feminist blogs

I was so excited to go see Sex and the City. Like most feminists with any shred of race or class analysis, I have always had a love hate relationship with Sex and the City. There were things about that show that were so god awful that I literally had to tune them out completely to enjoy the show. As a woman of color inundated by media that fails to ever acknowledge who I am or that what I am is valid, I am used to this type of spectatorship. And Sex and the City has always been one of those shows that always made it worth it, because for better or for worse, the show always made me feel better, especially if I was feeling heartbroken (which has been often!).

So naturally I was most excited to go see the movie with two of my best gal pals. Unfortunately, it did not live up to my lofty expectations. Disappointment would be an understatement. Did I laugh? I sure did, but I am stupid like that sometimes. And honestly, I couldn't tell if I was laughing at the movie or with it for most of it.

*******SPOILER WARNING********

The one redeemable quality to the movie, I felt, was the character of Samantha (the character that I had always felt I related to the most) who actually ends up alone and is OK about it. This was the one interruption to an otherwise painfully heteronormative script that I had hoped, in my more positive reflections, the show had disrupted.

But I was wrong. Beyond the embarrassing overacting of the role of "love" in life and romance, I could have dug it if at the end Carrie did not end up AGAIN with Big. One of the worst things that happened at the end of the last season is when Carrie takes Big back. Why? Because he was an asshole to her and the epitome of the kind of man that you hate when your best friend is dating. The unavailable, macho, insensitive, brooding "i can't express my feelings," so I am an asshole instead, kind of dude that has your gal pal (or you) in tears every other week they haven't heard from the bastard.

The movie starts with them in love, a love that is so final and real they are even reading love poetry together. So Carrie plans a big fancy wedding including a Viviane Westwood gown and it is all just perfect. But then he flakes on the wedding because he can't handle the pressure and ruins her big perfect day. In all fairness weddings are painful and full of pressure and expectation and make the strongest and most supportive of folk quiver. You would like to think he loves her, he has done enough to her, he will go through with it, but no he freezes. She is devastated, but in good SATC fashion all the gals crash her honeymoon and go to Mexico together. The character that comes after the devastation is quiet, sad and older. I almost started liking the quiet, non-boy crazy Carrie, but I knew somehow the fairy tale would have to end with them ending back together, so it was difficult to stay hopeful of my own feminist fairy tale ending.

And they do, so the moral of this story is wait for him, that one that fucked you over repeatedly, he will come around one day even when he is well into his 50's and it will be totally worth it. Granted it is fiction and it is Hollywood, but SATC had that one shot at rewriting the princess dream and despite tangoing with a new story on occasion, you realize at the end you have been duped and it was married to the knight in shining armor narrative since the beginning.

But it doesn't end there. The larger part of my critique of SATC wasn't about the romance. What startled me more than it has before was the role of people of color in the fairy tale that is white upper class NY. SATC has never been good on the role of race in the construction of their characters. Depictions of women of color were rare, whether it be a comment from Charlotte at a nail shop about "class" and pointing to the Latina women working in the shop, or black women "acting" black at a club in NY. The closest they had to a lead person of color was the role of Blair Underwood as Miranda's boyfriend who if we recall correctly was an attractive rich doctor for the Knicks that she ends up leaving for her barely employed white soul mate Steve.

But that is nothing. In the movie there are a few moments that are appalling and just make you feel embarrassed for the characters and the writers. One of them is Charlotte's eating pudding only in Mexico-albeit realistic to the way that ignorant people think about the global south-but painful at that. Also in another scene when Miranda is looking for an apartment after finding out that Steve has cheated on her, she is in Chinatown looking for the apt and says, "look follow that white guy with the stroller, he is going where we want to be, that is where we want to be." Just a mild but obvious reference to gentrification.

The last straw, the one that I think offended me the least probably was the introduction of their first black female character, Carrie's assistant , Louise, played by Jennifer Hudson. She becomes Carrie's support and nurses her back to health. Organizes her life and website playing off the stereotype of black "mamies" that support rich white women in their hopes and dreams. It was their first attempt at having a strong black woman and it was too little too late. However, I love Jennifer Hudson and I wasn't mad that I got to watch her on the big screen.

Finally, Samantha's character seems to be the one place that we can break out of the narrative of happily ever after as the only path to female happiness. This is discounting the awful scene where they talk about her weight and talk about how she got fat, even though she literally looks like a size 6.

All in all, I have to say I was upset about the way the movie turned out. They all seemed to be overacting and the jokes were not really as punctual or effective as the show. Maybe Sex and the City has always been like this and it just took me seeing it on the big screen to understand how bad it actually is. I will always have a special place for Sex and the City, but the movie did remind me that we need a new narrative for young women, desperately, that defies the fairy tale romance that all love stories seem endlessly bound to.

Yesterday was a pretty exciting day in SF. But this is not as exciting. I am all for fair and balanced coverage, but I have to question the motives of publishing the thoughts of Fred Phelps. "God hates fags" isn't exactly well meaning political discourse. It is hate speech.

Thanks to Greg for the link.

I am speechless, honestly. via CNN.

But there goes that. Can something just for once not be so predictable? Please, PLEASE.

Thanks to C. Rowen for the link.

We have written about hymenoplasty before. It is when women undergo a surgical procedure to restore their hymen and create the illusion of virginity, including the "bleeding" that should occur on that fated wedding night. So I suppose it shouldn't be a shock that so many women in Europe are opting for this surgery in the Muslim community. In discussing the fate of one woman who has undergone the surgery the NYTimes reports,

Like an increasing number of Muslim women in Europe, she had a hymenoplasty, a restoration of her hymen, the vaginal membrane that normally breaks in the first act of intercourse.

“In my culture, not to be a virgin is to be dirt,” said the student, perched on a hospital bed as she awaited surgery on Thursday. “Right now, virginity is more important to me than life.”

Hmmm, I don't know the motivation to feature this particular quote, but I think being a virgin is something that is heralded in most communities around the world, not just the Muslim community. Women are often scrutinized for their virginity and chastised, shamed, insulted, etc., if they do not have "it" come wedding night.

According to the article it has been noted that there has been an increase in the number of Muslim women wanting "certificates of virginity" because now they are in Europe and having more sex. Perhaps it is the shift in setting and through access to new norms around sexuality, but I don't buy it. I think it is a stretch to suggest that due to European influence and its supposed sexually free environment Muslim women are having more sex. That is a leap, I think they were always having sex, but working around the consequences in different ways.

Hymenoplasty is becoming common in many parts of the world. And while I think it is good to know it is happening, let's not forget the underlying message. While we might want to believe a sexual revolution happened in the Western world that the oppressed women of the world are still catching up to, it is actually untrue. Puritanical sex ethics reign supreme in many parts of the world, including Europe and the United States. And it is not about being able to have sex or not, it is the way it makes a man feel on his wedding night to know that another man has had sex with her. It is the control of female sexuality pure and simple because if she did it before she has already been used by another man, she has become property of the one before, as opposed to the one she married. It creates that inexplicable fear and anxiety that is often the basis of misogyny.

Understanding this, we do have to keep in mind that women are often put in great harm is they can't prove that they are virgins on their wedding night. We can't blame them for self-preservation.

Only in a world this patriarchal is there an expensive, painful and dangerous practice for women to undergo that will create an illusion of her virginity to indulge the male ego.

For a more humorous take the youth at YO! via yoblogger take on this topic.

Actually, the only poor choice is being anti-choice. Pro-choice is a bad choice of words for people that don't believe women should have choices. His thinking is of course informed by pro-life brainwashing that has forced him to believe being pro-choice somehow means, anti-baby, anti-family and anti-health as opposed to the reality that pro-life actually translates to being anti-choice.

Thanks to Jay for the link.

I hit up a lot in the last few days, but right now I am sitting in a panel of organizing the social web for change. The panel has Feministing's lovely tech lady, Deanna Zandt, along with Chris Rabb from Afro-netizen, Andrew Slack, Craig Newmark (craigslist) and Ruby Sinreich.

They are talking about how we use the web for social change. And asks the critical questions, "How can social networking impact politics and policies, and what new technologies will revolutionize organizing in the future?"

Earlier today I hit up "Netroots: What's Next?" about the power of the political blogosphere. It was interesting, but I am really apprehensive about the role of political blogs in the changing political landscape. The panel asked some key questions, one of which I care about dearly, "How are the Netroots connecting with the grassroots and organizing for lasting change?"

After 3 days of hanging out with media reformers and media justicers, I am still stuck on this question. How do blogs and online technologies connect with real grassroots efforts? I know you can give me a list of online efforts, campaigns, petition signings, action centers that have in fact been effective. But the communities that I work with aren't online in the same way that we are. They don't use the web in the way that many of us do, let alone go to a blog to understand how it can help in their campaigns and on their issues. As long as that disconnect exists and only certain people are producing and consuming blogs, I don't see how it is creating this democratic space that so many big political bloggers claim it to be.

Other ideas? How do we use the web to connect with people doing work on the ground? Email lists, listervs, blogs, online journals, myspace? Is Feministing doing this? Are we creating a space where organizers can come together to work on their issues in a real way, make connections and create impact?

When we speak of a justice agenda we are talking about greater political, social and cultural changes that are plugged into an analysis of power that reform focused movements often times overlook. Many times it is a matter of semantics, since all of us working in justice are effecting change at the level of reform. We are usually working on strategic campaigns, limited in scope that create small pieces of change, but hopefully greater in impact. Collectively and through sharing pieces of our agenda these changes can become a justice movement.

The media reform movement has been around since the 90's and made its debut in 2003 when fighting the cross-ownership rules that are being challenged currently. One of the explicit differences between the media reform movement and the media justice movement is that media reform believes the appropriate end goal for media reforms is more diversity. Media justice believes that reform without a power shift leads to reproduction of status quo inequities. This means that without a redistribution of the means of media production and ownership, our media will not reflect the needs and issues of our communities.

Although, reform and justice work together on certain pieces of reform and many of the wins have been fundamental, any type of social change that is not grounded in the needs of our most disenfranchised communities, often fails to be as effective as we want it to be. Media reform is a key and necessary step on our way to media justice. As I sat at one of the pre-conference events at the National Conference on Media Reform, the convening of Diverse Voices on Power, Justice and Media Change we started to lay the groundwork and have a conversation on the ways that we can build a media policy movement that is accountable to social justice goals. Simply put, how do we create media change that is driven by the needs of our most marginalized communities? Racist, sexist, classist, homophobic media policy affects all of us, whether it be through our inability to control the way we are represented in the media or the means of control to that representation. The dearth in community owned media due to corporate take over has had disastrous effects on the way that we are represented, the way we tell our stories and how we are understood. The danger of this is not just about having the ability to tell our stories. When our stories are not told in a fair and balanced way, our needs are not met at the legal, cultural, economic and social ways.

Kudos to NCMR for creating spaces where we can talk about the different ways that communities of color, women and queer folks have used media change and media activism to educate our communities and work for a just and fair media. But our work is till cut out for us. According to Carol Jenkins at the Women Media Center,

According to various studies, women hold only 3 per cent of “clout” positions in the media (“The Glass Ceiling Persists,” Annenberg, 2003). Only a quarter of the newsrooms are led by women (Dates 2007, Cramer 2007, Nicholson 2007, Media Management Center), while women hold only a quarter of jobs as syndicated opinion writers at our newspapers (Estrich 2005, Pollitt 2005). Women online are facing the same fate. Across all platforms, women are missing. Women of color are the most invisible of all.

Minority ownership is just as tenuous. According to Reclaim the Media

The state of minority media ownership in America is in crisis. According to a study by the nonprofit, nonpartisan group Free Press, people of color own just three percent of all local TV stations and eight percent of all local radio stations, even though they make up 35 percent of the U.S. population.

A media justice agenda would target the structural forms of oppression that create these disparities in ownership and that also lead to this "crisis of representation" for disenfranchised communities.

The media is an issue of life and death. Blogging, vlogging, independent and alternative media are all ways we have started to retell our stories. But without changing the mainstream media, without fighting for a fair and just media, and for our fair and equitable access to the media, the mainstream media will continue to set the agenda for the way we tell our stories. We are always responding to biased coverage and forced into a defensive position as opposed to setting the agenda ourselves. We can tell our stories till we are blue in the face, but if we are still playing by their rules, our stories are never told the way we want them to be.

So, we are running out the door to the Media and Democracy Coalition party, but I had a great and fulfilling day including meeting some great bloggers (Jenn Pozner, Baratunde Thurston, Matt Stoller, and if I forgot any others than shout out in comments!) and shared our ideas on media policy change, activism, and internet tools and how it relates to the communities that we work with. I also met some amazing organizers and activists.

I am so hyper and full of information and will definitely have some more substantive posts tomorrow about content, but all the panels I hit today were excellent. If you are around I will be that MAGnet table tomorrow morning from 8-10 so come say hello.

I am watching the amazing Adrienne Marie Brown ED of the Ruckus Society, activist, singer and gal pal is keeping it real about the necessity for the media reform movement to be accountable to community organizers in this morning's key note. This is going to be a theme throughout the conference for me. Media justice is not just about inviting us community groups to the table of your reform agenda, but letting us set the agenda through our grassroots work.

You can listen live here.

She also gave CMJ and MAGnet a shout out as an example of community based activism around media policy. YAY!