Filed under: Feminism — Kelly @ June 22, 2007 12:21 pm
“Kate Moss does not look like her photos, and celebrating her as a model only tells young girls they, too, can smoke and drink and still look airbrushed.”
Thanks for the newsflash, Daily Mail. You’re what we on teh internets call a “concern troll.” Because, really, the problem isn’t that airbrushed photospreads sell women an image that’s impossible for even the models to live up to; rather, it’s that airbrushed photospreads sell women an image that’s impossible for even the models to live up to while acting like boozing, coked-up sluts.
So. Yesterday, while climbing my way to gams of steel via my trusty step climber, I watched a month-old episode of MTV’s Real World/Road Rules Challenge* (technically called the Inferno, but whatevs). Judge me all you want, but the xtreme competitions make my workout seem that much easier. Cheesy, yes, but it’s my one guilty pleasure. Some people have House, others have Grey’s Anatomy, and for you neocons out there, it’s seasons 2+ of 24. So fuck off, is what I’m sayin.
Anyway, back to the subject at hand. This particular week’s challenge involved - well, the details don’t very much matter. Let’s just say that it involved some hawt sticky wet grape-stomping action. With “regulation uniforms”. Required wearing for all participants.
The girls got the standard two-piece bathing suits, and the guys got speedos. And when I say “speedos”, well, that’s what the host called ‘em. I’m just parroting what TJ said. They were more like “boy shorts”, really. We’re not talking banana hammocks, or mankinis, or anything like that. These were tight spandex boy shorts, and had they been on the girls’ women’s bottom halves, then they would have been considered relatively modest.
Most of the guys were, shall we say, good sports about the shorts. Most, in fact, acted like juvenile idiots, though thankfully none wedged their suits up their asses and strutted around with buttocks jiggling about. Like, um, in past year’s challenges. But three of the guys balked at the prospect of - gasp! - being exploited, degraded, manipulated and used. Like, you know, a girl! (Oh, the horra!)
They refused to suit up in their boy shorts, instead choosing to sit out the game.
Their scoffings and rationalizations were priceless. One guy (Alton, for those of you at home keeping score) was all “It’s not that I don’t feel comfortable with my body, I know I look great. It’s just that I’m hung like a mule, and those shorts aren’t big.” I’m paraphrasing, but the term “hung like a mule” is a direct quote. Of that I’m sure. (Just as I’m sure that Alton is, in fact, not hung like said mule.) Ace, who was one of those aforementioned idiots who had previously wedgied himself on national television (albeit on a seldom viewed channel) , ruefully explained that he didn’t want to “catch anymore flak” from his family and friends back home. (Here’s an idea, dumbass: just wear the spandex, don’t try to give yourself a colonoscopy with it!) Timmy, the furthest over the hill of the contestants (and by “over the hill”, I mean to say that he’s probably a whopping 35), didn’t offer a reason, but “pale and flabby / not cut like the yung’uns” would be my best, err, stab at it.
Whatever their reasons, I’ve heard nary a peep from any of ‘em when the girls are crammed into ill-fitting clothes, forced to shimmy to and fro, and otherwise objectified during the challenges. And besides, is wearing an effin’ “speedo” for 30 minutes really worse than eating bull nuts? Didn’t think so.
Something else to keep in mind: their team (and they were all on the same team, the other members of which I fully expected would castrate the uppity douchebags) had been up a player, but due to their teammate’s newfound modesty, they ended up down one player. And they totally got their asses handed to ‘em. Losing, in the process, $10,000.
So, the daily, ubiquitous, relentless objectification of the female sex? Total teh cool.
Thirty minutes of (perceived) andro-objectification for eight men? So offensive that 3/8 of them forfeit 10k.
Objectification sux when you’re the object instead of the objectifier, eh guys?
* Yes, I realize that “reality tv” is less real, more scripted. So my story comes with the standard potential bs disclaimer.
You know, I meant to blog this way back when, but was just too upset at the time. Seriously. So upset I was shaking. No joke.
So I took a few screenshots of NBC’s SVU episode summary page to augment the planned post, uploaded ‘em to Flickr, and…nothing. Never came back to it. That is, until a fellow Flickrite (and feminist, from the sound of it), asked for an explanation. Knowing full well Flickr/Yahoo’s propensity for randomly deleting photos (and the pic’s comment threads, along with ‘em), I thought I’d copy the exchange here.
That, and I’m short on original material. What can I say, closing is less than two weeks away!
According to NBC, this is the face of a woman who was "asking for it."
I’m not sure if I get what you’re saying… “according to NBC?” While there are characters on the show (the abusers or criminals, usually) who might say that a woman is “asking for” this type of thing, every episode of this show I’ve ever seen has a very strong “the victim never deserves this sort of treatment, no matter what” message. This is often expressly stated by the detectives or other characters on the show. I haven’t seen this particular episode, but I’d be very surprised if it deviated from this general message– nothing in the other two screenshots indicates otherwise. Misogyny from characters within the show, yes, but hardly from the creators of the show or NBC.
Esabeau - Actually, I’ve always been a huge fan of Law & Order: SVU, for the reasons you’ve stated. However, this particular ep. involved a woman who made a false accusation of rape against her husband in order to gain the upper hand in their divorce (and the ensuing custody dispute over their daughter). The detectives (and the audience) believed the woman - the "so-called victim" - throughout most of the hour. However, in the last ten minutes or so of the program, the husband made bail on the rape charge, confronted the wife in the street outside court, doused her in gasoline, and set her on fire. She subsequently admitted to the detectives in the ER that she made the whole thing up. Right before dying.
The implication - both implicit and actually stated (though not in so many words) - was that the lying slut pushed an otherwise nonviolent and decent man too far - she was "asking for it". A false rape charge apparently justifies murder. And a grisly one at that.
I was especially offended that the victim-blaming took place in the context of a "ripped from the headlines" show - remember the case of Yvette Cade, whose estranged husband burst into her workplace, threw a 7UP can full of gas on her, and topped it off with a lit match? AFTER Douchebag District Judge Richard A. Palumbo refused to extend the restraining order she had against him? AND made belittling remarks to her? I usually enjoy the "ripped from the headline" shows, but this was beyond tasteless. A woman who was abused by the court system, set on fire by her batterer, and is now disfigured for life….fodder for NBC’s shitty misogynistic fairytales? Talk about adding insult to injury.
And this seems to be the general direction in which the Law & Order franchise is headed. A few weeks ago, they aired a show based on the Shawn Hornbeck case…only this time, Ben Ownby wound up dead, and ("so-called") victim Shawn was later discovered to be his killer. Because Ben was competition for pedophile/kidnapper Michael Devlin’s attentions (!). Talk about blaming the victim. Bill O’Reilly ain’t got nothing on Law & Order!
Sorry, I meant to write a blog post about this when it happened (hence the screenshots), but I was just too upset. Worst. Episode. Ever.
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By the by, NBC invites viewers to leave their feedback here. Not that they give a shit what we wimmins think, being the misogynistic pricks that they are, but still. Blaming the patriarchy is fun!
Commenting on the media’s coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre - and, more to the point, their lack of coverage of the misogyny underlying the killer’s rampage - Jennifer Pozner reprints an editorial she wrote in the wake of the (seemingly now forgotten) Jonesboro school shootings, in March of ‘98:
Jonesboro’s mayor has been quoted as saying, “If anyone had had any reason to believe something like this was possible, they would have prevented it.” But as David Vest, a counselor to men who batter, writes in an editorial that ran in the Houston Chronicle and the Huntsville (Ala) Times, “The sad truth is, we had every reason to believe that ’something like this’ could happen. It has happened many times this year in America, and it’s barely springtime.” In the Christian Science Monitor’s “Pondering Jonesboro: Consider Gender,” sociology professor Kersti Yllo writes, “This case is extreme, not aberrant. According to the FBI, ten women a day are murdered by their boyfriends, husbands or ex-husbands. The Jonesboro boys are not alone in taking deadly revenge against the females in their lives.”
In rare articles addressing the true underlying causes of these murders — the targeting of girls for revenge by boys who felt jilted — Vest and Yllo bring into focus what the mainstream
press has largely left unsaid: unless we alter our culturally condoned, boys-will-be-boys / boys-will-own-girls attitudes, we are placing not only our daughters but our sons, and ourselves, in extreme jeopardy.
“We have every reason to believe that it will happen again,” Vest argues. “The boys who methodically gunned down those girls and those women were only acting out their own version of an all-too frequent story in America. The only difference is that they were a little bit younger….” […]
It may be tempting to echo the gender-blind soliloquy of the mainstream press and say that “there are no words” to describe the horror of children killing children. But I know better. […]
Push beyond the bliss of willful ignorance, and the answers we need appear with frightening clarity. There are words to describe the horror. Misogyny. Hate crimes. Dating abuse. Male entitlement. And, finally, femicide.
Jill’s earliest post, 31 Dead at Virginia Tech, generated upwards of 250 comments, many posted within the first few hours. The trolls, of course, made quite a showing (no doubt due in part to the recent developments in the Duke rape case, and the MRA’s subsequent smug trolling of feminist blogs for an “apology”).
Their attempts to dismiss the obvious misogyny and male entitlement at play here are predictably misogynistic and entitled:
ummmm, Few things are as important to people as their relationships with others, be they man/woman, man/man woman/woman. So to say that is insane. the person who committed this heinous act was not acting out of hate or lack of respect for women in general. he was acting out of rage for one person and when he couldn;t find that PERSON, he took it out on whomever he could.
But he wasn;t trying to kill her because of her sex, he was trying to kill her because he was pissed at the person who happened to be a woman.
I dint read every entry, but misogyny? Come on
Shoot your girlfriend in the head isn’t hatred of women, it is insanity. I would volunteer to cane him before I get to execute him?
I’ll certainly agree that hatred of women plays a large part in most of these shootings, but I don’t think that’s evidence of patriarchy. It makes sense: If you’re a guy, and you suck at life (as most of these jerkoffs do), it follows that most women, and most men also, will not like you much. Men not liking you isn’t really a big deal, but women not liking you is. Nothing reinforces someone’s sense of victimization and mistreatment as being unsuccessful with and unliked by the opposite sex.
Women are mass murders very often.It just doesn’t work that way. Let me suggest that it is a matter of maternal instincts in most women and a lack of it in men.
Yeah, nevermind that the guy apparently stalked several women on-campus prior to the shootings (as we’re now finding out); that the police didn’t take the first two murders as seriously as they should have since it was “just a domestic disturbance”; and that the victim-blaming in the media has already begun (see: “The girl who led to the massacre”). No misogyny here, so siree.
Nearly a decade ago, Pozner ended her Joneboro piece with the following entreaty:
The best way to honor the girls and teacher who died in Jonesboro is to take the steps necessary to prevent the targeting of girls and women for violence. On a legislative level, that means pressuring Congress to ratify an amendment, introduced in November by Senator Kennedy and others, which would include gender in federal hate crime laws. On a political level, it means following the example of Title IX Advocates and the Sonoma County Women Against Rape in pressuring the news media to place cases such as Jonesboro in their proper (if frightening) cultural context. We need to launch educational campaigns that challenge the notion that male violence is an “understandable” response to female rejection.
And when we identify sexism, we need to name it. To activists who’ve talked about the importance of breaking silence about domestic and sexual violence for years, this seems redundant. But in the wake of the senseless yet horribly predictable Jonesboro slayings, it’s more obvious than ever- Sexism kills girls.
