations on her own “failed” love life.

And now a movie expose of Austen’s real-life romances? Oh, dear. Marketed with the tagline, ““Their love story was her greatest inspiration,” I could only imagine what a historical yet fictional film could do to poor Jane…and it wasn’t very becoming at all.

The early reviews that I read about Becoming Jane did little to assuage my anxiety. On Salon.com, Stephanie Zacharek described Becoming Jane as a <a href="
http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2007/08/03/becoming_jane/”>”weird effort to remake Austen’s life — about which we actually know very little — into a genteel, tasteful Harlequin romance.” Questioning the slim historical evidence that was used as the foundation of this flick (the Jane Austen Society of North America provides a great analysis of fact versus fiction), Zacharek critiques the way in which this film is forced to fit a contemporary sense of romance. BBC Movies provided a similar yet slightly more positive review. There Stella Papamichael wrote, “Mercifully, director Julian Jarrold resists turning a literary icon into a 19th century Bridget Jones, but this story does take a few flights of somewhat dubious fancy in speculating on her relationship with the real Mr Darcy.” None so reassuring.

So it was with great trepidation that I sat down in a theater to finally see Becoming Jane for myself. Personally, I’ve always thought of Jane Austen as one of the great feminist figures in literary history (of course, as it is with most things feminist, whether Jane Austen and her characters are feminist friends or foes is, well, debated) – and I was worried that her dating life would get more attention than her prolific prose thus leaving audiences to forget her accomplishments as an author and to focus instead on a soap opera version of her so-called life.

2. With Pride

I must confess that I was pleasantly surprised by Becoming Jane. Sure, I’m a sucker for period pieces – seeing them is a hobby bordering on obsession for me. But I think most Jane Austen fans will be tickled by the clever blending of her fictional characters with the personalities of her real-life companions in the film.

There were some great feminist-y – though stereotypical – moments in the film, too. You go with that cricket paddle, Jane! You go, girl! I especially appreciated the girl-on-girl mentoring action. Whether it was writerly advice bestowed by Mrs. Radcliffe or sisterly advice shared by Cassandra, it always warms my heart to see strong, positive female relationships in major motion pictures. Because, really, the mean girls just get too much screen-time.

My major issue with the film comes from what I found to be mixed messages about combining career and marriage. Perhaps this issue is a bit too much on the contemporary scene to avoid being incorporated into this historical fiction, but I found myself wishing that I could rewrite history so that Anne-Hathaway-Jane-Austen really could have it all. Women receive so many negative messages in the media about the “consequences” of choosing a career in terms of their personal lives…Wouldn’t it be nice to see a more positive portrayal – just once?

To be fair, Jane’s on-screen love life was thwarted more by class and circumstance than by career. But when questions like “But how will you write?” were posed as counters to Jane’s proposed romantic schemes or when a successful writing career is presented as a consolation for the loss of a lover…It just makes me more aware of the (unfortunate) timelessness of the struggle for women to find a work/life balance that allows them to reach all of their aspirations – personal and professional.

I can’t think of a better place, though, to discuss the life of this literary lady, its cinematic portrayal, or the film’s messages about professional writerly woman than Girl with Pen.