pop culture

As Marco noted below, I was slated to speak on MSNBC this afternoon and got bumped. So instead, I’m posting some of my thoughts about the YouTube video of two middle-school girls fighting in a school locker room here and will just pretend that I said them on tv. (Sorry Mom, false alarm!)

As an astute observer noted in response to a previous girl fight also posted on YouTube, meanness and occasional violence among teenage girls is nothing new. The voyeurism around it is. American culture is obsessed with the girlfight—-think about the popular obsession with female mud-wrestling. Images of grown women fighting are often sexualized, staged, and designed to scintillate. Like porn. The girls are getting younger. And the fights are getting real.

But what’s really new (again, with homage to said astute observer) is the speed with which actual bad behavior is becoming entertainment. All it takes is a click of a phone. Notice that the girl who shot the clip with the camera on her cell phone made no attempt to break the fight or run to get adult help. Maybe she thought she was watching reality tv. Whatever the case, she was a spectator. Just like the thousands of spectators who then viewed the clip on YouTube. And the tv viewers (like me) who stared in awe as FOX News rolled the clip over and over again this morning on the air.

The YouTube clip is part of a trend. There are entire sites now, like www.girlfightsdump.com and www.fightdump.com, virtual repositories of girls behaving badly. I’m terrified at the way this has become entertainment. The violence in the video is scary. And so is the Cleveland school shooting for which I got bumped.

(An early plug for my friend Jessie Klein’s excellent book on school shootings, coming from Rutgers UP. The book, The Gender Police, focuses on boys. But Jessie has a chapter on girl fighting, too. Thank you, Jessie, for prepping me today. This post’s for you.)

Suggestion: for a quick, deep glimpse into the heart of the beast, go for half-hour treadmill workout at your local gym where you can gaze at a battery of overhead flatscreen TVs, each tuned to a different channel.

A random sequence of images from this morning’s visit:
—an endlessly repeated video clip of a vicious girl fight in a high school locker room
—a promo for the Bionic Woman (much running, jumping, drop-kicking of bad-guys)
—a music video of Jennifer Lopez beating the crap out of more bad-guys in a brothel or something, setting an example for the oppressed sistahs
—a Hummer barrels menacingly towards the viewer through a nighttime wilderness, scaring off would-be attackers (wolves, scorpions); in a second ad the Hummer is shown from a gamer’s POV, barreling into a morphing sequence of rough terrains (desert, arctic, tundra).
— yet another news story on a private “security” firm killing more civilians in Iraq, two women shot dead in their car

What seems to be the signal cutting through all the media noise? Is it that it’s OK now for women to be violent, because, hey, we all get to watch, while men have ramped up to the next level and gone invisible (and unaccountable), inside our all-terrain, obstacle-and-reality-proof paramilitary vehicles? We can’t be sure. But let wolves, scorpions, the environment and helpless civilians beware.

[UPDATE: Deborah Siegel was originally slated to appear on MSNBC this afternoon to comment on the Ohio middle school girl fight video mentioned above, but the story was preempted by the tragic school shooting in Cleveland. With shock and sadness we recognize that the two events are part of a broader ongoing crisis — rage and violence amidst our children — which seems to compound itself day by day. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims in Cleveland and their families.]

These pics are from the amazing dude ranch wedding I went to the other week. (Congratulations, Rebeccemy!)

Now I know the good folks of Ratify ERA Florida are well intentioned. But the description of this “Hillary” doll that appears on their website is a bit…much:

This is the exclusive, celebrated President doll with the shirt that thrills us all, seen enlarged. You will not find “Hillary” anywhere else. She is 15 inches tall, finely-made, soft and completely undressable.

Meanwhile, the not-so-good folks at Walmart had a different objection:

“Hillary” announces that “Someday a Woman will be President” on her shirt that Wal-Mart banned from its shelves. They claim that having a woman in the White House “is against ‘Family Values’ “. We think it is most timely and just perfect.

Yeah, ok, I’ll give it to them there.

I recently got a “hey, how are ya” email from Elana Levine, a colleague of mine from grad school, who has written what sounds like a fabulous book. It’s called Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television. Love the cover (left).

And meanwhile, Annalee Newitz expresses her disappointment at the remake of Bionic Woman over at AlterNet:

This time around, Jaime [Sommers, the bionic woman] isn’t an independent career jock: she’s a 23-year-old bartender and college dropout who has just gotten pregnant and is about to marry her surgeon boyfriend. When she asks said boyfriend why he likes her, despite her lack of professional success, he replies, “You’re the one thing my father didn’t plan for me.”

Newitz says much more, and concludes that “there’s something deeply wrong about a science fiction show, allegedly about a woman of the future, whose message seems taken from a past much further back than the show’s origins in the 1970s.”

Darn. I loved that show.

From the academic forefront come some very cool resources, of course, these days. In case you missed it(!), the Summer 2007 issue of the journal Feminist Studies focuses on Feminism and Mass Media. It includes an essay on the feminist cultural work of The Sopranos by my gal Lisa Johnson (“Gangster Feminism”). And on a very different subject–so different that I can’t even think of a way to link other than the fact that I admire all the authors–the University of Michigan Press is coming out this month with a book on everything you need to know about advancing academic women in science and engineering, Transforming Science and Engineering: Advancing Academic Women, wouldn’t you know. Take that, Larry Summers ole pal.

(So Marco and I were trying to figure out what a gasket was last night, so I looked it up and had to use it somehow in a post. A gasket, for the record, is a mechanical seal that fills the space between two objects, generally to prevent leakage between the two objects while under compression. You don’t want to “blow a gasket,” if you know what I mean.)

For those not in the know, Halo 3, which launched in the U.S. on September 25th, is the latest in an extremely popular series of “first-person shooter” video games which are the cornerstone of Microsoft’s XBox 360 empire. Microsoft has declared Halo 3 to be “the biggest entertainment launch in history.” And just who exactly plunked down the bucks? Well, I haven’t yet found hard numbers, but there seem to be no surprises on the gender front — at least according to the amusing video below from online pop magazine JetSet, wherein an intrepid (and exasperated) girl reporter goes on the hunt for gamergrrls at a Halo launch event.

It’s quite likely you are sitting there thinking “Well, thank God there aren’t more young women wasting their days and brain cells on such violent, proto-jingoistic tripe.” Ah, BUT… as reported just a couple of weeks ago by The Economist and then by Jezebel, a study conducted by the University of Toronto demonstrated how women’s spatial acuity (i.e. spotting “unusual objects … in [one’s] field of vision,” etc.) is dramatically and permanently improved after playing ten hours of Medal of Honour: Pacific Assault. “Join us or DIE!” seems to be the subliminal message to women here; but doesn’t the market support other types of games, with all the benefits and none of the (virtual) bloodshed? After all, there may actually be more women gamers in the U.S. than men: according to an online survey conducted early last month by the J. Walter Thompson ad agency (JWT), out of over 1000 respondents 44% of women said they owned a gaming console vs. 39% of men. These include owners of Wii, a platform known for broadening the gaming market across genders and generations.

There are definitely popular alternatives to the first-person shooters: you can improve your physical dexterity with say, “Dance Dance Revolution” or “Guitar Hero.” And for those who still prefer a good fight there is the intriguing strategy game A Force More Powerful. An interactive teaching tool developed by The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, it “simulates nonviolent struggles … against dictators, occupiers, colonizers, and corrupt regimes, as well as campaigns for political and human rights for minorities and women.” Now that frankly sounds kick-ass enough for most men and women I know.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Re. the pic at the top of the post: in a bid to corner the homebound nerd market, SuicideGirls reveals Halo hunk Master Chief to be… the lovely “Alaina.” (Thanks to BoingBoing Gadgets).