season of the bitch

Metric, I.O.U.
Relevant lyrics: » Read the rest of this entry «

After a long conversation with one of my favorite bloggers, I realized that I should spend less time feeling guilty about not being back in New Orleans, and more time actually following what’s going on down there.

As the fight heats up over Obama’s promised stimulus package, Senators Mary Landrieu and David Vitter have requested funding for “more than $6 billion in coastal restoration and levee construction projects in an economic stimulus bill now moving through Congress.”

It’s about friggin’ time. This fall will mark four years since Katrina, and according to the article, “[Army corps of enginieers] officials have said there’s a backlog of projects ready for construction that totals more than $65 billion.”

Let’s get on it, shall we? Let your Senator know you support funds for rebuilding the Gulf, as well as many other infrastructure-related projects.

Pinup model Bettie Page has died.

I’m sure there are so-called feminists out there who would take me to task for glorifying a patriarchy-pleaser like Page, but I really could give a shit.

I love Bettie Page. My story is not in the slightest bit original, so I’m not going to bore anyone with the details.

I’m sad that she’s gone, and I hope that she knew how much she meant to women, not just to the men who ogled her pictures. And a little part of me is glad that I cut bangs again recently. My little personal homage to Bettie.

I’m too caffeinated yet tired to write a full review, so I’m just going to throw my feminist critique out there. (Is it still a critique if I’m going to say something good?)

Yay for a movie about teenage hookups that focused on the FEMALE orgasm for once. Granted, one girl used it as a weapon to hurt the other, but let’s hear it for some focus on the girl getting off for once.

I don’t want to spoil it for anyone else, so I’m not going to say any more than that.

Oh, but Kat Dennings is so damn cute.

Regular readers here will know that I love me some Gina Carano, female MMA fighting superstar.

Well, apparently some male sports writers believe Carano needs to be “protected from herself.”

See, cutting weight is part of fighting. It’s one that I’m disgusted by, having lived with a fighter for two years and seen the battles that he–yes, he–went through with the process and the damage it did to his body image. Fighters weigh in a day or two before their fight, and the idea is to take a fight at a low weight, lose some of it off your body and sweat the rest of it out so that when you rehydrate, you weigh more–hopefully more than your  opponent, and you get an advantage. So no one actually fights at their real body weight, except amateur boxers and wrestlers, who weigh in the day of the event, just hours before their bouts. And even they  often sweat out a few pounds and hope to be able to hydrate and eat before their fight.

But thousands of men across the world do this regularly. Boxers, muay thai fighters, and MMA fighters, as well as even high school wrestlers “cut” weight. It’s been dramatized on shows such as The Ultimate Fighter and Fight Girls, which starred Carano.

None of them were called out by name as being in danger of injuring themselves by taking fights at weights too low to make, even though there are many who struggle with the weight-cutting process.

Instead, the writer here chose to make the female MMA star–and there is no argument that Gina Carano is the biggest female mixed martial arts star out there–the subject of his article.

Once again, the female body is there to be policed by men.

If this writer is so concerned with the health of fighters, he should have written an article exposing the entire weight-cutting process for what it is: physical damage done in the attempt to gain a somewhat unfair advantage. He could’ve written about high school coaches encouraging teenagers to go into the ring weakened and dehydrated in order to make a lower weight class.

In other words, he could’ve written this article without making it about a woman.

Instead, Carano needs to be protected from herself. She needs to be stopped from doing damage to her body. He throws in some images of naked Carano being weighed in between two towels, and jokes about internet fans hoping someone would drop the towel.

This is completely unnecessary. If he had a specific point to make about how women are more likely to be encouraged to lose weight, how the thin ideal is encouraged on women more than men, he could’ve done it. He could’ve proposed same-day or even right-before-bout weigh-ins (like jockeys on the racetrack, though they routinely go into races dehydrated and starved as well).

But he didn’t. He chose to sexualize and then scold the woman.

OK, so one of these is my article. But still: my take on the VP debate.

Also, read Natalia’s piece here. Really. You must.

So as you may or may not know, I’ve become addicted to Rachel Maddow. Not watching her yet? Here’s a taste:

In any case, though I love Rachel (and to a lesser extent, Olbermann), I must admit that this ain’t journalism and it isn’t a step forward for the journalistic profession as such.

It’s punditry, of course, just like FOX News. The dangerous thing about it, just like the dangerous thing about the blogosphere, is that it leads you to think everyone is thinking like you.

I watch Rachel for the laughs, and because she is in fact quite bright and backs up her sources. Because she’s a young, smart, liberal woman who’s an out lesbian with her own prime-time news commentary show, and that makes me happy.

I don’t believe in “objective” journalism. I believe in transparency. I believe that it’s impossible to hide your opinion, to pretend that you don’t have a horse in the race. If you’re a human being, you’re going to have an opinion, you’re going to be swayed one way or another. It’s just not possible. And thus I think that it’s better to be out in the open about it.

Still, I get my news from NPR, which of any American news outlet seems to come the closest to the “objective” ideal. That doesn’t mean they don’t call out bullshit when they see it–listen to the hilarity when actual lipstick was applied to an actual pig. Even objectivity doesn’t mean some sort of mythic balance between two sides.

It should mean finding the truth.

Anyway, I appreciate Rachel Maddow because she usually has backup for her sources, and her opinions are clearly that–opinions.

My dream media landscape would include much more public funding for NPR and PBS, enough to make them truly competitive news sources. Because not-for-profit news is the only way we’re going to get truly disinterested (at least financially–the reporters and producers will always be human and thus never truly disinterested) news. Then MSNBC and FOX and whoever else wants to get into the game can put out whatever kind of news and commentary they want, because there would be something to check it against.

Of course, the calls of liberal bias on NPR wouldn’t stop, not when Republicans have found it such an effective campaign strategy. But a recent study (Kull, Ramsay and Lewis, “Misperceptions, The Media, and the Iraq War”) found that NPR and PBS consumers had the fewest misperceptions about the Iraq war–and that having those misperceptions contributed to the likelihood of supporting the war, and of voting for Bush.

Anyway, that’s my dream.

Most of you regular readers know that I’m working on my master’s in journalism. Yet very little of what I do currently is actually journalism. I blog. I write op-eds for Global Comment. I write about comic books, movies, and pop music. Very little of that is real journalism. I suppose that when I do an actual interview with a comics writer (like this one) that might count, but I don’t really flatter myself that it has a huge effect on the world.

Not to denigrate the impact of art–I think art and music, literature and film can have a huge impact on the world, and it’s one of the reasons that I return over and over again to writing fiction. Willow Wilson’s AIR and Brian Wood’s DMZ, Warren Ellis’s BLACK SUMMER and Alan Moore’s V FOR VENDETTA and WATCHMEN all could conceivably change people’s minds about political issues, and for that comics are as valid as any other format. But when I’m writing about them? At best I’m a critic, at worst a glorified fangirl.

I’d love to do real journalism when I get out of school. Love to go write for one of the heavy magazines and do long, in-depth investigative pieces that require months of work at a time.

But it ain’t what I do now.

And it ain’t what Rachel Maddow is doing, either. Or Keith Olbermann or Chris Matthews or Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity or Brit Hume. At least not most of the time.

I usually expect revisionist history (or historical fiction) that purports to show the women’s side of things to have a rough time of it, for the simple fact that quite often the women had a rough time of it. A story of the Boleyn sisters isn’t going to end well—we all know what happened to Anne Boleyn.

But still, I would assume that the film would attempt to take some sort of a feminist tack, right?

I’d be wrong in this case. (Spoilers below) » Read the rest of this entry «

(h/t Pop Feminist for the video link)

I knew it was only a matter of time before Tina Fey played Sarah Palin. Her twisted, brilliant comedy writer’s brain must have exploded when she first saw a picture of McCain’s VP nominee. I mean, really, she’s note perfect (though I think Tina’s cuter, but I’m not exactly unbiased).

This clip, though, was better than I expected. By placing mock-Palin next to mock-Clinton, Fey and Poehler manage to both poke fun at both candidates and make several points about Palin. Most notably, that she is not Hillary Clinton. Also, that it’s bloody hypocritical for the McCain camp and supporters to cry sexism now.

Most importantly, though, they remind us that it’s NOT sexist to ask a female candidate about her positions and preparation for the job. That we had a qualified, smart, strong woman candidate and that this election shouldn’t be about choosing a woman for woman’s sake.

In this age of the utter failure of journalism to even approach doing its job properly, at least we have comedy. Yes, we have the blogosphere, but no lefty political blog comes even close to the audience of Saturday Night Live.