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With the 6^th and final season upon us, will Lost finally zoom towards a feminist future? With the number of female characters dwindling and the simultaneous deification of hetero white males, can feminist Lost fans hope for a satisfying island conclusion?

Previous seasons have been a mixed bag on this count.

Lost has many strong female characters, many of whom I could easily see wearing a “This is what a feminist look like” t-shirt. As noted by Melissa McEwan of Shakesville, an admitted Lost junkie, “Generally, the female characters are more well-rounded than just about any other female characters on television, especially in ensemble casts.”

Lost has often presented ‘gender outside the box’ characters, suggesting being human is more important than being a masculine man or a feminine woman. After all, when you are fighting for your life, ‘doing gender right’ is hardly at the top of you priority list.

While Jack and Sawyer try to out-macho each other in their love triangle with Kate, neither hold entirely to the Rambo-man-in-jungle motif. As for the women, they just might be the strongest, bravest, wisest female characters to grace a major network screen since Cagney and Lacey.

Though the island is certainly patriarchal, one could make a strong case that male-rule is not such a good thing for (island) society. Kate or Juliet would be far better leaders than any of the island patriarchs (and as some episodes suggest, would make great co-leaders – what a feminist concept!)

McEwan, in her discussion with fellow Lost fanatic, Brad Reed of Sadly, No!, agrees, stating “the show looks increasingly to be making an oblique but advanced commentary about the patriarchy.” As she argues:

“The Lost fathers (Benry, Widmore, Paik, Shephard the Elder) are archetypical patriarchs-rich, powerful, well-educated, well-connected, straight, and white, with the exception of Mr. Paik, who’s in the ethnic majority of his country of residence. It is within the battle among these patriarchs that everyone else is caught; it is to their whims, and their arbitrary rules and preferences, that everyone else is subjected. That’s clearly framed as Not a Good Thing, which rather suggests a feminist critique of the patriarchy.”

However, as the two hour season premiere revealed, one of the strongest female leads, Juliet, is dead. Kate is still rocking the strong-woman action, yet the fact remains that “We’re just about out of female characters to root for” (as Cara of Feministe points out).

This slow decrease in female characters means that a show that had more males to begin with has become decidedly testosterone weighted. Moreover, the (white) males left are being deified with Jabob/Lock/Richard/Ben all seemingly having godlike powers. This turn is all the more frustrating given that supposedly Kate was initially conceived as the island leader. Alas, as reported by Jill at Feministe, “execs thought that people wouldn’t watch the show if a chick was in charge, so they gave that role to Jack and turned Kate into one corner of a love triangle.” Grrrr.

The 30-minute season recap that aired last week kept implying women viewers are wooed by the romantic motifs that dominate many of the narrative arcs. Apparently ABC is unaware that women are interested in more things than romance (and shirtless hotties).

Sometimes the writers seem oblivious to the fact that women are more than man-seeking baby-making machines, too. Season five was particularly dire in this vein. Drawing on the Freudian ‘baby as penis replacement’ motif, Kate was depicted as trying to repair the loss of Sawyer with baby Aaron. (For more on this line of argument, go here.)

Yet, overall, Kate is arguably one of the smartest, most daring female characters to lead a contemporary mega-hit television series. Her back-story ain’t bad either – she was on that doomed flight as a result of fighting back against her mother’s abusive partner. And, though Juliet sometimes seems more focused on her various Romeos than on other matters, she heroically detonated the bomb that launched us into season six. Who knows, maybe this final season will launch us into some sort of feminist utopia led by Eloise Hawking or Rousseau. At the very least, let’s hope it doesn’t culminate with Kate all happily married and duly domesticated!

Please join me in extending a heartfelt welcome to our newest monthly blogger here at GwP: Natalie Wilson! As Heather mentioned yesterday, Natalie will be bringing us a monthly column called POP GOES FEMINISM, which will serve up feminist intersectional analysis of, you got it, pop culture.  A literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author, Natalie teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in the areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture.She is author of the blogs Professor, what if…? and Seduced by Twilight. She also writes the guest column Monstrous Musings for the Womanist Musings blog. She is currently writing a book examining the contemporary vampire craze from a feminist perspective.

Her inaugural post for GwP, an offering under Heather’s GLOBAL MAMA column titled “The Mommy Myth that Will Not Die,” sparked a superlively conversation here, which I urge you to check out!

Welcome, Natalie!  We’re so excited–and so lucky– to have you as part of the team!

Welcome back to guest poster Natalie Wilson, whose new column, Pop Goes Feminism, starts tomorrow!

It’s not about hating men, it’s about helping Haitian women

If one can wrangle any positive shards from the rubble that now pervades Haiti’s landscape, I would say that it would be the tremendous outpouring of concern and aid. Unfortunately, such concern tends to fade and aid donations shrivel once the media moves on to its next story.

Once the Haiti earthquake is merely a blip on the mental desktop of most Americans (like Hurricane Katrina before it), the situation for the majority of Haitians will not have changed for the better. Rather, especially for women and children, the situation is likely to be even worse than it was before. This is why some organizations are targeting their aid at women and children.

As reported by Tracy Clark-Flory, the “women and children” first aid model some organizations are taking makes sense due to the fact that women and children are typically the ones most vulnerable in the wake of a catastrophe.

Before the earthquake, Haitian women were already dealing with extreme poverty, lack of adequate healthcare, high rates of HIV/AIDS, and huge infant and maternal mortality rates. They live in a country that only made a rape a criminal offence in 2005, where at least 50% of women living in the poorer areas of Port-au-Prince have been raped. Haiti also has a serious child trafficking problem and huge numbers of girls working as domestic servants.

The global mamas of Haiti, as detailed by the International Childcare organization, must cope with the fact that one in eight Haitian children never live to see their fifth birthday due to infectious disease, pregnancy-related complications, and delivery-related complications. In Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, many parents cannot afford to send their children to school, give them proper medical care, or even guarantee that their children will have safe drinking water.

For all of these reasons, Haiti needs what Lucinda Marshall calls Gender-Responsive Aid. As she notes, “there are needs that are specific to women, particularly for pregnant women and mothers with new babies and the need to address the added vulnerability to violence that women face when government infrastructures are dysfunctional.” Yifat Susskind of MADRE explains that disasters are often followed by a rise in gender-based violence: “When men deal with very, very difficult stresses, one of their outlets is violence against women.”

In addition to the tendency for increased violence against women in the aftermath of a disaster (as also noted here), women are already economically disadvantaged in Haiti (due in large part to what is commonly known as the feminization of poverty). As noted by MADRE,

“…women are often hardest hit when disaster strikes because they were at a deficit even before the catastrophe. In Haiti, and in every country, women are the poorest and often have no safety net, leaving them most exposed to violence, homelessness and hunger in the wake of disasters.

Because of their role as caretakers and because of the discrimination they face, women have a disproportionate need for assistance. Yet, they are often overlooked in large-scale aid operations. In the chaos that follows disasters, aid too often reaches those who yell the loudest or push their way to the front of the line. When aid is distributed through the “head of household” approach, women-headed families may not even be recognized, and women within male-headed families may be marginalized when aid is controlled by male relatives.”

To make matters even worse, when the earthquake hit, Haiti’s Ministry of Women was holding a meeting–and nearly everyone there was killed or injured. (For the full story, see here). The loss of these women’s rights leaders is a severe blow to relief efforts throughout the entire country.

Despite all the reasons for gender-responsive aid, some have equated this approach with misandry–as in this article. Such spurious claims miss the point entirely and fail to recognize that gender-responsive aid benefits everyone, not just women. Gender-responsive aid isn’t about hating men, it’s about recognizing a gendered response to this disaster is necessary.

I am truly, truly happy again for the first time in years. Back where I should be, where everything about my body feels right. Running, running, and running some more.

Apparently, I’m not alone in this, and in the United States (as well as worldwide), we are experiencing another running boom. The first was in the 1970s, when people took to the roads in large numbers for the first time, and they are running in much larger numbers today. In 2008, 425,000 people finished a marathon, and marathons have become big business—travel destinations, boons for the economies of the cities and towns that host them. Participation is up from 25,000 people who finished a marathon in 1976:

Year Estimated U.S. Marathon Finisher Total

1976 25,000
1980 143,000
1990 224,000
1995 293,000
2000 353,000
2004 386,000
2005 395,000
2006 410,000
2007 412,000
2008 425,000 (record total) http://www.runningusa.org/node/16414

And that’s just the marathon—half marathons, 10Ks and 5Ks attract hundreds of thousands of others. So why a running boom, why now? I’ve got some ideas about this I’ll explore in future posts, along with the debate about how slow is too slow for a marathon time and whether the marathon should be primarily a competitive or participatory event. For a recent article exploring this issue, see the New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/sports/23marathon.html. This debate is part of a long history of such debates in the United States, whose sport governing bodies and sport educators have been divided on the question since the early twentieth century. Gender, and a claimed divide between male and female athletes, has been a major part of this debate—men are associated with the competitive model of sport, women with the participatory. This divide persists to some extent to this day, and I will be exploring the implications of this, along with the question of why certain sports are popular at certain times, and how this influences our body ideals. I’ll talk a bit about my own training, too, and its relation to my own ideas and feeling about bodies and gender.

My background: when I was younger, I was fast. I held the Arizona high school state record in the 1600 meters for 17 years http://az.milesplit.us/pages/Arizona_Track_and_Field_All_Time. I went to the University of Arizona on a track and cross-country scholarship, where I was competitive my freshman year, but so overtrained, injured, and burned out by my sophomore year I was ordered by my doctor to stop. I stopped competing, kept running on my own, but more slowly, and took up weight training, progressing over the years to competitive power lifting and specializing in the bench press, where I was ranked 11^th in the U.S. in my weight class for a lift of 235. My body, as you might imagine, was completely transformed, from a skinny, slightly muscular 120 pounds to a dense, extremely muscular 150 pounds.

I’ve written about this elsewhere, but what I haven’t written was how unnatural it felt to be like that, what a Frankenstein’s monster I experienced that body to be. At one point I was so stiff I couldn’t turn my head to the side, and it hurt so much to run and I had to do it so slowly that I stopped altogether. When I discovered that the closest I could come to touching my toes was to barely touch the tops of my knees, I knew I had to do something about this and took up ashtanga yoga—an intense, demanding form of practice that follows the same forms each time and takes anywhere from ninety minutes to two hours to complete: http://www.kpjayi.org/ Ashtanga changed my morphology again, and after six years I was down to 135 and the creaking cement that had been my chest and shoulders was finally starting to crack.

Then came the mid-life crisis moment, for me the occasion of my 45^th birthday last September. In July I decided that I was tired of worrying about aging and the wrinkles on my face, and I was going to do something about it. In the (il)logic of my world, this meant dropping back down to my college weight and body fat percentage (120 pounds and 12 percent), and I bought one of those diet and exercise journals where you record each calorie you ingest and each you burn, along with the relative percentage of carbohydrates to proteins and fats. That did it, and by my birthday I was down to 123 and 11.7 percent. So I’m giving myself a break on that last three pounds.

What I didn’t expect was that at this lighter weight, running felt good again. I started back slowly at first, running only once a week, a six miler on Sundays. By August I’d added some track work, and by November was up to a ten miler on Mondays, a six miler on Fridays, and at least four miles on each of two other days, meanwhile maintaining my ashtanga practice. By December, I’d gotten a Polar heart rate monitor, and was completely, utterly hooked, back in the that running world I’d lived in from 1979-1983, except with a lot more technology attached. With a HRM you can measure not only your heart rate, distance and calories, but your speed, cadence, altitude changes, and pretty much anything else you might like to know. By January, I’d signed up for a marathon in June, another in October that is 26.2 miles straight up hill the entire way and climbs 6,000 feet, and had started to look forward to my runs the way you look forward to whatever activity it is that you love the most, at home in my body in a way I’d never been.  Insane by most standards of sanity, clearly.

What are the implications of this changing body, changing activity slate, changing mind? For me, for you? How is the way we experience our bodies in physical activity a function of gender? What are your current physical training regimes, your backgrounds? I will explore these issues in future posts, and welcome your comments on any of these issues.

If in NYC, join me at this year’s Memoir-a-thon sponsored by Brooklyn Reading Works! It’s the first time I’ll be reading with my hubby, graphic designer/writer Marco Acevedo.  Deets:

Memoirathon at The Old Stone House (Third Street & Fifth Avenue in Park Slope), Feb 11 @ 8pm

And a note from the organizers about this year’s theme:

A lot of New Yorkers have their own recession story to tell, whether it’s from the past year, the past decade or the accumulation of a lifetime.

During this year’s Memoir-a-thon, you will get to listen to the personal reflections and insights on how some writers have managed to survive, preserve their sanity and even have fun during hard times.

You’ll be amazed to discover just how resilient and resourceful people can be, while still managing to find humor, cause for reflection and even gratitude, in some of life’s most challenging situations.

Whether you found the past year “the year you’d like to forget” or “the year of positive thinking”, you will be inspired and entertained by tonight’s lineup of writers who talk about infinitely new ways of being.

Lori Rotskoff (of “Beyond Pink and Blue” fame!) has come over for a visit and work session today and we are sitting here digging up treasures like this — just had to share:

Yep, that’s Michael Jackson.  As Lori’s 8 year old son said to her after seeing this, “I guess Michael didn’t learn the message of the song.”

Calling all girls studies scholars and advocates for the National Women’s Studies Association 2010 conference in Denver, Colorado. The Call for Proposals specifically invites folks doing work on girls (and many other areas–see the Call for full details) to submit proposals.

DIFFICULT DIALOGUES II

November 11-14, 2010 Ÿ Denver, CO

Proposal Submission Deadline: March 1, 2010

Program Co-Chairs: Beverly Guy-Sheftall, NWSA President and Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies, Spelman College and Vivian M. May, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies, Syracuse University

About the Theme

In response to wide demand, NWSA 2010 builds on conversations that began in Atlanta at the 2009 conference. Difficult Dialogues II will explore a range of concepts and issues that remain under theorized and under examined in the field of women’s studies.

NWSA 2010 identifies several thematic areas in which ongoing and new difficult dialogues are urgently needed:

• Indigenous Feminisms: Theories, Methods, Politics
• Complicating the Queer
• The Politics of Nations
• “Outsider” Feminisms
• The Critical and the Creative

Hope to see you there!

January is Cervical Health Awareness Month, making it the perfect time to post a follow-up to Part I which featured my concerns about potential unintended consequences of new Pap test guidelines (from ACOG, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists). To recap, it is vital that we do not confuse a recommendation of less frequent Pap tests with the unchanged recommendation of annual pelvic/sexual health exams (see the National Cancer Institute for explanations of both).

So, let’s look back at a letter dated November 20, 2009, in which the President of ACOG clarified:

Cervical cancer screening should begin at age 21 years (regardless of sexual history). Screening before age 21 should be avoided because women less than 21 years old are at very low risk of cancer. Screening these women may lead to unnecessary and harmful evaluation and treatment.

Medically speaking, why should this recommendation disregard an individual woman’s sexual history? His letter continues on to state:

Cervical cytology screening is recommended every 2 years for women between the ages of 21 years and 29 years. Evidence shows that screening women every year has little benefit over screening every other year.

Doesn’t this depend on how many new sexual partners a woman has in a given year? Are the revised guidelines assuming monogamy (or at least long-term, serial monogamous relationships) which decrease odds of a woman contracting a new cancer-causing strain of HPV in less than a 2-year period? Where are the conclusive findings of large-scale sexual-behavior surveys to support this assumption?

ACOG’s November 2009 press release featured these quotes from Alan Waxman, M.D.:

Adolescents have most of their childbearing years ahead of them, so it’s important to avoid unnecessary procedures that negatively affect the cervix. Screening for cervical cancer in adolescents only serves to increase their anxiety and has led to overuse of follow-up procedures for something that usually resolves on its own.

I agree with GWP reader anniegirl1138 who commented on my previous post that over-treatment is no joke. However, we have not been presented with data that a Pap test — the test, itself, not over-treatment based on test findings — is directly linked to significant increases of any negative health outcome.

Cervical HPV infections can be detected by Pap tests: ACOG acknowledges that, “the rate of HPV infection is high among sexually active adolescents, but counters with, “the large majority of cervical dysplasias in adolescents resolve on their own without treatment.”

Why should that smaller group of girls and young women (whose pre-cancerous lesions do not resolve without treatment) miss the annual opportunity to receive an early diagnosis? Early-stages of cervical HPV infection can often be resolved with less-invasive treatment options.

More-invasive treatment options, such as the “excisional procedures for dysplasia” that have been linked to increased risk of premature births, are one of several medical treatments for cervical HPV.

And, what about the possibility that an increased risk of premature births may not be the paramount concern for every female patient? Not all women want to or can biologically become mothers. What if an individual female patient would rather seek medical treatment for a HPV infection that has resulted in cervical dysplasia so that she has greater peace of mind in knowing that she has reduced her risk of cervical cancer and reduced the likelihood of transmitting HPV to her sexual partner(s) and/or future babies?

Call me a feminist, but I still believe that knowledge is power and that every sexually-active girl and woman should be encouraged to consider the benefits of annual Pap tests. When Pap smear results show “abnormal” cellular changs, then healthcare practitioners should explain the potential for false-positives and discuss the pro’s and con’s of moving forward with different diagnostic and treatment options.  

ACOG acknowledges that, “HPV also causes genital and anal warts, as well as oral and anal cancer.” A Pap test may be a girl/woman’s first chance to learn of a cervical HPV infection, which can result in her having a colposcopy exam. This procedure helps a practitioner find HPV-infected cells not only on the cervix but also in other anogenital areas (the vaginal canal, the labia, the perineum). Beyond the cervix, a Pap test that is positive for HPV may be a wake-up call to get a thorough oral screening for serious oral cancers which have been linked to sexually transmitted HPV.

In addition, my research and others’ studies have found that STI diagnoses can lead to attitudinal and behavioral changes which can decrease risks of contracting other STIs, including HIV. For all of these reasons, a Pap test that leads to a diagnosis of a sexually transmitted cervical HPV infection can bring unintended positive consequences.

In light of the new Pap smear guidelines, I hope that U.S. girls and women who get less frequent Pap tests will more frequently ask their healthcare practitioners to educate them about cervical cancer, about the full range of STIs, and about FDA-approved vaccines against viruses that can be sexually transmitted (HPV and Hepatitis B).

For the medical facts about HPV and HPV vaccines, check out the book The HPV Vaccine Controversy by Shobha Krishnan, M.D., a member of the Medical Advisory Board of the National Cervical Cancer Coalition. 

The Bottom Line: a recommendation for less frequent Pap tests does not mean you should forgo your annual pelvic exam. In our busy lives, e-reminders can make the difference:  PromiseToMe.com allows you to schedule an annual email reminder. [Note for boys/men: make sure to get an annual sexual health exam, too!]

Just a quick share:

The Council on Contemporary Families has opened nominations for its Eighth Annual Media Awards for Outstanding Coverage of Family Issues competition. We (I’m on the Board!) honor outstanding journalism that contributes to the public understanding of contemporary family issues, in particular the story behind the story: how diverse families are coping with social and economic change; what they need to flourish; and how these needs can best be met.

The Council will present three awards — two for journalism in text form (print- or web-based); and one for broadcast journalism (audio or video).  CCF recognizes that America needs a balanced national conversation about the cultural, legal, and psychological issues that shape both private life and public policy. Essential partners in this process are the reporters and producers who present complicated family issues in their broader social context.

Past winners include journalists from USA Today, Time magazine, the Boston Globe, the San Antonio Express-News, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, KPCC (Southern California Public Radio), Thirteen/WNET, AlterNet, the Associated Press, among many others. Topics have ranged from the consequences of parental snooping on tech-obsessed teens to hunger in Oklahoma and the role of religion in American family life. You can read about last year’s winners, who reported on raising special-needs children, contentment and self-sufficiency among older women living alone, and life in three Texan foster-care families.

Writers, editors, and producers may self-nominate.  For the nomination form, and more info, go here!

When people solidly in middle age write memoirs most often they have had unusual lives.  Or — better yet — they’re about to flee from ordinariness into a major life change, or they’re writing about the aftershocks from a sudden jolt.  Melanie Gideon, in her memoir The Slippery Year, fits none of these categories. Half Armenian, half-Indian, she is the middle-class daughter of a pediatrician and a psychiatric nurse raised comfortably with three sisters in Rhode Island.  Now married with a 9-year-old child and settled in the Oakland Hills, she’s a mother in the carpool lane, a wife who resents her husband’s snoring, a reluctant member of a women-only dinner group who buckles under the pressure of what gourmet dish to bring.  And she’s floating in the middle of an existential “Is this all there is and how do you know?” fog that she can’t wipe out of her eyes.

Yet when she squints at the bleary outlines intense humor, sardonic wit, and an almost sentimental angst seeps out.  “I did not have cancer.  My parents had not abused me.  I was in a good marriage to a kind man,” writes Gideon in her introduction as an apologia for the sense of quotidian disappointment and dysphoric angst she constantly feels.  The “slip” that serves as a touchstone throughout the book is a sense of meaningfulness sliding out from under her guise as a modern-day mother entrapped with privilege and accomplishment.

This would be sobering, a kind of pre-“Richard Cory” glance to see what’s lurking inside the minivan if Gideon wasn’t so damn funny.  Blessed and cursed by the fact that she’s deeply aware, she first chronicled the burr of her husband’s impulse purchase of a camper in the New York Times’ Modern Love column and in this book she expands.  Quite literally.  She blows up details of her Bay area life to comic effect, and after letting the air out settles into an almost poetic realization of what her life really is.

In a hilarious passage she describes the tortoise-like pace of shoppers having a “lifestyle experience” at her local Trader Joe’s and how this irks her.  While walking fast in San Francisco she is stopped by someone proselytizing the “Slowmandments” as part of a goal to make San Francisco “an official Slow City.”  Gideon’s response is that the thought of San Francisco being any slower than it already was – “was terrifying.” She replies that he has clearly mistaken her for a native Californian but then feels guilty she’s rebuffed his message. At Chez Panisse in Berkeley she looks for secret messages in her menu since she is so bereft she’s not having an orgasmic food experience like everyone else.

“At forty-four, I feel the current of that river pulling at me,” Gideon writes, “I am one of six and a half billion people currently taking their turn at being alive on this planet” and then she riffs on soccer-parent politics. It’s too flip to call Gideon a postmodern Erma Bombeck – the world is too changed from that era, the jar between generations too rife. But her humor, sense of modern-day ennui, and intense wit settle into a Rothko-like layering where she stares into the lack and creates an atmosphere dark with depth and poignancy. Gideon wades around in the muck of her well-appointed life but messy psyche to create a likeable character grappling sharply with issues of purpose, how to both nurture and let go of her son, know if she’s in love enough, deal with their beloved dog’s remains, weigh risk over safety and feel guilty because she takes this measure.

One critique is that I wish Gideon could show more courage.  Also the author of two children’s books she’s obviously a talented writer who makes no mention of her ambitions.  She is willing to discount her strengths in a way that translates as honest and humble, but also unfairly self-deprecating. Striking is her willingness to indict her own misgivings and chronic worry which makes the moments of happiness, when they float by, the more startling. Her son, Ben, emerges as the book’s mini-Zen philosopher.  In response to hearing his mother explain, “The sky is falling,” he reframes this as “the sky is calling.”  Gideon’s devotion toward her son, and her sense of unbearable grief that he will one day grow up and leave (foreshadowed in a hysterical recollection of his week away at soccer camp) catch up all of the book’s themes in a Gordian Knot of incurable feeling.

“My friends and I search for our lost selves everywhere” she writes, “Where is that plucky girl, that lustful teenager, that optimistic young woman, that tenderhearted young mother?”  “Occasionally, if we are lucky,” she writes, “we catch a glimpse of the woman we are becoming… the one who has been aging gracefully inside of us. She is more than her body.  She is more than her face.” By making the book’s subtitle “a meditation on happily ever after” she outlays its thematic reach – to set thinking against fairy tale, set reality against wistfulness, and the flip of finding her younger self’s aspirations set against the woman she now is.