Is It Too Late To Critique 2015’s Song of the Summer?

So hello and happy new year, one sensible month late. It’s been a bit of a while, because, you know, life. But here I am, still pondering all the ways women are represented in popular culture. Since last I wrote, I’ve started recognizing more clearly how my white lady feminism is a sort of narrow swath of what feminism needs to do, and I believe I need to address that more robustly in this blog. On the other hand, I don’t have the right to speak for anyone else or what they need.

It’s complicated. But the complicated things are the only things worth thinking about.

While I was gone I was writing a novel so forgive me as I ease back into this format. I’m a little rusty, so today I’m posting something I wrote back in August but didn’t publish because it was weird and a little personal. So (as usual) I’m little behind the pop culture times – I can only hope no one is listening to this song anymore – although, it’s worrying to think what might have replaced it. I have lots of ideas for more up-to-the-minute topics, but for now, let’s all sit back with our hot beverage of choice, shun the cold wet world outside, and bask in the warm misogyny of the “Song of the Summer,” 2015.

***

Last August, I had a conversation with someone I know pretty well, a white male. A white male with two daughters. He’s a good father. I know he loves his children very much.

It wasn’t a conversation so much as an argument. He and his eight-year-old daughter kept singing “Cheerleader” by Omi. I, perhaps unhelpfully, pointed out that it’s a song that’s bad for women. Why was it unhelpful? Because a lot of people got pretty irritated, and it put a damper on an otherwise pleasant day. Was I being antagonistic? Maybe. Did I frame my comments with gentle humor, or quiet deference? No. Am I tone policing myself? Do I have a right to point out problematic representations of women? Should I let it go, because the song is “catchy”?

I’m not sure.

What I do know is that “Cheerleader” is gross. Here are some lyrics:

“When I need motivation
My one solution is my queen
‘Cause she stay strong (Yeah yeah)
She is always in my corner
Right there when I want her”

You guys. RIGHT THERE WHEN I WANT HER. Isn’t that sort of like what evil cartoon villains say as they rub their hands together? “Now I’ve got the heroes right where I want them!” Sinister, right?

And then this:

“She gives me love and affection
Baby did I mention, you’re the only girl for me
No I don’t need a next one
Mama loves you too, she thinks I made the right selection”

Sing along now:

“I’ve found myself a cheerleader. She’s always right there when I need her.”

Pardon me while I skip like a broken record: this woman has no agency. She exists solely to encourage and pet this man (in her short short skirt and tight sweater, presumably, because, cheerleader semiotics). She doesn’t have appointments, or meetings, or goals. She’s ALWAYS RIGHT THERE, ready to be used by the man. Whatever the man needs, this woman GIVES and GIVES, pom poms twirling.

The singer has all the power in this relationship, particularly the power to choose (a right often denied to women, eh?). He has so many options for a woman, but phew! His mother approves his selection of a partner. The cheerleader is an object in every way, like a car, or a piece of furniture. “Well done, honey. You’ve chosen a strong, durable woman who should last for years before you wear her out and need to get a newer model.”

Not to put to fine a point on it, but here’s another winning lyrical simile: “She grants me wishes like a genie in a bottle.” As the classic Disney movie Aladdin taught us (let’s not get into those gender and class politics), genies are basically slaves. Calling her a queen, putting her on that pedestal, doesn’t negate the fact that her entire existence revolves around supporting her man. Baby, you are my queen. Now get me a beer!

Then there’s the treatment of all the women who are not the cheerleader queen in question. Apparently, all the women in the land are just desperate to be with the man singer:

“All these other girls are tempting…
And they say
Do you need me?
Do you think I’m pretty?
Do I make you feel like cheating?”

The man singer is so enamored with his cheerleader, he tells all these other girls no. He admits they’re tempting – I mean, he’s a man, isn’t he? Women are by their very nature arousing, what’s he supposed to do? But isn’t it noble, that he rebuffs all these women just throwing themselves at him, willy nilly? God, women are so needy, huh?  Women are insecure and, you know, immoral/selfish. AmIright?

Finally, there’s this creepiness, apropos of nothing: “’Cause I’m the wizard of love, And I got the magic wand.” Which, frankly, I don’t want to touch with a ten foot pole. Pun intended. But also, I don’t think eight-year-olds should be singing about magic wands, whether they understand the innuendo or not.

DJs on the radio kept referring to this song as the song of the summer, this piece of misogynist ownership masquerading as a celebration of love, and it bothered me. So as I said, I brought this up with personal acquaintances who were singing it repeatedly, and here’s what I was told:

•  This man’s wife is always there when he needs her, and he thinks that’s nice. And he’s there for her too!
• It’s just a song.
• This man, he doesn’t overthink things the way I do, and he’s not full of angst and anxiety like I am. He actually enjoys his life.
• This man is raising his daughters to be strong and smart and independent, so that they know they don’t need to rely on a man for their self-worth.

And here’s the thing: for a second, I doubted myself. It’s true: I overthink, I’m angsty. It is just a song. He is a good father. He does support his wife (though no such reciprocity is mentioned in “Cheerleader”). I myself want to support my partner to the best of my ability, and be a cheerleader for him whenever he needs it. Maybe I am driving myself crazy needlessly, thinking about all this stuff that’s out of my control.

And then I read [this is old news now, the Republicans have done a slew of baffling and enraging things since last summer– I think they actually finally passed their symbolic Planned Parent vote, forcing President Obama to veto] that the Republicans in Congress wanted to shut down the government if they didn’t get to defund Planned Parenthood. They wanted to defund PP because 3% of PP procedures are abortions (though no federal funding goes toward these procedures).

So…if 3% of something can be enough to want to shut down the entire federal government over, I think thinking critically about the “song of the summer” is not so extreme. I’m not asking to ban it from radio. I’m not even saying don’t sing along if you like it (I personally find those stupid trumpets insipid and irksome). I’m just saying: know what you’re singing. And know what it means. If an eight-year-old is singing about magic wands and wizards of love: just know that that’s a thing that’s happening, and why it’s troubling, even if they don’t.

It took me a while to realize that this person, male, whom I love and respect, who is extremely smart, and who generally has a good sense of humor, was giving me a “not all men” argument. He was defensive, even though I didn’t feel I was accusing him of anything in particular (except possibly having bad taste. I hate those trumpets!) He was hunkering down in NOT thinking because thinking, and changing attitudes, requires effort. And when you’re a white man who has a pleasant life – why on earth would you want to think too hard about anything that might point out how easy you have it compared to everyone else? When you work long, hard hours, why do you want to waste what precious time you have with your kids thinking about what messages your kids might be picking up from silly pop songs?

I get that. I do. I am not saying this white man hasn’t worked his ass off to have the nice life he has. I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve it. I’m saying it would be cool if he acknowledged it might have been a little easier for him than it is for others.

Maybe it is just one silly little song of summer, popular in one summer of their entire childhoods. But as I’ve probably said before, there is a cumulative effect when these songs go unexamined – and films, and TV shows. It’s just one song. It’s just one movie. But collectively, it’s a huge problem. And if we don’t point misogyny out every time we see it, if we let one thing slide because it’s only one example in the sea of pop culture – we’re going to drown. Women are going to stay short-skirted cheerleaders standing by their men. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be that if a woman wants to be that. It’s just that there should be other things it’s okay for a woman to be, and to be publicly, and for a man to value in a woman – publicly.

If this song acknowledged any gratitude toward this cheerleader, a desire to repay her through some concrete act – I would not have nearly as big a problem. If this wizard of love wanted to use his wand to please his cheerleader, rather than implying he controls all the women he encounters with his virile power – I would not have nearly as big a problem.

I don’t want to seem sour. I don’t want to ruin people’s afternoons. I don’t want you to stop singing a stupid song. I just want you to think about what you’re doing, before you do it. I want you to acknowledge there is a problem. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. I want you to already be uncomfortable with the way women are objectified in pop culture. I want that to be a problem for you. Because pop culture mirrors society as a whole. And I want you to want a better world for your daughters. I have no doubt you love them, and are teaching them to take care of themselves. The problem is, not enough men want to let your daughters take care of themselves as your daughters see fit. So if you add your voice to the chorus saying, “that’s not okay,” maybe little girls would have a better chance of doing whatever the fuck they want when they grow up, just like you got to.

I’ve stopped listening to the radio. I don’t know what the kids are listening to these days. But I hope the eight bazillion albums Adele has sold include songs with more than a quite literally strong female voice. I hope she’s giving little girls actual role models to aspire to in her songs.

Me? I’m listening to the (male-dominated) world of classical music. Mozart may have been a misogynist, I don’t know. At least, unlike Omi, he wrote beautiful music. I can hold both thoughts in my head at the same time: misogynist, soaring music. I wish more men would lean into this experience of cognitive dissonance.

An Untamed Writing Style: Should It Matter?

Guys, guys, guys. Dilemma.

What is the point of cultural criticism: to comment on the stories told, or the way the stories are told? These are the questions.

How do you criticize a book that presents an introspective perspective of a woman dealing with sexual assault?

I love Roxane Gay, as I have made abundantly clear. Reading An Untamed State didn’t sound like fun, per se, but I like her voice, I respect her as a writer, and I feel like it’s important to broaden my horizons and read about topics I wouldn’t ordinarily be drawn to (rape and kidnapping – duh; but also Haiti itself, American privilege, immigration). I assumed it would be beautifully written, if harrowing.

Within ten pages, I was confused. What was I missing here? What wasn’t I getting about this oddly formal, unnatural, repetitive style?

I read a bunch of reviews – The New York Times, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times – all of which heap praise on Gay and the novel for an “unflinching” portrayal of rape, and the PTSD horrors of trying to move forward from such a life-negating suffering.

Maybe. Maybe it is important because it does that. But – the writing’s just bad, yeah? No? No, we aren’t going to admit that, because somehow it would miss the point, or undermine the greater themes, or, or, or – Roxane Gay is kind of a poster girl for a new kind of feminist, and to knock the novel on any grounds would be to get on the wrong side of the zeitgeist?

I’m not sure. It wasn’t until I went to Goodreads and started scrolling through reader reviews that I found the relief of people who saw the novel as I did: bad. The topic may be important. The perspective may be one that is generally lacking in literary fiction. The need for sensitivity in critiquing such a delicate narrative might be vital. The book is still bad.

See what I did in those last four sentences? Imagine 365 pages of sentences exactly like them. Subject verb object. Subject verb object: declarative sentences piled up like so much unimaginative sledgehammering. I was this. He was that. We were the other thing. Page after page. It’s tiresome. I kept trying to figure out the purpose of this style choice – it has to be a choice, I think. Gay has a PhD. She teaches creative writing. She has to know that this is an arduous design to impose upon a reader. Right?

The novel deals with fairy tales. Fairy tales are aimed at children. Is this somehow mimicking the way stories for children are written, or how children tell stories? It feels so inorganic though, and makes the novel monotonous. Maybe that’s also a choice. Repetition is a narrative device used by ancient Greek dramatists, poets, songwriters. It can go a long way toward elevating a story to something archetypal, fundamental, something trying to touch a basic human nerve.

BUT.

It can also seem like that’s exactly what it’s trying to do. It feels to me like Gay is using repetition and these short staccato sentences as a cheap shorthand for profundity. I think a look at Goodreads’ quote page for Untamed State will demonstrate the faux wisdom permeating the text. Unfortunately, if you’re going to limit yourself to saying “I am in a cage” in that exact phrasing a hundred times, it’s going to cease being effective. The metaphor of a trapped animal loses its power. I get bored. (Are you tired of this rhythm yet?)

The dialogue is also really really bad. Really. Humans just don’t talk this way. Gay’s characters speak frequently without contractions – and that might be an affectation one person chooses, but to have all the characters speak that way is poor writing. It’s making the characters pawns of a writer, rather than living, breathing people.

I don’t find any of Gay’s characters believable. The romance between the protagonist, Mireille, and her husband, Michael, is repeatedly referred to in terms of the epic love of a lifetime, a real-life fairy tale. But it feels like it was written by someone who doesn’t actually understand how relationships work between two adults. There’s a sexual attraction between the two and Mireille claims she’s scared as she realizes she can’t live without Michael, but – why? What about him attracts her specifically? They seem like a terrible fit. It’s like something from a soap opera: her artificial pushing away, his dogged pursuit. There’s no reason for any of it and there’s certainly no reason for it in a book that’s supposed to be about Haiti, about rape, about the discomfort between rich and poor.

Which brings me to my next point, that there is a lot more telling than showing in the novel. Mirielle, the protagonist, keeps claiming she’s a difficult person to love, but: why? How? She’s beautiful and smart and successful, she comes from a good family whom she loves (at least at the beginning of the story). Sure, she’s stubborn and has a bit of a temper, but – what? She’s got a few flaws and that makes her “difficult”? They aren’t even particularly interesting flaws. Just sort of immature. She tells us a lot about herself, and sums up a lot of her past – but there’s little action to back any of it up. She’s too aware of the persona she’s crafting to just be herself. And so I just didn’t care about her. Not that I didn’t sympathize with her terrible situation. Not even that I found her unlikeable. I just didn’t feel like I knew her even after 300 plus pages.

But, here’s the crux of my dilemma: this is all a very literary criticism of the novel. Maybe none of these things matter in the face of the truth the story is relating about sexual assault.

Except, I guess I’m arguing: it is relevant. So much of this novel rang untrue to me, that it made me doubt the veracity of the narrator’s perspective. Which is fucking awful, I know. To somehow imply that because she’s not a good storyteller, her story isn’t true. Trust me, I know how problematic that is.

And yet…

The broad strokes of the sexual assault are just that – broad. Mirielle is kidnapped by militant Haitians for a cash transaction. When her father balks at paying, these “businessmen” take it out on Mireille’s body. I’m not saying this is not possible. Rape is a weapon of war, of cruelty. I understand kidnapping happens in impoverished nations where people might be so desperate they think it’s they’re only option to survive. But in this particular story, where the team of gang bangers are faceless and nameless and essentially agenda-less – it feels melodramatic. Again, I know, I know, I know, men can be cruel. Things happen without meaning, without cause. But the vagueness of this group of villains, whom we spend over 200 pages with, makes it like a fairy tale after all – a straightforward battle between good and evil. The grown up world of complex, nuanced human interaction is rarely so one-dimensional.

Haiti is treated with a similar lack of dimension. Gay is Haitian-American, born of immigrant parents much like Mireille. I thought this novel, as did many of the Goodreads reviewers, was going to offer some insight into the complex, nuanced situation of a beautiful but messy nation. But much like the relationship between Mireille and Michael, Haiti is vague, superficial. Mireille tells us it’s pretty. She tells us it’s complicated. There’s no explanation for the extreme disparity between rich and poor. There’s nothing more than a glancing hint at the guilt a well-off Haitian might have when faced with soul-sucking poverty around him or her. The kidnappers have no ideology – which may be fair enough, but I still feel like the amount of time Mireille spends with them, over 200 pages, I’d like to understand their situation a little better. If rape really wasn’t their intention, how did they become so cruel so quickly? Why are they so desperate? Why are they so angry?

Mireille heals, eventually, brokenly, and the story leaps to the future, post-earthquake. Mireille decides to return to Haiti, to bear witness, to help. All we see is a short scene with her parents, and Mireille standing bravely at the open gate of her parents’ walled-in estate. What is she bearing witness to? What exactly have I learned about Haiti here?

Mireille’s family, so important to her, apparently spend the five intervening years between her ordeal and the earthquake having no contact with their daughter. This visit seems like their first reunion. How is that possible? How have her parents not demanded to see their grandchildren, how did they never once call in all her months of recovery? Her brother, Michel, is just a name, never appearing on the page to offer Mireille any filial support, and her sister, Mona, whom Mireille calls her best friend, only breezes in and out to chatter at Mireille while she works out her own healing. So – what’s so great about her family?

This is only an issue because of something all the Goodreads reviewers point out that I didn’t even pick up in my obsessive valuing of the book’s literary merits: Michael’s parents help Mireille heal. Yep. The white Americans help the black Haitian woman heal from the horror inflicted on her by other black Haitians. Here’s a prime opportunity to use nuclear Duval family as a metaphor for Haiti itself, divided against itself, but able to heal itself, maybe. That’s me imposing a first world narrative, I’m sure. However, it’s clearly unhelpful to have good old heartland America fix the broken third world.

But here again lies the problem with my first world white lady critique: Roxane Gay has been through a sexual assault. She’s Haitian, and has (I’m assuming) visited that nation more than me, who has been there exactly zero times. So who am I to criticize the validity of her narrative? Who am I to say it feels false, that it feels manipulated by a writer unsure of her craft? Who am I to be unmoved by the journey of this character, just because she doesn’t use contractions?

I am no one, just like Mireille says in the novel. Repeatedly.

What do you think? Does theme/topic/plot outweigh style/nuance/dimensionality? Am I missing the forest for the trees? Can a book be Good for the zeitgeist without being good for the Reader?

Ruby Sparks My Ire

Guys, am I harder on women than I am on men representing women? I’m worried about it right now.

No, wait, I’m not. I’ve taken down a lot of dudes for their poor cinematic choices where women are concerned: Lars Von Trier, Jonathan Glazer, Alex Garland. Phew. I thought maybe I was beginning to act like men were better feminists than women.

Still, maybe I am too hard on women. If a woman writes it, doesn’t that necessarily mean it is a valid female perspective, and I shouldn’t criticize it? What do you think?

Here’s what I think, since you’re not here to talk to me.

Let’s take Trainwreck. I think Amy Schumer was hampered by Hollywood formulas for romantic comedy. I don’t think she wrote that film exactly as she would have lived it. I think narrative structure requires a character to change, and Amy was boxed into making that character change by the conventions of the genre. We could argue that there might have been more interesting choices for her character arc, but I have already written that blog, so I’m going to move on to another film written by another woman, equally if not more problematic.

Sigh. Am I shaming women here?

Ruby Sparks, a film written by Zoe Kazan, was recommended to me by my parents, who thought it was “cute.” It likely doesn’t speak to Kazan’s personal experience since it’s about a “genius” writer guy who dreams up his perfect Manic Pixie Dream Girl who magically manifests as a reality in his life. I’m pretty sure that didn’t really happen to her. I’m pretty sure Zoe Kazan is a real person, born into privilege as the granddaughter of Elia Kazan, and having been given all sorts of opportunities as a result, including getting her film made. How nice for her.

It’s not good, guys. It’s cute all over the place, but it’s not good.

It could be good. Kazan seems like she’s acknowledging the absurdity of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, which Wikipedia (and apparently someone named Nathan Rabin) defines as “that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” MPDGs are said to help their men without pursuing their own happiness.” Kazan seems like she might be setting up a cinematic critique of this trope.

But then, she doesn’t.

I’m going to spoil the shit out of this one, so don’t read if you don’t want to know.

Okay, let’s review that fantastical plot again: Calvin, genius writer, only has one genius novel to his name, and everyone’s chomping at the bit for his next opus. He has massive writer’s block, until he dreams about this faceless perfect lady, cute and quirky and other adjectives men want without actually dealing with any complications that may attend them. He starts writing about her and all he wants to do is write because it feels like he’s with her – it’s junky writing, ‘cause love stories/women aren’t really genius material, but it makes him happy.

Then one day, this imaginary fantasy lady is in Calvin’s house. This is surprising, and makes Calvin think himself crazy, but he gives in to it and he is so so happy, guys. He discovers he can control Ruby by writing things about her, but he decides to put away the manuscript and just let her be herself because “She’s complicated. That’s what I like best about her.” Awwwww. Thanks, buddy!

Of course, Ruby’s not really complicated. Once you get past the colorful tights and nomadic lifestyle and stated but not performed desire to be an artist, Ruby is not a human person. She likes singing (which irritates Calvin when he’s reading) and fun times in the pool (which annoys Calvin when he’s reading), but mostly, she’s just a reflection of Calvin’s interest in himself. She asks Calvin questions about his writing, cooks all his meals, has no annoying family or friends that Calvin might be obligated to spend time with. Instead of saying what she thinks, Ruby constantly asks Calvin what he’s thinking: “What did you think the first time you saw me?” “Were you disappointed when you got to know me?” She’s shaping her idea of herself solely on what Calvin thinks of her.

When Ruby finally  starts wresting control of her destiny from Calvin, behaving as if she might leave him for good (because Calvin, boy genius, is pretty sour and tedious, to be honest), he unlocks the manuscript to write that Ruby misses him. When she gets depressed, he writes that she is always happy. Whenever she behaves in a way he doesn’t like, HE CONTROLS HER.

Look, I can see this as a cultural criticism, maybe. There isn’t much to Ruby, and that’s perhaps a pointed reference to the idea that some men don’t see what they aren’t interested in (a woman’s internal life and thoughts) or don’t want to deal with (her flaws). Maybe Kazan is indicting men who can’t get out of their own fantasies in order to see the reality of women’s anger, boredom, depression, etc. Maybe it’s a critique of men who want women when they want them, and want women to blend into the wallpaper when said men are in the mood for other things. Maybe it’s a critique of the suffocating, oppressive quality of men who want to control the women they say they love.

Maybe. Maybe she’s implying all those things in a subtle but searing social commentary.

But then the end happens. And the end is awful.

Because Calvin decides Ruby can have the freedom to just be herself, as mentioned above. Then Calvin takes that freedom away. Calvin rubs it in Ruby’s face that he has her agency in his hands, during a cruel scene in which Calvin types a list of degrading activities that a shocked and powerless Ruby has no choice but to perform. And finally, Calvin, in all his magnanimous generosity, has the power to give Ruby her agency, by typing it into the manuscript: Ruby is free.

There is nothing good about this. This is reinforcing every negative idea about gender and power. Ruby never has any agency. She is a slave, a product of Calvin, to be used and consumed by Calvin. When Calvin chooses to set her free, Ruby is free.

Come the fuck on. Really?

And then the denouement is worse. Calvin, poor Calvin, is so so sad that Ruby, once granted her freedom, chooses to bolt from the house and forget she ever knew Calvin. But, what’s this now? Calvin uses his pain to write the blockbuster follow-up novel to his first genius book. He is a genius after all. The name of this masterpiece? The Girlfriend. And what’s that now? Oh yes, that’s a word that defines a woman by her relationship with a man. Cute.

So Calvin behaves very badly, then makes a whole lot of money off his bad behavior. Calvin, unlike the writers of chick lit, elevates Love and Romance to profound topics worthy of literary fiction. But Calvin, poor Calvin, is still very sad. Cash and artistic validation aren’t really what he wants. He still doesn’t have Ruby.

But what’s this now? Calvin is walking his dog in the park after a well-attended reading when doggie runs away to plant himself by a girl lying on a blanket, reading. Who is that girl? You know who it is. What is she reading? Of course she is

Ruby doesn’t know Calvin, but finds him cute and oh wow! You wrote this book? Neato! Calvin is going to have his happy ending after all.

COME THE FUCK ON. REALLY?

So Calvin is rewarded for what? Doing the right thing and finally freeing Ruby, and immortalizing his love for her in his opus? But what’s that now? Oh right, he’s the one who enslaved Ruby in the first place. What’s worse is that the film is still denying Ruby her agency – she doesn’t remember that Calvin created and tortured her, so she’s going to get involved with him without the ability to make an informed choice.

So why does Kazan make these choices in her writing? For the cute romantic ending, trying to recreate the inevitability and magical chemistry of Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine – that there are certain people you are tied to, no matter how hard you might try to erase them?

It isn’t cute here. It’s horrifying.

Maybe Kazan intends to make a pointed statement about how men treat women as ciphers, but Ruby is never anything more than that. She is never a Person. She is an object upon which Calvin acts, for better or worse. Ruby never gets to claim her power. She never has a chance to look at Calvin and say: No. She never has a choice. Calvin and Ruby don’t exist on a level playing field, not even in that final reintroduction, where there’s the vague idea that Calvin has learned his lesson and will treat her properly this time. Maybe especially in that scene, the lack of equality is palpable.

If the ending was treated as ominous rather than happy, Ruby Sparks might be a complicated indictment of gender and relationship expectations. It might make a bold assertion about the difficulty for women in asserting their own agency, the difficulty of extricating themselves from all-consuming relationships that confusingly masquerade as love. If the film was told from Ruby’s perspective rather than Calvin’s these things might be possible. But the final scene is unremittingly cheerful. Calvin gets a second chance, an opportunity to redeem himself.

Too bad Ruby never had a chance at all.

And it’s a shame, because Kazan is smart enough to put words into the mouth of Calvin’s brother, Harry, warning Calvin about the danger of his attitudes towards women: “You haven’t written a person. You’ve written a girl.” and “Quirky, messy women whose problems only make them endearing are not real.” Kazan knows this shit, but she hasn’t created a character to back it up. Instead she’s written yet another rom com with a male protagonist and a female love interest who is at the mercy of his whims. This male protagonist gets everything he ever dreamed of, and Ruby is lucky to be his muse.

I’m tired of this story.

So am I being too hard on her? Am I holding women writers to an impossibly high standard?

I hope not. Because I think we deserve better.

The Last Burlesque: Nearly Naked Ladies and Male Feminists

Writing about a play at a small theatre in Washington, DC – and one that’s now closed, to boot – might seem like a pointless exercise. I can explicate the why’s and how’s of this feminist piece of theatre but unfortunately you can’t see them for yourself. So maybe I’m wasting my time. But since I think representations of women in all cultural media need to be examined, and I hardly get to the theatre anymore, and this was such a lovely piece, Ima go ‘head and write about it anyway.

Part of what I want to celebrate here is the playwright himself. A man. Stephen Spotswood. Full disclosure: he’s a good friend of mine. That doesn’t automatically mean I’ll like his work. But in this case, I do. What I like about Steve (one of the things I like about Steve) is that roughly ninety percent of the plays he’s written have had female protagonists. At a certain point this decision was practical – the MFA playwriting program we attended had more actresses than actors available  for readings and such. But then again, it also isn’t just about practicality. Steve recognizes that there are a lot of stories out there about white men, and women are just as complex and textured a group of individuals to delve into, so why not showcase those whose stories have been less told?

The Last Burlesque, his most recent venture, the one I saw this past weekend at the Logan Fringe Arts Space, is about the final days of a failing burlesque theatre in Washington, DC. The performers love what they do, but the audience is waning. A decision has to be made about whether to fight to keep the theatre open, or let it go. That’s sort of just the backdrop. At its heart, this is a love story about a young professor (Darcy) who lectures on the history of American alternative performance, but is wrapped up tight inside her own body – despite having been raised by two burlesque-performing women. Darcy falls for a burlesque performer, May, who is as fluid and bubbling as a river. May is as open as Darcy is closed.

So if you’re keeping score, that’s two sets of lesbians. But this isn’t a story about sexual orientation – no one is fraught and fighting their nature, no one needs to gain acceptance for being “different.” Darcy and May’s budding romance is hampered by Darcy’s fearful, unintentionally condescending nature, but not by her sexual repression.

And that’s a fine line, because she is weighed down by a general physical discomfort, which a lifetime around the free-flowing flesh of a burlesque family hasn’t blunted. Of course, there’s a great deal of flesh prancing around in this play. Two of the burlesque performers are normal-lady-sized – which is to say, not Hollywood’s version of acceptably thin. These two women perform sexy dances and one strips to her tassels. The actress who plays Darcy fits the modeling world’s requisite ideal body, but she wears shapeless button-down shirts buttoned right up to her neck. The casting is in part the director’s (Amber Jackson) choice, but knowing Steve and how elegantly he writes stage directions and character descriptions, I wouldn’t be surprised if these women fit an idea he had in his head.

But then again, this isn’t a show about Body Size. There’s no message about learning to love your shape like some preachy Lifetime movie. The non-Hollywood ladies are confident and sexy and it’s not a thing, not a Valuable Lesson for us all to learn. They just are. Confident and sexy. Because why the fuck wouldn’t they be? The skinny girl lives in her head, and yes, does need to learn to live fully inside her skin, but it’s not her size that makes her uncomfortable. It’s the simple burden of existing on the physical plane that makes her prickly, locked down inside her brain.

And that, my friends, is what Steve does so well: he tells stories about humans. He happens to populate them with women, because he recognizes that women are under-served in the world of storytelling. But he’s demonstrating so eloquently that the greatest hardship we all face is not gender, or orientation, or our own flesh, but being a fragile human being trying to navigate a world of other fragile human beings, without hurting or being hurt.

He does it so well that I’m going to copy and paste the text for the final scene here, because I think it is tremendous. So don’t read if you don’t want the play spoiled for you. I hope you will see it, that it will have a long and healthy life being staged all over the friggin’ place:

The music rises.
DARCY begins to perform a burlesque.
The whole Valley crew is still there, but this dance–this dance is just for MAY. Maybe she has a little help from MAY to get her started. Maybe she doesn’t need it.
Maybe the ensemble becomes part of her burlesque. Maybe they perform just for themselves. Maybe DARCY will peel something back to reveal the Queen of Spades hidden in a surprising place. Or maybe it’s the Queen of Hearts.
Maybe we’ll see DARCY’s routine through to the end. Or maybe darkness will fall before we do.
The important thing is that DARCY is, for a brief time, at home with these people on this stage. She is comfortable–or at least willing–to bare herself to MAY.
If every burlesque has a message at its core–something the performer is trying to say that they can only say in this one specific way, then DARCY’s is this: “I want to be braver. I don’t want to live life as a closed box. I don’t want to be afraid of being vulnerable…Now watch this.”
DARCY reveals, pulls back, reveals again. Reveals more.
The act crescendos.
The last reveal.
Darkness.

Steve’s characters in The Last Burlesque live on the fringes of society, working at an atrophying art form, yet they face the same troubles we all face: parental conflict, miscommunication, financial strain, fear of rejection. This isn’t a show about Being a Woman, although it deals with a lot of things a lot of women deal with. The way these things are dealt with positions feminism as humanism – trying and failing and trying again, because that’s all any of us are can do.

Oh, and it’s also really fucking funny. I’m being all intense and serious about it, but there are tassels and feather boas and playing cards in unexpected places, and you just can’t help but smile gleefully as you watch it all unfold.

Every now and then I come across the suggestion that men can’t be feminists. That’s ridiculous. Men can be sensitive, and self-aware, and wary of their own privilege. These men are women’s best allies in the struggle to be seen as humans who deserve all the same advantages white men have been hoarding for centuries. Stephen Spotswood tells stories about women with humor, and intelligence, and empathy. He is the kind of ally I’m more than happy to have.

I’m Wild for Films with Flawed Female Protagonists

It’s rare that I think a movie adaptation stands up to the book, so I wasn’t particularly eager to see Wild, the Reese Witherspoon adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s book. To be honest, I wasn’t as impressed as everyone else with the book itself – I liked it, but it felt like a book jumping on the Eat Pray Love bandwagon – female solo travel as transcendent interior journey through scenic landscapes. It’s a whole subgenre that I’m very interested in, but that also can be a little tedious in its self-helpy, “lesson learned” neatness. As I read Wild, I felt like I could see the seams – Strayed was working so hard to point out the Meaning and Significance of Past Life Events in relation to the Present that it all felt a little strained.

But I was pleasantly surprised by the film: it culled the book down to its essence and didn’t try so hard to justify what was included. Manifesting the story visually allowed the feminist significance to become clearer: a woman alone, pushing herself to her physical limit – this is a narrative generally reserved for male protagonists. It’s an internalized movie – as much as Strayed struggles with nature itself and her body’s rebellion, she is mainly battling disappointment and grief, for her mother’s death, for her failed marriage (which she almost purposefully imploded, but still feels bad about), for her education and career. She’s making peace with her own choices in dealing with All These Things, with not following the traditional map of womanhood, and that is deeply resonant, at least for me.

Wild was distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures, which is a studio for “independent” films but it stars Reese Witherspoon, received wide release and did well at the box office, so I’m not sure how “indie” it is. And happily so: the more “mainstream” we can define this film, the more it mainstreams a story about a woman who isn’t a) searching for the love of a man, b) selflessly devoting herself to the advancement of others, or c) backstabbing other women in an effort to get to the “top” of whatever ladder she’s climbing. This is a movie that lets a flawed woman ruminate on her imperfections, and find redemption by herself. Or to put it another way, to forgive herself, rather than seeking external validation.

I find this wildly (!!!) exciting, the internal landscape of a woman being enough ground to cover for a movie. It may not be a great movie – it’s hard for redemption not to come across as a bit sentimental, even in as un-suspenseful a film as this – but I think it’s significant just for what it’s presenting to a commercial audience. I also think the storytelling is refreshingly feminine, despite the maleness of the creative team: director Jean-Marc Vallee, and screenwriter Nick Hornby, of all people – kudos to them both for sticking to the source material rather than imposing a more dramatic arc. Returning again, as I so often do, to Caryl Churchill’s assessment of narrative structure, I like that in this film, Strayed falls into a memory but her memories do not move in a chronological pattern. Her brain waves jump around, from her mother to her ex-husband, from her childhood to her adulthood, from studying to heroin use, without predictable rhyme or reason. In her mind, things do not march inevitably toward a climax. They wrap around in a circle, and this is that feminine storytelling style Churchill champions. As I said, the book felt more constrained by traditional narrative structure to tie each memory laboriously to the present moment with context and meaning. The movie moves more lyrically through memory and it feels more truthful because of it.

The film also takes seriously the constant vigilance Strayed has to maintain as a woman traveling alone. The film perfectly evokes the underlying tension every time a woman encounters an unknown man. Women literally walk through the world hoping not to be victimized. Very few stories demonstrate that threat credibly without devolving into the use of outsized villains who make it easier for men to find comfort in the hashtag “not all men.”

I read a review that criticized the film for moralizing upon Strayed’s promiscuity, but I actually thought it presented her sexuality well. Yes, there is judgment regarding Strayed’s illicit encounters – but only because she is married, and lying to her husband. When Strayed has a one-night stand near the end of her hike, it is presented as gentle and generous, and she walks away buoyed, rather than full of guilt. There is no attempt to shoehorn this man into becoming the next love of Strayed’s life. It just is what it is, and what it is, is nice. A woman can have sex, enjoy it, not need love, and not feel bad about herself.

2014 saw not one but two films about women walking. So having watched Wild, I decided to watch Tracks, which I have not yet read. It’s interesting that Tracks was adapted at this cultural moment, since the book was published in 1980. It’s also interesting what the two films have in common: women dealing with the death of their mothers (though in Tracks, it seems to have been a childhood trauma rather than a recent one). Both have the unexpected mercy killing of a beloved pet. They have a similar structure – interspersed memories, though in Tracks they flashbacks are more faded, less coherent. Robyn Davidson is not walking to redeem herself so much as because she likes to be alone, with animals, and finds most human interaction intolerable. That’s it – she’s not even trying to find herself. She doesn’t need love, or to devote herself to the needs of others. She’s pretty irritated that the photographer Rick, assigned to her by National Geographic, is so into her – though she is often relieved to see him after weeks of being alone. It’s a bit perplexing, this contradiction between what she says and how she acts. How, you know, human of her.

One review of Wild criticized the film’s cinematography: though set in “wild” nature, the camera focuses narrowly on Reese Witherspoon’s face as she ponders things. To this critic I say: fuck that. Tracks is slightly more landscape oriented, but I think it’s important that neither film is about the healing power of nature. That would be trite. Nature doesn’t haven’t to be the star. These are stories about walking, a repetitive routine, a physical goal, a personal clarity. These are stories of women forging a path for themselves, and that path means something different to each – and it’s lovely that two such similar films have dissimilar motivations. Women are not One Thing. But their varied internal landscapes and external journeys are as worthy of being explored as anyone’s.

Trainwreck is a…

Look, guys, you know I love Amy Schumer. Love her. I think she’s hugely important to the conversation right now, and she is smart, and hilarious. I think it is fantastic that she gets to star in a romantic comedy on the big screen – whether or not such validation should be necessary, it validates that she is as beautiful and deserving of love as, like, Julia Roberts.

And I know she wrote Trainwreck, so maybe I should accept it as one of myriad compelling representations of what it means to be a woman today. There is no right way to be a woman, or a feminist. Maybe this is how she sees some of her own experiences, and I shouldn’t call that out as “wrong.”

But seriously. Trainwreck is – wait for it – a trainwreck. If you let yourself bounce springily across its surface, it’s amusing and kinda sweet, but dig in just a little bit and you’ll be buried alive by limiting archetypes and conservative morals.

Hilarious.

This film pretends to celebrate the “trainwreck” in question: Amy starts the film as a men’s magazine writer who loves her job, loves sex (and will get her o’s without feelings the need to reciprocate), loves her life as a single lady and hates kids. But the film offers a harsh judgment on this lifestyle. By the end, Amy’s sexuality has become so self-destructive it gets her fired from her job. But that’s okay, because she realizes her job writing smutty fluff for men is meaningless anyway, and really, she probably does want kids, because she’s found the right man, and why wouldn’t she want to pass on such amazing DNA as his?

The movie is simply the tale of a damsel in distress. Just because this damsel is raunchy and selfish, doesn’t make it less of a terrible plot. And I mean, Aaron, the love interest, literally saves her from herself. Her life only turns around after she gets fired from her job and writes up her interview with Aaron (the saintly Doctors Without Borders volunteer) and that interview gets published in a more respectable magazine. He’s helping her have a more legitimate career, guys. She ends the article with some line about how spending time with Aaron has taught her a valuable lesson about life…golly gee, I mean what would Amy have done without Aaron to show her the error of her ways?

Ugh.

In a lot of ways, this film is flipping a familiar script – virginal woman converts player/bad boy to loyal, dutiful husband. But I don’t think inverting these unhelpful, clichéd gender roles suddenly makes this story okay. People shouldn’t have to change in order to deserve love. The number of men a woman has slept with shouldn’t make her more or less worthy of – well, anything, in the whole world, ever. But this film is adhering so closely to the archetypal narrative that Aaron is practically a virgin, with only three sexual partners in his life. (I suppose making a thirty-something man a complete virgin would make him unreasonably “abnormal,” so they had to throw him a bone (three bones, as it were)). But seriously. This is a prominent, powerful doctor who hangs out with professional athletes, who hasn’t been married and off the market (at least not that I heard in the exposition). How on earth is it possible that he’s only slept with three women?

I don’t know how but you want to know why it’s possible? Because this is a world where we’re trying to shame the female protagonist for having slept with a whole boatload more than that. Aaron’s number needs to be low so Amy will ultimately feel bad that hers is so high. He actually tells her it bothers him that she’s slept with so many people – straight up conservative moralizing, that. Amy’s never felt bad about it before. But that’s the power of magical (near) virgins – they make you realize all the fun you’ve had was actually no fun at all because sex should be a special act shared only between two people who really love each other.

Right?

No, yeah, totally right, because what does Amy do that makes her hit rock bottom? She almost has sex with a sixteen year old (accidentally). Because women who really like sex will fuck anything in front of them. This smart, powerful woman (who really likes sex) has to be punished, and so she’s fired from her job for making this error. I guess maybe she’s also being punished for being so self-absorbed and selfish that she didn’t even notice how young he was. Obvs.

We gotta pay for our sins, ladies!

Anyway, getting fired is a blessing in disguise because this job that she really enjoyed is actually totally meaningless and she didn’t really want that promotion anyway.

So. On top of thanking Aaron for making her a better person through that excessively complimentary profile in a national magazine, Amy has to prove she’s changed by learning a Knicks City Dancer dance and prancing around skimpily clad for her man. I don’t think I need to comment further on why this is an issue. (I get it. Women can want to do sexy stuff for their dudes. But if this film was really interested in undermining gender stereotypes, it would have been Aaron in a short skirt doing a kickline circle.)

Finally, Amy spends the whole film being grossed out by kids. Her sister is married and has a stepson, then discovers she is pregnant. Amy is completely uninterested in any of this. She loves her sister, but she doesn’t want the life her sister has. But after her life implodes, a little speech from her step-nephew makes Amy tilt her head and reconsider. You can practically hear her ovaries crack open and weep.

Why is it not acceptable for a woman to genuinely just have no interest in children? Why is that a flaw that needs to be overcome?

There is nothing ungendered about this film. There is nothing that says – it’s okay to be kind of a mess. This movie is shouting a traditional, conservative view of womanhood: you have to be selfless, you have to be monogamous, you have to be a mother. Okay, sure, old-Amy goes out of her way to be kind of a dick. Even if she’s not perfect, if she’s sometimes mean, sometimes selfish, why does she have to change to be worthy of love? Or, why can’t she have been the Doctors Without Borders volunteer who also likes to get drunk, do drugs and fuck? Why can’t two contradictory things exist within a single person at the same time, as they do, in all of us? Why can’t Aaron have been a little messier, a little more human, a little less moral-high-ground? Why can’t two damaged people find and support each other, rather than one having to “save” the other?

So, yeah, this movie is a – you know where this is going! – trainwreck. It’s proclaiming to show a complex, modern woman find love. Instead it reverts to a narrow-minded fairy tale, in which there is only one way to deserve love: you have to be a good girl, and you have to be ready to be saved by your knight in shining armor.

Bored now.

Mike’s Magic is Different from Harry Potter’s, But Equally Powerful

Roxane Gay said Magic Mike was a feminist movie so of course I had to see it.

I didn’t agree with her, until I realized how weird and personal my reaction to the film was. This epiphany has bounced me back around to agreeing with Ms.Gay. I’ll get to that in a minute. First, some rambling lists, because I like lists.

Here are all the ways the film is not feminist, ‘cause I’m a Debbie Downer:

This movie fails the Bechdel test. I know that’s not the only mark of a film’s feminist positioning, but I think it’s a bit problematic.

While I know it’s impossible to avoid in this world, commodified sexuality is not something I think is helpful for gender relations. I don’t think women should be objectified, so actually no, I don’t think men should be objectified either. Of course, this particular ragtag group of male entertainers choose, through their powerful personal agency, to use their sexuality to heal women (ahem). But still, I’m not so sure either the innocent monetization of sex or the therapeutic capacity of stripping is a thing that should be bought into.

You know why? Because you can’t make a positive film about female strippers, who harness their self-love and confidence in their own gorgeous bodies to help less fortunate men. Women taking their clothes off for money may not be inherently degrading – there are many urban legends about women putting themselves through law school via this profession –but the dynamic between an unclothed woman and the leering male gaze is fraught with potential danger in a way that the reverse relationship isn’t. It would be much more feminist to find a way to make female stripping genuinely empowering than it is to show a group of male strippers who get to be saviors to women….

Because you see, the “male entertainers” in Magic Mike think they’re “healing” women by paying attention to the women’s needs, both physical and emotional (sometimes they sing to the ladies to prove how attuned they are). I find this attitude condescending on the one hand, and fallacious on the other. Mike and the gang get paid to take off their clothes. If women weren’t paying for it, I think the men might be much less interested in “healing” them. Maybe this transaction doesn’t need to be more emotionally honest and connected than paying for a massage or a therapist, but I struggle to buy altruism as some sort of beatific motivation for stripping, and it chafes that the whole movie is premised on women requiring the male salvation.

Roxane Gay points out that the desires of women of all colors and sizes are given legitimacy in this film, but…all the women with actual speaking roles are skinny and traditionally beautiful. Sure, Michael Strahan slinks and writhes across an ecstatic larger lady, but that woman doesn’t speak. It’s Jada Pinkett Smith, tight, tiny, and a name brand commodity that gets to run the show and accompany the men to Myrtle Beach. Channing Tatum flirts with a tiny, big-eyed Amber Heard. Even Andie McDowell is about as sexy as you can get if you’re over 50 (see how that’s a problem?).

There’s a lot of talk about consensual interactions in this film. The argument goes that the women who are gyrated on want it, ask for it, love it. Maybe. But the scene in which Tito sprays whip cream onto the faces of three women in a simulated money shot – not sure that seems too consensual, or uplifting for women as a gender.

Okay, now for the cognitive dissonance list of why the film is still pretty enjoyable:

How can you not like a movie that name-checks Voldemort, debates the supremacy of N*Sync vs the Backstreet Boys, and uses Nine Inch Nail’s “Closer” for a strip tease? “It’s not bro time, it’s showtime!” It’s blissfully silly. Hooray!

I think there is something subversive in terms of structure and plot. As in, there is no plot. This film eschews the inherently “masculine” rules of plot as pointed out by Caryl Churchill. There is no major conflict, no obstacles, no stakes, no climax. The stripper convention isn’t even a contest – there is absolutely nothing to be won or lost in this film – except maybe self-acceptance…

Which makes this a very “feminine” film, in the sense that we only ever see stories about women taking that journey. Now we have a screen full of hyper masculine men telling each other how much their friendship means, doubting their ability to reinvent themselves in new careers, trying to put the needs of others ahead of their own. They tell every woman they meet that that woman is beautiful and worthy, and while there is a bit of an after school special vibe to the polemic, nothing these men does comes across as effeminate. They aren’t “acting like women.” They are demonstrating that “female” behavior is simply human behavior. It’s nice that the bromance-y relationships aren’t played for laughs, but as sincerely as the women of Sex and the City. These are men who dream, who fear they will fail, who still try. For that reason, it’s a film more men should see, to know it’s acceptable to express insecurity and vulnerability.

Most of the positive reviews I read (including Ms Gay’s) point out that the movie celebrates female desire and lust. This film caters entirely to the pleasure of women, without making it dirty, shameful, or laughable. This movie tells ladies, “Go on, get your kicks. You deserve them.” I still think this ignores the unhealthy commodification of sex, in that the only way women can get these kicks is by paying for them.

But let’s put that aside for a moment.

Most of the time I watched this movie I was uncomfortable. The gyrating, the hot pants, the one-on-one ballad-ing, the crotches in faces. I felt, I dunno, awkward, dirty. Just watching it. I kept putting my hands over my eyes. And I realized that maybe that’s what makes this film more important than I give it credit for, what Ms Gay and Christopher Orr and Welsey Morris and Linda Holmes are all acknowledging and celebrating: this is a film that encourages women to not only embrace their desire but flaunt it. Shout it. Share it.

I consider myself a liberal, sexual woman. I like sex, a lot. And yet it would appear I think sex should happen in the dark, behind closed doors. Lust is a private act, enjoying physical beauty is unintellectual, letting go into desire is nigh on impossible.

I didn’t know I felt this way. But it makes sense. I’ve always thought of myself – the me of me, the main part of my entity – as a tight fist driving the shell of my body from somewhere deep inside my brain that even I can’t access. Given that disconnect between mind and body, it’s no surprise that my reaction to this movie was visceral in a deeply uneasy way. I can’t let go like the enthusiastic convention attendees, and so I scoff at them. But actually, I could stand to be a little less uptight, a little more appreciative, and a lot more assured of my own worthiness to live as a sexually curious, lusty human, fully stretched out toward the surface of my body, rather than huddled up in my brain.

So, I get it. I am on board. Go see this movie. I won’t condescend to say it will heal you, but if doesn’t make you smile like Big Dick Richie’s convenience store clerk audience-of-one, you might want to reevaluate your own attitudes towards sex and joy.

Happyish: A Title That’s Truth In Advertising

Happyish weighs on my chest like a brick. I like it and I don’t like it. It makes me happy to see my problems reflected on TV, to know I don’t struggle alone, while making me unhappy that we’re all such self-absorbed assholes. It’s all a little too real, despite the talking elves and geckos. It’s the struggle to craft the life you want, and then to discover the life you want is still, somehow, dissatisfying. It’s about (mostly) white upper middle class New Yorkers who’ve relocated “upstate” but still commute to the city. The male protagonist hates his job in advertising and longs to write his novel. His wife is an artist who also cares for their son. They know they should be happy, they know they’re living the dream, with lives better than billions and billions of people on this planet, and yet they’re only just barely keeping the encroaching existential angst at bay. What does it all mean? How can they make themselves feel better?

I like the show because I like the two central actors, Steve Coogan and Kathryn Hahn. I like that the creator, Shalom Auslander, used to contribute to This American Life. I like that I can relate to the desire to be happy, to know I should be happy, to know that by all standards my life is good, but to still have to constantly remind myself to be happy. My ability to see myself reflected in the the show is probably one of the biggest strikes against it: its troubling how myopic it is about race and class, focusing so exclusively on the navel-gazing of fairly well-off (and almost exclusively white) people whose biggest problem is having too many choices. But that’s the crux of it: just because your problems aren’t starvation or disease or tsunamis or earthquakes, are you not entitled to feel disappointed, discontented, disaffected? Can you force happiness? Can you choose to be happy? Is that real happiness?

It’s right up my alley, though I can’t say I exactly enjoy it. And to be honest, I am tired of the tropes about the advertising in books and movies and TV shows. Either advertising is elevated to the stature of  meaningful art, or disparaged as soul-sucking and greed-driven, the most morally bankrupt career known to humans. I lean toward the latter opinion, but, so: don’t do it. No one’s holding a gun to your head to work at a job that allows a little bit of creativity in a world where so much office work is sheer drudgery, repetitive, mind-numbing, low-paying. Thom Payne’s philosophical debates with cartoon mascots are trite and irritating.

But, I do like the central relationship. Thom and his wife Lee are a fascinating study of marriage, two people who thrive because they personify “misery loves company.” They hate the world, but they love each other for hating it with them, if you see what I’m saying. There was a whole episode in which they both thought of themselves as aliens, set painfully apart from what humans want and do. The miracle is that they recognize each other as being from the same planet, and rejoice in having found such a kindred alien spirit in an isolating culture. I like this very much. I like their team stance, us against the world.

Lee is an interesting representation of womanhood: she’s of whatever wave of feminism condescended to condone a woman’s right to choose to be a stay at home mom. She’s committed to motherhood, but also to her art, and she wishes she had more time to devote to her creative pursuits. Lee is angry and bitter, she has cut her mother out of her life by very conscious choice – an action that goes against the stereotypical representation of women as community-minded peacemakers, passive in the face of stronger personalities. Lee hates helping at her son’s school because she’s not an earth mother. She doesn’t particularly care for any kids but her own. Lee likes sex, and if anything, has her own needs frustrated by her husband’s use of antidepressants. She hates Frozen but she buys her son a Elsa dress and wig and claps after each of his performances of “Let It Go” (Julius’ gender exploration occurs without comment, which is great. No one implies that it’s weird for Julius to want to dress like a girl. His liberal parents let him play and encourage his process of discovery. You don’t see that often on television.)

Lee’s an artist who lets motherhood take precedence over that art. In this way she’s very, very human to me. Her life gets consumed by other things because staying self-motivated and self-disciplined enough to create art is difficult. She blames it on external factors – she needs a separate space, she needs her son to be less needy. But even once she’s renting a studio, we never see her complete a single work of art, we don’t see her art in a gallery, being shown or purchased.

I tend to read this through a biased lens, because I know how easy it is to be distracted, how hard it is to feel like your work is meaningful and necessary when you’re working in a vacuum. When you have all the time and options in the world, paralysis generally hits. So I interpret Lee’s relative lack of artistic success to align with what I know of the world, but I can see a more critical reading. It’s possible that Auslander’s intentional or unintentional rendering of Lee is as a mere support character to Thom, the driving force of action (such as it is in a show that’s mainly diatribes and lack of forward momentum). Just about every episode has a Thom storyline and a Lee storyline and they entwine around a similar theme. But Thom’s are still presented as primary, possibly implying that his existential angst, as the breadwinner with the fraught and perhaps empty career, is more valid and difficult than hers. I would have to rewatch the whole season to see if there is a subtle gendered dynamic regarding whose struggles are more important and more “compelling.” But on a deeply personal level, I find Lee’s pursuit of craft truthful and relatable.

My biggest criticism of the handling of gender occurs in the season finale, and this is a big old spoiler so stop reading if you have any intention of watching. It is a truth universally acknowledged that as soon as a woman pukes on television or in a movie she must be pregnant, and Lee’s sudden vomiting comes at The Worst Possible Time: right as Thom finally quits his job and Lee has done up their spare room as his home office, complete with vintage typewriter for the birth of his forthcoming novel. When Lee finally figures out her barfing is not the result of her new anti-anxiety medication but because of an impending baby, she yells “FUCKKKK!” As a girlfriend consoles her, Lee amends this to “FUCK….yay?”

I just completely don’t buy this. A couple as non-religious and liberal as the Paynes would not blink at having an abortion if they didn’t want another child. They have crafted their life to be exactly what they want it to be – why on earth would they let an unwanted pregnancy tamper with their future? Why would they risk their financial stability, their independence.? I imagine the hesitant “yay” is supposed to indicate maybe Lee sort of did want another baby, but I feel more like this is a male writer imposing his will on a female body, not to put too fine a point on it. Lee is a victim of her biology, and though she felt like she was just starting to get out from under the burden of the needy first years of Julius’ life, she must resign herself to drown in pregnancy and sleepless nights once again. Why? For good TV? To demonstrate that you can want something and not want something at the same time? To make a point that the universe always has the last laugh, that just when you think you’re in control and have put your life on the track of your choosing, life’s gonna throw you a curveball? Pregnancy is a very tired TV curveball, and one that is completely controllable if you are of Lee’s status and means in the world.

I will sympathize to the moon and back with the very bougie difficulty of being an artist stymied in the creative process even when the character has every tool for success at her fingertips, and I will sympathize wholeheartedly with an unanticipated pregnancy for a character who doesn’t have the means to deal with it, but having means and having morning sickness and seeing your future crumple before you? It’s a slap in the face to feminism that a woman like Lee could be undone by a pregnancy. It unravels much of the good work Auslander has done throughout the season making Lee the anti-mom, a loving and angry and apathetic and creative woman, and reduces her, as women in media so often are, to the size of her uterus.

There Has to Be More Than One Direction for Women in Pop Music

Maybe One Direction is an easy target. In the pop stratosphere, they’re just another shooting star boy band who will fizzle out over the horizon before too long.

I fell for them. And I’m mad that I fell for them. I adored their dreamboaty adoration, even though I’m supposed to know better. I’m mad at them and every singer or band who has ever put a woman on a pedestal.

It’s misplaced blame, of course. I’m projecting my own self-loathing, because, I’m ashamed to admit, I always wanted to be the girl on the pedestal. I wanted to be the girl who the Beatles saw standing there, so they’d never dance with another, the face that made the Monkees believe, the “you” New Kids on the Block would be loving forever, the woman for whose honor Peter Cetera would fight. I still don’t know who Peter Cetera is, but I wanted someone to want to be the hero I was dreaming of. More than anything I wanted to slow dance with Macaulay Culkin to “This Night” by Billy Joel.

I grew out of that phase, as we generally do. I discovered bearded hipster animal bands, the kind that sing of a more complex love and nuanced female worship. Or maybe not. I stopped liking men solely because they were hot, but instead because they were smart and funny (liking them because they were kind took a lot longer). But back in 2012, I was in a bit of a situation with a male of the population who was not smart, not funny, the antithesis of kind.

It was complicated.

I made poor choices. Among them was finding solace in “That’s What Makes You Beautiful” by One Direction. In my early thirties I longed to be sixteen again, so I could unabashedly heart those five boys. I wanted to be the one who didn’t know she was beautiful. I was most assuredly not beautiful when I was sixteen. But I was always hoping I secretly was, and that someone would notice. “That’s What Makes You Beautiful” is a low self-esteemed teenager’s anthem, and I was that teenager.

A long time ago, I mean. I was a low self-esteemed teenager a long, long time ago…

Of course, Stephen Colbert took down One D and their predatory ode to the insecure, and I laughed so hard at his incisive satire. What the f, One D? Why can’t knowing you’re beautiful, being confident and self-accepting – why can’t that be powerful, and attractive to the boys? I remembered life at sixteen came with its own complications and thank god I never have to go back to that time.

But how damaging have these songs been to my perception of gender relationships? Why did it take me decades to realize being the object of obsessive love probably isn’t the best thing ever, no matter what Bella Swan and Anastasia Steele tell you? How much of pop music aimed at teenage girls is teaching them to be the predicates of life’s sentences, to be acted upon, to forfeit their agency to a man’s right to love? (I wanted to be sure I was using predicate correctly in this context, and I think the Wikipedia definition really hits the nail of what I’m trying to say: “the purpose of the predicate is to complete an idea about the subject.”) The purpose of women in pop music is to be loved by men.

Sometimes women – Shockingly! Horrifyingly! – don’t accept this love from men, and oh, oh, how sad those men are. They write whole songs about that too. Here I am, once again lying prostrate at the feet of One Direction. I have not learned my lesson, I have been seduced by structural elements: rollicking guitar intro that reminds me of a banjo (or maybe it is a banjo, what do I know?) building to a soaring, heartbeaty drum-underscored chorus. I’m speaking, of course, about “The Story of My Life.”

I’ve been hearing this song a lot on the radio lately, and I like it for the aforementioned musical reasons. Catchy is a catchall for my lack of musical acumen, but catchy it is. I couldn’t really grasp what the story of his life was, so I looked up the lyrics. It seems love was proffered to a lady, but this lady rebuffed. And this act of unrequitedness will be written on the man’s tombstone, because apparently it’s the single most defining act of his life: not being loved by this particular lady. Oh, my sixteen year old self, having kind of a crummy year and looking for some smooth escapism, shivers in glee at this level of devotion. She remembers all the imaginary suitors she imagined she would turn down in that ever elusive One Day. She knew she wasn’t beautiful, but she figured she would be, One Day, and the mens would drop at her feet. Write it on your grave, boys: I don’t want you.

Still, if we’ve learned anything from The Police, it’s that this kind of eternal devotion following a heartfelt “thanks, but no thanks” is kind of creepy. The man in “Story of My Life” then says he’ll “take her home/I drive all night/to keep her warm,” and I’m not clear what this means. Is driving a warming act? Haven’t we established that she doesn’t want your warmth? Did she want to go home with you, or did you kidnap her? Is she warm because she’s locked in the trunk?

But whatever. It’s all One Direction MisDirection so you won’t notice the next bit of lyrical magic:

“The story of my life
I give her hope
I spend her love
Until she’s broke
Inside”

What. The Actual. Fuck?

Putting aside the reliance on a misfire of slant rhyme, does anyone else find this lyric deeply disturbing? I am going to use this woman until I have taken all I possibly can from her. I will take and take until there is nothing left to take. Why isn’t OneD giving love until they are broke? That would still require the lady to act  as a receptacle of unwanted affection, but at least if he’s the giver there’s a chance the lady might not be left a husk of her former self.

Let’s look at it again: she’s made it clear she’s not offering to participate in this transaction. But he’s still gonna take anyway. Isn’t that kind of, I don’t know, rapey? I guess that hope he mentioned giving her is NOT the hope that he’ll actually leave her alone to live her life the way she wants to live.

I’m also pretty concerned about that dangling “Inside.” You might think I’m being a little too precious with words and their meaning in this “catchy” little pop ditty. You might think, oh, it’s just a clever metaphor, love as currency. Cute.

But that “inside” is insid-ious. “Until she’s broke – inside.”

Until I destroy her spirit. Until I take the “her” of her. She might not love me, but I will still own her. It is my right, as a Man.

Sweet, huh?

Later in the song the singer laments, “baby, running after you is like chasing the clouds.” Dude. She doesn’t fucking want to be chased. Stop. Just fucking stop. What is your deal?

I can read the song as a scenario in which the singer has helped the lady through a crisis of some sort and is shocked that the lady is not repaying the favor in the way he is demanding. The story of his life is a story of friend-zoning, and men’s rights, and I sing along to this in the car.

This song has been listened to over 121 million times on Spotify. Six of those listens are mine as I wrote this blog, but that leaves a lot unaccounted for. How many times has this song been put on repeat by a girl who just loves Harry sooooo much (one of them is named Harry, right?) and she would do ANYTHING to be his girlfriend?

Even to the point of letting him spend her love and leave her broke inside? And if not Harry, some other unworthy guy, just because he happens to ask and she’s too well-trained in docility to say no?

I’m starting to think pop music is way more crucial in shaping society than I had ever given it credit for. Music is pervasive, and when it’s *catchy* how often are we repeating these detrimental lyrics over and over and over until we think the only way to know we’re worthy is to be put on a pedestal by a man? I’m still trying to purge myself of the unrealistic expectations of romance that I learned from my favorite childhood songs and books and movies.

I’m trying to knock down my idea of myself on a pedestal.

So the moral of the story is obvious: listen to the Spice Girls. I think we could use a little Girl Power in our five-piece British “bands.”

Roxane and Rebecca: Rrrrrr(n’t) These Women Rad?

You guys, I have the biggest crush on Roxane Gay. Also, I’d basically just like to be Rebecca Solnit.

Yeah, yeah, I know, once again I’m a bandwagon jumper rather than thrusting forward at the forefront of pop culture criticism. One day I promise I’ll be cutting edge, but for now I’m just happy have women to gush about.

I have long been a fan of essays – my dwindling attention span in recent years has made the bite size format quite palatable (see what I did there?). Anyone who knows me knows my love of All the Davids: Sedaris, Rakoff, and Foster Wallace. Sedaris is the funniest, and possibly the best at structure, FW is the smartest, pushing my brain to its outermost capacity, and Rakoff is the one I’m most like, the snarky sad one, who often feels unlovable and catatonic about writing. I love them all so hard, but they are men, wonderful men, but men nevertheless, and they don’t often speak to my personal experience.

But now I have found a pair of R’s to put on my mind’s bookshelf of aspirational texts, and they are women! Roxane and Rebecca, sitting snug among my Davids.

I bought Bad Feminist for my Kindle last October, but only just got around to reading it because you know: surfeit of books. This book feels like reading something I would have written. It’s like being inside my own head. Roxane Gay finishes an essay where she talks about the cognitive dissonance of liking to dance to rap and hating the lyrics with “Blurred lines, indeed.”

You guys, that’s almost exactly how I ended Meghan Trainor blog (“So many blurred lines”)! I have so rarely had that experience of recognition in reading/writing/consuming culture that it is actually shocking, that sense that I am not living on my own separate page in this world. It is powerful, the identification of a kindred spirit.

Upon clicking to the last Kindle location (only sometimes not as satisfying as slamming shut a paperback), I went on Goodreads to rate the book with five fat gold stars and I got to reading some of the reader reviews.. I was surprised to find them frequently negative. People disapprove of Gay’s essays, arguing that they were light, lacking in critical rigor, and unclearly structured. There was a recurring complaint that they read as quickly jotted blog posts (cough), and it’s true that most if not all originated in an online format on one website or another.

I couldn’t help but feeling these critics were jealous of Gay’s success. We have blogs too, why can’t we have book deals!? I get it. I loved this book and yet felt my voice become superfluous: why continue to write at all when Roxane Gay can articulate exactly what I’m thinking better than I can? And I understand that Gay isn’t doubling down for a big academic shakedown of representations of gender and race in pop culture, that the essays are somewhat limited in nature. Yes, Gay is  a university professor. But this isn’t meant to be a textbook, nor a story/memoir. This is knowing your audience. Gay is trying to open up the dialogue on what feminism is and isn’t to the mainstream, to all the women out there who repeatedly and proudly claim, “I’m not a feminist.”

The beauty of this collection is that Gay is demonstrating that it’s okay to grapple with feminism. She is advocating feminism as a movement that can mean many things to many people.  You can be a feminist and like the rapey “Blurred Lines” or the abusively obsessive 50 Shades of Grey or the scripted Bachelor. She just wants us all to raise our awareness of how gender and race are being portrayed. One reviewer lamented that Gay doesn’t offer solutions to all the problems she raises. No, she doesn’t. There aren’t concrete answers. Making pronouncements like “Women shouldn’t watch this” or “Women need to do that” only alienates, and Gay is trying to include. Awareness is the first step toward progress.

Last year I read Caitlin Moran’s “How to Be a Woman,” a humorous memoir/feminist manifesto that I found mildly irksome because I felt like Moran undermined herself as much as she pleaded her case. She labeled Definitive Acts of Feminism, or Not (caring about your hair – great! Getting plastic surgery – evil!) For every strong statement she made a joke which negated it. It’s a problematic text, but I came to appreciate what Moran was trying to do: encourage more women to designate themselves feminist.

There are far too many women out there who disdain feminism, who find it militant, angry, ostracizing (Men won’t like me if I say out loud that I’m a feminist – is a thought I’m sure I’m not alone in occasionally having). Both Gay and Moran are saying, you can be feminist and still like men, still like shoes, still want to stay home with your kids. I think anything as smart and thoughtfully written as Bad Feminist deserves a wide readership. It can only help broaden minds.

That’s how I feel anyway. Maybe it’s because I have had guilt about enjoying 50 Shades and Hugh Grant movies. Maybe it’s because I apparently spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how women are portrayed in books and movies and television programs. I think art is vital to help people process emotion, build empathy, engage with the world, take stock of where we stand as a culture. Snobs and intellectuals (a group I frequently and smugly try to sit with at the Table of Life) may write off Stephanie Meyer and Law and Order, but the implicit messages about gender, race, and class these widely consumed products disseminate (I’m just now seeing the horrifically gendered root of that word) reinforce negative stereotypes and create an echo chamber between art, such as it is, and the general population. I was amused by the number of Goodreads reviewers who snubbed Gay because they themselves are too refined to participate in such low brow culture as reality TV and The Hunger Games. Ladies, do you not see the irony of your poo poo-ing? All Gay is saying is that it is human and lovely to have contradictions, to experience cognitive dissonance, to like something at the same time we know it’s bad for us. I think she’s saying, we can forgive ourselves these sins, and take what pleasure can be had from all this silly Table of Life has to offer, as long as we remain critical of the underlying meaning, and hope for something a little more nuanced and compassionate.

On the other hand, maybe I’m just a dummy that I didn’t mind that the criticism wasn’t more rigorous, or that Gay’s structure wasn’t as tightly wound as a David Sedaris story. But I think it’s important to capture the zeitgeist, to say: this is where we are and some good things are happening but we still have things to be accomplished. Until our art is reflective of our reality, our reality probably needs some improving. Dissatisfaction can mingle with enjoyment, and together breed something closer to the picture we’d like to see.

I was so excited by Gay’s book I wanted to read more like-minded ladies, and Rebecca Solnit has been buzzing around my brain lately: I’ve had Men Explain Things to Me on my Amazon wish list for over a year, and recently a friend posted a picture of it on Instagram, reminding me I Want It. Then another friend posted a new-to-me Guardian piece by Solnit, and I was like, Yasss. Now is the Time! Bill Nye’s universe backed me up when I discovered it was a mere $2.99 for Kindle. Fate!

Solnit is also taking a snapshot of the current state of feminism, how far women have come since the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, and how much work there still is to do. Solnit approaches feminism from a more historic/legislative standpoint than the pop culture musings of Gay, and I think they are excellent bookends to a discussion of feminism. Same issues, different perspectives.

Like Gay, Rebecca Solnit is clearly smarter than me, more patient, more studied. She’s good at gathering and analyzing statistics – math stuff we ladies aren’t meant to ponder much. Though she knows we have work to do, like Gay, she has a compassionate approach to womanhood – she wants to celebrate all that feminism has accomplished rather than simply focusing on the still pervasive discrepancies and battles.

Her essays are also mainly pulled from pieces she has written for different online platforms, and it shows a shifting world – my Davids existed in a time before the Internet, and who’s to say that Sedaris would have gotten where he is today *today* if he didn’t have a blog or something. Unlike all the Goodreads elites who are focused on the slight nature of these collections, I celebrate that they were published at all, that someone thought they could make money off them! If feminism can seduce capitalism, we might actually get somewhere in a world where money talks.

I couldn’t help but think of one of my favorite men while reading Bad Feminist:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, I contradict myself.
I am large, I contain multitudes.

Like Walt Whitman, we need to sound our barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world. I would love to yawp as loud and fiercely as Roxane Gay and Rebecca Solnit. I am grateful to have these strong female voices to admire, emulate, and aspire to.