Feminism in the United States seems to be, well…in a slump. A large generation gap looms, building resentment and misunderstanding as my generation declares itself decidedly “Not Interested” in the issues mapped out by the Old Guard. Young women seem to display feminist values but don’t want to call themselves feminists; in some cases they say they are feminist while blithely expressing the opposite in the next breath. What is trendy in feminism in the U.S., though, is decidedly not at all helpful to feminists in other nations. Our lovely nation is facing a disconnect with the rest of the world, because we have been more feminist in a real sense than most of the rest of the world for decades now. We are in a different stage of discussion and development, something which U.S. feminists fail to appreciate when talking with international partners. Here are six issues I see as most important to the reduction of suffering and the advancement of women worldwide. You may notice that abortion does not make the list.

1. Thoughtful discussion of traditional customs. Part of the legacy of colonialism has been a reticence to examine the effects of culture, particularly traditional culture, on the well-being of women. There is a short story from Ghanian writer Ama Ata Aidoo called Hair which highlights this perfectly. In it, a female professor thinks about the pressure African women feel to have long, straight hair. This was one of the holdovers of colonialism, where all that was white was good and all that was African was ugly. The narrator describes her own struggles in a world with no easy answers: either she must wear a wig and embrace the inherent self-rejection in that act, or she must obey her brothers and leave her hair natural, garnering the social consequences of being African in a society that still likes European things better. No matter her choice, she must also watch other women make the same choice and compromises that reinforce their “inherent” lack of worth.

The short story also subtly brings up an interesting point, and that is that the narrator cannot make the choice to be “African” (or not) without also obeying male authority figures. Throughout the world, traditionalists struggling to maintain cultural identities from various threats have equated women’s rights with the threatening force. Whether the enemy is former colonial powers (as in much of Africa), capitalism (as in China, Viet Nam, and other communist nations), materialism and debauchery (as the West looks in the eyes of Muslims), threats to traditional religions (pretty much everywhere), or genetic diversity (as in Europe in its constant efforts to devalue immigrants), traditionalists declare that any change in women’s status is a direct result and poisonous consequence of the cultural invasion. Renewed repression becomes a way to assert cultural identity and authenticity.

The results of this are different depending upon local tradition. Indians and Chinese selectively abort female fetuses, reasserting even in the face of demographic disaster that females are not worthy of life. Critics of traditional practices, such as recently murdered journalist Uma Singh of Nepal, who criticized the dowry system, are intimidated and attacked. Women who seem to be go beyond their “places” are threatened. In her autobiography, Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai  recalls being attacked as anti-African by Kenyan legislatures for the double crime of being an educated woman and one willing to participate in the political process on her own terms. Women whose clitorises have not been scraped off and their vaginas sewn shut sometimes face total rejection from all future partners. Women in the Middle East/South Asia region of the world risk being mutilated with battery acid if they reject (or accept) sexual partners or try to go to school. Worldwide, women’s sexual choices, no matter what they are, are used as justification for denying them and their children legal protection, for rape, for denying their very sanity. Muslim men in particular seem to enjoy taking it upon themselves to kill their female relatives for sexual misconduct – that is, any sexual conduct.

These traditions need to come under scrutiny. In many cases I will admit that traditionalists’ critiques of Western culture (it is pretty much exclusively this which they are fighting against) are valid. Materialism is and consumption-based economies are, in fact, bad things. Yes, our tendency to oversexualize women, to the extent that we make sexualized dolls and clothes for little girls (go check out the girls’ section in a store once and you’ll see) is not a good thing. Still, is it not also wrong to consider a woman such a burden that she must “pay off” her husband with a dowry? Why not view a dowry as assets she brings to a marriage, assets that she herself controls rather than her husband? That’s a twist to a dowry that retains some of its cultural purity without degenerating into an attempt to keep women without economic means. Discussions like this cannot be imposed from the outside of the cultures which they affect, and all attempts to impose them will backfire. Still, there is not an inherent conflict between women’s rights and traditional cultural identity, and we need to continue discussing how they converge in a meaningful manner.

2. Making it okay for women to say “no”. This is a debate from about forty years ago for the U.S. – whether or not women have an obligation to have sex because they are married, or because they are in sexual situations at all, or because they wore the wrong clothing, or because they were/are prostitutes, etc. It’s a debate that is still going on, unfortunately. (However, now the debate is whether someone can say “yes” without giving a blank check.) In most parts of the world there is no debate. The situation is so terrible that a large portion of research money into an HIV vaccine goes into developing ways for women to protect themselves without their partners knowing about it. The research is important, yet sad, because it means that a huge population of women cannot enforce condom use, dictate the terms of their sexual experience, or decide when and with whom to have sex. The Bush administration’s abstinence-only AIDS policy for the last eight years has employed a “just say no” approach for young women – but most HIV-positive African women contracted the virus after marriage. The policy also assumed that young African women were like teenaged U.S. women in that their sexual choices were determined by lust and social pressure. This does not square with the reality that, unlike in the United States, a woman’s rejection of sexual advances would not be upheld without question by the larger community. Boys and men do not need to take their partners’ requests into account, because there are few social consequences for rape.

I doubt that this is an issue that women can really make much headway on without male allies. A recent NPR story highlights the actions of one man who has embraced the importance of female choice, and there needs to be more men like him (except maybe for the “I was a rapist first” part). In fact, I see this issue almost exclusively as in the domain of men. Women can certainly band together on this issue, and they can teach their sons about consent (which would require, you know, actual conversations about sexual conduct), but they will win no legal battles without male allies. Their enforcement techniques will be poor at best without male enforcement. Children, especially sons, will not listen to their parents unless their fathers also assert that condom use is required during sex, that consent is not inherent in any situation, and that female opinions matter.

I have a question, born from years of observation. Some background: I like to work out, and a part of my workout routine involves free weights for my upper body stuff. I work out about twice a week on average, though I’d like to do it more. My question is this: why don’t women lift weights?

Keep in mind while reading this that I’m talking about women who work out regularly – not folks who have never done so or that only go every once in a while. I’m talking about people who are past the stage of feeling intimidated by a gym and who find value in taking time out of their week to exercise. More power to them; I wish everybody worked out more. However, there’s this strange phenomenon that I’ve observed in gyms all over, and that is that women don’t lift weights.

I get some of the reason why. The free weight section is rather intimidating, because it requires a basic knowledge of form and muscle groups; machines are more user-friendly in this way. And there’s men in the free weight section. Beefy ones. There was a time when I myself attempted to be as unobtrusive as possible, assuming that the men there would be hostile to my presence. Actually, if anything they were surprised. Like most people, though, they focus on their own work outs; the fear of being judged is a big reason why people are shy to start exercising, I think, but it just doesn’t happen very much.

The free weight section isn’t male-dominated because of any active or covert intimidation on the men’s part; the fear of that came completely from me, and I’ve gotten over it. But the lack of women in this area puzzles me, because presumably other women have discovered this as well. I have observed a number of women using free weights, but mostly they use weights that are less than twenty pounds, if that. I can count on one hand the number of women I’ve seen using weights higher than thirty, me included, and I think the others were athletes.

Okay, so why don’t women lift heavy weights? Let’s go through possible explanations. One: women are not as physically strong as men. Well, maybe. But are they as physically strong as a thirty pound weight? I’d say this explanation is diversionary. I’ve seen women do badass stuff at gyms, like run for 90 minutes and do seven bazillion crunches. And I myself started free weights with twenty pounds in each hand, so it’s not like there’s some inherent weakness here. Two: women are intimidated by weights and generally think of that as a “male” activity, while machines and such are “female” activities. This is quite possibly the case, and if so I think it’s time to stage a coup and shake up the gender divide. Since I’m hanging out on the “male” side of the equation, I’ll rally all of ‘em up and take over the machines so that women will be forced through lack of options to lift weights. Take that, division of exercise labor!

The third explanation is that women don’t want to have muscle. They want the benefits of exercise (healthy metabolism, strong heart and lungs, proper body-mass index, etc) but they don’t want to look like they exercise. I’ve heard a lot of women express the desire to “tone up” rather than gain muscle (as though they had any in the first place. I’ve had two female athletes – athletes! – tell me that they “don’t want to have muscles.” And I’ve heard female friends with twigs for arms say they don’t work out because they fear having muscles.

For one thing, this displays a gross ignorance of what the female body actually looks like. Women with big bulky muscles work out for a living. It’s their job. Women just don’t gain muscle mass the way that men do. Do women not work out because they are afraid of losing their femininity? Do they think that only men have muscle?

Here’s what I think when I see someone (of any gender) with muscle: “Wow, that person could twist my head off.” It’s quite an impressive sight. Along with that, though, I also think that the person looks capable. I think that they look strong. Muscled folks look like they know their worth and they aren’t afraid to display it, and they are not afraid to make others pay attention. A muscled body takes up space.

These are all very good things. Why shouldn’t women be as capable, strong, aware of their worth, and take up as much space as men? I just can’t see a muscled person standing for such treatment as being underpaid or ripped off or otherwise mistreated. That’s not who comes to mind when I see a victim. Yes, there’s more than one way to achieve the above virtues, and yes, there’s an undercurrent of aggression in a muscled body, simply because one becomes more aware of the physical power it holds. The first objection is a cop out; the fact is that women do not choose to display themselves as physically strong, physically capable, physically aware of their worth, and they do not like to physically take up space. To the second objection, I ask: why is it bad that women hold an undercurrent of aggression? Because I am female, strangers look at me and see a victim, which is why women in particular are cautioned from walking alone at night. If I can demonstrate with my very physicality that I can fuck you up (more delicately referred to as “defending oneself”), then I’m all for it!

Given these obvious benefits, then, why don’t women want to look strong? Why do women consistently chose to discount their ability to lift weights and say that they want to avoid muscle? The opposites of strong, capable, knowing one’s worth, and taking up space are weak, incapable, ignorant of one’s worth or devaluing one’s worth, and taking no space. Is that what femininity is? Do women really want to be these things? Or am I completely off base? Is there another good reason I’m missing why women do not chose to lift heavy weights? I’m a bit bewildered by this observation of mine, and I do not think that it is only present in the gyms I go to.

photo credit http://flickr.com/photos/dirty_dan/

Palin Dresses Like a Naughty Schoolteacher

The rather crazy identity politics of this most recent election brought into the mainstream discussions of identity and the importance of it. Sure, these discussions were usually no more than superficial regurgitations of stereotype…but conversations between pundits do not reflect the perhaps more significant private conversations among individuals. Central to these discussions were, of course, Barack Obama’s racial heritage (and, at times, his skin color was interpreted with respect to his Americanness – revealing that Americans still really struggle to see dark skin as “American”) and the gender of Hilary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin. These discussions had nothing to do with who these people actually are. Rather, what their differences from white male politicians – that is, their “weirdnesses” – symbolized were was on debated. We did not talk about HRC, Palin, and Obama themselves. We talked about female politicians, and therefore women generally, and black politicians, and blackness generally.

Clinton’s shameful treatment by the conservative/moderate media (read: most of it) has been well-documented elsewhere: statements about how the country run by her “would be like being nagged by your wife”, how she’s a “bitch” (but isn’t that a good feature in a leader? I mean, by definition no one pushes bitches around), constant assessment of her clothing, etc and so forth and please god let the misogyny stop. These comments had nothing to do with her, but what she represented – a powerful, liberal female politician.

When Sarah Palin came on the scene out of nowhere, conservatives were overjoyed. Apparently not understanding the definition of “feminism,” conservatives declared that their support of Palin made them “feminist.” Actually, Republicans supported her because she is “theirs”; their contempt for Clinton’s politics translated into insults based upon her biological status as a woman. If they really were “feminists,” they could still say hateful things about Clinton – but their statements would have attacked her ideas, not who she is.

So much for conservatives. Yet the mere fact of Palin’s presence on the political scene allowed a slimy undercurrent of liberal feeling to surface as well. Liberals, faced with a female political opponent, conducted the exact same method of attack. For the most part they ignored who Palin actually is and used a distorted caricature of her ideology to discredit her. This is typical in politics. Yet as with conservative attacks on Clinton, the basis and center of Palin’s caricature was femaleness, not her ideas.

The primary method used by the liberal media (and in casual conversation with liberals) was sexualization. (For a mild example, click here.) Media of all kinds sexualized her. The difference was that when the conservative/moderate media mentioned how “hot” she is, it was a positive statement. Their admiration of her ideology and their admiration of her body came together. Liberals, however, used sexualized/naked images of her in order to demean her. Her reactionary views on sexuality, birth control, and other choice issues was usually the justification for this. Liberals knew that the quickest way to humiliate Palin was to reduce her to the level of a naked body, to make her image into one that could be used for sexual gratification (even if it wasn’t.) In doing so they did not directly respond to the ideas that they objected to, but attempted to undermine the credibility of such ideas by sexualizing the woman that held them. After all, if she’s nothing but a slut, then her ideas aren’t important, right? And we can tell she’s a slut because her look-alike is in a porn flick and we drew naked cartoons of her with fetish gear. Palin’s consent in using her image this way of course is irrelevant to the conclusion that she is now a slut whose opinions do not matter.

Sometimes feminists annoy members of the general community by claiming that certain actions that harm women or show a bias against women based on gender are political. Most people claim such things are social, not political. Well, folks, here we have it: the degradation of a woman via sexual imagery for explicitly political purposes.

Additionally, we have a kickback to an earlier era of eroticism, where one is meant to feel contempt for the subject of one’s arousal. Make no mistake, Sarah Palin is attractive. And when we explicitly sexualize her even when we violently oppose her ideology, doesn’t that seem unhealthy? We’re getting off on the image of someone we are contemptuous of. To me, that is an unhealthy expression of sexuality as well as misogyny. The only difference between this and hating women who act as porn models or strippers generally is that it is aimed at a particular person.

This reminds me of a story. When William Jennings Bryan was running for president under a Populist platform around the turn of the century, his wife appeared with him on the campaign trail. In one particular instance in the South, she was insulted by male Southerners and even egged. This was despite the tradition of “Southern chivalry” that demands (white) women be treated with respect. Mrs. Bryan, of course, was exempt from this because she not only had the “wrong” political views, but she was acting in an “unwomanly” fashion. Thus the harassment of the Southern men was justified – she had to be put back in her place.

Likewise liberals have and will try to put Sarah Palin, whose ideas are “incorrect,” in her place by using her gender as a weapon to undermine her credibility. And, like conservatives, they will do this and still attempt to claim that they are “feminist.”

Politics corrupts. It is a natural process – just as expectable as a jilted woman murdering her lover or the naïve being taken in by a con. This, it seems, is one of the inevitable conclusions of All the King’s Men, currently playing at the INTIMAN Theatre.

The play is set in Jim Crow Louisiana. Written in 1947, its plot is loosely based upon the life of Louisiana Governor Huey P. Long. The play centers on the life of Jack Burden (Leo Marks), who lives his life hanging around the line between legitimacy and corruption. He begins his career as a journalist with a pushy reputation, and eventually manages to become the shadowy employee of the Democratic Governor of Louisiana, Willie Starks. He knows how to empathize with and manipulate almost everyone around him. But who he is, what he values, and why he does what he does – these things the audience is never privileged to know. Jack spends the play alternatively in a state of cynical detachment or in soul-wracking conflict with himself. But why? What are the exact forces pulling him? After watching for three hours, I still could not say that I know much about Jack Burden.

The play opens with the ensemble coming out and singing about a metaphorical/physical flood: “They’re trying to wash us away” is the refrain. Like a Greek chorus, throughout the play the ensemble will come together and sing the inner thoughts or general feelings of “the common people.” This was a common device in ancient Greek theatre, and to heighten the connection between the two eras the foreground of the stage is set with Greek columns. This implies that the events portrayed in the play are as ancient as, well, the ancients, though of course the modern theatrical form is not a copy of past form. Sometimes the chorus device works and sometimes it doesn’t. At one point the ensemble sings about how they are all rednecks who are proud of it, but the kinds of things they say are so insulting that no actual “proud redneck” would say them. The intrusion of the urban intellectual playwright’s opinion is rather obvious.

The chorus also provides an eye-rollingly obvious justification for playwright Robert Penn Warren to ignore black experiences. “See?” he says, “These characters are racist! They’re ‘keepin’ the niggers down!’ Therefore I don’t have to include black people in my play about Jim Crow Louisiana, not even as ensemble characters with no lines!” Other than that one song, an epithet-loaded exchange between some “hicks,” and a line or two about how in Baton Rouge “everyone looks like me,” the issue of race never comes up in the play. The main characters don’t give their opinions on race or interact with black people because then we as the modern liberal audience would be forced to dislike them. The playwright clearly sees racism as a side issue to whatever he wants to talk about, and director Pam MacKinnon went along with it. Perhaps it is simply that neither of them are skilled enough to address race without distracting from the play’s main themes.

We first meet politician Willie Stark (John Procaccino) as small-town player trying to prevent the local school board from selling a contract for a new schoolhouse to their relatives. He fails, and two years later the school falls down and kills and injures students. Willie is recognized as the one who stood against the corruption, and off the momentum of good public opinion he is eventually elected as governor.

Willie Stark in the first half of the play is almost as intriguing as Jack. Unlike Jack, his struggles are obvious. He tries to stay true to his values while jumping into the deceitful world of politics for the first time. He learns to abandon naïveté, but disturbingly, he concludes as part of this (as so many politicians do) that voters are stupid and there is no place for transparent discussion of issues. He morphs from a relatively bumbling, kind-hearted and principled man to a suave politician. Willie in the second half of the play is so different that he bears only passing resemblance to the man he once was. Yet the moment he crosses the line from his past self to his present takes place offstage. I can only conclude that Willie’s fall was considered an inevitable result. Watching the process is not important, except to the extent that Jack is caught up in it. In this play, all the characters lack free will – one cannot imagine them making different choices if Jack were not there. The question, then, is why Jack makes the choices he does.

This is the only way I can think about Jack in a way that makes sense: in his cynical youth, he decided that there was no such thing as consistent “higher values” or “morality,” and so he became comfortable with doing the dirty work of others. But as time went on, he came to realize that there were limits and objective standards, lines that he deeply feels he should not have crossed. Yet he did, in part because he had such a stake in seeing himself as “the one who really knows what is going on,” though he seems to have a fantasy about the depths of Willie’s corruption. Visiting his mother and childhood friends reveals the essential conflict between the way they see him and the way he sees himself, which makes him so uncomfortable that he pushes them away. But eventually, he is forced by circumstance to resolve the division within himself.

This interpretation is extremely tentative. I do not know if I would come to the same conclusion upon seeing the play a second time. Those who know about the life of Huey P. Long would certainly bring a different perspective to the play. But the value of it is that it is so opaque. How I interpret the sources of Jack’s struggles says more about me than about the truth of his situation.

Despite its flaws, the worldview of All the King’s Men and Jack’s psychological conflict deeply impressed me. My theatre-major housemate, however, was less impressed. “This should have been a TV miniseries,” she said as we left. The play is long, I grant, but the second half in particular went quickly due to the intense emotional action onstage.

But she had another reason to be unimpressed, and I cannot state that better than in her own words, so: “What is it about male playwrights and feminism? It seems like they listen to us on everything except the sexual relationship thing. They get the intelligence, they get the spunkiness, but when it comes to sex the whole thing is as traditional as ever! I sat through this play and watched Sadie [Burke, Willie Stark’s publicist, played by Deirdre Madigan] turn from a strong character into a weak one because of a sexual relationship. I believe she was a good publicist who made Willie what he was, who was willing to speak the truth when none of the other characters were, and yet she becomes mentally unbalanced because she was dumped! What the hell!”

Clearly we feminists must be underestimating the power of the man juice.

All the King’s Men runs until November 8, 2008.

For those in the mood for daring live theatre, the Book-It Repertory Theatre’s production of “Even Cowgirls Get The Blues” fills the niche for theatre that still pushes the envelope.

Based on the 1976 Tom Robbins novel, “Cowgirls” follows the hitchhiking travels of Sissy Hankshaw and all the vibrant characters she finds along the way.

Blessed with abnormally large thumbs from birth, Sissy is “the one great passenger” for all the great drivers in the world. From New York City to North Dakota, Sissy roams earning money when she needs it by modeling for The Countess (Brian Thompson), a transvestite tycoon of vaginal perfumes. It’s The Countess who steers Sissy towards Julian (Chris Maslen) a full blooded Indian, though he doesn’t look it. Here, Sissy faces her first real dilemma. She’s enchanted with the freedom the American Indian represents, but her own personal Indian becomes a shut in, unwilling to show Sissy’s huge thumbs in public. Through the rest of the play, Sissy continues to fight for her right to live the way she wants, despite all efforts to get her to conform.

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SPOILERS AHOY!

Every Friday I eagerly find a television to watch Battlestar Galactica. It’s on Sci-Fi, and it’s one of the best and most politically relevant shows I have ever heard of. It provides nearly up-to-the-minute commentary on hot button ethical issues as well as extended, deeper probing of more fundamental problems. For example, the end of the third season (Crossroads parts one and two, aired March 2007) featured the trial of a former state leader for war crimes – two months after the hanging of Saddam Hussein and in the midst of arrests of former leaders for war crimes in Cambodia, Chile, Argentina and other nations. The episodes also commented more broadly on the nature of justice and the almost guaranteed lack of it for the unpopular. Baltar’s acquittal was portrayed as a lucky accident, possibly caused by nepotism – raising further questions about whether the means matter in pursuing the end of justice.

But aside from the nuanced political and social commentary, Battlestar is amazingly anti-sexist (especially in a genre characterized by the sexualization of hot babes for the viewing pleasure of the socially inept). Until this week’s episode, that is, and for that matter last week’s.

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