feminist blogs

I suppose it's cool that the Blogher conference has gotten such high-profile attention from the Austin Chronicle, but I can't quite get over the fact that the editors ran with this cover.
Here Blogher is about empowering women's voices, and the spin they put on it uses cheap sex appeal, while also echoing the really bad movies of the '50s, like, um, Queen of Outer Space....

Three American astronauts are on the first manned mission to Venus, and when they arrive, they find the planet to be inhabited solely by women with high heels and short dresses. Unfortunately, they are immediately imprisoned, for the queen who rules Venus hates men... Suspecting the astronauts to be spies, she now plans to destroy the Earth. So now it's up to the three men (and some friendly Venusians) to overthrow the wicked queen and save the Earth.

Yes, that's right, get a few women together and they automatically hate men and want to take over the world. Those familiar with the genre of the times know that there were many movies like this, drawing on cultural fears of women who don't live to be in the arms of their man, much like the alien invasion movies played off of the red scare.

The final plot point of most of these movies was when the evil women finally succumbed to romantic advances by their male captives, dropped their guns and presumably rushed off to happy lives spending their nights on their backs and their days in the kitchen. Silly, uppity women, they just didn't know their place!

And this is the image the Austin Chronicle decides to run with to position Blogher in the minds of its readers.

The article itself is quite complimentary, introducing the founders of Blogher and the stuff they're talking about in panels at the SXSW festival.

"Women who write about family are 'mommybloggers,' while men who write about family are 'personal bloggers,' incorporating personal elements into their blogs," Des Jardins says. "It's so easy to call someone a 'mommyblogger,' to say that they write 'just' about family."

"As though so much of our great literature and art isn't about family relationships," Camahort points out. "When Arthur Miller wrote All My Sons, nobody said, 'Oh, he's just a 'daddy playwright.' Nobody calls him a 'male playwright.' I think that's why women are rightfully apprehensive."

Fellow BlogHers Stone and Casino – who Stone describes as an "unashamed, unabashed feminist blogger" – will continue the talk about marginalization, identity, and their implications in "Public Square or Private Club: Does Exclusivity Strengthen or Dilute?"

A serious enough take, and it's presented without any snark or sarcasm.

So what's with the overtly sexist cover? I've never been to Austin, but I hear tell it's a liberal town, so maybe they will all "get it." But really, this seems like a rather cheap shot to me. Imagine an African American blogger's conference with a Sambo-like caricature on the cover, or an Anti-Defamation League conference with a caricature of an "evil Jew" with a long hook nose. This cover says that women empowered want to emasculate men (note the three women ) while lounging around as objects of desire.

If that's the political climate we have in liberal areas, no wonder ERA never passed and forced pregnancy is the political fad du jour.

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Technorati tags: news arts BlogHer feminism media politics progressive values visual arts

BRAVO!! to Chavez:

[AFP photo]

The Venezuelan government has given a Christian missionary group from the US until Sunday to leave the country.

President Hugo Chavez has repeatedly called for the expulsion of the New Tribes Mission, saying they are American imperialists.

He has called them spies of the CIA and colonialists.

Most of the 160 evangelical preachers and their families have already gone back to the US, after he asked them to leave last October.

Only 30 New Tribes missionaries are still in Venezuela.

For the past 60 years, the New Tribes Mission, which has its world headquarters in Florida, has been trying to convert indigenous groups in Venezuela to Christianity.

It is a non-denominational Christian society which says it is only funded by private individuals, not by the US government.

Indigenous groups

The missionaries live and work in the remotest areas of the country, including the Amazon rainforest.

Their goal is find tribes untouched by so-called "civilisation" in order to convert them to Christianity.[...]

In return for agreeing to adopt the Christian faith, the indigenous people receive basic health care and literacy classes.

Yes send them home. Tho it sounds like "home" is the funding purse of some hard right evangelical religionists in America.

And, in the meantime, America and Venezuela and whomever else can cartoon caricature the church groups (and Jesus, God the Father, the Blessed Holy Virgin AND the Holy Ghost) and Imperial Invasive America in any way they wish.

Part of politics (and war) is harsh, often nasty and mean propaganda by depiction. And religion is part of power and politics. Part of geo political war as well.

If the right wing Danish press cannot caricature the prophet Mohammed (and if there was NO truth in some of those cartoons you have not been reading along for years) then the ME press had best stop with the all too familiar anti-Israel / anti-occupier cartoons.

I say let it all rip.

The last thing on earth that should be sacrosanct is religion. Anybody's religion.

What a fetid sacred cow.

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Technorati tags: news culture media politics race rant religion visual arts

One benefit from the holidays for me is having the time to just sit and read. I always skim through The New Yorker, plowing through Talk of the Town and and soaking in one or two articles and/or reviews that catch my interest. But it's usually a semi-distracted affair on my part, so I rarely even notice the ads.

I had time to start into this week's issue with some leisure, though, and that afforded me the pleasure of seeing a multi-page ad for Iconoclasts, a miniseries on Sundance Channel celebrating "innovators, ground shakers and rule breakers."

I couldn't help but notice that, out of the 12 iconoclastic movers and shakers profiled, only two are women -- actress Renée Zellweger and CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour.

Meanwhile, the male Iconoclasts featured are:

• Robert Reford (actor)
• Paul Newman (actor)
• Samuel L. Jackson (actor)
• Bill Russell (sports star)
• Tom Ford (fashion designer)
• Jeff Koons (artist)
• Brian Grazer (film producer)
• Sumner Redstone (CEO)
• Mario Batali (chef)
• Michael Stipe (rock star)

To be sure, many of these people have done much more than what they're known for. But let's face it, they're known for being actors and designers and so on.

So why aren't there more women? Yes, we live in a patriarchy and yes men dominate the arts, fashion and entertainment industries, but women account for 53% of the population and, in the creative arts industries, there certainly is not a dearth of female iconoclasts, is there? (Need I post a list?)

Are women deserving of only 16.67% of the honors? (Are Hispanics and Asians so undeserving of any mention? And what is Sumner Redstone doing in this show at all?)

If this were a Fox or NBC product, this kind of bias would hardly be remarkable -- in fact, it would be expected and insisted upon. But this is Sundance, which supposedly is about empowering disempowered voices and supporting progressive causes. With Iconoclasts, Sundance gets a failing grade.

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Technorati tags: news arts business design fashion feminism food movies music television visual arts

Click on the image to read the whole thing.

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Technorati tags: Katrina politics visual arts

Gotta love The Heretik!

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Technorati tags: blogging link politics visual arts

You just gotta see this.

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Technorati tags: culture visual arts whimsy

Million Dollar Baby

I knew "Million Dollar Baby" had a fine cast - Eastwood, Swank, and Freeman, but somehow I had missed the fact that this was a film at least as heavy as "Unforgiven." Ten minutes into the first reel, I elbowed my friend and gasped in a whisper, "this is a good movie."

Like Unforgiven, the two old pards face something through the catalysis of the young ambitious one - the Scofield Kid and Maggie Fitzgerald. Facing the ghosts of their own youths and business unfinished, they each become the changer and the changed.

And Eastwood does not disappoint in "Million Dollar Baby" any more than he did in "Unforgiven." Making a right-angle-turn, like the film "It's a Beautiful Life," there is a moment the director dashes us against a wooden stool and ends our hopes for a feel-good-movie-of-the-summer. It becomes a film for all times and all seasons. We witness the fighter who now lays among the living dead. Whereas a zombie has a body and no mind, Maggie has a mind, but not body. I do not know which frightens me more.

Having worked in orthopedics, given the poetic license needed for a film, it delivers on the deterioration a healthy body undergoes when there is a C3/C4 cervical insult. I could almost smell that room - and then there is the power of the fighter. Freeman says early on something about her character that sets us up for the turn of the plot.

To make a fighter you gotta strip them down to bare wood: you can't just tell 'em to forget everything you know if you gotta make 'em forget even their bones... make 'em so tired they only listen to you, only hear your voice, only do what you say and nothing else... show 'em how to keep their balance and take it away from the other guy... how to generate momentum off their right toe and how to flex your knees when you fire a jab... how to fly back and up so that the other guy doesn't want to come after you. Then you gotta show 'em all over again. Over and over and over... till they think they're born that way . . .

All fighters are pig-headed some way or another: some part of them always thinks they know better than you about something. Truth is: even if they're wrong, even if that one thing is going to be the ruin of them, if you can beat that last bad out of them... they ain't fighters at all.

This is a good movie.

During the theater viewing - I was toward the front - four different people (along with companions) stormed out of the theater. How many behind did the same, I don't know, but the theater was still packed when the film was over.

I tried to tell a friend about the incredible experience I had had and how I was lucky enough to still catch the film while it was still on the big screen. Maybe he would consider catching it and to my surprise, though I spoke in a quiet voice, I was shouted down. How dare I suggest a woman could fight in this special way - the way of prize fighters?

I sat in stunned silence. He had already stormed out of the theater, like those other four, without ever showing up. I wonder how many walked out of Unforgiven at similar moments?

Clint Eastwood, the angle of death - The High Plains Drifter; Pale Horse, Pale Rider; Unforgiven; Million Dollar Baby - comes. In "Whose Life Is It Anyway," Richard Dreyfuss is in similar circumstances in an era when courts still held power and rather than biting his tongue off, he used it to argue that life support should be disconnected. Such a concept! How far we have slipped.

The two sides - the patients who wants life support withdrawn - and the "establishment" who wants the main character to live out his life "as given" - square off; and the judge who presides at the hearing says, sadly and with sincere irony, no matter what the outcome, he is a "hanging judge." Hang 'em High.

The ultimate cut-man, Eastwood clinically administers the next step. The fighter begs that the trainer throw in the towel. Freeman's character lost his eye and Swanks was about to lose her soul.

And yet, the story is about love. I could not get the 1940's song about the "Million Dollar Baby" out of my mind, each time I saw the titles and maybe there was a reason, if only my own reason.

And so we come full circle to "Revenge of the Sith." What Anakin cannot do, Eastwood's character does, and that is to face death. Different movies and genres, yet juxtaposed. Anakin is willing to kill others to save his soul mate's body, while Eastwood takes his soul mate's life to give her peace. Anakin is ready to slaughter many rather than face death of the one - a short step from himself, while Eastwood is ready to help the one he loves. Anakin is willing to prompt his ends at all costs to others; Eastwood, at all costs to himself.

Did I see anyone storm out of "Revenge of the Sith?" No.

The Dark Side cannot accept mortality and it is why they inflict their views on others, even as they take life in the name of life.

Yoda and the Eastwood character deeply regret death, but as Freedman's character reminds us, it comes to all - but at least is some cases someone "got the shot." Or, "I coulda been a contender."

Million Dollar Baby is about opportunity and love and redemption and storming out of the theater does not change the fact that some of us will lose. But we asked for the shot.

As women, can we ask for any less?

Schofield Kid: I guess I'd rather be blind and ragged than dead.

Munny: You don't have to worry, Kid. I ain't gonna kill you. You're the only friend I got. Here, take this money and give my half and Ned's half to my kids. Tell 'em if I ain't back in a week, they give half to Sally Two Trees. You keep the rest. You can get them spectacles now.

Maggie: You never signed those papers like you were supposed to because you were worried about losing your welfare. I can still sell that house right out from under you. And if you show your fat, lazy hillbilly ass around here, that's just what I'll do.

It was a lucky April shower
It was the most convenient door
I found a million dollar baby
In a five an' ten cent store!

The rain continued for an' hour
I hung around for three or four
Around a million dollar baby
In a five an' ten cent store!

She was sellin' china
an' when she made those eyes
I kept buyin' china
until the crowd got wise!

Incidentally . . .

If you should run into a shower
just step inside my cottage door
an' meet the million dollar baby
from a five an' ten cent store!

If you should run into a shower
just step inside my cottage door
an' meet the million dollar baby
the lady that I adore
she's the million dollar baby
from the five . . .
the five an' ten cent store!