Author: shipleal

Bachelor Feminism?

shipleal,

One of the weirder things about being so progressively feminist is how much I love The Bachelor. For the under-initiated, this is a first generation (now in its 17th season) reality TV show on ABC that features a hunky Bachelor trying to decide between 25 hand-picked, lovely young women who incredibly all fall in love with The Bachelor on the first night of the show. There are old-fashioned dates, lots of gratuitous makeouts with basically every contestant, and a ceremony featuring roses at the end of each show that confirms it’s all as white and heteronormative as TV gets.

If I’m being honest, The Bachelor isn’t the only trash media I intake on a fairly regular basis. I love almost every rom com ever created. This reverence is seconded only by my extensive adoration of Sex and the City now that it’s on daily reruns on cable TV. I can practically quote entire shows at this point. And the made-for-TV program I’ve watched most of in my life is none other than BBC’s Pride and Prejudice—5.5 hours of Jane Austin goodness (note to my Curmudgeon co-blogger: I guess a girl can like profanity and Jane at the same time).

If I were a well-rounded media consumer, I probably wouldn’t give this debasing dalliance a second thought. As it goes, I rarely watch TV and spend too many of my internet hours reading tumblr feeds (and tumblr feeds and tumblr feeds and tumblr feeds), revisiting my Bachelor fascination, or scouting out weird Mormon DIY blogs. It’s the furthest I could possibly get from BBC news or reading about indigenous women undergarment knitters.

A friend has a theory he calls “nostalgic escapism” – a way to label the longing for a place you used to live and the incessant imagining that life would somehow be better, even now, if you were there rather than here. You know, escaping to something or someone you used to love, even if that love was only realized once you left… and may or may not be as fantastic as you imagine if you really did go back.

It isn’t any great thought to posit that the media we consume is a form of escape. I spend a lot of time during the day thinking about a lot of bad things, seeing a lot of bad things, and trying to fix a world that at times feels completely backward. When I’m on recess—whether a five minute interwebs break or an hour on the couch after work—the last thing I want to do is review more bad things with Mr. MacNeil or Mr. Lehrer. Why, when I can watch a hunky guy fall in love with 25 lovely women all at once? I guess that’s why most Americans get their news from Colbert and the Daily Show and weird cat videos are the most watched thing on YouTube—we all need an escape.

What I’d like to unpack a bit more is why I want to escape to something that I have no nostalgia for—and are shows, no less, that feature relationships and power dynamics I denigrate during real life. Even my non-feminist lady friends (writing these words reminds me of another post for another time) think The Bachelor is trash and don’t understand the appeal of Carrie Bradshaw. I guess they watch cool shows like Modern Family.

Let’s skip any dime store psychology that says, deep down, I really do want to play out the archaic, creepy scenes I love watching to unwind. Or maybe that I’ve overcomplicated relationships in my own life so much that textbook gender roles take my mind off of this self-made quagmire.

Neither answer works for me. Instead, I think it has more to do with Feminist Ryan Gosling. Have you seen this one yet? Images of cutey Ryan G. overlaid with feminist quotes like “if I had a hammer, I’d smash the patriarch,” complete with a catchy “hey girl” meme. Feminist Ryan Gosling serves as a good reminder that life rolls out in shades of color. It says, “hey girl, it’s okay to like the things you like, even if the combination seems a little unintuitive or even contradictory.” Just like you can learn important feminist lessons while enjoying a laugh at the oddness of the internet, you can get your daily news from Jon Stewart and still have important ideas about the world. Or be a good feminist (!) and have fun with the paradoxes involved in watching trashy reality TV.

I’ll leave you with this: the concept of nostalgic escapism, at least in the sense of how we consume media, isn’t really applicable. Even if you try to escape, the content trudges ahead. I’m not saying reality TV is a progressive’s dream, but it’s no longer 90’s—we’ve come a long way from Pedro Zamora breaking all sorts of barriers. Nowadays, you’re hiding from real news and Samantha Bee nails it on military brohesion. Try to find that kind of smarts on any local news show. As RyGo might say, hey girl, we can’t ever go back, but let’s move forward together.

Note: this post was first published on fortysevenseventyeight.wordpress.com.

Prioritize the Gap

shipleal, , , ,

Much has been made in the past week or so of claims that our President has fallen prey to a bit of gender and racial bias in staffing his inner circles. In case you missed it, this photo in the NY Times prompted a wave of news items and opinion pieces about whether Obama prefers to employ white dudes rather than living out the dream of a diverse and equal America he promoted relentlessly on the campaign trail.

I cheered on Dowd for calling out the hypocrisy of Democrats smugly condemning Republican “binders of women” when the Democratic Party is clearly not enjoying any post-feminist sunset. I also appreciated this update of an earlier study of professional women in Washington D.C. revealing how the “old boys club” is still in full swing in this town—if you ask women. Here’s one that squarely blames Obama for ignoring the “optics” of his woman problem because he’s got the policies right. And finally, one of my favorite blogs, Feministing.com, published a simple but straightforward post on Obama’s gender/race gap. That piece concludes:

Yes, there are too many white men in the White House, but there are too many white men everywhere you turn in politics.

Well said. Obama’s thoughtlessness about these decisions reveals what every woman working in politics and policy knows: it’s 2013 and still a man’s world. Women represent 18% of the House and 20% of the Senate.  We’re 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs. We hold 20% of top positions across business, law, academia, and journalism. But we make up more than half the workforce and are better educated than men (more BAs, more MAs, and almost as many MBAs and law degrees). Despite this, qualified women aren’t getting equal pay, or the shot at promotions—including in Obama’s White House.

I believe this is what must change before anything else in American politics shifts. As progressives, we’re working with hope toward change for a wide swath of issues we all care about—education, poverty, violence, the environment, choice, etc. But if we realistically hope to change anything, we’re going to need to address the fact that our political system is filled with white dudes and that unless our government becomes more representative of America, it will continue churning out status quo policies (and hiring practices).

A couple of things. I like white dudes. There exist some really awesome white dudes. American white guys, even. But the knapsack of white privilege and patriarchy fits really comfortably and doesn’t require much critical thought from those who wear it. It’s not like I believe there’s a secret class in high school that all the white guys get pulled out of class for—like some racial/masculinity indoctrination curriculum where they don the knapsack and learn about pay inequity and beer commercials. That’s crazy.

Power is definitely a complicated concept, and you could spend decades thinking through Foucault, Gramsci, MacKinnon, and what many others have written about it. But I think we can agree that it’s generally something that doesn’t get transferred (to run with a loose concept) without a fight. Just ask any redistricting commission across the country.  Or elementary school kids playing with Legos. But nor is power something that is easily identified by the masses themselves.

So yes, we cut Obama too much slack on parity/equality issues within his administration because he’s a black man breaking a glass ceiling himself. But we’re also cutting him slack because we don’t see women and minority under-representation in American politics as a problem. Men don’t see it as a problem and women don’t see it as a problem. It’s the status quo and it’s the reality in our country—just like gun violence, crappy schools, smog-filled air, and institutionalized poverty. But unlike these other issues, under-representation is not something that progressives or feminists have honestly admitted is holding us back as a democracy.

To me, our first priority should be clearly seeing the gender and racial gap in American politics and committing ourselves to changing it.

Note: this post was first published on fortysevenseventyeight.wordpress.com.