Rupert Murdoch: “Reporters are mean to me”; or, Feminéma diagnoses our shame differential

Is it any surprise I have trouble telling the difference between satire and true stories? Witness the latest from Rupert Murdoch’s trial for phone hacking in London:

Rupert Murdoch described on Thursday being “mobbed” and “harassed” by journalists and paparazzi, in an exchange rich with irony during his testimony at a judicial inquiry on press ethics prompted by criminal behaviour at one of his papers.

The 81-year-old media mogul was facing a second day of grilling at the Leveson Inquiry, which has heard dozens of witnesses give detailed accounts of being harassed by reporters from Murdoch’s own newspapers.

(Reuters, 26 Apr. 2012)

I’m sorry, but how is it possible this man feels no shame for such a statement? These are the questions that keep me awake at night.

Just recently I was utterly fooled by a satirical story about Ann Romney — a story for which I apologized so profusely that several wise commentators left notes telling me to let it go. “Women apologize too much,” Naomi wrote kindly but tersely. She continued: “Rather, women of conscience do that.” She’s right. But I wonder if the shame differential is not just a gender issue, but also a class matter. Why does my middle-class, female shame button get pushed at the slightest error, and Murdoch’s wealthy male shame button appears to be protected by impermeable glass and Secret Service-protected launch codes?

After all, let’s remember the (true) story about Ann Romney of last month, when she pronounced that she doesn’t “consider myself wealthy,” which prompted the ever-astute Jezebel to offer the headline, ZILLIONAIRE ANN ROMNEY DOESN’T CONSIDER HERSELF RICH. Now, Ann Romney can consider herself in whatever way she likes. But it seems to me that if someone who earns $21 million per year on investment income alone — and pays a minuscule $3 million in taxes (ca. 14%) on it — makes such statements out loud during an economic recession, she might feel shame. There is no sign of such.

Thus, I offer you my Social Science-y Insight Of The Month: the Shame Differential©! (Copyright pending.) Let me explain:

The Shame Differential is the sum total of two separate measures tallied by the Shame-O-Meter® and the Shame Ray®, observable on these two tables (and apologies/ compliments to Jessica Hagy’s blog This Is Indexed, from which I borrow her style of graphics):

You see? As this “scientific” graph shows us, the lower your income, the higher your capacity to experience shame. Since women own only 36% of the wealth in the U.S. (and the stats are significantly more dire for Latinas and African-American women), the Shame Burden falls disproportionately on women at the same time that it hits working- and middle-class men hard, too.

Yet to fully assess the Shame Differential©, this “scientific” finding by the Feminéma Institute for Advanced Study must be paired with the equally “scientific” Shame Ray® Index, which measures the eagerness of specific populations to dish out shame to others:

Now you may be infinitely more enlightened by my research, but perhaps you’re wondering: why does it seem that U.S. Republicans seem so eager to shame women, Blacks, Latinos, and/or the poor? Well, duh! The Shame Differential© explains all! Who do you think the GOP represents: the 99%? Ha ha! Moreover, if you’re a woman, a person of color, or not wealthy, you’ve doubtless become quite skilled in feeling ashamed of a whole lot in your lifetime.

One final note: because Feminéma’s Shame Differential© is not merely an index but a diagnosis of a cultural disease — and therefore a social problem to be corrected — I hereby rename it the Breivik Shame Differential© after the Norwegian responsible for last summer’s massacre of 77 left-wing fellow countrymen and women, 69 of whom were teenagers at a summer youth camp. Now, Breivik is not a member of the GOP, nor is he the consummate ideological media mogul asshole criminal that Murdoch allegedly is, but his utter incapacity to feel shame helps us further understand the sociopathic inclinations of the Shame Differential:

OSLO — The self-described anti-Islamic militant [Anders Behring Breivik] who has admitted killing 77 people in a bombing and shooting spree last July told bereaved families on Monday that he had also lost his family and friends as a result of the massacre.

…“When people say they have lost their most beloved, I also lost my entire family, I lost my friends,” he also said. “It was my choice. I sacrificed them, but I lost my entire family and friends on 22 July. I lost everything. So to a certain extent, I understand.”

(New York Times, 23 Apr. 2012)

So the next time you hear a story that appears so hypocritical as to rattle the teeth in your head, and/or the next time you hear a GOP presidential candidate say that the very poorest in the U.S. are cared for by social services, just remember the Breivik Shame Differential©.

You’re welcome.

Declaring inde-fem-dence

Now this is a good idea. Public declarations of “I need feminism because…” — by smart young people, including Duke students, and during an election year. Sing it, brothers and sisters.

International Women’s Day

Because if the Republicans can’t stop talking about how they want to prohibit American women from getting contraception and access to reproductive health care, you can just imagine how they’re going to view international women’s issues. Here’s to a world in which Wonder Woman can say, “If I don’t get pants, nobody gets pants” — and the other SuperFriends get to find out how comfortable it is to wear budgie smugglers all day.

Now, if only Rush Limbaugh could find out how un-fun sex can be if you spend the whole time fretting that you might get pregnant.

Who I want for president

Quoted originally from anonymous, photocopied broadside that was handed around during the 1992 primary season, and which was authored by Zoe Leonard, a member of Fierce Pussy, a lesbian feminist group with roots in Act Up:

I want a dyke for president. I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to aids, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no airconditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and layed off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.

I’m often struck by how my own students have no idea about how desperate the AIDS crisis was 20 years ago in this country. They have no idea that people like me worried that having sex might kill you. But even if they’re too young to get that part of Leonard’s prose, they can’t help but feel the urgency and fury of the rest of it. I can hardly wait to show this to them — and it makes me want to create an assignment in which they write their own version. I want a new generation of angry students who articulate themselves with bitter clarity when they say aloud, “This is who I want for president.”

Pitch: “Growing Up Female” 2012 edition

Ever since hearing that the 1971 documentary Growing Up Female (dir. Jim Klein and Julia Reichert) was selected for the National Film Registry, I’ve been trying to find a copy. (The closest I’ve come is this fabulous 5-min. clip, which you should watch too and beware of too easily thinking, “We’ve come a long way, baby!”).

Here’s my pitch to documentarians: we need an updated version. You know who else wants an updated version? Riley, our future president:

Riley’s right to start in toy stores, just the way the 1971 film starts in a day care. Here are some other hot spots I hope the documentarians will visit:

• “breast-araunts” like Twin Peaks and Hooters
• girls’ sports: the good (confidence, strength, great role models) and the bad (the pressure to appear straight straight straight; the dismal sports opportunities for women beyond college)
• abortion politics: talk to a young woman who’s going to give birth to her rapist’s baby because of the law or access issues (or, frankly, because of brainwashing)
• girls who come out as gay or trans (or, alternately, choose not to come out)
• religious and church messages to girls about gender roles and sex
• girls’ clothing choices and body pressures to be both whisper-thin AND have a hot badunkadonk
• children’s TV programming (talk to Geena Davis about this)
• the pressure to get into college
• messages about gender and sex in pop music
• the assholes at Lego who claim that “months of anthropological testing” tell them that girls want pastel-colored Legos despite years of girls wanting regular Legos
• college sororities and college feminist organizations (and college anti-racist or ethnic organizations, which can have retrograde gender or sexual dynamics)
• mother-daughter relationships; domestic chores meted out to daughters and sons
• the effect on girls of presidential candidates who want to outlaw The Pill in their eagerness to “protect life” (that is, everyone running for the GOP nomination) and Pres. Obama, whose commitment to women’s reproductive health seems, well, changeable
• teenagers growing up in quiverfull or fundamentalist Mormon environments

PLEASE. Not just because it could be an amazing document for the future. For all of us feminists who need to see what’s going on now. For everyone who forgets their own little protected bubble of a world is not a reflection of the whole.

The ever-useful straw feminist, academic edition

According to Dr. Karen, academic mentor-for-hire and blogger at The Professor Is In, women academics have to start acting like men — and just when she’s about to hand out some helpful advice, she decides she needs to create some straw “feminists” who “disagree” with her:

Some feminists don’t like the Dr. Karen method. By the Dr. Karen method I mean my practice of telling women to stop acting “like girls” and to start learning to recognize and master the codes of power and authority that operate in academic settings, which are almost entirely derived from male patterns of behavior.

Damn! if we’re not ball-busting, man-hating, hairy-legged wet blankets, we’re clueless utopians who have unrealistic notions about how soft, consensus-building chanting circles can change academia. Just how fucking plastic is this notion of a feminist?

There are two things wrong with Dr. Karen’s statement, and one thing right with it. She’s right when she says women can benefit by not portraying themselves as free of confidence, value, and directness. “Speak in short declarative sentences without rambling,” she says. “Stop apologizing. Stop focusing on what you didn’t do and don’t know.” It should be helpful to women to “nurture less” and to “master the straight, direct, level gaze.” Dr. Karen: I am a feminist, and I am on board with all of this advice. The two problems with your advice are: who are these phantom feminists you insist on deriding? and why don’t you talk about the fact that many women academics who don’t “act like girls” are, instead, described as “bitches” by their colleagues?

With great consistency, audiences with feminist tendencies object. “No!” they insist. “That’s terrible advice! We should be telling young women to reject those behaviors, because they are the very behaviors that make academia cold and isolating. We should be telling young women to be MORE collaborative, more nurturing, more caring! We should encourage a variety of ways of being, because women’s ways of being are equally valid!”

On top of these unnamed “feminists,” Dr. Karen quotes at length the media scholar Clay Shirky, whose “Rant Against Women” blog post earned a lot of media attention, including from me. Shirky later acknowledged that his prescriptions didn’t take into account the fact that many bolder and less self-effacing women are punished for not being appropriately feminine. In the end, he was forced to admit that women are forced to walk a fine (if not impossible) line in the professional world. Dr. Karen, in contrast, ignores the complexity of the situation to jump on an easy bandwagon: let’s blame “feminists” for advocating women’s weakness in a push-and-pull world.

Let’s be realistic. All women get these days is vague advice: do more of this, but not too much, if you want to be taken seriously. Wear makeup, but not too much. Buy clothing that shows off your body, but not too much so. Be more direct and less self-effacing, but not so much that you’ll be seen as a bitch. Is it any wonder we all have whiplash, with this kind of advice?

To quote my blogging idol, Twisty Faster, “The femininity game is like Vegas. It guarantees that you will eventually lose, so the house always comes out ahead.”

…in which Feminema tears her hair out

“Ladies’ Man or Sexual Predator?”

That’s what they’re asking at ABC News about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund (as if I needed more reasons to hate the IMF), in the wake of charges of sexual abuse and rape. That’s right: let’s offer the public one more chance to excuse his behavior as harmless flirting, and fill comments sections with suggestions that Strauss-Kahn’s victims are whiny bitches. I’ll bet you $1000 when the pundits debate this question, they’ll get a woman to defend the “ladies’ man” side of this important question.

Meanwhile, the news about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “love child” (as the press invariably terms it; why not just “child”?) begs the question: you’re surprised? Oh, I get it — you didn’t believe all those women who came forward with reports of The Governator’s predatory nature back when he was running for governor.

And then there’s Roseanne Barr, who’s penned an unforgiving essay in this month’s New York Magazine about her experience being undermined, ridiculed, and dismissed even as Roseanne became a #1 TV show. Tina Fey observed earlier this year in that terrific New Yorker piece that men will call any of us a “crazy bitch” once they no longer want to fuck us. I’ll bet you $1000 that 70% of the response will debate the question, “How much is Roseanne Barr a crazy bitch?”

Message: you can’t win, ladies! So let’s debate whether Schwarzenegger is a ladies’ man or a sexual predator (and let me advise you that if you argue the latter, you will be termed a crazy bitch!).

Update, 11:15 am Tuesday: Our hero, Twisty Faster, has some sparks-flyin’ words at her blog, I Blame the Patriarchy, in which she points out that both Strauss-Kahn and Schwarzenegger shtupped “the maid.” Oh, “the maid.” The media barely treats such women as human, much less worthy of respect.

No equity for Title IX women’s sports

Why should we care that colleges have found ways of shirking Title IX rules that seek to create greater equity for women in college sports, as reported in last week’s New York Times? Because those rules never demanded true equity to begin with. Everyone needs to stop acting as if colleges have been under some crazy burden to give women 50% of all resources. Title IX was never intended to deliver exact parity. To offer an analogy: it’s as if the federal government passes an equal pay act and 50 years later women are still only getting paid 77% of what men make, only to have men argue women are getting paid too much and stealing resources away from men. (Hey, wait a second…that’s pretty much true, too!)

First, a few truths about Title IX: this law does not demand exact equality between men’s and women’s sports. Rather, colleges can comply with it in one of three ways:

1. by showing that the number of female athletes is in proportion to overall female enrollment
2. by demonstrating a history of expanding opportunities for women
3. by proving that they are meeting the athletic interests and abilities of their female students

Considering that women make up 57% of college student populations nationwide, it’s obvious that colleges are not complying via path #1. I know of no school that gives female students a majority of funds and resources. Instead, according to the best statistics I can find:

• Division I institutions: women make up 53% of college student bodies but only 46% of athletes
• Universities overall: women make up 57% of college student bodies but only 42% of athletes
• Female college athletes receive 42% of athletic scholarship money
• College women’s sports receive 36% of sports operating funds
• Women’s teams receive 32% of recruiting funds

Again, all of this is legal so long as colleges show that they are doing their best to increase athletic opportunities for women or are otherwise meeting the athletic interests and abilities of female students. There is no equality for women’s college sports. Men’s sports still get the vast majority of university funds. And this does not count the vast amounts of booster funds that come in to support specific sports, creating vastly disproportional funds going to football and basketball. (How else do you think top-shelf football coaches can get paid $5 million per year?)

Title IX has been fought from the outset. The NCAA went to court in the 70s fighting to be excluded from the law but was denied a victory. Instead, many colleges simply disregarded the rules since there was no governmental regulation or punishment for noncompliance until 1992, when a Supreme Court case determined that individuals could receive monetary damages in court. In 2003 and 2004, a public battle took place again over Title IX, resulting in the Bush Administration opting to soften the rules even further. The Obama Administration quietly reversed that decision in 2010, returning Title IX to previous rules and seeking more enforcement of the law. But now it seems colleges are at it again, giving college women’s sports short shrift.

Here’s a quick rundown of the story (with quotes) from the NY Times: colleges have found ingenious ways of flouting the rules. Some schools count male athletes as women: 15 of the 34 players on Cornell’s women’s fencing team are men, while “Texas A&M, which just won the women’s Division I basketball championship, reported 32 players in the 2009-10 academic year, although 14 were men.” Or schools populate women’s teams with ghost players, as at the University of South Florida, where only 28 of the 71 women on the cross-country roster ran a race in 2009. “Asked about it, a few laughed and said they did not know they were on the team.” Still other schools engage in voodoo math: Quinnipiac University was found guilty last year of “requiring that women cross-country runners join the indoor and outdoor track teams so they could be counted three times,” according to the Times‘ story, and guilty too of adding names to a roster in time for the count but cutting those players a few weeks later.

Are colleges engaging in this duplicity because they can’t find women interested in participating in sports? No: they do it because they must submit annual reports listing the total numbers of women and men in athletics, and whereas it costs money to start a new team that women might want to sign up for, it costs a college nothing to add names, however fraudulently, to existing teams (honestly, 71 cross-country runners?). No one has shown that college women don’t want to engage in organized sports.

Nor should we confuse the question of whether a sport earns a profit in ticket sales with its value to the university. I understand the impulse to celebrate football teams that earn money for their universities, but not only is this relatively rare, but most men’s teams are as equally unprofitable as most women’s teams. Besides, as I’ve already mentioned, much of that income goes back into the coffers of profitable teams; it’s not distributed widely.

These facts make it all the more aggravating when journalists on the ever-reactionary, often anti-feminist Double X podcast (you guessed it, Hanna Rosin again!) last week offered this slew of false information and misinformed commentary on the issue. Rosin is introduced by her colleague Jessica Grose by saying, “So, Hanna, you have done tons of research on this topic. Can you tell us a little bit more about college women’s sport and Title IX more generally?”

Rosin: “Yes. I did not have the expected response to this article. You’re supposed to have the expected reaction of, just, you know, isn’t this is terrible, how could they be fudging the numbers, they’re giving it to the boys once again. But I raise my hand in exasperation and, just had the words Title IX reform! It’s time for Title IX reform! This is a law that was passed in the 70s that really doesn’t seem to any more reflect the reality of American colleges and there’s so much shenanigans they have to go through in order to comply with this law that it seems like we need to rewrite the law. Now that’s not to give credit – not to take away credit from all the amazing things that Title IX has done in terms of making it possible for women to be competitive and aggressive and participate in sports the way they never have been. But, like, if you’re padding the running team with people who have never run a race in their lives, like, what does that mean? You should force the women to run the race? I just, I just don’t know a way around this except to say, you know, ease up on the proportionality a little bit! It doesn’t have to absolutely be exact. Like, isn’t there a way to rewrite the law in which it’s not exact? So am I being, like, a crazy anti-feminist [unintelligible] here?”

Well, yes, Hanna, you may be a crazy anti-feminist, but mostly you’re a bad journalist who offers up false information about the subject you’re discussing. I’m not a journalist, but was able to find this information and statistics using reliable sources online in a single morning. Next time you use your journalist credentials to spout off — especially after being introduced as having “done tons of research on this topic” — do just a tiny amount of research ahead of time.

Is it feminist or not?

In my professional life I happen to be writing about the question of political expediency, and it’s affecting the way I think about feminism and pop culture. To wit: I’ve become concerned that when feminists debate publicly whether something is feminist, it leads antifeminists to hold up a banner saying WHO OWNS FEMINISM?, as if us feminists are angrily policing some kind of fortress. I strongly believe that feminism is not such a plastic word that it can encompass both Audre Lorde and Sarah Palin; but here’s my question: for the sake of political expedience, should feminists restrict their public battles to decrying anti-feminism, rather than parsing what counts as feminist?

I got off on this question after watching Anita Sarkeesian’s most recent Feminist Frequency video (if any of you are unaware of her terrific pop culture analysis, give yourself a treat and get up to speed NOW) about whether the character of Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld, right) from True Grit is a feminist character. In doing so, Sarkeesian responds to a number of mainstream articles claiming that Ross is feminist; she maintains “it’s a bit of a leap” to make such a designation. She advances two key reasons for disagreeing: 1) Mattie’s character doesn’t change but remains “basically the same person from the first scene to the closing credits,” and 2) Mattie’s strength, independence, and grit are all coded as male; that is, she’s accepted the rules of a male-dominated society and plays along. In contrast, Sarkeesian says,

“The feminism I subscribe to and work for involves more then women and our fictional representations simply acting like men or unquestioningly replicating archetypal male values such being emotionally inexpressive, the need for domination and competition, and the using violence as a form of conflict resolution.”

Oh, the mixed feelings. On one level I agree with Sarkeesian on all counts: it’s one thing to say it is a feminist act to place an interesting, complex female character at the center of a film and watch the events through her eyes and a far different thing to call Mattie Ross a feminist. One might even go so far as to say that the question of her feminism is irrelevant to the film, the era it describes, and the range of emotions it covers. Melissa Silverstein at Women & Hollywood has a neat way of drawing a line between feminist movies (with female leads as well as narratives that seem to promote women’s equality) and movies that she’s “not so sure they are feminist but they are about women.”

It’s great to hold high standards, but have you noticed that most female characters onscreen aren’t just one-dimensional but so stereotypical that I want to hurt someone? Is it really important to dicker about whether Mattie Ross (or Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, or Katee Sackhoff in Battlestar Galactica, or Chloë Moretz in Kick-Ass) is a feminist? Wouldn’t it be better to complain about all those rom-coms oriented around weddings and bridesmaids — or, for that matter, Slate.com’s consistently contrarian rejections of all feminist issues? Katee, hand me that gun so I can blast some holes in Hollywood execs’ heads!

I “hear” myself write that paragraph and laugh, because as an academic I spend a lot of time on far more esoteric questions no one gives a shit about. And, frankly, I’d love to engage in a debate about the relative feminism of these characters — these discussions are fun. So why do I suddenly care about political expendiency such that I’m willing to argue we keep those arguments amongst ourselves?

Because the battle to define feminism is ultimately not just a distraction but a zero-sum game, and I’d rather leave those definitions open enough that we feminists can stay focused on denouncing anti-feminism. I would rather see writers at Slate spending their time analyzing the deeply misogynistic notions that women need to have 24-hour waiting periods and detailed explanations of sonograms before being permitted to get their legal right to an abortion — rather than read some idiotic essay about how the Tea Party is feminist simply because it has a lot of women in it. Look: women can be just as effective anti-feminists as men can be. (WHERE is that gun? Chloë?)

And because Chloë Moretz was the best part of Kick-Ass, and likewise Katee Sackhoff was one of the best parts of Battlestar Galactica. I’m not sure it’s a rejection of feminist values when films depict worlds in which not all women exhibit the characteristics of cooperation, empathy, compassion, and nonviolence. I think it helps us all question whether there’s anything necessarily male about being violent, emotionally inexpressive, dominating, and competitive (can I introduce you to some of my female colleages?). More important, such characterizations offer opportunities to explore complex expressions of gender identities. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to see just a bunch of gun-totin’ women in film (for gods’ sake, I live in Texas already). Besides, wasn’t True Grit just a great story with a great female lead? 

What do you think: is it useful to have these public discussions about whether something’s feminist or not, or it is more politically expedient to avoid having them publicly?

The exceptional Mirren exception

Helen Mirren is the exception. At 65 she’s getting a ton of work, is widely recognized as a top-notch actor (and “national treasure” in the UK), and has just as many online photos of her in a bikini as Mila Kunis. Moreover, she’s getting work that’s fantastic, and not just a bunch of queens. Julie Taymor converted one of Shakespeare’s canonical male roles into a woman, Prospera, for last December’s The Tempest; then there’s R.E.D.‘s Retired, Extremely Dangerous killer Victoria; Sofya Tolstoy in The Last Station (2009)…. Remember how the peevish Ellen in the wonderful show Slings and Arrows used to talk about an actress’s career as going from the ingénues to the queens to the “dreaded nurse” parts? Mirren has gone from queen to king — and people online call her a GILF. (People online are jackasses. But if I had my chance…) In contrast, I remember reading something about how Meryl Streep had “let herself go.” People online are jackasses.

But rather than simply hoover up all the best parts, pull up the ladder after herself, and show up in flattering gowns to awards events, Helen Mirren speaks openly, frankly, and eloquently on the complexities of age and gender onscreen. Here she appears truly exceptional: she acknowledges that she’s an exception to the rule. My favorite is her speech accepting the Sherry Lansing Leadership Award in December. But she’s appeared in many other interviews just recently now that The Tempest is due to appear in theaters in the UK; see here for an interview in The Guardian – many thanks for that link, JE — as well as on the Film Weekly podcast. In that latter interview she discusses the career problems faced by her young female co-star in The Tempest, Felicity Jones, who’s dying for a part in which she doesn’t have to cry prettily. That’s one problem for young actresses, Mirren opines: “you’re always sniveling in a corner somewhere” onscreen.

I have a colleague who’s a golden boy — he can’t seem to do anything wrong, according to my senior/important colleagues. I tried to talk to him one time about how white male privilege works in my department and he got angry, as if I’d implied he didn’t deserve the plaudits he’d received. No, all I mean is that if you’re the exception, you’ve got to be exceptional and not act as if it’s the very least you deserve.