Helen Gurley Brown, Joan Halloway, and the Legacy of the Cosmo Girl

Helen Gurley Brown was not boring. She was a self created wonder who had as much a hand in creating the second wave of feminism as anybody, though nearly all the second wave feminists would be appalled to think so (as, likely would be Brown herself). In some ways, I think Brown is responsible for both the best and the worst about being a woman in these United States at the dawn of the 21st century. She is, in other words, a titan.

The best is what she accomplished for herself and her part in sexually liberating ordinary women in the United States. She grew up poor in Arkansas, moved with her family to Los Angeles as a teenager, worked in factories, and then held many secretarial jobs. Her big break came, much like Peggy Olsen's did, when she was promoted to copywriter at an ad agency. In some ways, I find it sort of risible, that in five seasons of Mad Men, Brown has never been mentioned. Her book "Sex and the Single Girl" was unleashed upon the world in 1962 and sold millions and millions of copies. I own a 1963 edition (see above) and it's a pretty remarkable piece of work. Remember, in 1962 married men and women weren't permitted to be shown sleeping in the same bed in movies or television (the first television couple shown doing so were Herman and Lily Munster!).

I think perhaps Brown is never mentioned in the Mad Men universe because the Joan Holloway of the early seasons is, in many ways, Brown's book made flesh, though Joan, unlike Brown, is both beautiful and college educated. Brown wrote that her readers should have jobs and careers, because money equals freedom, and having a career gives one something to be. Removed from its pink, exclamation point strewn trappings, these are radical and essential statements of self actualization. Brown made these ideas palatable to women who couldn't afford to take time off to find themselves, who had roommates and no college education and had never read Virginia Woolf. Brown told these women, in no uncertain terms, that wanting things is okay, that being single is probably a better time for most women than being married, and you can have sex (with multiple partners if you want!) and still be a lady. The Cosmo Girl was born. Bless her heart.

That said, Brown isn't perfect and is not only a product of her time but probably a great influence on some of the more unfortunate trends in ours. Brown was all about upward mobility, which is fabulous, but she was also all about avariciousness. In true Ad Man fashion, she was focused on surfaces and she liked those surfaces shiny. She scrimped to dress well on the way up, and advocated dressing for the job you want, something I've certainly advised, as well. But she focused on these surfaces, placing their importance above whatever was going on inside of one's head. Brown was also a dinosaur in terms of her views of the workplace. She didn't see any problem with sexual harassment, and thought women's problems with it ridiculous. In her view, any girl worth her mettle should be able to stave off unwelcome advances with aplomb and wit, much like a character Katherine Hepburn would play in the movies. Sadly, this doesn't always help. Also demonstrated by Joan as she is quietly raped on the floor of Don Draper's office by her fiance. Not everything can be solved by a saucy remark and a disdainful flip of the hair.

Brown was profoundly apolitical. She wrote of a world of her own creation and it's a remarkable place. She said you don't need to be pretty (and used herself as an example) to get men or jobs or have a great life - But you should help nature along, by surgical means if necessary. Just, no, Helen. I saw her in person in the ladies' room at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center about 20 years ago, and she looked both terrifying and twice her age because of the amount of work done. At least a small part of the blame of this society we now have, in which perfectly ordinary women are shamed into thinking they have to look like supermodels belongs to her.

Helen Gurley Brown's legacy is complicated, indeed. The most lasting part of it, I hope, is her joyful insistence that women are sexual beings, and that the best way to please a man is to enjoy oneself. That single women aren't simply women who haven't gotten married yet, or have been left behind. That their lives should be fun and exciting and, most importantly, their own.

Why I Hope The Zombies Win

Hello, fellow consumers of culture!

Last night was the midseason (or season - I'm a child of the 70s and 80s, I find this new habit of seasons just popping up all willy nilly completely baffling) premier of The Walking Dead. The first season was enjoyable, for the most part, with its tense depiction of Atlanta and environs in the immediate aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. The second season really fell apart for me. It's based on a well regarded comic book which I haven't read, and I've heard it's pretty faithful to the original. Since I'm woefully rusty in my blogging skills, I once again present a listicle containing my thoughts on the zombie apocalypse drama.

1. I'm tired of zombies. Really, really tired of them. Has anyone else read Pride & Prejudice & Zombies? Beyond tiresome. But I'm guessing most of the people reading it have missed the glut of zombie related theater I've seen over the past decade. Zombie Shakespeare! Zombie proms (I've seen at least three)! And on and on. And, really, zombies are kind of dull.

2. That said, I am enamored of Carrie Ryan's young adult zombie books which began with The Forest of Hands and Teeth. Primarily because they do what no other zombie apocalypse story (that I've seen) has done: take place a couple of hundred years after the initial zombie contagion has struck and imagined a society in which zombies are a given. She's a lovely writer and she's obviously given this a great deal of thought.

3. That farm is super boring.

4. The Walking Dead has an all-male writing team, which a: is unacceptable, and b: shows.

5. Those scenes in season one in which the women spent all their time doing laundry made me want to put my fist through a wall.

6. The one black male character is written to be a eunuch. All the remaining female characters are white, and the writers of the show behave as if there is zero possibility that he could have a romance with one of them. All he seems to do is to assist the white characters to carry heavy objects or to dig holes. It hasn't seemed to occur to any of them that in their little farm at the end of the world, he might find one of the women, you know, attractive, or maybe would have his own ideas about running things. It's incredibly frustrating to watch.

7. Will a zombie eat that insufferable old guy already? He's just the worst.

8. When all of your action involves multiple trips to the local drug store, you have to know you're doing something wrong.

9. The whole pregnancy storyline really killed the series for me. It's such a potentially potent subject to delve into, and they squandered it. This was where the all-male writing team completely fell down on their job. The pregnancy was entirely viewed from a male or baby-centric POV. Call me crazy, but if I were pregnant in a place with zero medical care or possibly even hand-washing facilities, the thought "OMG, I'm going to die" would be pretty front and center. This was hardly even mentioned.

10. The final nail in the coffin for me was the drama surrounding the morning after pill. There seems to be some MAJOR confusion. The morning after pill is NOT an abortifacient. The morning after pill is emergency contraception. If you are already pregnant (i.e. missing periods, etc. as the woman on the show was) this will not work. The writers of the show are clearly oblivious to this. It angered me when it first aired, but have since heard this same misunderstanding of how The Science works from various Conservative pols who are trying to kill women by taking away their access to health care and choice. So, yeah, this stuff matters. And, no, I'm not going to just enjoy the zombie show and calm down.

11. All the characters are so dull, I'm pretty much just waiting for zombie attacks which makes me feel like a ghoul.

12. I have horrible completion mania, so I'm having trouble not watching. I mean, Season 4 of Alias was just unforgivable and I watched the whole thing.

Playwright Wars 2011: This is the way things work when they are broken

The thing is, art doesn't exist in an empty, airless space. And merit is as merit does, but things - paintings, novels, plays, whatnot - become a part of our larger culture, not in a self-replicating, Tribble-like way, but through familiarity. Also, people are freaking lazy and the same stuff gets cited and produced and then people will have heard of whatever the artistic thingy is and then it will be seen and mentioned and Presto! it's a part of the culture.

Which brings me to what I've dubbed "The Playwright Wars of 2011".

In theater there is simply not enough pie for anybody. Playwrights can't make any money, the big not-for-profits have the producing style (by and large) of frightened, penny-pinching industrialists, and if you don't have an MFA from a fancy-pants school you're in big time trouble. And if you're not a boy: watch out! And if you're not white: oh no! and if you're not rich: Sorry, you don't have a chance! But even if you are all those things: Still - not enough pie.

For those who haven't been paying attention:

Julia Jordan's Introduction to Opening The Curtain of Playwright Gender (FYI - I was at the meeting at New Dramatists she mentions, along with nearly every woman playwright I know, or have ever heard of for that matter, barring the ones who are dead or not in NYC)

Theresa Rebeck's Laura Pels Keynote Address

My blog posts on the Wendy Wasserstein Award debacle (and here is the complete text of Michael Lew's letter to the prize committee)

Michael Kaiser's deeply problematic post about finding quality new work for the HuffPo

Joshua Conkel's great and rabble rousing response, about the issue of class on the Youngblood blog

Dripping with privilege and entitlement, Mat Smart's post in which we find out why we're all a bunch of failures

Kari-Bentley Quinn's lovely and thoughtful response

So. Yeah. It's broken. All of it. There's lots of lovely work, but nobody is making a living hardly. There's not enough pie. Lord knows, I have no answers: except this. People don't go to theater much because most of it is really boring and it's expensive. And when things are broken people respond with conservatism rather than bravery. The first casualty are the new, the untried and the un-obvious. One of the great addictions of modern times is the listening to of people one agrees with. Olberman, Maddow, Beck, O'Reilly, all of them. There was a study published that demonstrated how people get a little endorphin rush when they listen to television talking heads say things with which they agree. It's fascinating, and I think people on all points of the political spectrum are addicted to the feeling. And I can't help but think that people of course want to feel that feeling all the time, that people have lost any sort of tolerance for unease (if they ever had it).

Easy choices are called that for a reason and the easiest choice of all is to pick work by white, straight guys, as they are, you know, neutral. I've so many times read or heard the phrase "voice of his generation" referring to some white guy, and by that they mean the voice of everyone. And then the phrase "voice of her generation of women" or "or voice of African-Americans today" or some such, as if women only speak to (and for) other women and African-Americans only speak to each other. That might not be what the person means, but there it is in the language, plain as can be. And hardly anyone ever means anything by it (except maybe Mat Smart. I think he meant every word), but the thing is, language is all we have. Culture is all we have. Otherwise, what separates us from chimps? So, of course it matters

I think in some ways if it was intentional, it would almost be easier. Because then one could just shun the jerks. But in this situation it's perfectly nice people who just don't think. Because, mostly, they don't have to. Because they ARE the default. It's not even a question of like being drawn to like. It's not a question of critics and artistic directors and writers championing their own. I think it's deeper than one's personal associations. It's cultural. That's why when women make lists they include plenty of men and often exclude women. White guys are considered the default, neutral. Everyone else is like an added flavor kind of. Like a topping. Like they are the only ones who get to just be playwrights. Everyone else is a "woman playwright" or a "gay playwright" or a "black playwright" or an "Asian playwright" or a "lesbian playwright" or what have you.

I'm not placated by "special" posts on Women in Theater or festivals of "Women Playwrights". It's not good enough. No more exceptionalism. No more of that bullshit.

But it's so hard, as I said, as there are so many permutations of all sorts. There's stuff like "talent". Merit plays a factor in getting pie, but the best pie, the Christmas pie with a gold sovereign in it, seems to be given to the same people again and again, and we all know that other people are better. And if we're talking about privilege, what people with it don't understand, is it's mainly the privilege of not having to worry about shit. So many times the issue of privilege can seem like an endlessly complicated game of rock-paper-scissors in which the rules are always changing. Like, I have boatloads of it being a white, thin, straight, conventionally attractive person.

Though everything has its flipside. Just talk to the person who was my boyfriend for most of my twenties. Being with me essentially changed his world-view forever, as he watched for years as people assumed, before meeting or speaking to me, that I was stupid, and behaved accordingly. I am many things, but one of my particular bits of privilege is that I'm smart as all get out. But still: people assumed I was stupid because of a certain physical presentation.

The other day, a downtown playwright, in a quickly written blog post, listed a bunch of playwrights he admires that have been published by the New York Theater Experience to introduce a podcast interview he did with Martin Denton. And they were all a bunch of white guys. Look. I know there wasn't any intent to slight. But I think it's a very useful example of what happens sometimes in a world with very little pie. As I've mentioned many times here before, Martin has done a really terrific job of featuring theater artists of all stripes in his yearly anthologies (even someone as prickly and unprolific as myself). We have so little, you know, all of us. So it seemed like such a shame, really, that the default system runs so deep. Something needs to break.

What would that list looked like if the editor of this particular series was a woman? Maybe the same? Possibly. We don't know. What if the editor of the theater section at Time Out was a woman? Or at the Times? Or at the Voice? See? The thing is we just don't know. Because none of them are, so we have no idea how the conversation would change, if at all, if that were the case. I'm not saying David Cote or Brian Parks are biased (I don't particularly think they are, though possibly the people who hired them are), I'm just vaguely curious to see if anything would be different if suddenly the percentages were flipped, everywhere, all at once, in terms of who was running things: editors, artistic directors, all of it. Wouldn't it be interesting, just to see?

What always gets to me, and what I spend a lot of time doing on this blog, is focusing on lots of writers and artists I find interesting. They're not all women, but lots of them are. Because their work just tends to interest me more. There's, again, not a great deal of intentionality there. But if the whole world was like me, men would be getting the short end of the stick, no doubt. That is exactly what the world is like for women. So many times it's pointed out "Look! I [wrote a feature on, produced, gave money to, curated] some woman [this one time!]", and I'm supposed to respond as if that person is Martin Luther King or something. Like they want even more pie for featuring some woman that one time. Yeah. I'm over it.

I realize I'm talking about too many things at once here, and none of them are easily solvable. Theater is a mess mostly because of the afore-mentioned pie issue. But c'mon. Really. Every mention in every publication ever in every blog post in every article adds to the sum total cultural currency of whoever is being mentioned. So everything matters. Just think, maybe about the aggregate factor of mentions in public places. It all just compounds and snowballs and just one tiny slight doesn't seem like a big deal, but when it's on and on and again and again it does, because it's not just this one small thing, it's a part of a much larger whole.

Why Bette Davis and Alice Faye Are No Scarlett O'Hara

The inamorato and I have been indulging in an orgy of movie watching of late. He's working on a play based on a 19th century stage sensation (I'm not sure if I'm supposed to spill or not), so his Netflix queue has been full of period films about women performers of one sort or another, and over all they've been mostly disappointing.

There were two, In Old Chicago and Lillian Russell, starring the ludicrous Alice Faye (left). Pudding faced, dull and completely lacking in any sort of discernable charisma, the best thing I can say about her qualities as a movie star is that she was probably a very nice lady. The real life Lillian Russell must have been something else. She is one of the prime inventors of the modern idea of celebrity, and ran her own career (i.e. there was no husband/manager lurking in the background) becoming a huge, huge star at the end of the 19th century. Watching Alice Faye in the bizarrely over-written Fox musical that tried to tell her story, you would never know it. Her character was strangely inert, her successes springing from a series of coincidences and accidents over which Russell had no control. I truly don't understand why the story of Tony Pastor accidentally overhearing her singing in her backyard is more compelling than the real life Russell angling and scheming and working her way to success and fame. Were people so uncomfortable with women of purpose and ambition that this was the only way they saw to tell this far more interesting story?

In In Old Chicago she is miscast as a music hall performer (in a role that before her untimely death, was meant for Jean Harlow) who winds up married to one of the O'Leary boys (they, of the pyromaniacal cow). The movie is lethargic and preposterous, most of it centering on the O'Leary family, with the requisite good brother (Don Ameche) and wicked brother (Tyrone Power) vying for political power. At one point Faye sings a song called "In Old Chicago" - I mean, at the time, wouldn't it seem like up to the minute, modern Chicago? The fire, however, was beautifully and excitingly shot, so much so that it seemed like an entirely different film. But the Faye character was mostly an empty plot point who sang songs.

It turns out that In Old Chicago was a rip off of a similar, but tonier MGM offering, San Francisco which starred Clark Gable, Jeannette MacDonald and Spencer Tracy. This film also adhered to the model later adapted by Titanic in which a fictional love triangle is grafted on to an exquisitely filmed real life tragedy. Clark Gable plays a disreputable nightclub owner who is bowled over by the light operatic skills of good girl, Jeanette MacDonald, while his Catholic priest best friend (and boxer) Spencer Tracy tries to save his soul. The actors are all strong and this was obviously a big budget, class picture. MacDonald, though far out of fashion, is a dynamic performer. But her character! She continually vacillates between sexy Gable and his Music Hall and a life as a respectable opera singer. The vacillations feel whimsical and unmotivated, which is a shame, because there was no reason why they couldn't have written her character as being torn between the pleasures of pop and sex, and her higher artistic ideals (and a far richer husband). As it plays out in the film, as she teases (virginally) both Gable and her respectable opera house swain, she just becomes unlikable and one wonder why either of them bother with her.

By this point I was thoroughly frustrated with 1930s Hollywood and couldn't wait for that damn earthquake. Which, incidentally, blew me away. In the middle of this rather ordinary studio film sits about five minutes of a Russian masterpiece. The quake looks as if it was filmed by Eisenstein, with gloriously expressionistic camera angles and a Potemkin-like montage. Really thrilling stuff. MacDonald survives to sing a Christian hymn among the wreckage and renew Gable's faith, which was less thrilling.

Then, one night, in the midst of all this movie watching Gone With the Wind came on TCM, and one felt as if one had been blasted into another world. Now, GWTW is an incredibly complicated film to talk about. Its depiction of slavery and race and the Reconstruction is greatly abhorrent. But, it also gave the first African American an Oscar. It's complicated. But that is a discussion for another day. I want to write about Scarlett. I know, I know. Everything that could possibly be written about this greatest and most problematic of American films already has been said, but I don't care. Scarlett O'Hara is the ur-American screen heroine. One of the other movies we watched was Jezebel. Bette Davis won the Oscar for the film, but I thought it was awful. The main character was a narcissistic pain in the ass, and in some ways it pointed to how Davis (who greatly coveted the part) would have played Scarlett had she been cast. And judging by this portayal of another strong willed Southern belle, it would have been disastrous.

Vivien Leigh was a miracle of casting perfection. Scarlett is a narcissistic pain in the ass too, but just the fact of that isn't supposed to make her interesting or attractive as it is with Davis's Jezebel character. Scarlett is a monster who interestingly lacks all the characteristics that are supposed to be attractive in a female. She's smart about business, but has zero self-knowledge or empathy and is shatteringly stupid about people. She wants to be a good person, in theory, but makes no effort to do the things that make one actually good. She's self-defeating and smart and a mess.

Compared to her, most of the women previously portrayed on screen look like stick figures. One of the reason for this is screenwriting 101: the choices Scarlett makes constantly set the story in motion and keeps it moving. The war happens to Scarlett, but how she behaves within this monumental circumstance is up to her. The other films we watched in the past couple of weeks or so, did not allow their female protagonists this privilege. Even in something so driven by a woman lead as Lillian Russell, was neutered. Lillian was not permitted to act on her own behalf, becoming a sort of boring object of either desire or career advencement for the swirl of men who surround her. Gone With the Wind is told, pretty much entirely, from Scarlett's point of view. She is no way objectified, she is agency incarnate.

The question is, why are there still, in goddamn 2011, still so few female characters this interesting to watch? Obviously, one can pretty easily say that there are few characters of either gender in American films that are this dynamic. In the first decades of the 21st century, I think it has become clear that most of the films being made in this country are for the most part, dirty minded amusements for children. Complex characters are for television. Or one can once again quote Joss Whedon:

So, why do you write these strong female characters

Because you're still asking me that question.

Note: Today is the anniversary of the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. For a fascinating look at that day from a show biz angle, see what Mr. S.D. has to say here.

Painters X 10: The TNC Gallery

The other day, inamorato and I swung by Theater For the New City on the business of dropping off postcards, and were instantly entranced by the gallery show, Painters X 10. The subtitle of the exhibition is "Painting That Spits, Drips, Twists, Amuses, Disturbs, Soothes". The show features ten painters: Velveeta Heartbreak, Liam O’Brien, Scott Geyer, Vladimir Ginzburg, Daniel Caspera, Darlin Formeta, Sean Noyce, Ian McGillivray, Jeffrey Faerber and Lawrence Quigley.

I particularly liked the work shown by Darlin Frometa (above, left), who showed paintings from a series entitled "Big Men In Dresses Fighting Superstition". The work varied greatly in terms of subject matter and technique, with a moody, very traditional oil painting of a ferris wheel up next to a riotous multimedia pop inflected explosion of unlikely juxtapositions. According to the materials available, this is a renewal of sorts for the gallery at TNC. They have a new curator (Peter J. Ketchum) and with him, a commitment to featuring underrepresented artists.

Which, great. But. Sigh.

First things first. Theater For The New City was founded 40 years ago and has been a downtown cultural institution ever since. They founded the Village Halloween Parade and have featured artists of all stripes in and on their stages. It's simply the most inclusive of places imaginable.

This is why, though I enjoyed much of the work currently on TNC's walls, I walked away disappointed. You see, all the painters are men. The show features painters exclusively, all with widely varying technique and subject matters. I just find it hard to believe that under an umbrella so potentially wide ranging, Mr. Ketchum was unable to find a single woman painter to feature. It's just not good enough, and particularly surprising in a place such as TNC. This is a big enough deal that if Mr. Ketchum does not know of any female painters, perhaps he should enlist a colleague or two to point him towards one of the many female painters who could benefit from a showing at TNC.

The next show is going to feature LGBT artists. There better be lesbians, or I'll be awfully cranky!

And my crankiness will be vocal indeed.

The Aching Romanticism of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Fourteen years ago this month, the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted on the (now defunct) WB. I was going to let the anniversary slide by without notice, but then something Fuzzy Bastard wrote in his excellent review of Catherine Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood (which I haven't yet seen), got me thinking:

"The tendency of male critics to gleefully embrace power/revenge fantasies and scream in indignation when confronted with fantasies of romance is just embarrassing..."

Well, it didn't start me thinking exactly, as this is something I think about more or less all the time, but I thought this would be a nice time to revisit. What I mean is, in discussion of genre fiction - whether it be books, movies or television - the world at large is incredibly forgiving of all nature of violent stupidity. Tired superhero tropes, even the dumbest and most unforgivable, while not necessarily liked, are viewed as an individual aberration and not used as an indictment of the entire genre. These same people flip out about romance, as Fuzzy Bastard says above, and deride all of it as awful. And don't give me some bullshit rubric about "geek culture". I'm so over it. When there are enough fans to constantly populate gigantic conventions, and the films of a genre are consistently number one at the box office, a line has been crossed: it's just plain old every day "culture", and it's become a bullying one at that.

I think we're going though a bad patch in which mainstream culture isn't particularly welcoming to women. The reasons for this are vast and varied and something that certainly deserves its own blog post, so I'm going to leave that alone for now and talk about a television show that aired its finale almost eight years ago. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was best described as a Horror Comedy Romance, and I'll go out on a limb here and say that the Buffy/Angel storyline is the greatest romance in the history of the medium. Sorry Spike enthusiasts. Sorry Dave and Maddie fans. Sam and Diane? Please. Luke and Laura? Ew. Kelly and Dylan? Don't make me laugh.

You are simply wrong.

Rewatching Buffy, though some parts feel dated, the story is still fresh. A great deal of this is because like all truly good art, the show isn't really about vampires or magic or a Hellmouth or a superhero, but about people. And a big part of that is - as it is with so many coming of age stories - romance. Seasons Two and Three of Buffy contained romantic episodes that felt like nothing I've ever seen on television. They felt like opera or like myth. I've written a bit about the glorious episode in which Buffy loses her virginity, Angel loses his soul, and all kinds of hell breaks loose. The lead up to this pivotal episode, and the way in which the story is shaped through to the end of the season is a complete fucking master class in story structure.

Angel is evil and killing people, and Buffy feels as if she is responsible as, like all over-conscientious control freaks, Buffy feels responsible for everything and usually reacts by shutting down emotionally. Buffy hesitates, like Hamlet before her, in killing Angel. So he, in the episode Passion, kills Giles's girlfriend Jenny Calendar (undercover gypsy and computer science teacher), and Buffy is shaken to the core. The episode contains that gloriously edited sequence in which Giles finds Jenny's dead body on his bed, strewn with rose petals, as an aria from La Bohème surges on the soundtrack. You so rarely see that kind of gothic romanticism played straight anymore.

Which I guess is what I'm getting at. Buffy manages the tonal shift from comedy to horror to romance so well by taking them all equally seriously. Romance is played straight and worked out creatively, and not as an afterthought. I've seen so many people all over the internet make it very clear that they like the horror and fantasy and comedy aspects of Buffy, but have no interest in the romantic story lines - as if that would be somehow embarrassing. Romance novels are given equally short shrift. And, yes, many romance genre novels aren't very good. But many, many fantasy or science fiction novels aren't very good either, and one rarely sees the bad ones as causing critics or those that blather on the internet to dismiss the entire genre as a whole. I've made it fairly clear that fiction that is aimed at or primarily enjoyed by women is rarely afforded much respect. Most often male critics of genre sneer. It's completely tiresome and the reasons for this have a few causes. One of the big ones, which I don't think is spoken of very often, is that men and women are conditioned to respond to books and media a little differently. The typical (and lazy) critical thought (male) as opposed to emotional reactions (female) is far too simplistic.

A few years ago, I conducted a survey in which I asked a simple question: "What did you read when you were growing up?". I left the question purposefully vague in order to have people interpret the question as they chose, which I thought would be illuminating (it was). First, men were far more likely to question me about what I wanted to hear, i.e. what was the "right" answer. They were also five times as likely as the female responders to mention a learning disability, or a reading disorder. They were six times as likely to respond that they "didn't read much". They also were far more likely to mention being bullied or made fun of for reading (zero women reported this). My raw data makes absolutely fascinating reading.

Reading fiction of any sort used to be referred to as a "feminine vice". Still, many men read mostly non-fiction or maybe for relaxation, Stephen King or Tom Clancy. Other men read widely and well. But, over all, more women read fiction then do men. Another gender difference in my survey response was in the language used - three times as many women than men used the word "loved" to describe a book (27 - 9). Women were also more likely to send me email after email, adding books they had forgotten to list. But the thing that surprised me the most was how much commonality there was in the lists from women, as opposed to the lists from men. Many, many women listed Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, the Little House books, the works of Frances Hodgson Burnett, Sweet Valley High, the Bontes, Baby Sitters Club, Nancy Drew, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler, All of a Kind Family, Anne of Green Gables, Harriet the Spy and the works of Dr. Seuss.

There is very little overlap in the books the men cited, which as not something I expected at all. Part of this is that the average male responder listed so many fewer books than the average female one. The following books were listed by multiple men, and by equal numbers of women: Narnia, Tolkien, A Wrinkle in Time, Roald Dahl and The Phantom Tollbooth. The only books citied in great numbers by men and not women are The Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown. Men mentioned genre far more often, though, saying they read science fiction, history and comics. It's all so interesting, and I've been sitting on all of it for ages, as I'm not sure what to make of it all. There were many impassioned responses from both men and woman, which is thrilling. But - the results were kind of overwhelming. I don't think I need to say that my sampling skewed ridiculously toward college graduate, East Coast artistic/educator types, so I really didn't expect there to be as large a gender divide as there was. I expected it to be far more subtle.

One thing I gleaned that didn't at all occur to me before I read the responses was that women have very little shame in admitting they liked things that could be perceived as silly or childish. Several men responded with something along the lines of,"I read a lot of comic books and spy novels and stuff, but that's not what you want to hear about" and then proceded to list a bunch of "school" books. Their lists also skewed far more grown up with far fewer mentions of picture books like Where the Wild Things Are and Dr. Seuss (and I'm pretty certain that these books were read and enjoyed by both boys and girls equally). There was a subtle feeling that the men were a little bit more concerned with how they would be perceived - as exhibited by the worry about answering the question "correctly". Women, by and large, didn't seem to care. They answered with gusto, making few apologies for anything they read and liked when they were young. In other words, the women came off as being far more confident than the men, which was (embarrassing for me) completely unexpected. On average, women enjoy fiction more than men do, I think. They also have so much common ground with each other in terms of what they (or, I should say, we) read. The women responders seem to lap up enjoyment without worrying as much about how these choices would be viewed.

I think one of the big reasons for this is because if you're a girl growing up, your options for watching stories about other girls has always been limited. That's far less true for boys. Girls like Star Wars too, of course, but it's not the same. Movies, television shows and plays are overwhelmingly by and about men. Girls mostly have had to look elsewhere for challenging and entertaining stories about girls, and that elsewhere is often in books. So, there are an awful lot of books that are geared towards girls and women. The fiction stacks of Barnes and Noble (and certainly in the Young Adult section) may be one of the very few places where boys and men aren't top dogs.

Which brings me back to Buffy. More than any other show I can think of, it was about women. And not just one women surrounded by men, but about a female protagonist surrounded by lots of other women. That's one of the reasons lots of women also like the much mocked Sex and the City (of which the first couple of seasons were pretty interesting) and Gray's Anatomy (which I think is a nightmare). But, really, in these post-Roseanne times, there's not much - and even less that can be construed as feminist (my long awaited 30 Rock post is on its way, I promise). I mean, we live in a world in which Two and a Half Men can last for nearly 10 seasons! There are so few women on TV shows who bear any sort of similarity to human women as I've encountered them here on Earth, and Joss Whedon, in a show about high school kids and vampires managed it better than nearly anybody.

There is over the top gothic romance at every turn, which I found thrilling. But Whedon always manages to ground all of it in recognizable human feelings. So, I'll leave you with a flashback musical number in which Anya, the 1100 year old ex-vengeance demon sings of her love for Xander. Of course, as it is a flashback, we know, though she doesn't, that he will leave her at the altar and she will go back to being a vengeance demon, and as the song is played, Anya has a sword through her chest that has been thrust there by Buffy as Xander watched.

Ah, romance.

This is just too much

From Planned Parenthood:

The U.S. House of Representatives has just voted to bar Planned Parenthood health centers from all federal funding for birth control, cancer screenings, HIV testing, and other lifesaving care.

It is the most dangerous legislative assault in our history, and it cannot go unanswered. We — Planned Parenthood and the three million women, men, and teens who are at risk of losing access to basic care — need you to stand united with us now.

Sign our open letter to every single representative in the House who voted for this cruel, unconscionable, unthinkable law, and to every senator who still has a chance to stop it.

This is just appalling. Please sign this open letter to Congress. Planned Parenthood performs a service that no other health agency in the United States provides. Here is a wonderful, long, personal essay on why Planned Parenthood matters. There are very few places young women, queer women and poor women can go to get non-judgmental, potentially life-saving care.

See the graphic below. It cannot be reproduced enough times. Planned Parenthood prevents far more unwanted or unsafe pregnancies than they terminate.



Our government funds so many stupid and unnecessary things. This isn't one of them. Please call your senator and congressperson and make your feelings known.

You Stay Home. I'm Sick of It.

Back when I was in high school, I read Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire and I absolutely loved it. It's been written about and written about: Why do women like vampires? Since Byron since Varney since Dracula in all his horrible and sexy incarnations since Louis and Lestat since Angel and Spike since sparkly Edward. Women like vampires. And the women who kill them: Sonja Blue, Anita Blake and, of course, Buffy. I've had a lot of thoughts about this for a very long time. Here are some of them.

Look. We all do it. We're all in the same boat. We all grew up in the same culture hearing the same things and being told the same received wisdom more or less. What I mean is that there are certain kernels of acceptable truth that have made a home in most of our heads. The thing is, so many of those ideas are default settings, just things we've heard over and over so many times we cannot picture the world behaving in any other way. Which brings me to Natalee Holloway, who I've been thinking a lot about recently. And, yes, this has to do with vampires so bear with me.

After Holloway's disappearance and presumed murder, there was a lot of talk about the safety of young girls in terms of travel. There was (and is) lots of talk about how the world is just too dangerous and girls should not be permitted to travel abroad without parents, and how they must be properly supervised. And we're not speaking of children: we're talking about women 17, 18, 19 years old. I hear this sort of talk and my insides constrict. As women, we're told to be frightened. But if we say we are too vociferously, we're told we're being unfair, or cowardly. If we're not afraid, and something happens (and by "something", we usually mean rape), she's often told she should have known better, and that it's her fault, that she was stupid. It's unwinnable.

So, back to vampires. When I first read Anne Rice's books when I was a girl, one thing that she wrote about was the freedom of suddenly being the most dangerous thing on the street. Louis walked along the night-time docks in New Orleans, Lestat's mother traveled the world, finally possessing the freedom she had always dreamed of as a pre-Revolutionary Frenchwoman constrained by what was possible. This seemed so exciting to me. To be honest, it still does. Look. I know the world is often times a dangerous place for all people, but women are in the terrible situation of not being the ones causing the problems, but being blamed for the outcome more often than not when things go awry.

Boys, if you are in a not very safe neighborhood late at night and your iphone gets jacked, likely someone will say that maybe it wasn't the greatest idea to flash it around. But, it is also unlikely that too many people will say that since you did so, the thief has a right to it and should not be punished in any way. In fact, you are the one who should be punished! But the case is not the same for women. At all. Again, totally unwinnable. That's, I think the reason fictional vampirism seems so attractive to so many women. Maybe we can suddenly win, or at least control the game.

Or at least it's a reason.

I initially wrote this post (everything above this paragraph) before hearing the news this afternoon that CBS Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, Lara Logan had “suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating” in Egypt on the 11th, the day Mubarek stepped down. There's no word of who is responsible for this attack, and does it matter? When I read the news on the WaPo website, the first comment referred to Logan as a "blonde bimbo". Most of the rest said she shouldn't have been there in the first place and this is what happens when you send a blonde white women to report from Egypt.

Look. Logan is the senior foreign correspondent at CBS news, to be specific, she's a war reporter. She's been reporting from Afghanistan and Iraq for years. She's a big girl and a stone cold pro. It was Logan's decision to be there. She is brave and brilliant. When I read about this, something inside me shattered. The news from Washington has been unwatchable recently. I have so many people blocked from my feed on facebook, I hardly know why I even bother to log on. Not because I disagree with them or don't like them, just that I can't stand the constant reminder that my body isn't my own and that I am a second class citizen in this world. As a facebook friend wrote today, "I am so sick of being a woman. I would like to be the one imposing my belief systems on another gender."

It's become exhausting. I'm tired of it. I spent half of today trying to figure out what a world looked like in which the default was set a different way. In which the default assumption was that I was smart and strong and capable. In which the things I enjoyed weren't considered slightly embarrassing. In which being "one of the girls" was considered something to which the opposite gender would like to aspire. In which men had to learn how to moderate their behavior and speech in order to be taken seriously, to be assertive but not too intimidating. There was a recent HuffPo piece that I can't find right now that was written by some fucking man advising women how to behave in the workplace. No talk that maybe the men they were speaking with perhaps moderate their behavior and maybe everyone should work together on functioning in their workplace. Then I hear that this is the way the world is and that one must adjust oneself to it. I'm just completely tired of it. I'm ready for the world to adjust itself to me.

Lara Logan is brave and strong and smart. She's attractive and blonde. None of these things make her responsible for her attack. She was rescued by a crowd of women and soldiers. She is in a hospital in New York. She has two children. She is a warrior. Hearing people say she should have stayed home makes me want to put my fist through a wall. Why? Because it's dangerous? Because she was attacked because of her femaleness? Why don't people say that about male reporters when they're shot and killed? That it's too dangerous, that men should stay home? She hasn't been defiled. She was assaulted. There's a difference.

So, what do we do, if we cannot become vampires or vampire slayers? I have some suggestions to try out. Maybe we should start making boys stay home for once, because boy-people seem to be the ones who are causing the problems. Maybe constant chaperoning of young men would be fair. But, wait - I can hear the cries already - that's not fair. I didn't do anything, my son wouldn't do anything, my best friend wouldn't do anything wrong! Well, maybe not. But, look at it this way. The freedom of women to roam the planet at will has been constrained for thousands of years. Just because we were born girls. That's not fair. Nothing is fair.

Just look at it from our point of view for like two minutes. Why should the girls be hampered and constrained? Why not the boys? Let's all imagine a world where rambunctious girls do their best to sneak boys out of their dormitories after dark. Twelve Dancing Princes instead of Princesses.

Just think about it for two minutes.

Reality Bites Back

As regular readers of this blog know, I've broken up with Project Runway, but I'm still BFF with Top Chef.

Just to be clear.

While crawling through a depression a couple of years ago, I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that I watched hours upon hours of Reality TV (while completely missing Mad Men and 30 Rock, an oversight that's been since remedied). As a writer and lover of fiction, I find it terrifying that so much broadcast (and basic cable) real estate was being taken over by Reality Competition or "unscripted" television. But, documentaries are good, right? And people like watching people, right? And lord knows I need to parse this to separate disdain and snobbery from actual alarm. But no. Most of it is truly awful.

It has recently been estimated that Americans, on average, spend 31 hours per week watching television. That's an astonishingly high number, and maybe, just maybe we should be paying just a tiny bit more attention to what is being shoveled into our fair citizens craniums day after night after day. Which brings me to the point, which is Jennifer L. Pozner's excellent book, Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV. In it, she takes careful stock of the practices, politics, economics and larger cultural implications of Reality TV.

Pozner makes as good an argument as any I've heard for why shows such as The Bachelor are regressive, truly terrible and likely dangerous. I find dating shows to be particularly repugnant. In them, a crowd of seemingly interchangeable hot women are placed in a house to compete for the affections of some dullard they've never met before. Okay. That's completely unfair, I have no idea if the "bachelors" are dullards - they might be interesting and likable in real life. But in "Reality", they are edited to be achingly, painfully dull. But that's just a matter of taste. What isn't, as Pozner points out, is the question of agency.

I cannot watch the Bachelor (and really, Pozner deserves some kind of award for sitting through all of it so you don't have to) because it literally makes no sense to me. A large group of women meet their prospective boyfriend and not one of them says, "You know what? He's not for me. Bye." One might posit that they don't do this because of contractual obligations and whatnot. Which, fine. But that's what we call extratextual - it's outside of the narrative being presented. So what we have a group of marriage mad women, all seemingly enchanted with a stranger, waiting for him to tell them that they are good enough for him. Or not. Ew.

Something Pozner doesn't bring up, but I think is worth stating, is this complete lack of any sort of differentiation between prospective dating partners is a dangerous idea to have pounded into people's heads every week. In rape case after rape case, it is implied that if a woman freely had sex with one man, she is likely to have sex with any man. Otherwise sexual history would be inadmissible (I always wonder why in cases of theft, the defense attorney isn't allowed to ask the victim, "You lent some guy 60 bucks that one time - how do we know you didn't just lend my client (who is a complete stranger, and hit you on the head) money in this instance?"). Women on the Bachelor are edited to be stupid, greedy and backstabbing. Executive Producer Mike Fleiss comes off as a particularly nasty piece of work with quotes like: " It's a lot of fun to watch girls crying. Never underestimate the value of that."

Pozner also spends a lot of pages looking at the really appalling racism of Flavor of Love, and does a nice job of tracing particular racial archetypes all the way back to the minstrel shows of the 19th century. She also spends a great many pages dealing with the muddled brew of race and gender one slurps up while watching America's Next Top Model. Really, someone needs to write an entire book long study on this show as I think after 15 Cycles (as the seasons of Top Model are called) it encapsulates so much that is wrong with America today as it looks to young girls.

The producers of Flavor of Love and The Bachelor are deeply cynical business men, out to make lots and lots of money. Tyra Banks, I think, honestly believes what she is saying about girls and equality and opportunity. She's drunk her own Kool-Ade and to be honest, it's often riveting viewing. She congratulates herself for admitting larger sized (by modeling standards) girls onto the show, and then punishes them for it. She does this again and again. She seems pleased to give a pretty girl who is also a burn victim a shot, or a transgendered person (which was handled surprisingly well), an Orthodox Jew, some truly weird hipsters. But they always wind up being punished by Miss Banks for their differences. Watching her is a little like watching Henry VIII in action: she really thinks everyone should be super grateful for this bounty she is distributing, and when they aren't, she goes completely freaking ape shit. The decisions on ANTM all seem so weirdly... personal.

Pozner also applauds the stars in the crown of reality TV: Project Runway, Top Chef and The Amazing Race (in the new season the Harlem Globetrotters and the Goths are back!) for showcasing the best in people, celebrating differences and talent, and not approving or rewarding (for the most part) bad behavior. She does call out the two Bravo competition shows for Excessive Capitalistic Tendencies, which: granted. But I see no harm in a sometimes craving for Kobe beef or a ball gown.

What these three shows have in common is that they, by and large, respect the people participating. They don't trade in humiliation or cruelty. Which is what I think is the most damaging part of these shows: that people are rewarded for being cruel assholes. Watching hours and hours of this is good for no one without context, and in most of these shows there is none. The edit is often on the side of the bullies, as this makes "good TV". There's a celebration of brute stupidity and cruelty that I think is potentially culture destroying.

I'm really happy that Pozner called out irony as the corrosive force that it is. Look. I'm as guilty as anybody of ironic distance, but that doesn't make it good. It enables us too look on people crying and being humiliated and making really ugly fools of themselves and call it "entertainment". It's almost terrifying.

All this aside, I found the final chapters in which Pozner carefully breaks down the economics of Reality television to be the most interesting. She carefully lays out how deregulation has made broadcast television a nearly entirely advertising driven product. Most Reality shows are completely paid for by advertisers, and are promoted via the network's other properties (broadcast, radio and print). In other words, they don't cost a dime, so they can keep airing them even in the numbers of viewers are low. The profit margins are wide indeed. It's chilling and depressing reading. But Pozner, rather delightfully, seems to be mostly an optimist at heart, writing passionately for the cause of net neutrality, and calling for people to write and blog and make things that are outside Network hegemony. She also likes Pop Culture, and doesn't advocate throwing your TV out the window, just the making of informed choices and being an engaged and aware viewer.

We all spend a lot of time watching and sneering and ignoring, but I really think this stuff matters. Nothing makes me angrier than people telling me to "Lighten up. It's only a TV show/movie/ whatever". Mainly because it's complete and unadulterated bullshit. This is our culture. This is all we have. This is what separates us from the chimps. It matters. The producers of this garbage know this - that is why it makes so very much money, and it costs so much to make a product placement (apparently, Coca-Cola pays more than 25 million dollars to have those coke cups on the judges table on American Idol). If it was "just" anything, it wouldn't be the case. This is powerful stuff. This is something people in power: Popes, Kings, Premiers, Presidents have always known. People used to be arrested for creating media that the powerful didn't like - in some places they still are. People used to be burnt at the stake for creating media-when media was called "books".

So it matters.

More information about Women in Media and News can be found here. More information about Reality Bites Back can be found here.

Robbed, I say! Robbed!

I missed Saturday night's airing of the Miss America competition, mainly because it's awful and, really, who cares? But, BUT I missed Miss Arkansas's talent presentation which, as it turns out, is unforgivable. She's a country-western singing, yodeling, VENTRILOQUIST.



She was clearly robbed, the girl who won - Miss Nebraska - just played the piano and did nothing else. Yawn. I haven't run this past my darling inamorato yet, but I think she was born about 100 years too late. I also learned, that when she did this act for the Teen Miss America Pageant, she ended with clog dancing. Really, this girl was made for vaudeville. She's obviously been doing this same crazy five minutes of material for years and years.

This also seems like a perfect time to point out that Miss America is still the largest scholarship organization for women in the United States, which is just pathetic. Apparently, the largest scholarship organization for women requires one's scholars to sport sequined jump suits with impunity and to answer leading political questions without saying anything substantive or offending anybody. It's just not good enough. And, for the record, I think sports scholarships for men who can't keep up academically are stupid as well.

Oh. If you've never seen it. Watch Smile. It's awesome.

You're Skinny Fat. Yes, You.

Two things:

1. My coverage of current celebrities here at The Cabinet is minimal, to say the least.

2. I rule my facebook page with an iron fist. If your comment makes me either the tiniest bit annoyed or pissed off, and I don't feel like arguing or discussing or explaining: I will delete it. To be fair, I delete my own comments all the time. If you do this, say, twice in one week, you will have your commenting privileges taken away.

Last night I was half watching the Golden Globes, mostly for the outfits as I haven't seen any of the movies (expensive! no time! fear of bedbugs in movie theaters!), so I only really have an opinion on Mad Men and 30 Rock.

I read what people were saying on facebook and twitter and the interwebs and, as per my usual reaction, most of it made me want to vomit. Women come in five flavors: voluptuous (but only if they're not white), fat, anorexic, pregnant (with a baby bump as an "accessory") and asexual (includes lesbian and old and children under the age of eight). So, I wrote the following status update:

Also, I know there has to be a sweet spot for actresses between anorexic and fat, but according to what I'm reading, I'm beginning to doubt it.

Lots of people missed the fact that I wrote "reading" and not "seeing", so I spent all night deleting comments bemoaning how "anorexic" various actresses are. Because, I suppose, in the circles I run in, it's frowned upon to say someone is too fat, but it's perfectly okay to say one is too skinny. Or that some actresses used to be "normal" and now they are not. Fie! Fie!

Unsurprisingly, much of the chatter revolved around Angelina Jolie. Of course, whether you like her dress and think it's gorgeous or if she stole it out of Crystal Carrington's closet or if you're over sequins or if you're just sick of her in general is pure personal taste (and some of it was very funny, especially the worry surrounding the reappearance of shoulder-pads). But, the constant referral to her as "anorexic" or "skeletor" was disturbing.

It's such a fine line. These women work in an industry where their appearance matters and is a part of their work. I'm a fan of movie stars being gorgeous, and I think that fashion magazine in Germany that uses non-professionals as models is ridiculous and looks terrible (or "real" women, as they are referred to. I suppose as opposed to the imaginary ones so commonly hired. My god, do I loathe that phrase!). So I know what shaky ground I'm on. But there seems to be a factor of unwinnability about this. One group of people thinks you're too fat. This is bad. You lose weight. Another group of people thinks you're too thin. It's just completely preposterous.

There's all this raving about unrealistic body expectations, which is completely true. It's terrible. And there's the problem of obesity in this country. Also bad. But, who is where they are supposed to be? There's a constant conflating of skinniness and health that is simply made up. Women think of themselves (and are referred to) as overweight, when they are just larger than the current fashion dictates. This has nothing to do with health and everything to do with aesthetics. Look, if you want to be thinner, fine. But I really hate the world pretending it has anything to do with health. I'm not saying being 200 pounds overweight is healthy, let's get that argument out of the way. But most times, weighing 20 pounds more than you would like is no big deal in terms of "health".

This is a complete rant. I don't understand when it became a part of polite conversation to talk about women's weight and body size incessantly. And to their faces! It's ludicrous and weird. The world is an inherently unfair place. Some are thinner, some are larger. Some people work out and are athletic and super fit. Some people eat cake all the time and don't exercide much and are thin anyway (raises hand). I'm not that healthy. When I was in my twenties my eating habits were abysmal. I had no eating habits. I had no idea how to feed myself, and I wound up hardly eating at all. I was completely unhealthy. But I looked great, apparently. I was rewarded more or less constantly. So, please, don't give me any more guff about "health". It's all aesthetics. Some people like looking at curvy women. Others like looking at skinny ones. That's pretty much it. Some women lose weight to get more work. They could be doing so by exercising more, or cutting out sugar (I stopped eating cookies at one point and immediately dropped significant weight). Who knows? But none of it is empirical. Oh: and you cannot tell if a person is anorexic by looking at her.

I thought Miss Jolie looked freaking gorgeous. I thought a little more of the dresses Adrian made for Joan Crawford in the later 30s and 40s, which were the inspiration for the glam 80s Dynasty moment everyone was referencing last night. And found it fascinating that so many women wore green. And I think Olivia Wilde looked stupid. And I think brown sequins are ugly. And Tilda Swinton, that crazy Scottish aristocrat, can do no wrong; she just makes everyone else look a little tacky and like they're trying way too hard. And, Tina Fay (Bless her!), cannot dress herself, but clearly doesn't give a shit. And Elizabeth Moss looked stunning. And I'm worried about Megan Fox as she seemed really off, but I should just shut up as I don't know her. And how weird was it seeing David Straithairn like a week after I saw him in person? And, I don't watch Glee, but that boy's acceptance speech was just lovely.

I'm just full of opinions today!

To The Wasserstein Prize Committee, addenda: Learn from Your Betters, Listen To Artists

Just one more thing. As I've stated many times, I've spent countless hours over the past decade or so reading and evaluating the work of many young, unsung playwrights, both for my own (now defunct) theatre company and for other organizations. Quite a few years ago I read Nancy Milford's remarkable biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay. In it, I found the following passage, an excerpt from a letter Millay wrote whilst judging poets for the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. It's as good advice as any for anyone seeking to promote the work of young artists of any discipline.

"Of the six writers I am recommending this year, three are
definitely revolutionists, one is definitely a classicist, one is
probably mad and the other is doubtless trying to recover from shell-shock. What
are you going to do about them?...I have come loudly out into the open, and
am running the risk of making an utter fool of myself. I think the
Guggenheim Foundation cannot properly be administered on any other terms; we may
not foster the conservative at the expense of the experimental; the solid
at the expense of the slippery; we must take chances; we must incur danger.
Otherwise we shall eventually become an organization that gives prizes for
acclaimed accomplishment, not fellowships for obscure talent, tangible
promise, probable development and possible achievement."
ESVM, 1938

If you believe art matters, it matters what you do about it. Don't be afraid of making fools of yourselves. Take risks. Otherwise, why do we bother?

TDF and the Wendy Wasserstein Prize Administrators Are A Bunch of Lazy Asshats Who Need a Scolding and To See Some Freaking Theater

I'll be returning to my usual coverage of intense frivolity shortly, but some disturbing news on the theater front crossed the Cabinet's inbox yesterday, and I really need to expound. I mean more than I already have in the subject line of this posting.

Some background: A prize (25K) for emerging female playwrights under the age of 32 was set up in the name of the late Wendy Wasserstein to be awarded annually and to be administrated by TDF. This year, as reported on the Youngblog, there will be no prize awarded. Below I have excerpted the first paragraph (read the whole thing here) of Michael Lew's clear, sane and articulate note to Victoria Bailey, Executive director of TDF:

Dear Ms. Bailey,

I recently had the chance to review one of the rejection letters for the Wasserstein Prize. As stated in the letter, "We regret to inform you that of the 19 nominated plays, none was deemed sufficiently realized by the selection panel to receive the Prize. As a result, the Wasserstein Prize will not be presented in 2010. While the panel thought that many of the scripts showed promise, they felt that none of the plays were truly outstanding in their current incarnation." This decision can only be interpreted as a blanket indictment on the quality of female emerging writers and their work, and is insulting not only to the finalists but also to the many theatre professionals who nominated these writers and deemed their plays prize worthy. This decision perpetuates the pattern of gender bias outlined in Julia Jordan and Emily Glassberg Sands' study on women in theatre, and the message it sends to the theatre community generally is that there aren't any young female playwrights worth investigating.

That's it in a nutshell. They looked at 19 plays and have decided to withhold the prize. What the fucking fuck. As I've mentioned here before (and many of you know), for seven years I was on the adjudication panel for The New York International Fringe Festival. Each year I would look at something like 200 proposals. During the year I see countless more shows. There are armies of talented young female writers out there, I mean you can't swing a fucking cat without getting at least ten of them really fucking angry because there are so many of them that many will inevitably see you doing it. To say there are no playwrights of merit worthy of receiving the prize points more, in my opinion, to administrative malfeasance than to the lack of talent in every female playwright in the whole fucking United States of America. They looked at 19 plays. That number alone is laughable. From what I understand, plays must be nominated. By whom, I have no fucking clue, as the prize doesn't have a webpage. In fact, there is not one mention of the prize on the entire TDF site.

The best way to find worthy recipients is to, like, look for them. Give it a whirl you fucking assholes. Women artists of all stripes are treated shitty enough without a prize that was set up to promote their work insulting freaking everyone through their laziness and negligence. So woman up, bitches, and get it together.

And, everyone: Sign this petition.

The World Could Use More Humorless Bitches

How much digital ink, I wonder, has been spilled in praise of Christina Hendricks and Joan Holloway, the fascinating character she plays? Gallons of pixels I warrant, and the bulk of them talk about her body. Which is glorious:

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Look. I'm not going to go off on a rant about sample sizes, or about various body types or parts being in or out of style (short arms are in for Fall!) or any of that, mostly because I want to write about Joan in 1965, not Christina in 2010 (though I do have a post about the fashion of female beauty aesthetics in the works, and may talk more about her there).

What I wanted to talk about was office politics or, more specifically, Joan and Peggy's respective places within Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. Don Draper is a partner and the head of creative. From what I've gathered, Peggy is his second in command, hiring mostly freelancers (both copywriters and illustrators). Jonathan was hired a few episodes ago, but we haven’t really seen him since. So, all the young creatives sit around a typical writers’ room, throwing ideas around, bullshitting, the usual. It’s 1965 and the vibe is far more relaxed and laid back and, well, modern than it was at the old firm in the pre-Beatles years.

Joan is the office manager, inhabiting a space I know all too well. Upper management knows she’s invaluable: smart, ultra-competent, a born fixer. But the (mostly male) rank and file behave as if she’s just some fucking secretary who has the gall to think she’s more important than, say, some freelancer out of Harvard who could be replaced in an instant. She’s not management, not staff, not creative, but is instead in some kind of twilight zone in which she is utterly unreplacable, but ill-defined in terms of office hierarchy.

Back to the writer’s room. All of the creative team are men except for Peggy. Their room is separated from Joan’s office by a glass wall. Lots of silliness happens when they are all trying to work through problems and come up with ideas, which is inevitable and good for any creative process. The mid-sixties are far looser and more permissive in style than the 50s and most of us think of that as being a good thing, but inevitably, when certain social strictures are loosened, what comes spilling out isn’t limited to wacky brilliance, ugliness is unleashed as well. One of the freelancers in particular is a total creep. This is a dynamic most women have encountered. You are the only women in the group. Most of the men are pretty reasonable, and than one total asshole starts making all kinds of ugly, hateful sexist jokes and all the previously reasonable men join in. It’s maddening and puts you in an impossible situation. If you let it go, you die a little inside. If you complain, you are a humorless scold. You cannot win. I have personally solved this problem by not giving the tiniest damn if people thing I am a humorless scold. But, I’m almost fifteen years older than Peggy, living in very different times.

Peggy is in a quandary. Then, the creepy, creepy jerk decides he has a particular problem with Joan after she yells at the little boys in creative for screwing with the snack machine, turning their workspace into a pig sty, using her office as a through way, etc. This guy has admitted Mommy problems and goes fairly psycho. Peggy yells at him for being a jerk to Joan, and he (of course) responds by belittling her. Joan takes him aside to have a word, and he says “What exactly do you do around here besides walking around looking like you want to get raped?” This guy is a total jerk, but the thing that struck me most is that within the hierarchy of SCDP he is subordinate to both Peggy and Joan. We have a word for this and it’s called privilege. This is a person whose privilege runs so deep, he is sexually harassing his superiors, and oh my friends, this is a situation I have been in and it’s simply mind boggling.

Finally, the insufferable freelancer goes too far. He draws a cartoon of Joan giving someone a blowjob and tapes it to the window of her office. It’s always struck me how men like that are so adept at zeroing in on someone’s insecurities. Joan is the most competent person imaginable, but her former sexual relationship with Roger Sterling puts her in s slightly unfortunate position in terms of power dynamics. Both Joan and Peggy absolutely lose it, understandably. Joan storms in and tells all the boys that when they get drafted and go to Vietnam and get killed she, for one, will be happy about it. Not nice, no, but her husband is being deployed that week and she’s been pushed pretty far.

Peggy goes to Don. This is where it gets really interesting. He clearly doesn’t think it’s that big a deal and really doesn’t want to deal with it. But in deflecting the situation away from him, gives Peggy some excellent advice. He says: ”Fire him.” When she looks taken aback he says (okay, I’m paraphrasing), “If I fire him, you’ll look like a tattletale. Is that what you want?” Peggy calls the asshole freelancer aside and tells him that he’s behaving inappropriately and that he needs to apologize to both her and Joan. He refuses and makes yet another smart remark, clearly not understanding that he is, in fact, talking to his boss. So Peggy fires him. It’s awesome. He clearly doesn’t believe she has the authority to do so as she’s sporting a vagina and all. So he says, we’ll see what Don has to say about that. She responds, “Don doesn’t even know who you are.” And at that moment her eyes are shooting off magical feminist laser beams of power and it’s just thrilling.

The final grace note of the episode is what really makes it. Peggy is clearly buzzing from the excellent firing and gets on the elevator with the still clearly upset Joan. Peggy obviously wants to share a happy “ding dong the manwitch is dead” moment with her, but Joan is having none of it. She tells Peggy she could have handled it herself by having one dinner with the client and having a private word with him and Peggy, by doing what she did has only proved that Joan is “just some powerless secretary and that she [Peggy] is a humorless bitch”. Poor Joan. She’s basically espousing that age old anti-feminist rhetoric that women can get whatever they want through their feminine wiles and getting men to act for him. And this is a perfect example why I have exactly zero problem with being a humorless bitch. As I discussed in a previous blog post about calling a woman a stupid slut, there are the same three reasons to call a woman a humorless bitch:

1. To shut her up.
2. To discredit what she's saying or doing
3. To humiliate her.
   

What Peggy really needs to do, is to hire more women. Seriously.

I'm Just Really Fucking Over It

I've been awfully happy recently, so maybe I've gone a little soft. And before that I was REALLY unhappy, and sort of convinced I was a horrible person, so maybe that made me go all domesticated, too. So I feel as if I've been letting things slide here and there in a way I really shouldn't. I'm talking specifically about my review of Ghost of Dracula last week. The show is pretty inconsequential, and not particularly skilled, so I was really soft on it. Which is fine. Making any theater is really difficult. But there's one thing that's been really nagging at me, so I felt I had to bring it up.

First of all, just to get it out of the way, I'm a bitch. Do you know how I know this? Because I'm informed of it, on average, two to seven times a week. I walk down the streets of Manhattan and I ride the subway and occasionally I get on buses. If there is even the tiniest ray of sunshine I will have my sunglasses on. If I am sitting, in public, I will most likely be reading a book. Most of the time I have earphones in my ears. I keep a stony cold look on my face. But it does no fucking good. I cannot go out in public without some creep intruding into my personal space bubble and talking to me and demanding that I talk to him. I never fucking do, so I am called a bitch. Like, all the time. I hardly even notice it. Occasionally, I am called a slut or a whore for refusing to talk to these assholes. Which, on top of being evil, makes no fucking sense. Even according to their warped thinking, how does refusing to talk to strange men make me a slut? But that's not the point, and that brings me to what I wanted to bring up about Ghost of Dracula.

Twice in the show Mina is called a stupid slut by her ex-boyfriend Van Helsing, which made me want to aim a flame thrower at the stage. There was no context to it, and Mina's only response was to look angry and embarrassed and shut up, just as Van Helsing wanted and the show continued. Now, look. The following are the only reasons anyone calls a woman a stupid slut:

1. To shut her up.
2. To discredit what she's saying or doing
3. To humiliate her.
   

That's it. That's why the random assholes on the street call me a slut all the time. To discredit and humiliate me. And, to preclude this from popping up in the comments (in general, my commenters are lovely, but one never knows what under bridge dwellers will pop up), if anyone asks "Why do we have to be so politically correct all the time?" my answer will be: Are you fucking kidding me? What is your definition of "politically correct"? A world where the continuous harassment of 50% of the world's population isn't tacitly endorsed? Because, like, that's what we're talking about. Got it? Or should I use smaller words. Think for two seconds: why is calling a woman a "stupid slut" funny in and of itself? People in the theater laughed, not because it was funny, per se, but because at that moment Van Helsing was the biggest bully in the fucking schoolyard, and by laughing they were demonstrating allegiance with the center of power. It couldn't be surprise, because women get called horrible humiliating things all the time. On the street, in print, everywhere. It's not new or transgressive in any kind of interesting way if it's devoid of context and point. It's just ugly and backwards looking and uncreative and depressing. And if you think it's funny you are a total fucking asshole.

That's it.

Cheerleader Addendum

When I wrote my Johnny Weir post last week I originally went off on a pro-cheerleading rant in the middle of it which I subsequently erased. But Lily Stark White expressed sadness at my doing so, so here it is in all its ranty glory.

*The point is made very well in Bring It On. In the film, Eliza Dushku's character, Missy, cheers because her school doesn't have a girl's gymnastics team. But none of the girls in that film give much of a shit about football or whatever. They have their own (maligned) sport. Hey. Have you seen what those girls can do on ESPN? If curling qualifies as a sport, so can cheering. Another thing I find kind of interesting about cheerleader hatred, is that it seems somewhat divorced from jock hatred in that many people who loath jocks and were victimized by them in high school, enthusiastically watch football and basketball and baseball. With cheerleading, the skill of the girls who participate is pretty much dismissed, and all that remains is a pretty broadly felt contempt. The images of both cheerleaders and football players have been highly sexualized by our culture, the difference being that with the boys who play football, these perceptions are pretty solidly tied to what they do, i.e. play a sport. With the cheerleaders, the sexy mean girl image is seen more of a state of being centered around the heavily fetishized outfit, rather than tied to the activity itself.

/Rant.