Categotry Archives: monday media watch

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Rapist, International Fugitive Arrested: Media Aghast

Categories: don't get your panties in a bunch, monday media watch, Outrage, privilege stories, rape is hy-larious, supremely sexist, your rda of misogyny

I will preface this by saying I like Roman Polanski’s movies, at least the ones I’ve seen–Rosemary’s Baby, Frantic, The Pianist, and especially Chinatown; I saw a restored print of it ten years ago that was almost a religious experience.

His sudden arrest in Switzerland over the weekend has stunned the world’s artistic community. A true cinematic artist, one who’s long-suffered and even been forgiven by his victim, opinion seems to be that…the man is a rapist and why the fuck are we having this conversation?

Yeah. Rapist. He didn’t “have sex” with a 13-year old girl. He raped her. Well, first he got her drunk and high on quaaludes. Then he raped her.

Don’t believe me? Check out the Smoking Gun’s transcript of her testimony. I looked at it for the first time on Sunday. It made me ill.

Predictably, the comments at the New York Times website were full of fail. A lot of people seem to feel that he’s “suffered enough.” They base this, I guess, because he hasn’t been allowed to re-enter the United States since he fled in 1977. Instead, he’s had to content himself with making lots of money directing movies in Europe and living in France.

Ya know, I just got back from France. That’s really not a hardship assignment.

The latest bit of doucheoisie posturing is this:

Nearly 100 entertainment industry professionals, including the movie directors Pedro Almodovar, Wong Kar Wai and Wim Wenders urged in a petition that Mr. Polanski be release, saying: “Filmmakers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision.”

Ronald Harwood, who won an Oscar as screenwriter of “The Pianist,” which Mr. Polanski directed, said: “It’s really disgraceful. Both the Americans and the Swiss have miscalculated.”

Jack Lang, a former French culture minister, said that for Europeans the development showed that the American system of justice had run amok.

“Sometimes, the American justice system shows an excess of formalism,” Mr. Lang said, “like an infernal machine that advances inexorably and blindly.”

One wonders, however, if Wong Kar Wei, Wim Wenders, or Pedro Almodovar would feel comfortable leaving a prepubescent female relative unattended around Roman Polanski. Or if they’d be arguing about the “great artist” exemption for a shocking act of rape if it were their 13-year old daughter.

Liss McEwan, as usual, hits it right on the head:

Very few, if any, of the people who have publicly defended Polanski, or who have worked with him, make it their business to champion or associate themselves with admitted child rapists. They make an exception for Polanski for the same reason exceptions have been for other famous, artistic men – directors, writers, actors, comedians, singers, musicians, dancers, choreographers, painters, sculptors, photographers – who have been known to sexually assault women and/or children: Because geniuses get special dispensation.

Because there’s only one Roman Polanski.

So goes the breathless defense of the artiste, while the flipside of that particular coin, because thirteen-year-old girls are a dime a dozen, goes unspoken.

So yeah. Overaggressive prosecution! Of a child molester! Who admitted to it! That’s overzealousness, all right! Just remember, as long as you can paint a nice picture or make a good movie, you get to rape young girls!

But not boys. That would be sick.

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Monday Media Watch: Oh NYT, You’ve Done It Again

Categories: media tool kit, monday media watch, privilege stories

Oh, New York Times! You mixed-up kid! When you’re not panting all over the latest Dan Brown novel (for shame, Janet Maslin, for shame) you’re punting muddle-headed essays on gender on us.

Let’s take a look-see…hm, they talk about Caster Semenya–hey, join the club! I used the controversy to talk about gender issues too, seeing as gender and appearances were a major part of my life. What’s Peggy Orenstein got to say?

I had my own reasons to be fascinated by Semenya’s story: I related to it. Not directly — I mean, no one has ever called my biological sex into question. No one, that is, except for me. After my breast-cancer diagnosis at age 35, I was told I almost certainly had a genetic mutation that predisposed me to reproductive cancers. The way I could best reduce my risk would be to surgically remove both of my breasts and my ovaries. In other words, to amputate healthy body parts. But not just any parts: the ones associated in the most primal way with reproduction, sexuality, with my sense of myself as female.

I…see.

No, wait, I don’t.

I mean the whole point of the Caster Semenya story is how people question your gender, right? Now, not to diminish Ms. Orenstein’s pain here. I am well aware of how terrible cancer, breast cancer, and the surgeries proposed are, and how not having breasts or a womb or ovaries can make you question your femininity and your sense of yourself as female, as a woman. (I’m rather intimately acquainted with that, actually.)

But like they say over here, quoi?

So I began to fret: without breasts or hormone-producing ovaries, what would the difference be, say, between myself and a pre-op female-to-male transsexual? Other than that my situation was involuntary? That seemed an awfully thin straw on which to base my entire sense of womanhood. What, precisely, made me a girl anyway? Who got to decide? How much did it matter?

Um…the difference would be that you thought of yourself as a woman? Ya think? And waitaminute–involuntary? Are you kidding me?

I guess you can say that starting treatment to transition is voluntary–I mean, you have to decide to do it; nobody makes you. But the being trans part isn’t.

Oh, goodness, ducks, there’s a lot to pick apart in the essay–like when she says biology is destiny! Sorta! But it totes shouldn’t mean anything to women’s rights or stuff (which seems pretty baffling.) She does inch close to something important though:

According to Sheri Berenbaum, a professor of psychology and pediatrics at Penn State who studies children with disorders of sex development, even people with ambiguous biology tend to identify as male or female, though what motivates that decision remains unclear. “People’s hormones matter,” she said, “but something about their rearing matters too. What about it, though, no one really knows.”

There is something mysterious at work, then, that makes us who we are, something internally driven. Maybe it’s about our innate need to categorize the world around us. Maybe it arises from — or gives rise to — languages that don’t allow for neutrality. My guess, however, is that it’s deeper than that, something that transcends objectivity, defies explanation.

Now, that I can agree with. I mean, that’s the story of my life, right? Except that in my case, my sense of gender was at odds with my body. I didn’t choose a middle way or androgyny or something like that (though people do and that’s just as valid as my own gender), but instead was impelled to think of myself as female. Why? And why is it so hard for some people to accept that about me–why do people cling to narrowly construed models of gender? What is it in human culture or the human brain that does that? These are good questions! Ms. Orenstein, maybe you’ll leave me on a good note!

I know that my sex could never really be changed by any surgeon’s scalpel.

Thunk. Boy it’s a good thing my desk is 5,000 miles away.

I mean, I know what she means, and it actually follows the same course as my own thinking: my gender was female before, during, and after my surgery. But sheesh, lady, for TS and intersex people, surgery can be Kind. Of. Important.

And that’s just it. She wants to talk about gender, she even brings in the example of a famous person who is intersex (or presumed to be, thanks to the leaks of evil, evil people), but does she engage with any intersex or transsexual people, who sure as hell know a lot about intrinsic gender identity?

Fuck no.

People get all in an uproar, it seems lately, about the word cis as opposed to trans. (Right now on a message board I still read we’re having our latest battle about it, a three-way fight between cis folks who don’t want the word applied to them, trans folks who want it applied in the neutral and descriptive way, and other trans folks who oppose its use and want to be nice in hope of getting a cookie from the cis folks.) But an article like this shows exactly why we need to have a word like this: because the privilege of not only never wondering about your gender identity, but never needing to know anything about people who have, is astonishing and smothering. So many of the questions Ms. Orenstein ponders have been batted around for years. There’s research, books, testimonials, diatribes, and even blogs.

There were answers. But privilege deafened her to them.

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Monday Media Watch: Special Chan(n)eling Edition

Categories: monday media watch, Your RDA of Outrage

Ducks! I almost forgot this bit of bizarreness in the upcoming September issue of Harper’s Bazaar:

From “What Would Coco Do” in the September issue of Bazaar, wherein designer Karl Lagerfeld was asked to “channel the original fashion wit,” Coco Chanel:

HB: Your clothing liberated women in the 1920s. Are you still a feminist?

CC: I was never a feminist because I was never ugly enough for that.

Um. Wow. I know why they chose Lagerfeld (he’s headed Chanel in the past) but still…a man being asked to channel one of the first major female designers? One of the first women to head her own house? And then to say she wasn’t a feminist because she wasn’t ugly?

Heh. Well you know what they say: ugly is as ugly does, Karl.

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Monday Media Watch: The Grey Lady Strikes Again

Categories: monday media watch, really, ross douthat: what's he know, your rda of misogyny

Greetings, ducks! Today, on Monday Media Watch, a special double-hit from our favorite source of all the news the establishment deems worthy to print, the New York Times!

First, let’s talk the economy! I’ll wait while you finish crying. There, there.

It’s bad, right? I myself am an underemployed computer worker, which is why I have so much time to write internet screeds. But do you know who has it worse than me? Did you guess men? Because the Times sure did!

We’ve pointed out before that that recession has disproportionately hurt men, who are more likely to work in cyclically sensitive industries like manufacturing and construction. Women, on the other hand, are overrepresented in more downturn-resistant sectors like education and health care.

Casey B. Mulligan noted, for example, that for the first time in American history women are coming close to representing the majority of the national workforce. It would of course be a bittersweet milestone, given that it comes primarily as a result of men’s layoffs.

The data is actually very interesting–it is in fact true that men are getting laid off more than women. The article linked in the quote has some ideas on why:

Women tend to be employed in areas like education and health care, which are less sensitive to economic ups and downs, and in jobs that allow more time for child care and other domestic work.

But is that the only reason? Or is it also that, well, women make a lot less?

 ________________________________________________________________________
                      Male                         Female
          _____________________________ _____________________________
             Number     Mean income        Number     Mean income
Age and year      with ___________________      with ___________________
             income   Current      2007    income   Current      2007
           (thous.)   dollars   dollars  (thous.)   dollars   dollars
________________________________________________________________________
15 YEARS OLD AND OVER
2007           104,789   $47,137   $47,137   105,230   $29,249   $29,249
2006           103,909    46,677    48,001   104,582    28,416    29,222
2005           102,986    44,850    47,635   104,245    26,261    27,891

CY 2007 data

Even when you factor out women working part-time jobs, the median wage gap between full-time male and full-time female employees was still almost $10,000 a year. (see page 14 of the pdf.)

So maybe that’s another reason that women aren’t losing their jobs as fast–they’re cheaper to keep on.

Of course, some things never change:

When women are unemployed and looking for a job, the time they spend daily taking care of children nearly doubles. Unemployed men’s child care duties, by contrast, are virtually identical to those of their working counterparts, and they instead spend more time sleeping, watching TV and looking for a job, along with other domestic activities.

Speaking of things that don’t change: Ross Douthat is still kind of a tool! Today he bewails the fact that nobody likes Judd Apatow’s new movie–not because it’s not that good, but because it’s too conservative:

Don’t laugh. No contemporary figure has done more than Apatow, the 41-year-old auteur of gross-out comedies, to rebrand social conservatism for a younger generation that associates it primarily with priggishness and puritanism. No recent movie has made the case for abortion look as self-evidently awful as “Knocked Up,” Apatow’s 2007 keep-the-baby farce. No movie has made saving — and saving, and saving — your virginity seem as enviable as “The 40-Year Old Virgin,” whose closing segue into connubial bliss played like an infomercial for True Love Waits.

Oh yeah, Knocked Up sure makes keeping your baby look glamorous and wonderful–plus you get to be the reason a 30-year old man finally decides to grow up! And The 40-Year Old Virgin tells us that woman can be the reason a…40-year old man finally grows up. Which is a great deal, if you’re not the one who’s the lady.

Somehow I don’t think that ever crossed Ross’s mind.

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Monday Media Watch

Categories: douchebaggery, media tool kit, monday media watch

Greetings, ducks! This week here at TSA we’re going to try something new and different–recurring theme columns! Today will be the inaugural Monday Media Watch.

Over the weekend, in between writing SQL specifications, I managed to actually watch some TV (other than Buffy DVDs, that is.) In fact, I caught Mike Judge’s 2006 internet cult fave Idiocracy.

I’m mostly confused by Mike Judge–I was in college when Beavis and Butthead first came out and was never really impressed by watching a couple of barely-articulate slackers make fun of music videos. (I mean, I wasn’t even a fan of that in real life.) But after that came King of the Hill which might as well be a modern-day Leave it to Beaver–Hank Hill’s solidly middle-of-the-road conservative values always win out in the end. In some ways it’s similar to Parker and Stone’s “common sense” values on South Park, although without that show’s audacitous offensiveness and sometimes spot-on satire. But both are similar in the way that the “common sense” approach that always manages to win out looks suspciously like the point-of-view of middle class white privilege.

(With some caveats: I liked Judge’s Office Space for its gleeful and accurate satire of the mindlessness of modern corporate existence, and the South Park movie’s general gleeful destruction.)

Idiocracy probably had visions of being a satire, and its vision hits some easy but satisfying targets: a Costco the size of a city, every conceivable surface–clothing, furniture, even the flag–covered with advertising slogans, cable TV hitting the lowest possible common denominator (the Violence channel has a show called “Ow! My Balls!” consisting of an hour of a guy getting hit in the crotch.) Much of this is chuckle-inducing, greatly enhanced byLuke Wilson in another of his startled shlub turns.

Other jokes, however, have a cringe factor. Judge ferociously attacks the pornification of American advertising by showing us a world of franchise sex: Starbucks gives hand jobs, H & R Block offers “gentleman’s tax planning” and there’s even fried chicken with “full release.” All of which might have gone off better had not the other main character (played by Maya Rudolph) been–a prostitute.

And that leads us into some other troubling matters. The English language, we are told, now resembles a mix of “hillbilly and Valley Girl slang,” but there seem to be a preponderence of hispanic names and “accents” around to demonstrate how much stupider America is in the 26th century. And yes, there’s a black president–but one who comes off as just another bunch of 21st century stereotypes: he’s a former wrestler and porn star. (In fact, the three main African-American characters are: a porn star, a prostitute, and a pimp.)

Not surprisingly, the movie ends up validating a white male slacker as the only reasonable character–and hey, given that Mike Judge is a white male slacker who made very good, I guess I can’t blame him. But Idiocracy has developed some kind of hip-cult status on the Internets, and I have news for you guys: it ain’t as transgressive as you think.

While I was watching Idiocracy, I got treated to the usual series of ads catering to the doucheoisie that Comedy Central routinely runs. (It’s much worse on both CC and Adult Swim late at night, when the ads for the local stripper clubs run.) One of those included the newest Burger King Late Night series, in which their “King” character plays a prank on a sleeping person–in the spirit of this:

Except this one apparently was set in a woman’s dorm (or at least a house with female roomates.) Sadly, the video isn’t up yet, but what happens is that they do the old “shaving cream on the hand, tickle the face” gag–the woman wakes up and slaps her face to brush away the “bug,” only to smear shaving cream all over her self.

But here’s the part that makes this ad even douchier than normal–she wakes up and sees a strange man wearing a bizarre mask on his face. And screams. Well, no shit! I mean, this is the start of a slasher/rape nightmare, and I’d scream too. And I know that makes me a Humorless FeministTM, but give me a break–it’s bad enough that this forms the plot of every cop show on TV, do we really need it to sell burgers?

There was, however, one ad I did like:

I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the Progressive ads–I don’t own a car, so I’m largely indifferent to them–but I love how she totally rocked this guy back on his stereotypes. Rock on, Flo!