Confuse Rick Santorum with Tom Delay? Okay, I know one is a by-product of certain sex acts and one is…not. But every time I read the gorram news I read about one or the other as committing unspeakable acts of evil and greed all over the American people and I dunno, I get mixed up.
Archive for Deborah Lipp
Bond Girls Are Forever
Via Carnival of Feminists 7, I found this post on Bond girls vs. Bond women. The writer deplores the sexualization of girls (“Bond girls” says one actress, is a “sexier” phrase than “Bond women”), and that is certainly a good point. On the other hand, the writer admits to neither knowing nor liking Bond films.
In my book, I do use the term Bond girls, and I also go to some length explaining why I do, and why a feminist can love Bond. The short version of the use of the term is that “Bond girl” is a meme. It isn’t the same as a “Bond woman.” A Bond woman is a woman in a Bond film. She could be Judi Dench, playing Bond’s boss with great skill. She could be eye candy, a woman hanging out poolside in a bikini but never interacting with 007. Both of these are Bond women, but neither plugs into the “Bond girl” meme. For that reason, I persist in using the sexist terminology.
The other thing is that every Bond girl has said she’s not “just” a Bond girl “like the others.” Honor Blackman says it all the time, and she was in the third movie; that’s pretty early on, isn’t it? Well, Ursula Andress has also said it, and she was in the first movie! The fact is, the “bubble-headed bleach blonde” stereotype attached to the meme has never been all that true.
Virtually every woman in the first seven Bond films has been self-directed, independent, strong, owned her own sexuality, and sometimes beat Bond at his own game. Okay, not all of them were exactly as independent or strong as all of the others, but the trend was there from Day (or Film) One. It wasn’t until Roger Moore came along that Bond girls were helpless eye candy in desperate need of rescue. The first four women (in his first two films) were all wimpering idiots. But then, I’ve never been a Moore fan.
What is more interesting to me, as a feminist, is not the whole “girl” vs. “woman” thing, but how a stereotype developed despite the existing evidence. (That stereotype was solidly in place by the early 1960s, and Moore didn’t come along until 1972.) I think the sexual aggression and independence of these women was so threatening that it was easier, and safer, to see them just as beautiful and objectified. (True, they were cast for looks, but so was Connery, so was Moore.) I think to be a beautiful woman in an action film engendered the stereotype despite the evidence. And I think that Bond girls rock.
Too Many Gods Spoil the Broth
Amy wants to know what’s wrong with mixing pantheons, anyway. It’s a good question.
Our culture is an eclectic one by nature; it is the way of modernity. Even the most hidebound Traditionalist is affected by this. At lunch the other day, the Indians were eating pizza, the Libyan had Chinese food, and I ate Greek salad with the Israelis. The polyglot West uses TV, movies, and yes, the Internet, to convey a broad cultural mix. We might think this doesn’t effect religion, but we’d be wrong. In fact, I’d argue that the Radical Christian Right is fighting against exactly this blended cultural stew, more than Paganism, liberalism, or homosexuality, which are merely symptoms of accepting the coexistence of a multiplicity of values. They know that even Christianity grows, changes, and embraces other influences, and it frightens them.
New York Bitch
Pinko Feminist Hellcat has a smart post about “elitist” New York women. The thrust is that too many people are willing to condemn a New York (or Northeastern) feminist woman as de facto “elitist.”
What is that? It’s really not New York women who are, y’know, busting unions and oppressing the poor.
I think there’s two things going on here. First, part of it is an anti-education bias. Somewhere in a screed against a New York feminist bitch, there will always be a reference to her college education. Gods forbid we should have brains. I mean, she’s smart, how bitchy is that?
But more importantly, it’s about attacking women because women are always the easy target. Go after the fur-wearing “rich bitches,” not the leather-clad bikers or, more significantly, the cattle-raising industry. Go after disposable diapers (3% of landfill) instead of corporate waste (80% of landfill), because moms are easier to pick on than corporations. Go after Martha Stewart (endlessly! I thought I was bored with Martha until I got really, truly, full tilt boogie bored with Martha-bashing) instead of the man who actually did the crime.
I don’t know where this instinct to go for the female jugular comes from. Shall we blame the patriarchy? Is it the animal in us, ferally attacking the weak?
I do know we need to resist this impulse. We need to recognize it, acknowledge it (within ourselves or others), and just let it go.
The Delight of Unusual Sentences
1. Gary and Arthur are on the floor, hooking up a gaming system to a TV that is behaving in a recalcitrant manner. Arthur has removed his hat.
Arthur: Don’t step on the hat!
I was actually not all that impressed by this one, but Arthur loved the image, presumably of someone walking across the tops of people’s heads.
2. Me: I found the missing meat.
Arthur: Where was it?
Me: Under the kale.
Arthur: The meat was under the kale?
“Kale” is a funny word.
Dominance and Sexism in Computers
I have two hard drives. One is a master, and one is a slave. I am told that these are offensive terms to some. I have a hard time accepting that, because these aren’t words which are slurs, they are words which have specific meaning, accurate and applicable to the situation: One entity is able to act, but only with direct instructions from another entity, never independently. The other entity directs operations, both of the subordinate entity and of the system as a whole. So this sounds like a slave and a master to me.
I am told I should now call my hard drives primary and secondary. This is non-offensive but inaccurate. A secondary entity should be able to take over if the primary fails; a second-in-command takes over if the captain is incapacitated. If my “primary” hard drive fails, I’m SOL, because the “secondary” has no ability to substitute for the primary. It’s non-promotable; it remains, let’s face it, a slave. I need a new master (or mistress, I guess, but I think hard drives plug into slots, and in the language of hardware, that makes them male).
Arthur says it trivializes a tragedy of history to use the language cavalierly, about computers. I say it is never trivial to use language accurately.
Meanwhile, my motherboard died, but Gary tells me I shouldn’t call it a motherboard, I should call it a mainboard. Except, every time we spoke to a vendor about buying a replacement, the conversation went:
Gary: “We need a mainboard.”
Vendor: “Do you mean motherboard?”
So it’s an idea whose time has not yet come.
Anyway, since when is “mother” sexist? It is gendered, yes, but I am wracking my brains and failing to come up with a way that this demeans either gender. I like that my computer has a primary female part (especially what with the masters and slaves running around inside—presumably with collars and whips and such).
Monday Movie Reviews: Down With Love
Down With Love (2003) 6/10
In mod mod mod 1962, Barbara Novak (Renée Zellweger) writes a self-help book that advises women to give up love, demand equality in the workplace, and have sex “like a man; a la carte.??? Famous writer/ladies man Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor) determines to trick Novak into falling in love with him so that he can write an exposé.
Down With Love is a pretty movie, with bright colors and bold costumes, in exactly the way 1962 was pretty and bold. » Read more..
Woe O Woe
The computer is still out of commission. We replaced the hard drive, only to discover it’s the motherboard. Now I’m waiting for the motherboard to arrive via UPS. I know the US Post Office is closed today for MLK, but I’m not sure about UPS, so I might lose another day.
Best. T-shirts. Ever.
Ilani Ilani found great, great t-shirts for geeky types.
Who’s the Victim?
Atrios writes about a heinous Jonah Goldberg post, and an excellent Glenn Greenwald response.
Both Atrios and Greenwald use this quote from Goldberg:
I understand the need for following the procedural niceties, but as a plain moral common sense issue, if you are a drug dealer and keep drugs on the premises with your child, you get zero-point-zero sympathy from me if your kids are searched, warrant or no. It may be wrong for the cops to do it. But you are not a victim for choosing a life where you can rationally expect to expose your kids to far greater risks than a search by a polite cop. The kid’s a victim — of bad parents.
(In case you’re not up on this issue, the reference is to Alito’s argument that a 10 year old girl could be strip-searched without a warrant, because there was an existing warrant to search the girl’s alleged drug-dealing father.)
Greenwald excellently describes how dangerous Goldberg’s ideas are; he wants to sell off the Bill of Rights for the sake of being “tough” on drugs. But neither Atrios nor Greenwald point out a rather reprehensible corollary to Goldberg’s ill-considered argument.
Goldberg says “The kid’s a victim — of bad parents.” Really? ‘Cause I thought the kid was a victim of a warrantless strip-search. While Goldberg is snotting off about how drug dealers (he doesn’t say “alleged”) aren’t “victims,” he completely forgets that they weren’t the ones victimized, that theirs weren’t the rights violated.
A ten year old girl was strip-searched. Without a warrant. And, it turns out, without finding any drugs. Goldberg thinks it’s the parents who are the portray themselves as victims, and the parents who may, or may not, deserve sympathy—presumably because children are simply parental property or appendages. But whether or not the child is a victim of having bad parents, she is certainly the victim of a violating and illegal search. Her rights should not be set aside while we discuss Constitutionality. She is the victim.
