pop culture

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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We had different plans for this month’s blog, but it has become impossible not to comment on what transpired on the night before the Grammy’s.

Tonni: Thanks to the wonder of technology I was receiving live Grammy commentary via a three-way conversation with friends in the States when my girlfriend mentioned that Chris Brown was missing. Apparently so was ‘our girl’ Rihanna- ‘our girl’ ‘cause she’s a fellow ‘Caribeana’ and regardless of her vocal abilities we’re proud and protective. There are many problems with what happened next but what I find repulsive is how the gory details are unfolding in the media. Unlike Salon’s Tracy Clark-Flory, try as I might I couldn’t escape TMZ’s trademarked photo. It was everywhere, displaying a young woman battered, bruised, and completely and totally vulnerable.

Gwen: As a survivor of violence myself, it will not come as a shock that, like Tonni, I was saddened, outraged and generally overwhelmed by the coverage of Rihanna’s struggle with domestic violence. We felt that highlighting Rihanna’s ordeal could help us capture the fact that domestic violence is directly related to the systematic oppression of women around the world, regardless of race, class, ethnicity and fame. In short, domestic violence can happen to anyone, including celebrities. Further, the coverage of domestic violence in popular media outlets shows the shortcomings of current methods in dealing with the structural nature of violence against women.

The Big Picture
According to Amnesty International’s Stop Violence Against Women program, without exception, a woman’s greatest risk of violence is from someone she knows. Amnesty International classifies domestic violence as a human rights abuse, rightly arguing that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms the inadmissibility of discrimination and proclaims that everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in the declaration, without distinction of any kind, including distinction based on sex. When women are subjected to domestic violence and the State does not protect them against this violence, whether due to inefficient or ineffective laws and policies, then the State should be held responsible for the abuse.

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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).

First, thanks to Aviva over at Fourth Wave for posting a roundup of links to the Great Ms. Cover Debate of 2009 (“Super-Feminist Obama to the Rescue!“), and to Yondalla, who writes in reference to the image of Obama as Super-Feminist-Man in comments here at GWP, “A man who is a feminist would not be someone who would rescue us. It would be someone who walks beside us.”

Having read the critiques, I get it now.  And I respect the dissent.  But I stand behind my original praise of the cover.  I agree with Jill over at Feministe, who writes,

“Obama has reportedly self-identified as a feminist, and has the legislative record to back it up. Is he a perfect feminist, or a perfect progressive? Not by any stretch of the imagination. Is he going to disappoint us over and over? Yeah, he’s already started. But he’s still pretty damned good, especially for a mainstream, center-left politician elected to the highest office, and I don’t really see the point in kicking him out of the club just yet.”

The brouhaha over this cover is not generational, nor is it necessarily PUMA-related (as Megan at Jezebel snarkily and dismissively asserts). The controversy is over the rescue narrative, and how one reads visual imagery, which is often more polyglot than it seems.

Looking at the current cover next to the famous 1973 cover featuring Wonder Woman, a bunch of questions come up for me.  First, wasn’t this cover perhaps intended as satire?  Because next to the cartoonish Wonder Woman cover, the current one certainly strikes me as having an element of fantasy to it too.

Second, Ms. is a magazine that has tried to reinvent itself over and over again.  Its current readership skews older, and I imagine engaging younger readers is now key.  In putting Obama on the cover in this way, are the publishers sending a message that the feminism of Ms. is big-tent enough to encompass younger Obama-supporting feminists?  Was this a move to get beyond the stereotype of Ms. as “your mother’s magazine” that some younger women continue to hold?  If so, I laud the extending of this generational olive branch.

In the end, I get the critiques about how men can’t save feminism.  I really do.  But bottom line over here: I like the playful, subversive idea that inside the most prominent man in the world right nows lies a feminist ready to more publicly engage.  Time will tell whether or not it’s true.

(Paging Marco, my laid-off graphic designer husband who thinks a lot about superheros and blogs about the narratives behind images!  Weigh in, my dear Clark Kent?!)

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.

Here to bring you your monthly insight into the youth perspective is Courtney Martin with a post on how young people are getting involved in politics…by targeting their grandparents for the Obama vote. Courtney’s awesome column, Generation Next, appears the third Monday of every month. –Kristen

One of my favorite get out the vote efforts by youth this fall is, hands down, The Great Schlep. The young, civic-minded, and Jewish recognized that they had a profound power to influence a very special population in a very special swing state: grandparents in Florida. And thus the Great Schlep was born.

Here’s the always controversial Sarah Silverman on the basic concept:

There are a few things that I deeply admire about this project. First and foremost, I love that a bunch of young people took stock of the power they already possessed (being beloved by their well-intentioned, if not a bit conservative grandparents) and figured out a way to use that power for political leverage. This is the best of youth activism at work—a homegrown, grassroots exercise of power in innovative ways.

I also appreciate that, while it springs from a place of cultural and religious identity, it serves a much broader cause. Jewish youth didn’t wait until there was a fantastic Jewish candidate to start organizing, schlepping, and registering/influencing voters; they participated in a long, beautiful tradition of Jewish activists promoting the best interest of a “minority” and, in turn, their own vision of a more just society.

And finally, they used shocking humor and a sort of wonderful sarcasm about their own culture to get the word out. Some have found the racial implications offensive, which I totally understand. I happen to think it’s pretty amazing social commentary. In any case, they got your attention didn’t they?

–Courtney Martin

Sarah Palin and Tina Fey do Sarah Palin on SNL!

And Amy Poelher does the Sarah Palin rap.

And a quick PSA from me: Dagmar Herzog, a historian of sexuality based at CUNY who has done revolutionary work on post-World War II German memory and sexuality, will be speaking in conversation with Richard Goldstein, who writes on pop culture and sexuality at The Nation, at Book Culture tomorrow. Dagmar Herzog just published a new book, Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics. The book explores how the Religious Right has taken control of and subsequently manhandled the way sex is talked about in contemporary America. In three words: married, monogamous, heterosexual. This should be a great talk. I’ll be there and I hope to see some of you there too!