media

This month’s guest post to The Man Files comes at us from Jonathan Felix — college student, drummer, sports fan, and astute social critic. In Jonathan’s words, “Me and my dad sarcastically laugh at the sequence of commercials during ‘guy’ shows on TV: beer, burgers, military. Beer, cars, televisions, military …” Here Jonathan takes on Carl’s Jr. ads asking why they portray guys as kind of stupid.

Masculine, Jr.

In true corporate marketing fashion, Carl’s Jr. depicts demoralizing stereotypes of men and women in efforts to attract consumers.

The fast-food chain’s current commercial shows a beautiful skinny blonde girl wearing make-up and a nice blue dress. She enters her boyfriend’s apartment expecting a classy night out, and finds him on the couch playing video games. The couple talks about a steak dinner, and the guy implies they are going to Carl’s Jr. for their new steak sandwich. The motto after the commercial is that Carl’s Jr. is “How guys do fancy.”

This is NOT how I do fancy.

Commercials like this give good guys a bad reputation. Hey Carl’s Jr. — Listen up! A lot of us actually have our lives together and enjoy taking women out to nice places and good dinners.

Or what about the ad with the guy and the avocado? It makes men look like total barbaric meatheads, who can’t even use a spoon to eat an avocado, and we somehow need Carl’s Jr. to make guacamole for us because we’re too stupid to figure it out.

Now I happen to like Carl’s Jr. But for them to portray guys as that lazy and ignorant is offensive. I can only hope my peers would agree that we have to do better than a #4 Combo if we plan on making good boyfriends and future husbands.

These commercials project a message to the world that men are lame and losers and unable to appreciate even the smallest bit of romantic effort. Far too often our society depicts “real” men as barbarians who love sports and beer and total sexual dominance. And although plenty of men have some of these traits, pop culture insists on exploiting our more obtuse characteristics to sell their products.

These ads completely ignore a man’s intellectual or emotional capabilities. This hurts men who actually have their lives somewhat together. It perpetuates negative stereotypes and affects women’s future opinions about men, be they Prince Charmings or Ronald McDonalds.

Show Jonathan some love and welcome him to Girl With Pen by posting your comments here. Or reach him directly at johnnylbeach at yahoo.com. Until next month! -Shira

No way!

“Over 40 and Over Men?” reads a headline gracing the cover of this month’s MORE magazine.  I’m intrigued.  I look inside and read: “More and more women are living the ultimate do-over: falling for another female.  Meet the gay and grey generation.”

That’s me.

While not feeling particularly grey, my family and I have been living “the ultimate do-over.” I buy the magazine and bring it home, compelled to devour every word of this narrative – a narrative that my family and I are living out, that is just now beginning to make its way into the cultural conversation.

“A normal part of coming out as an adult is the feeling of being an adolescent on fire, caught in the body of a 40 to 50 year old,” says my friend and colleague Joanne Fleisher, author of Living Two Lives: Married to a Man and In Love with a Woman.  Ah, the memories…I was that adolescent on fire (my friends will attest!) in my mid-40’s.

AND married. Just like the women profiled in MORE.

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Just had to post the amazing, emotional speech Dustin Lance Black gave at the Oscars. Black won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Milk (go see it if you haven’t!). After this, it was pretty much downhill for the Oscars:

I’m working on this week’s post for my column at Recessionwire.com — a Valentine’s Day Special — and just learned about yesterday’s profile of the site on CNN. I’m so tickled I just had to share:

See also latest coverage in Wired, Mediabistro, and Portfolio.

Go Recessionistas!

Meeting Notorious on the Big Screen

I’m happy to introduce Ebony Utley who contributes this kick-ass guest post to The Man Files. Ebony cleverly writes about her “date” with rap star B.I.G. — a posthumous movie night watching B.I.G. on the big screen in the recently released biopic, Notorious. What follows is Ebony’s sharp call about the demands and expectations of masculinity.

Me and B.I.G. just went out on our first date. I’d heard about him around the way, but he seemed like such a bad boy. I was content to watch him from my stoop.  Then some friends were like, “Girl, I heard he done changed. He told us to tell you to meet him at the Pike at eight for this movie.”  And thought, “If dude wanna take me out; he should take me some place where I can look him in the eye and see if he lyin’ when he talk.”

But you know, he’s B.I.G., so I went.

It wasn’t a typical movie date. He told me lots of stuff about his life.  It was juicy.  I was surprised at how open he was about his past. He had been a hustla, but got his money legal.  He loved his mama. He loved his kids. He admitted to being a playa, but he told me I was special. I knew stuff that nobody knew.  Said he’d had suicidal thoughts but now he was ready to live. I myself was mesmerized by his charisma and swagger.  I soaked up every second of his life.  Before we left the movie, he asked if he could be a friend of mine, and then just like that, he was gone.

I’m not going to lie. I miss B.I.G.  Who doesn’t?  But I’m trying to be real about the things he told me on our first and only date together.  I mean, it was still dark in that movie, and I couldn’t look him in the eye good.  What if he told all the ladies that they were special and knew things nobody knew?  He kept saying that he’d changed.  I’m hearing him say that he’d become a man.  I admired B.I.G., but what made him a man? He told me real men make money, have kids, and lots of women, get respect, and die too young.  Hmm.  Even the list is suspect.

B.I.G. made money, yes, but Diddy was in charge of his destiny. Without Diddy telling my girls to tell me to go see B.I.G. we would have never even hooked up.  I can’t imagine that B.I.G. didn’t love his kids, but they didn’t really know him; he didn’t seem to know them.  Sure, he was sometimes at peace with his women but what about the lies, the deception, and the manipulation?  Everybody was celebrating B.I.G. when they killed him. So much for respect. If this is what a man is, I’m glad that we decided to be just friends.

All I can say ladies is don’t let them hypnotize you.  No disrespect to the person who was the Notorious B.I.G., but those traditional celebrations of manhood as the fearless protector, provider, babymaker get old after a while.  Better to watch them from the stoop than get caught up in some mess.  If B.I.G. had tried something different, maybe he’d still be here, but his story is still powerful. I’m glad he shared it with me.  Gives me a point a reference for what else manhood should be—entrepreneurship, present fatherhood, honest, healthy relationships, and caution over reputation.  Thanks for the teaching moment. I’ve still got mad love for you, B.I.G.

Ebony A. Utley, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at California State University, Long Beach and author of  The Gangsta’s God: The Quest for Respectability in Hip Hop (Praeger, forthcoming).

I joined the Board of the Council on Contemporary Families this year, and we are currently soliciting nominations for the 2008 Media Awards for Outstanding Coverage of Family Issues, so if you’re a journalist and published something you’re particularly proud of in 2008, please read on!

Submissions are due Friday, February 6, and the form is at the bottom of this post.

This will be our Seventh Annual Media Awards competition, honoring 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 for outstanding coverage of family issues during 2008:
*      two for journalism in text form (print- or web-based); and
*      one for broadcast journalism (audio or video)

The awards will be presented at the 12th Annual CCF Conference on Friday, April 17th, in Chicago, Illinois. (I’ll be there!)  Check out the conference program.  It’s pretty amazing.

Winners will receive up to $500 towards travel expenses (depending on employers’ contributions). At the plenary session where awards are presented, winners are invited to speak for five minutes on emerging issues affecting American families and how CCF members and supporters can help the media cover these stories effectively.

Here’s more schpiel:

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 Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Bergen Record (New Jersey), WUFT/WJUF-FM, Thirteen/WNET, AlterNet, the Associated Press and many other organizations. Subject matter has ranged from the effect of the AIDS epidemic on children in South Florida to hunger in Oklahoma and the role of religion in American family life. You can read about last year’s winners here.
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Check out the fab lineup of sessions at this year’s Women, Action, and the Media Conference (fondly known as WAM!).  The conference is once again at MIT’s bizarrely wonderful Stata Center in Cambridge, MA (pictured left) and it’s from March 27 – March 29.

This time I’ll be speaking on a panel called Going Group: How Blogging in Numbers Gets It Done, along with fellow GWPenners including Shira Tarrant, Racialicious’ Latoya Peterson, and the brilliant Ebony Utley.  The full (yet still evolving) lineup of panels and events is now posted. I loves me those WAMMers, I really do.  There’s something for everyone, veteran mediaheads and newbies alike.  And the dance party’s always fun.

Register here. If you do it before Feb. 13, you pay $145 (Seniors pay $80 and Students pay $45).  The fee goes up to $165/$95/$55 on Feb. 14, and to $195/$110/$75 on-site, if space allows.  Go ahead, do it, do it, do it….!

The other day I stumbled across Rafael Casal on YouTube and was blown away. The first thing I did was to send out an email to a bunch of my friends that said: If you knew about this guy and didn’t tell me about him, y’all are in some deep shit.

A slam champion poet, recording artist, and educator, Rafael Casal is turning up the political heat. His message is steaming hot. And now that I’ve found Casal, I want to tell as many people as possible about this amazing hip-hop influenced poet who cuts straight to the heart of so many issues.

Take the Bill of Rights. You know, those 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution that were ratified as a package deal in 1791? Remember those 10 gems that are supposed to protect us from an overzealous federal government? Freedom of speech, the right to peacefully gather, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment or unreasonable search and seizure. Yeah, that Bill of Rights.

Well, “I’m billing them for my rights,” Casal says.

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Hells yeah, as long as folks like Andi Zeisler are running the show. Check out this interview with Bitch magazine’s editor, by Jessica Wakeman, over at The American Prospect. And GO, BITCH! I think I’m gonna make it a holiday gift for some folks this year.

According to the Second Annual “Women And Major Magazines Cover Stories Monitor”, women were the full photo subject on 22 covers, earned 65 full photo cover story bylines and eight full photo cover credits, of the total 203 issues in 2007 of Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, Newsweek and Time.  Not so good.  Feh.