My quick thoughts about Battlestar: Galactica, which I have just finished catching up on:

Good:
1. So many strong female roles! A female president (even if she usually defers to the Admiral in matters military); several female fighter pilots; a female commander (even if she is morally, ah, misguided, her gender is clearly not the issue), at least one female surgeon…
2. Deft handling of the abortion issue.
3. One of the lead roles is a Latino - in a sci fi show?! Hooray! (I honestly can’t think of another show where this is true. Not one.)
4. The entire question of “am I a real being, or just a construct, a machine?” - applicable to any number of groups over time and extremely well done.

Bad:
1. Everyone’s last name is whitewashed, “normalized” in a way. While I respect the idea that race is less important than what colony you come from in this world, it seems to me that one could just have easily used last names which “read” as certain ethnicities, cross ethnicities (so, call Laura Roslin - oh - Laura Ramos; call the Adamas the Adachis; etc.). Then again, maybe I just “read” names like Roslin, Adama, Tyrol, and Biers as white, and no one else does?
2. In any case, why give Edward James Olmos such a very white son - especially since his actual son is also in the series, but playing another character? I’m not saying that Jamie Bamber makes a bad Apollo, but I feel like there’s a certain amount of “in space there are only white people or otherwise people we will now pretend are white because hey it’s space” going on. Would it really be so weird to have two Latino male leads?
3. There are no happy, normal family relationships until season 3, and that relationship takes a very gendered slant (Cally stays home with the baby and frets about the child’s health, while Tyrol tries to press them both into working too hard). I realize that we’re at war, etc., etc., but since the BSG world is clearly much more gender-equal than ours, would it be too weird to show us a family that works in that context?

Ugly:
1. There are only two black men with speaking roles. One is a Cylon working to harvest the eggs of (white) human women for their crazy breeding schemes, and one is traitorous (having been tricked by the Cylons). This does not seem… uh… equitable. Black women get by a little better, since they have both Dualla and Elosha, but that’s not a lot of screen time either.

All in all I think that BSG does unusually well with gender issues and clearly is making an effort when it comes to race, there’s still a long row to hoe…

I just watched a video about portrayals of masculinity in Disney movies.

I had a number of problems with the video. Not because I think that it makes inaccurate statements — I agree, at the very least, that Disney movies almost always privilege certain male body types and make statements about what is “masculine” that usually are about physical prowess and violence (I’m not sure I would agree that modern Disney movies encourage young men to think of women as sources of pleasure or servants, which is the video’s third and weakest point).

Unfortunately, the video chooses some exceedingly poor examples to make its point. It largely seems to rest on the character of Gaston, the hyper-masculinized villain of “Beauty and the Beast.” While Gaston is certainly presented as a “manly man,” he is by nature parodic. No one leaves “Beauty and the Beast” thinking that Gaston is the hero. When they sing about Gaston’s physical size, strength, and abundance of chest hair, the song is purposely ridiculous and over-the-top. His pursuit of Beauty is obviously “boorish, brainless!” — as Belle complains in a song. The Beast, who certainly does not come across as “effeminate” or “un-manly,” has a relationship with Beauty that centers around genuinely healthy and friendly activities: feeding birds, reading books. When the Beast turns into the prince, he is nowhere near as barrel-chested and stereotypical as Gaston.

On the other hand, the video has a point. Even if the prince isn’t as barrel-chested as Gaston, he’s still pretty dang barrel-chested. Although Gaston’s belligerence is bad, the Beast still can’t run from battle: he only comes into his own when he finally fights the bad guy for the girl. To skip to another movie, despite the fact that Mulan successfully pretends to be a boy and completes all the tests of physical prowess necessary, the fact remains that boys are being told that in order to be male, you have to have physical power. If Mulan had failed the tests of her strength, they’d know she was a girl. Even if the scenario empowers young women by telling them that they can do anything a man can do, it still labels the quality of physical strength as “masculine.” And as for falling in love? “Beauty and the Beast” is a rarity in that it allows the protagonists time to get to know each other and perhaps actually forge friendships rather than simply going goo-gah at first sight.

And of course, even these caveats are more complex than my initial analysis allows. The story of “Mulan” requires her to pass physical tests: one could argue that strength is a quality of soldiers, not men. This argument would be stronger if Disney more frequently presented admirable men with different physical appearances and interests. As for “Beauty and the Beast,” Belle also has to prove that she isn’t a coward: perhaps she isn’t forced to physically fight Gaston, but she bravely tries to convince the villagers not to attack the Beast’s castle: speaking to a riled-up mob requires its own type of courage. When the villagers reach the castle, the female servants are portrayed as playing just as large a role in the defense of their home as the men. And let’s not forget that the Beast attempts to convince Gaston not to fight. Only when he’s attacked does he resort to physical violence.

Are there problems with the Disney movies? Sure. They’re racist in varying degrees, certainly white-centric, promote certain body types above others, and are unfailingly hetero. But I don’t think that the situation is quite as dire as the video makes it out to be, or at least, not in the particular examples it cites.

On the topic of fairy tales, though, the best fairy tale you’ve never read: the ballad of Tam Lin. Why have you never read it? Because it’s about an unwed mother standing up to her family’s expectations and setting off on an adventure to save her baby-daddy. No, really. And this is a very old, traditional story — but it’s nearly impossible to Bowlderize, so you’ve probably never heard of it.

Hey, look! More depressing news coming out of my home state!

Less than three months after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ban on a controversial late-term abortion procedure, a Cincinnati Republican has reintroduced legislation to outlaw all abortions in Ohio. Rep. Tom Brinkman Jr. hopes his bill will become the vehicle for overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which legalized abortion.

I didn’t know much about this guy prior to these events, as he’s not my representative– he covers the eastern segments of Cincinnati, such as Hyde Park, Mt. Lookout, and Mt. Washington. However, a quick skim of his campaign website makes a strong case in my mind for him being an asshole.

This is, of course, not the first time he’s tried this; in 2005, another bill banning all abortion in Ohio was introduced by the same legislator. Luckily, it didn’t pass; unfortunately, another anti-abortion bill introduced around the same time did, and was signed into law by the outgoing Republican governor only a few weeks before our current Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, took office. As a result, “it is the public policy of the state of Ohio to prefer childbirth over abortion to the extent that is constitutionally permissible”, and “None of the funds appropriated to administer [health assistance for poor Ohioans] shall be used to counsel or refer for abortion, except in the case of a medical emergency” (HB 239, as sent to the governor and signed into law). In effect, there’s discrimination against allowing poor women in Ohio to have access to a full range of reproductive choices, including abortion, since the procedure is often expensive and can’t be subsidized by any governmental funds below the federal level in Ohio.

Reading the comments on a Cincinnati Enquirer blog post on the subject made me feel vaguely sick. Relatively safe in Oregon, which just passed laws granting domestic partnerships and subsidizes reproductive health care for patients under a certain income level, it’s always a shock when I take a quick glance at what average people in Ohio are saying. There’s so much work to be done in educating people that abortion rights are deeply necessary to offering women free choice in their reproductive health, and with more and more of the people in my generation fleeing the midwest, how are we ever going to manage it?

Time to go write to my state representatives. You should write to yours, too.

I came across this link via Feministing’s Weekly Feminist Reader (a weekly weekend trove of articles and news on feminist [and queer and class and race] issues) and was intrigued:

[Anti-choice protester Joseph Logsdon] will get a chance to prove in court that police violated his rights when they arrested him during a protest outside a Cincinnati abortion clinic.

Ah, the home town. I grew up in Cincinnati, which is considerably more conservative than my current home, Portland (and, as my father likes to say about his own hometown, Dayton OH, “an excellent place to be from“). Still, the article itself didn’t immediately scream “anti-choice bias!” at me. Feministing offered up the link in the following frame:

An anti-choice protester wins his appeal after being arrested outside a clinic. His lawyer said, “It struck a very positive tone for a pro-life protestor [sic]. In most courts around the country, they are treated like they are maniacs.” Gee, wonder why that is?

I don’t disagree with Feministing’s basic point here (at least, not their basic point as I read it)– anti-choice protesters generally support a lunatic platform that is hugely detrimental to women’s health. They linked in their blurb, too, to a recent post on the incredibly creepy memorializing by “pro-life” activists of violence against abortion providers– a connection which is maybe a little alarmist in this guy’s case, but definitely not an unreasonable parallel to draw when discussing the trend in louder and more daring anti-choice protests.

That said, I don’t see the fact that Joseph Logsdon won his appeal as a feminist issue one way or another, except in that we should be celebrating our civil rights.

While his lawyer casts it as a recognition of the sanity of a “pro-life protestor[sic]”, a quick read of the actual article implies instead that the decision just dealt with whether or not Cincinnati police violated the protester’s constitutional rights when they arrested him for trespassing at the clinic. A read-through of the decision itself [PDF download] also inclines me to believe that the court decided rightly in this case, although my opinion is, admittedly, informed by a non-lawyerly understanding of the law.

See, the case isn’t about whether or not anti-choice protesters are nuts. It’s about whether or not the Cincinnati police should have arrested Logsdon for trespassing at the Cincinnati Women’s Services Clinic (side note: this clinic is a scant two miles from where I went to high school), given that they weren’t present when the trespass occurred and (allegedly) ignored the input of witnesses when making the arrest. The case also isn’t a blanket statement of approval for Logsdon, an unqualified “win”: it just says that he should– and will– have the chance to argue his side of the story in court. My resident lawyer not-quite-lawyer says he seems unlikely to win the actual case. Plus, I have to admit here to a certain wariness towards the Cincinnati police when considering whether they might have ignored someone’s civil rights. After all, in 2001 their apparent disregard for a young black man’s rights sparked race riots.

So where does that leave us? In short, I wouldn’t be too quick to say that this decision was a bad thing, let alone a decision that set back women’s rights or supported anti-choice activism. All the decision says is that protesters have civil rights, too, even when they do some stupid things. I can’t disagree with that in good conscience, just as I can’t look too negatively on the ACLU defending the Phelps from a charge of “flag desecration”. The Phelps have an incredibly hateful, vicious, ridiculous message, and we should all wish they’d pick a more decorous way of presenting it, but they still have a constitutional right to say what they do. Likewise, Joseph Logsdon may be protesting in favor of a miserable women’s health policy and a culture of enforced conformity and religious oppression, but he has a right to be treated fairly by the police.

I’m not trying to say Feministing hates the constitution. They don’t. But their presentation of this case is a little misleading, and while I hope Logsdon stops harassing the people at the Cincinnati Women’s Services Clinic, he at least has the right to make his case in court. And that’s the way it should be.

My excellent friend Friar Yid has a terrific skewering of Pat Boone’s latest sexist and moronic column on WorldNetDaily. (I won’t link directly to either of those since I don’t want to be seen raising idiots’ Google rankings—if you care, you can find links and lengthy excerpts on the Friar’s blog.) In a nutshell, the erstwhile rock singer Boone claims that strong women only exist by contrast with men who are weaker than usual:

Consider the women, in our day, who have become the heads of state in India, Pakistan, Israel and Great Britain. Question: Is it likely that these very accomplished and brilliant women would have attained these positions if there had been men in evidence who seemed equally or perhaps even better qualified? … Don’t get all defensive, ladies; hear me out. I’m praising and complimenting you here. Thank God for you!

It wouldn’t be worth commenting on this (except with great humor and brilliance, as is Friar Yid’s wont) except for the fact that lots of people take crap like this seriously and those of us with an ounce of sense are left to flail our arms wildly and wonder: What the hell?

Commence wild arm-flailing on the count of three. Ready? One…

This article in the NYTimes is an infuriating example of exactly what to do to discourage women from caring about technology.

Ms. Duarte represents a growing number of women who are embracing consumer electronics just as the technologies are reaching out to embrace them. Behind this quiet revolution are engineers and designers who are bringing a more feminine sensibility to products historically shaped by masculine tastes, habits and requirements.

Only a few years ago, feminizing a consumer electronic product meant little more than creating a pink or pastel version of the same black or silvery item coveted by men. And, some retailers note, that kind of marketing still goes on. But feminizing technology is more about a product’s fundamentals, often expressed in its ease of use.

Where does this persistent belief that technology needs to be “feminized” in order to be successfully marketed to women come from? I’m not entirely familiar with the marketing data that makes manufacturers so obsessed with gender, but surely there’s a little merit to the idea that if you update a product’s features and design so that it’s easier and more efficient to use, the resulting increase in sales has less to do with women preferring “simpler” technology than better product design. Ghettoizing women by making special technology products “for her” will never be the right way to “encourage” women to use computers, if we need encouragement at all.

Luddites abound in both genders. I work in tech support at my college, and see equal numbers of male and female techno-terrified professors. Among students, there are rather fewer who are unfamiliar with the technology in use around them, but an equal number of men and women ask for help formatting their papers and printing out homework assignments. Granted, this is evidence from personal experience, never a statistical source to be trusted absolutely— but what is it that so convinces people that women are afraid of technology?

I do remember hearing from friends— and occasionally teachers— during elementary and high school that it was “weird” for me to be interested in computers, or to play online games.^[1] When I was in fifth grade, we first got a computer powerful enough to connect to the internet (a Mac G3). I excitedly told my teacher all about how neat the new computer was one day while walking with our class to the school buses, only to hear her reply, “I’m really not all that interested in your new computer— I’d rather hear about your craft projects.”

I hope we don’t still so emphatically tell girls that computers aren’t interesting or appropriate for them. Indeed, evidence points to girls being just as interested in technology and the internet as boys— take another article from yesterday’s NYTimes, for example. Some online playgrounds for kids are as much as 96% female now, belying the tired old tripe that girls “just aren’t as interested” in computers.

This may seem trivial to producers of technology products, software, and web apps whose work isn’t directly linked to the “interactive online doll” movement. Yet these programs are creating interest among girls in computers and the web, and ensuring that children who grow up in the middle class in this generation will be technologically literate.^[2] When women are making half of all technology purchases in twenty years, it won’t be because manufacturers have finally hit on the right shade of pink with the perfect glitter-coated single-button interface for every gadget and software app, it’ll be because technology is central to work, play, and every aspect of life for the new generation.

Manufacturers should be making the user interface changes described in the NYTimes’ piece— smart televisions that turn on when a DVD is inserted into an attached player, or gadgets whose size doesn’t overwhelm their usefulness, or consumer electronics that interface easily with everyone’s laptop are wonderful additions to the plethora of technological devices available today. They’re great additions because they’re designed well and appeal to a variety of consumers, though, not because women are any more likely to be the Luddites adopting them than men. Instead of “feminizing” technology by making it “simpler” for women, we should be simplifying technology with the goal of making it easier for everyone to use, and ensuring that girls and boys alike grow up interested in tech.

Edited To Add: Today (6/12/07) I came across an excellent blog post at Shrub.com tangentially related to this article. Go read it, and the rest of the Shrub blog.

[1] I was an avid player of MUDs in middle and high school, particularly the RPI variety. Someday I’ll get around to writing a post about how gender seems to play out in many MUD environments. Back to where you were.

[2] The growing disparity in technological literacy between the “middle” class and those in poverty is a troubling one, and further disadvantages those already held back from full economic success. However, the problems of technology and poverty— and the accompanying issue of technological literacy and race— is a can of worms for a different post. Back to where you were.

If you posted a comment to this site in, oh, the past two months, it was probably marked as spam and deleted.

This is because Your Badass Blog Owners decided that finals were more important than, yknow, comment moderation, and came back to find that 2,031 comments had been posted, at least 99.9% of which were about Xanax.

As the thought of reading 2,031 spam comments to find the one non-spam one made us want to pop a Xanax, we made the decision to just throw ‘em out and start anew.

So, I’ve been thinking about making a series of posts on the subject of abandoning the beauty industry. Jumping, like a rat from a sinking ship. Sending them the one-fingered salute as one rides off into the distance.

It took me a long time to come to the point where I even recognized that I needed to purge the beauty industry from my life. I’m still not done with the process (makeup sits, waiting for use, in my cabinet; sometimes I look at myself in the mirror and think today is a day when I need lipstick real, real bad; more than half my shoes are heels) but I’ve taken some steps. Do I need to explain why I’ve taken them? Underweight models, eating pounds and pounds of toxic chemicals in makeup over your lifetime, the “benefits” of never letting your skin breathe. The belief that without expensive toiletries you aren’t fit to be seen in the world. Makeup, the grand apology for your face — your face.

When are men asked to apologize for their own face?

And then I went into my cupboard and looked at all the crap that was sitting around. Why do I need medicated lotions and potions? Sure, I’ve had pimples, but who doesn’t? Does that really mean I have an “acne problem”? No, no, no. So why do I spend money on it? Because Neutrogena puts out ad campaigns wherein pretty white models splash water on their perfectly made-up faces? I guess. That’s a stupid reason to buy something.

And what about my hair? What is it about hair that makes regular soap not work? Seriously; I want to know. Why doesn’t soap suffice to clean hair anymore? I’m happy to use shampoo if it’s going to make a difference, and I know for a fact that shampoo makes my hair feel better than Dr. Bronner’s, but why? Is there some special reason that shampoo requires so many more long chemical names in its ingredients list than plain old natural soap does?

So next time: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, AKA “You mean that despite the fact that the beauty industry has been trying to convince me that oil is BAD EVIL BAD, I can actually use it to wash my face?” and an examination of a few bullshit PR campaigns regarding makeup + makeup remover.

There have been, what appears to be, an influx of ‘security alerts’ at the Claremont Colleges, an increase that seems to be congruent with the recent escalation in threats of violence on campuses nation-wide after last week’s the shootings at Virginia Tech. Although the threats here have been mild – robbery, an attempted break in, grand theft auto, stalking, and a possible attempted abduction – they do garner attention from the students and administrators of a group of colleges that pride themselves on being extremely safe places for to work, study, and live. While Asian American and immigration activists vocalized critiques of the insensitive media reporting about the Virginia Tech Shooter’s race and immigrant status I can’t help but wonder why the Claremont Colleges isn’t engaged in a similar dialogue about race-based discrimination in crime reporting. With the goal of starting a discussion about racial-profiling at the Claremont Colleges, I intend to consider how we might go about identifying this tendency and examining why racial profiling is normalized at the Claremont Colleges

In the past week, three security alerts have gone out across the Claremont Colleges that give descriptions of suspects. The first alert described an incident where a man in a car summoned a student from the sidewalk and made several attempts to coerce her into his car. The suspect was described as “an older male with gray hair and a slightly receding hairline. He was wearing a short-sleeve blue and white striped shirt and a gold signet ring with initials.” The second incident describes an attempted break in to a residence hall. Although the suspect was confronted and claimed that he was “trying to reach his girlfriend,” the only available description of the man is that he is an “African-American male in his late twenties/early thirties.” The third report was for “suspicious behavior,” and describes several men in a car – who appeared to be following a student – simply as “of Hispanic descent.”

The suspect from the first security alert, it is safe to assume, was white, because his racial identity was not deemed to be of importance by either the student who reported the incident or the campus safety officer who took down her report. White privilege, after all, is invisible for a reason. In the second and third reports, how is it that all those involved thought it justified to describe the suspects only in terms of their perceived race? My best guess: Claremont College students (assuming that a student reported these incidents), who are overwhelmingly white, embrace the racist notion that all brown people look the same. Markedly, in the case of the second alert no one can claim that they didn’t get a good look at the suspect. In regards to the third incident, it is important that we examine racialized accusations not as inconsequential crimes, but as physical manifestations of enculturated racial stereotypes. This is not to say that stalking threats do not merit appropriate judicial response; rather, it is crucial, when presented with incidents such as these, that we thoroughly investigate the racist ideological roots at the heart of racial profiling.

In a culture that indoctrinates women (or rather all white people) to fear men of color as violent sexual predators, we create artificial “security alerts” that meaningfully impact the lives of women and men of color. When campus administrators (and society at large) tell women to “Trust [their] instincts, better to be safe than sorry,” without first asking why whites tend to label men of color as ‘suspicious,’ ‘threatening’ or ‘dangerous’, we can’t expect much more than the proliferation of racist ideology, racially-motivated discrimination, and in fact, an overall artificial increase in ‘security alerts.’ This is why our prisons are bursting at the seams with people of color; dominant white society has the ability to label people of color as lazy or troublesome at best and as threatening or violent at worst, without ever investigating the racist foundations of such “instincts”.

None of this is meant to undermine the importance of security alerts to the maintenance of safety at the Claremont Colleges (I myself often wish that safety threats against LGBT populations at the 5C’s were more widely distributed); rather, I hope that we might challenge ourselves and the larger community to investigate the racist underpinnings of crime reporting on our colleges, and its implications for the lives of individuals and anti-racist activism.

So there’s this television show called House. You might have heard of it: FOX medical drama, Hugh Laurie, Tuesday nights at nine. Well two weeks ago, towards the beginning of April, we were treated to a special episode cleverly entitled “Fetal Position” wherein Emma, a pregnant photographer hospitalized with a stroke and other serious symptoms, faced the classic dilemma of a) terminate the pregnancy and save herself or b) risk her life in an attempt to save the baby. She picks b.

“You’ll both die,” Dr. House tells her, but Emma refuses the abortion, even with the prognosis of two days left to live. The rest of the episode is, of course, a scrambling attempt to cure Emma and allow her to keep the baby, wherein we’re treated to touching moments such as empathy from another doctor and the fetus reaching for House’s fingers during one of the surgeries. Awww. Or Ewww depending how you look at things. Miraculously, Emma and her baby both live.

So allow me to pose a riddle:

Q: If “Fetal Position” aired today, how would the moral dilemma be different?

A: Terminating the pregnancy would NOT be an option because abortions this late in the term are now illegal regardless of whether or not the mother’s life is as risk.

The Supreme Court ruled on this ban yesterday. No late term abortions, and no legal exceptions for when the mother’s health is in danger.

It’s possible you didn’t hear about it in the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy on Monday (CNN hasn’t even reported on this yet, as far as I know). If anything, the media has so far downplayed the ruling. So if you’re interested in the details, here are a couple of articles I dug up:

• Denying the Right to Choose
• Doctors Weigh Next Move on Legality of Abortion
• Abortion Law is Upheld
(googling “supreme court abortion ban” will inevitably bring up more)

I’m not about to start an abortion debate, but I think this particular issue goes a little beyond whether you do or do not believe a fetus is a life. It’s about the government denying a woman a life-saving procedure.

So what’re we going to do about it?

ETA:  It was brought to my attention that my presentation might be “exaggerating” the ban, as it refer to second/third trimester partial birth abortions–and whether the removal of a fetus through a C-section-like procedure (the issue on House that I mentioned prior) would be okay or not under this ban isn’t totally clear.  The NPR article I linked to above shows a concern from doctors that the actual meaning of “partial birth abortion” (not a medical term) is not as specific as it could be.  So not being a doctor myself, I can’t say for certain that the way that pregnancy would have been terminated would have technically been illegal.  But it certainly raises the issue.