Archive for Politics

Interacting with Image

October 18, 2006 / / 9 comments

I was kinda wondering last night how I ended up being included in two Big Fat Carnivals. I don’t consider myself a fat activist particularly.

Here’s the thing: Both of the included blogs were about movies. And this is what fascinates me; the image. The interaction between images and social constructs. The things we see on-screen (or on TV or in magazines) reflect the unspoken and often unconscious prejudices we hold. What is acceptable to see, what is unacceptable to see; what is shown as good, shown as evil, never shown at all. I honestly don’t see how you can watch movies with a critical eye and not notice the sexism and the narrow definition of acceptibility.

What makes The Celluloid Closet a great movie? It’s because it looks at homosexuality in the movies through that lens. Which is to say, it just looks. It looks and asks, ‘What is being shown here? What is not being shown?’ It doesn’t make any activist statements particularly, or issue any answers on right and wrong. It just says ‘Look at this.’ It exercises the intelligence of pattern recognition, and the pattern it recognizes is largely homophobic.

I’m interested in that. I’m interested in what movies say about women and age and size and Teh Gay and Teh Slutness and race and money. All that.

I’m very capable of getting worked up over triviality, because we express ourselves in triviality. The recent blogstorm over the intersection of feminism and femme beautification has everything to do with that. Looking For Mr. Goodbar says more about our reaction to women who have casual sex than any dissertation or politician ever could.

So, yes. I will keep reviewing movies. In case you were wondering.

(A cross-post is worth a thousand words.)

Follow the money

October 15, 2006 / / 3 comments

Here’s a thing. When the Bush administration starves our school districts of cash and then makes them waste what they do have on NCLB, wingnuts are empowered to destroy school systems that don’t have the funds to fight back. “Lawsuit” is a very scary word when there’s no money in the till.

I was thinking about the art teacher in Texas. The news report say she was fired based on one parent complaining. One. After multiple approvals and winning awards and blah blah. One. Which reads to me like fear of lawsuit, and that implies things about the pressures that the school district is under and how much money it has to fight if it chose to fight.

A big chunk of the wingnut agenda has been to take over the schools. Weaken the schools by starving them of money, and they’re easier to take over. Maybe it’s just that simple.

(No cross-post left behind.)

Relational Rights

October 11, 2006 / / 4 comments

Per Shakes, today is National Coming Out Day. Shakes posted a list of reasons why she, a straight woman, is so fierce an advocate for gay rights. I want to add my own.

Gay rights are my rights. Yours too.

If gay rights aren’t a reality, we’re voting “yes” on standardized sexuality; on forcing all of us to goosestep to a sexual norm. And I may not be gay, but I ain’t normal.

Is anyone? (Actually, yes, some people are.) Most of us like a little kink, or have strolled into the forbidden zone. Few of us want to be confined by a bunch of heterosexual rules that expand like housework to fill the space allotted them.

Gay rights are human rights. They are relational rights. They are our rights no matter who we are.

Bubba and the Comedian

October 11, 2006 / / 2 comments

So about six weeks ago I saw this standup comic while I was on a cruise. The crowd was mostly African-American. (Actually, it was too dark to see the crowd, but when he said “How many sistahs are here?” he got a huge round of me! me! type applause. Definitely a majority.)

So he does a Dubya joke. He gets a weak laugh, maybe half the crowd or less, and a smattering of boos. Then he starts to do a Clinton joke (by which I mean, he gets as far as “Well, at least Clinton isn’t President anymore, he…”). A huge eruption of booing. I mean, stop in your tracks, can’t finish your joke kind of booing.

I guess it’s true what they say about Big Dog being the first black President of the U.S. I tell you, it was heart-warming.

Marshalling everyone into straight lines

October 10, 2006 / / 2 comments

Garrison Keillor wrote a brilliant piece in The Funny Times, on the attacks on Nancy Pelosi, California, and San Francisco. Here’s the money quote:

People who want to take a swing at San Francisco should think twice. Yes, the Irish coffee at Fisherman’s Wharf is overpriced…but the Bay Area is the cradle of the computer software industry, which continues to create jobs for our children. The iPod was not developed by Baptists in Waco. There may be a reason for this. Creative people thrive in a climate of openness and tolerance, since some great ideas start out sounding ridiculous. Creativity is a key to economic pregress. Authoritarianism is stifling. I don’t believe that Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard were gay, but what’s important is: In San Francisco, it doesn’t matter so much. When the cultural Sturmbannfuhrers try to marshal everyone into straight lines, it has consequences for the economic future of our country.

Nice. Smart that someone ties the scary nasty gay gay California free gayness to Silicon Valley and economic growth. Because Keillor’s right, they are related. Just like living a fearful, repressed life full of hatred is tied to a lack of creativity. And I also like not standing there with our tails between our legs when they talk about our wild lifestyle. Fire both barrels, sez I!

(I left my cross-post in San Francisco.)

Things that happen to pressure cookers

October 5, 2006 / / 10 comments

Here’s my take on the whole Foley thing: It’s not a coincidence.

It’s not a bizarre coincidence that the co-chair of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children is also a pedophile. And it’s not just a coincidence that it’s mostly (not exclusively, but mostly, and by an impressive margin) Conservatives who are being knocked down like tenpins by sex scandals. Yeah, part of it is that power corrupts, and the consolidation of power that has increased dramatically in Washington these past five years has been massively corrupting, particularly of Conservatives.

But it’s not just that. It’s that it’s built into the system.

When you suppress, suppress, suppress, you create a pressure cooker. Pressure cookers only do the one thing, yet everyone is all suprised by the explosion. In terms of psychology, you generally only suppresssuppresssuppress when you have something serious that needs suppressing, and you generally only blame everyone else for being a perv when you need to avoid blaming yourself. It’s called “projection.” Look it up.

These Conservative freaks with their constant and intense fascination with Teh Gay and Teh Sex and Teh Dildoes, who want to make laws about my bedroom and yours, my marriage and yours, my orgasm and yours, what do you think is on their minds? This morning, while I was deciding if I should go back to using an alarm clock, and thinking about a writing project, and making coffee, and thinking about t-shirts (I swear by the Goddess, I was thinking about t-shirts), the Foleys and Dawn Edens and Santorums and Fred Phelpses of the world were thinking about gay gay naughty gay sex with boys how naughty how gay I must write a column to denounce that oh look I have a woody.

That’s how it works.

Two things: (1) If you’re a sick motherfucker, you have a higher tendency to denounce everyone else for being a sick motherfucker. (2) If you have natural, normal urges, ’cause you’re, lemme think…human, that you suppresssuppresssuppress, those urges, when inevitably expressed, won’t be expressed in the nice, normal way they started.

I’ve written about this before. Suppression is not only a bad model, but it’s had a good long test run, and people should have figured out by now that it’s not working.

Call for Change

October 4, 2006 / / 7 comments

A couple of weeks ago, I participated in a MoveOn event called Call for Change. I’ll be doing this again in a couple of weeks, and I highly recommend it. I had a lot of concerns about doing political phoning, and every one of those concerns was answered.

  • First, it was fun. I was meeting other political progressives in my area, and you know, it’s relaxing to just bitch about the state of this country without clenching for the inevitable counter-attack.
  • Second, it was well-organized. There was very little figuring out what to do. Everything was provided for us in a clear and understandable way.
  • One thing that bothers me is, as a New Yorker, I’m in the bluest of blue states. So there’s the preaching to the choir factor. Well, MoveOn had us phoning into a swing district. I have free weekends on my cell plan, so the fact that I was calling Pennsylvania didn’t bother me, and I was reaching an area where there was an opportunity to make a change.

The calls were non-confrontational. We were essentially gathering phone numbers of Democratic and potentially-Democratic voters so that get-out-the-vote calls could be made nearer election day. When we reached conservatives, we were instructed to thank them politely and hang up. Meanwhile, for the undecided and ignorant, we were feeding them the Democratic name and the idea that they could vote for him.

The whole thing took about three hours on a Saturday afternoon, and I was done by six. So…easy! I recommend the experience.

Big Fat Link

October 3, 2006 / / Comments Off on Big Fat Link

The latest Big Fat Carnival is up, and I’m in it. Go look!

The Taming of the Shrew

October 3, 2006 / / 6 comments

Continuing on my tirade about whores whores and more whores, I’ve decided that the only acceptable script for an interesting woman in which said woman survives happily is The Taming of the Shrew. All scripts written before 1988 (and most since) punish a woman for her freedom, especially her sexual freedom, as well as her willingness to compete with men.

(In the old days, women were punished for unmarried sex. Unmarried sex=slut. In recent years, sexual freedom is not simply unmarried sex. A woman can have unmarried sex without necessarily being a slut, but only if it’s fundamentally pre-married, not un-married. Uncommitted sex is still Teh Slut; women who fall in love and fuck are not punished, but women who fuck for fun are.)

Punishment is herewith defined as death (Looking for Mr. Goodbar), prison (High Sierra), drunken misery (the aforementioned The Long Riders), or just plain ol’ humiliation/ostracism/misery (Dangerous Liaisons).

Anyway, cheer up girls. There’s a way out. The Taming of the Shrew (a.k.a. Annie Get Your Gun, a.k.a. Pillow Talk, a.k.a. Spellbound). Any woman who admits her wrongdoing and gets in touch with her inner wifeliness and desire to be dominated by manly manly macho men is off the hook.

Phew.

(Cross-posted for your reading pleasure.)

Monday Movie Review: The Long Riders, the Wild West, and Whores, Whores, Whores

October 2, 2006 / / 6 comments

The Long Riders (1980) 7/10
Jesse and Frank James (James and Stacy Keach) ride with the Younger brothers (David, Keith, and Robert Carradine) and Clell Miller (Randy Quaid), robbing banks and being pursued by the Pinkertons.

The Long Riders is stylish and earthy. It feels authentic and sticks fairly close to history. It is a sweeping celebration of outlaw machismo, a pure boy sort of experience. This movie is so obsessed with the idea of brothers—real brothers—that the fourth Younger brother, John, is here called a cousin, presumably because there wasn’t a fourth Carradine to play him. (The brothers motif continues into Dennis Quaid playing Ed Miller, and Christopher and Nicholas Guest playing the Ford brothers.)

David Carradine gives one of his most relaxed performances. He’s terrific, and the performances in general are good. The complex history of the Civil War guerrilla actions that took place on the Missouri/Kansas border; important to the story of these men, is lost, but then, it is complex, and it’s not the story the movie chooses to tell.

I have lately been fascinated by Westerns. I find them terribly sexy—not in an artificial fetishistic Midnight Cowboy sort of way, but in a cool, silent, scary Man With No Name sort of way; although I suppose that, too, is fetishistic. They are washed, rinsed, and wiped down in testosterone; stark, iconic, and dramatic. They rely on silence, restraint, and very cool costumes.

So naturally, they are usually sexist.

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