media

In January, tragedy struck the Los Angeles suburb of Manhattan Beach.

Investigators believe that 24-year-old Michael Nolin killed his girlfriend, 22-year-old Danielle Hagbery, because Hagbery was breaking up with him. Apparently, Nolin then committed suicide.

This murder-suicide story is tragic all the way around. We hear about situations like this all the time. But while the details of this case might still be fuzzy, one thing is for sure: The report published in The Daily Breeze perpetuates the worst of victim-blaming and misguidedly frames the issues.

The story headline reads:

Police believe romantic break-up fueled Manhattan Beach killings.

But romance and break-ups don’t cause murder. Violence and aggression do. Let’s revise and edit, shall we?

An accurate story headline would read:

Police believe violent aggression fueled Manhattan Beach killings.

But the problem doesn’t end with the headline. The article quotes Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s Lt. Dan Rosenberg who provides so-called tips to women on preventing their own assault.

I would insert a snarky “yawn” if the issue wasn’t so absolutely critical!

Daily Breeze reporters Larry Altman and Andrea Woodhouse quote Los Angeles Sheriff Department’s Lt. Dan Rosenberg as saying:

“Danielle Hagbery’s death should serve as a warning to other young women that they need to look out for themselves — such as not going to the boyfriend’s home — when a relationship goes sour.

“This is one more tragic end of a dating relationship where these young women should be aware of it,” Rosenberg said. “Ladies need to be vigilant when things go sideways with boyfriends.”

Seriously. Really?

I’m willing to accept that Lt. Rosenberg was well-intentioned but seriously misguided. And, if so, then Altman and Woodhouse are complicit in their equally misguided decision to include these “tips” in their article.

Badly informed comments such as Rosenberg’s perpetuate a serious problem: Blaming the victim for her own death. This profoundly shifts the attention from the real issue. Presuming it’s true that boyfriend Michael Nolin killed Hagbery before turning a gun on himself, the warning must not be directed toward victims.

Ladies don’t need to be vigilant. Murderers need to not kill.

If this was in fact an instance of “one more tragic end of a dating relationship,” then men need to be aware of their own potential for violence and prevent it from happening. The best way to end violence is for the violent person to stop. Prevention is the real solution.

On February 1, 2010 I sent a letter of concern to eight Daily Breeze editors and reporters, and to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. This letter called out the newspaper and the sheriff for what violence-prevention educator Jackson Katz calls linguistic shape shifting, where language obscures men’s responsibility for violence.

The letter of concern includes signatures from authors, professors, public speakers, advocates, and community activists, experts across the country who work in preventing gender-based violence and sexual assault.

The letter concludes by offering support: “There are plenty of community-based resources and educational materials on the subject of preventing male violence against women. Please do not hesitate to be in touch if you would like to avail yourself to our services and resources.”

To date, not one of the individuals or agencies receiving this letter have replied. The silence is deafening.

A friend of mine recently introduced me to the website pinkstinks.co.uk: a “campaign and social enterprise that challenges the culture of pink which invades every aspect of girls’ lives.” Founded by two “thirty-something” British twin sisters, pinkstinks aims to spark public discussion and influence the media to promote positive gender roles to girls worldwide. Website co-founder Abi Moore, a London-based documentary filmmaker and mother of two sons, grew disgusted by the vapid 24/7 media coverage of Paris Hilton and other celebrities while the achievements of brilliant female scientists and other talented women go virtually unrecognized. Determined to provide more substantive female role models for girls today, Abi teamed up with her sister Emma Moore—a publishing executive and parent of two girls—to start the online venture.

Their appealing website creatively challenges the “culture of pink” and its reductive, restrictive gender stereotyping. On one level, pink is just a color—and if you’re a mother struggling with whether to buy a rose-hued wardrobe for your princess-obsessed daughter, rest assured that a few pink shirts or dresses won’t keep your five-year-old out of the Ivy League down the road. On the other hand, though, “pink” is more than a color: it’s a ubiquitous cultural symbol for a set of prevailing values and messages about what it means to be feminine, for what girls are supposed to care about: beauty, appearance, domesticity, and (before you know it) heterosexual allure.

According to the website, for example, more than 60% of British girls aged 7 to 10 wear lipstick and / or perfume, while over 40% wear eye shadow or eyeliner. Among British girls aged 15-17, 73% say that when they feel bad about themselves, it’s related to their looks or their weight, rather than school work or other abilities. In contrast, pinkstinks motivates girls to develop more meaningful ambitions and privilege brains over beauty.

If you visit the website, be sure to click the box labeled “voices,” which links you to a video of two Swedish pre-teens who took on Toys-R-Us for its “very gendered and sexist Christmas Catalogue.” According to the young investigators, only 14 out of 54 pages of the catalogue portray boys and girls playing with the same toys. Their report is an inspiring example of children’s feminist activism on a global scale—and it may prompt your own kids to question, or at least be aware of, the hidden politics of pink. You can also purchase some alternative merchandise, including a bib or t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “I’m no Princess.” Just think of how adorable your little one might look in that!  And by all means feel to comment with your thoughts below:  does pink stink?

I am so pleased to bring another important and insightful post to Girl With Pen from our regular guest blogger, Shawna Kenney.

The world hears much about women in the Middle East from Western media. Most stories are told from a human rights perspective, about women; rarely do we hear from the subjects themselves. Yet there are fierce young women working from within media structures in countries not especially known for their equal rights policies. As a journalist and educator, I have been blessed to encounter many lately. These brief profiles-in-courage are just a sampling of the work being done behind cameras, within newsrooms, from boardrooms, and in day-to-day life.

Mai Yacoub Kaloti has been a reporter with Al–Quds newspaper for almost a year. The 25-year-old Palestinian says she chose her field “to open up minds and reveal the truth about what’s happening” in her part of the world. Kaloti chose the print journalism field despite her father’s wish for her to be an accountant. Now she proudly signs her “full name” to every story and says that he is just as proud of her bylines. When people tell her women shouldn’t work in war zones, she says it’s her job and that she intends to do it right. “Women in the Middle East are just like all women on earth: they deserve respect, love, and care. They work in different fields, defend their country with pen and weapon, raise children with a sense of responsibility and good manners.”

30-year old Mozn Hassan is the Founder and a member of the Board of Directors for Nazra for Feminist Studies in Cairo, Egypt. While most of her time is spent partnering with local and international organizations in promoting women’s rights, she also answers “nonstop questions from neighbors, colleagues and even the guard of [her] building” about why she is unmarried, why she travels abroad alone, and why she chooses to live in an apartment with her sister rather than her parents. “As an Egyptian feminist I see customs and culture here which govern the mentality of Egyptians. The hardest obstacle we face is that most Egyptian men are occupied by patriarchal ideas.” Still, she fights on. “I think this field is one of the most sensitive and important issues that must be tackled openly and critically in my country. The issues of women’s rights opens lots of discussion on all of society’s problems, and in my opinion it is impossible to reform our society without tackling gender issues.”

Muna Samawi is a 25-year-old Program Officer working for the Freedom House organization in Amman, Jordan. After earning a Bachelor’s degree at St. Lawrence University, Samawi dedicated herself to working in the field of human rights. “I was fortunate to live, study and work in a foreign country for 6 years where I was able to express myself without hesitation, and practice my freedom of expression.” She has since worked with at-risk youth and organized exchange programs focused on including journalists, lawyers, bloggers, and human right defenders from the Middle East. Her activism is not always encouraged. “Political and societal pressures are placed on any activity in the Middle East that is sponsored from foreign agencies, so some eyebrow raising occurs from time to time,” she shares. “As a young woman working in development, I do not always get the recognition or support needed, but my family’s support is sufficient to sustain and push my personal goals to higher levels.” She stresses that advocacy for women’s rights and feminism are “growing movements” in the Middle East—more than most people know.

Marianne Nagui Hanna is a producer at a large news support corporation in Egypt. The 29-year-old describes herself as a “news junkie” who works 14 hours a day in this field she loves. She says her work environment is multicultural and multinational, but that managers tend to assign field missions to men, and has been told “it wouldn’t be cost-effective sending one woman with a team of men, being that she’d need a room to herself instead of sharing.” She takes it in stride and says she wishes the world knew that women in the Middle East “can actually achieve things. We are not all backward housewives from the Middle Ages. We do live in the Middle East in very tough circumstances, in a culture that doesn’t hold much respect to women and considers them second-class citizens, yet we are able to successfully work and gain respect. We don’t ride camels, we don’t live in tents .. and for sure, the harem is no more.” In her bit of spare time, Hanna maintains her blog http://resstlesswaves.blogspot.com/

22-year Hana Al-Khamri is a Yemeni woman from Saudi Arabia living in Denmark to study journalism. Her passion has pushed her to study in another country, due to laws and social pressure. “It is illegal for women to study journalism,” she says of her choice to leave Saudi Arabia. “Second there is a huge social pressure to marry and quit working. Third, I often faced hostility (writing for the ‘women’s section’ of the paper there), especially from older conservative men. I have been refused entry to press conferences only because of my gender. Fourth, I am dependent on men for transportation since I am not allowed to drive a car. And finally, media in Saudi Arabia is under strict government control and censorship, and when you are as open-minded and openmouthed as I am, you are bound to get in trouble.” In her opinion, it is tradition, not religion, that oppresses women in the Middle East, and though her career choice is one not supported by her government, she calls her path in line with God’s will. “My faith is a liberator, not oppressor. I can change my community through my pen,” she says.

Shawna Kenney is an author, freelance journalist and creative writing instructor. Her essays appear in numerous anthologies while her articles and photography have been featured in the Florida Review, Juxtapoz, Swindle Magazine, Veg News, the Indy Star, Transworld Skateboarding, and Alternative Press, among others. She also serves as the Language Editor of Crossing Borders Magazine. You can read more about her work at http://shawnakenney.com/.

Four years ago, Judith Warner made the argument that “hyper-parenting” in the U.S. has caused plenty of mothers to lose all semblance of balance in Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. While the book received its fair share of criticism (for example, see the thoughtful analysis of Warner’s book on The Mothers Movement Online), I recently confronted the bubbling up and spiraling out of my own anxiety–slightly irrational but nonetheless all-consuming–which found its source in the shadowy threat of the H1N1 virus.

A few weeks ago, I was totally caught up in H1N1 anxiety. No doubt some of it had to do with media stories about cases of mortality; the rest of it was wrapped up in having young children. I was managing to control my anxiety surrounding my youngest son, who’s in nursery school, but couldn’t manage to quell the fears about my oldest daughter. J. is in elementary school and has asthma plus multiple food allergies, including to egg; this means she can’t get flu shots. We had plans to travel to see their grandparents for Thanksgiving on two planes. Given our past history of taking her to hospitals for various asthma- and sickness-related issues, both my husband and I were nervous about the whole plan.

What to do? Forego the trip to see aging grandparents because of our generalized anxiety about the possibilities of the kids catching H1N1 (from which plenty of kids have recovered)? Grit our teeth and try our best to get a grip on the anxiety and fear we knew were being influenced by media hype? Silence our concerns about a relatively new vaccine and do everything we could to find out if it was possible for both of our kids to get vaccinated?

In the end, we settled on choice #3. This wasn’t hard for my youngest one, but proved more time- and labor- intensive for my oldest. We finally managed to score a dose of the vaccine from the pediatrician, which we transported to the allergist–where we sat, all morning, watching Sponge Bob in the waiting room while the doctor skin-tested her for reactions to the vaccine and eventually administered the dose in two stages.

So, what does this have to do with global motherhood? For one, our little family drama was set into play by globalization, which not only affects the pathways of pandemic viruses and the constant flow of information about them, but also the fact that we were living two plane flights away from my parents. At the same time, our experience represents parenting from a position of privilege: we had health insurance, access to the vaccine, and the ability to take a whole day off from work in order to vaccinate our daughter. It reminded me how many U.S. families don’t have the resources to access preventative care, or even to navigate relatively minor medical issues.

Subsequent phone conversations with friends in other states made me realize how this global scenario was at the same time very local. My friend in Boston? Couldn’t get the vaccine for her two kids but didn’t seem overly worried about it. The pregnant friend of friends in Atlanta who wanted the vaccine? Wanted it but couldn’t get it. Those same friends in Atlanta? Had one child who got sick with H1N1, recovered, and subsequently got the vaccine with the rest of the family. These geographical differences are exacerbated when we look at other countries, where H1N1 has sometimes not even registered on the radar. In many countries, it’s diseases such as pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, and HIV/AIDS that threaten children on a daily basis. (Here’s a link to UNICEF’s The State of the World’s Children 2009 report.)

Parenting in the time of H1N1: for those of us with some degree of resources, it highlights how caring for children often boils down to managing risks. Does the risk of a relatively new vaccine outweigh the potential risks of contracting a virus? Or is it the other way around? (For that matter, how risky is a plane flight to visit grandparents? The car trip to the airport? The list goes on and on.) Thoughtful parents perceive and weigh risks in different ways. There don’t seem to be right or wrong answers, except in hindsight, which can be kind or cruel. We can never know in the moment.

Families without resources have fewer choices, less ability to take control of these anxiety-ridden situations. I suspect it’s far more stressful not to have choices, to care for small children when you can’t take control and you can’t battle fate with much more than prayers and crossed fingers. Even if “control” is anything but.

Before I moved to Los Angeles a little over a year ago, I had never heard people speak with complete lack of irony about their television-watching habits, certainly never academics.  Among the revelations I’ve experienced since moving one of the biggest has been realizing how serious so many people are about what’s on the tube. In La-La Land, of course, because so many work within this industry.

What a pleasure to then discover Merri Lisa Johnson’s book Third Wave Feminism and Television: Jane Puts It in A Box with its feminist counter to what’s seen on the screen (see below).  The subtitle riffs off of one of Johnson’s previous books Jane Sexes It Up. This anthology covers many of the cable favorites from the past decade: The Sopranos, The L Word, Six Feet Under, and Queer as Folk, among others, and a show that has spawned its own subgenre of academic inquiry: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In her intro “Ladies Love Your Box: The Rhetoric of Pleasure and Danger in Feminist Television Studies,” Johnson harkens back to the now classic essay “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema” by Laura Mulvey and the complicated, gendered relationships long explored between pleasure and spectatorship.  Johnson compellingly outlines her own position in both settling on the couch for a night of cable and wrestling with the theoretical assumptions this act also contains, particularly as a third-wave feminist.  She considers how television is now embracing characters who can be identified along a range of sexual positions and feminist roles and the complicated relationship the viewer enters into by watching.  The book’s contributors explore how plotlines, characters, and thematic twists can be considered progressive as they look through the lens of feminist and queer theory and the scope of cultural studies.

In “Primetime Harem Fantasites: Marriage, Monogamy, and A Bit of Feminist Fanfiction on ABC’s The Bachelor” Katherine Frank offers analysis of the show and its popularity with the imagined alternative ending of a non-monogamous choice or critique of the strictures of heterosexual monogamy that celebrates the finding of “the One.”  Laura Stemple’s essay on “HBO’s OZ and the Fight Against Prisoner Rape: Chronicles from the Front Line” opens with a narrative about her work as former executive director of Stop Prisoner Rape, “a national human rights organization working to end the sexual abuse of men, women, and youth behind bars.”  As the show OZ aired, Stemple finds herself stunned by the “gloves-off nature of OZ” with realistic depictions of the effects of prisoner rape, and the psychological dimension of abuse prisoners experience and how this brought victims forward to her center.  She notes that OZ‘s sixth and final season “ran in 2003, the same year in which the first federal legislation to address prisoner rape, The Prison Rape Elimination Act” was signed into law.

On a different note, in Candace Moore’s “Getting Wet: The Heteroflexibility of Showtime’s The L Word” she writes how the show accesses a range of methods to make “straight tourists into queer-friendly travelers” incorporating what she calls “the tourist gaze” sometimes by craftily using “immersion and distance” through camera work and the show’s visual rhetoric.   Cultivating “the tourist gaze,” Moore says, “in politically positive ways” the show moves along an axis between queer and straight viewers allowing for access of “multiple desires and sensibilities.”

On the cusp of big-movie release season, nevermind the plethora of holiday “specials,” Johnson’s book offers welcome relief as its astute critics offer analysis and provocative perspectives on television’s influences. On this holiday weekend, good feminist, media watching to all.

By now you might have heard that the popular TV series Glee recently aired an episode entitled “Wheels,” which was all about disability. It was a mixed bag. For the most part it was better than the sorts of cloying, sentimentalized depictions of disability on television–shows often advertised as “a very special Punky Brewster” (or whatever).

The main premise is that one of the regular characters, Artie (played by Kevin McHale), uses a wheelchair, and is going to have to find his own way to a glee club competition because the school district doesn’t have any accessible buses. The episode starts with Artie being framed by an individualized rhetoric of triumph over adversity–Artie is used to overcoming obstacles, Artie doesn’t mind–but it quickly undermines these messages. Artie does mind, and for most of the show the nondisabled glee club members are required to get around in wheelchairs. This of course is a learning experience for them, and it has the effect of visually challenging the normality of bodies not in wheelchairs for the show’s viewers. The show ends with a wheelchair dance number that’s nicely done, and is a lot of fun.

So there are good things about this show. But I had a number of problems with it, too. The most obvious problem is that it became the disability episode. Not only do we have Artie and his wheelchair, but we have two characters with Down syndrome. And while I am delighted to see actors with Down syndrome on any mainstream TV show, these two characters were used in problematic ways. The first, Becky Johnson, played by Lauren Potter, tries out for the cheerleading squad and is accepted. The good aspect of this is that she’s pushed really hard by the coach, who says that Becky wants to be treated like the other cheerleaders: she refuses to coddle her because of her diagnosis. The bad aspect is that she’s terrible, just terrible. She can’t do even the most basic things that the rest of the squad does.

And the worst aspect of the inclusion of the characters with Down syndrome is that they’re ultimately used, as the New York Times Arts Beat blog argues, “as a prop in the continuing humanization of [cheerleading coach] Sue Sylvester.” We find out that the coach let Becky onto the squad because her older sister (played by Robin Trocki) has Down syndrome, and we find this out when Sue visits her sister and reads her Little Red Riding Hood. Again, a mixed bag: many folks in the world have people we love with disabilities, and it’s nice to put that message out there. The scene with Sue and her sister was trying to be very loving and affectionate, and it sort of worked, but sort of verged into that cloying, a very special Glee kind of place. Is it sweet that Sue was reading her sister–her older, very clearly adult, sister–Little Red Riding Hood, or was it infantilizing of the sister for the sake of making Sue seem sweeter?

Ultimately the show can’t fully escape from the individualized triumph over adversity rhetoric that permeates a lot of mainstream treatment of disability. Near the end of the show, the character Kurt, as part of another plot line, tells his dad, “Being different made me stronger.” In some ways this is the message that the show leaves with its viewers, and it’s a message I have strongly mixed feelings about.

We have a chance for Girl-with-Pen’s Courtney Martin to be the Washington Post’s “Next Great American Pundit.” In her own words,

I may not have a Nobel Prize, but I did manage to work the phrase “inaugural orgy” into my column.

So, check out Courtney’s website, and then cast your vote online at the Washington Post now through Mon. at 3 p.m.

Girl With Pen’s newest Guest Blog comes to you from the awesome Therese Shechter, documentary filmmaker of I Was a Teenage Feminist and The American Virgin. Here, Therese susses out the sexism in the retro TV fave, thirtysomething.

Was thirtysomething anti-feminist propaganda?

There’s been a recent outpouring of hype now that thirtysomething‘s first season is finally out on DVD. If you missed it, the show was an hour-long drama following the lives of a baby boomer-clique living in late-1980s Philadelphia. The show was so popular it even spawned a pithy new suffix of its own. (Twentysomething, fortysomething . . . You get the picture.)

I loved the show because it reflected my own life at the time as a young single career gal surrounded by married and breeding friends. (This was pre-history before Sex and the City). But the mirror it held up to me was warped and disturbing in a way I just couldn’t put my finger on … until I read Susan Faludi’s critique of the show in her 1991 book Backlash:

In ‘thirtysomething,’ a complete pantheon of backlash women is on display–from blissful homebound mother to neurotic spinster to ball-busting single career woman. The show even takes a direct shot at the women’s movement: the most unsympathetic character is a feminist.

Bingo. Through interviews and production materials, Faludi created an astonishing portrait of a show filled with a weirdly aggressive sexist agenda. For example, scripts were specifically written to make wife-and-mom Hope fail at any outside work she ever tried. Repeatedly — and laden with guilt — Hope returned back to husband, home, and child. And lest this plotline seem accidental, it was the clear intention of writer Liberty Godshall (wife of co-creator Edward Zwick) to urge women to stay home while their children were very young:

I wanted to tell women don’t try it–unless, one, you really need to, or you really really want to. Because while the successes are there, the failures and the guilt are there too.

Ironically, Mel Harris, the actress playing Hope, was back at work 9 months after having her real-life baby, stating that she felt she was a “better mother and better person” because she worked. Female viewers told market researchers that they wanted Hope to get a “real” job. The creators disagreed. Faludi quotes co-creator Marshall Herskovitz in a men’s magazine interview about his distress over the women’s movement:

I think this is a terrible time to be a man, maybe the worst time in history … Men come into the world with certain biological imperatives. Manhood has simply been devalued in recent years and doesn’t carry much weight anymore.

Although everyone on the show was miserable some of the time (my friends and I called it “thirtysuffering”) the single women got the worst of it. Melissa wasn’t given any backstory at all until actress Melanie Mayron created a photography career for her character. She was described simply as “man-hungry.” Faludi quotes Mayron as saying:

I remember that message of just because you’re a single woman you must be miserable. That’s not like me or any of my friends.

Career gal Ellyn was also a bitter caricature whose character development was helped only somewhat by the lobbying of actress Polly Draper. She recalls her audition where producers described Ellyn as:

the kind of person who was so irritating you would walk out of the room whenever she walked in. And they wanted her to worship Hope and want to be exactly like her. And I said, ‘Wait a minute, can’t she be okay in her own right?’

Apparently not. She was single and career-oriented, so who could ever love her? In fact, writer Liberty Godshall had considered making her a drug abuser but settled for a simple bleeding ulcer and being dumped by her boyfriend.

Gary, the lone single guy had a decidedly different arc, happily running through women without a neuroses in the world. In season two, he meets the feminist character Susannah. Faludi describes her as:

a social activist who works full-time in a community service center in the city’s ghetto, tending to homeless men and battered wives. Despite her selfless work, the show manages to portray her as inhumanly cold, a rigid and snarling ideologue with no friends.

After Gary gets her pregnant, she’s determined to get an abortion,

But then, at the clinic, she hears the biological clock ringing. “I’ve always put things off,” she confesses to Gary, tearily. “I just can’t make assumptions about the future anymore.” He is triumphant, and she has the baby.

After almost 20 years, I’ll probably find the show lame, with its late-1980s fashions and weirdly sexist messages about how I should live my life. Sad to think I ate it up back then — even with its sour after-taste.

Postscript:
Melissa Silverstein at Women & Hollywood wrote a excellent piece about the several talented women that came out of thirtysomething (although none quite achieved the same level of success as the men) and noted that Zwick and Herskovitz went on to create the groundbreaking yet short-lived series My So-Called Life. I loved that show and especially Claire Danes in the starring role. But I remember wondering about the characterization of her mother: A totally unpleasant and uptight career woman who spent most of her time verbally castrating her nice-guy husband. Now it all makes sense.

About the Author:

Therese Shechter is a filmmaker, writer and activist whose documentary I Was A Teenage Feminist is probably screening in a women’s studies class near you. She’s currently making a documentary about society’s attitudes towards virginity and writes the blog The American Virgin on the same subject. Her production company Trixie Films is based in Brooklyn. You can find Therese’s work on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and more Facebook.

The Sotomayor hearings begin Monday (7/13), and the media has been talking about her in the most ridiculously sexist and racist ways — “Hispanic chic lady” anyone? In response, the Women’s Media Center has launched a video highlighting the recent sexism & racism against Judge Sotomayor. Check it out above, or right here. The WMC is hoping to inform media coverage of Sotomayor, to encourage the media to do its job free of expressions of sexism and racism. Do check it out, and please spread the word!

The question: Why is the media talking about Sonia Sotomayor’s tongue or temperament?

In a recent New York Times article, Sotomayor’s Blunt Style Raises Issue of Temperament, journalists Jo Becker and Adam Liptak write that President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee “has a blunt and even testy side.”

There’s way more to this story! Read about it at Huffington Post with my latest piece,

Sonia Sotomayor: The Answer Rhymes With “Fender.”

Cross-posted at http://shiratarrant.com