While Stieg Larsson’s literary Girl trilogy has received generally positive reviews, reactions to the Swedish film have been mixed.  Having finished the first and second books, and now having viewed the film, I feel ready to throw my two-cents out there.  But first, the disclaimer-y stuff: There are certain to be spoilers, but I’ll try to keep it to book one and the film.  Also, be aware (if you aren’t already) this series contains graphic depictions of violence against women and sexual assault.

I’ll start with my summary and conclusion in case you’re using this to determine whether or not to read the series or watch the film:

If you’re the kind of person who likes psychological thrillers, non-slasher horror films, and murder-mystery style suspense, you’ll probably like this series.  If you like those types of things AND choose to view the themes of the series through a feminist lens, you may well be impressed.  But if you can’t handle violent films on the principle of the matter, this film will overload your system.  If you can’t handle violent films AND choose to view the themes of the series through a feminist lens, you’ll probably be pissed.  And revolted.

Let’s take a look at the first installment in the series. Read the rest of this entry »

Eve Ensler is best known as the woman who wrote The Vagina Monologues.  Although I have not read The Vagina Monologues or seen them performed live, I have seen them on film a few times (including an awesome Logo documentary called “Beautiful Daughters” in which Eve wrote a new set of monologues for trans women).  Eve has a very direct style, but also works a great deal of beauty, imagery, and personality into her art.  She recently released a new series of pieces entitled I Am An Emotional Creature: the Secret Life of Girls Around The World.

I Am An Emotional Creature is similar to The Vagina Monologues in many ways, but focuses on the experiences of adolescent women.  It is deeply personal and contains many stories of many different young women: girls on the basketball team, girls who dream of horses, girls with body image concerns, girls with pregnancy concerns, girls who have been raped, girls who have been slave, girls who work in sweat shops, girls who want a new pair of UGGS.  The pieces are each works of fiction, not inspired by personal interviews, which I found somewhat disappointing.  Although the passion and personality that Eve wove into these stories would certainly make them engaging when performed by young women, there is a slight hollowness to knowing they were written by an adult woman stepping into the mindset of an adolescent, rather than adolescent voices themselves.

At times it gets a little painful.  Like the dramatic Mean Girls scenario of the pressure to be (and stay) popular.  The teen panic about deciding whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term, ended with concerns about not liking it very much when the baby won’t stop crying.  There is mention of the dreaded “sexting.”  What I mean to say, is that it sometimes feels as though some freaked out moms from a 20/20 special got a hand in this.  At other times it gets very painful.  Not in the 20/20 way, but in the tingles down your spine as you read about female genital mutilation/sex slavery/kidnapping and torture sort of way.  Some of the stories might be too much to stomach if we did know that they came directly from interviews.

But being an emotional creature, being a girl, being a woman, isn’t all pain and suffering, even if it appears that way through the first two thirds of the book.  There are a few positive pieces tucked in at the end, but they feel… different.  This is not to say that they aren’t all empowering in some way: stating these experiences, validating the reality and emotion inherent in them is empowering.  However, it starts to feel a little gloomy and a little dramatic and extreme from time to time.  (I would love it if we could just not ever use the term “sexting” in a tsk-tsk concerned-grown-up kind of way again.)

My favorite part of the book were the lists of descriptors of what it is to be a girl.  Lists like “What don’t you like about being a girl?,” “What’s a good girl?,” “Things I heard about sex,” “Things I like about my body.”  Here the simplicity of little phrases and words illuminate the complexity of being female in today’s world: the variety of experiences and attitudes and values.

I Am An Emotional Creature is a quick read, but probably something to be revisited many times to truly soak in.  I would love to see this performed by young women as a high school or community production.

[This was one of the very first posts at feministhemes, debuting on April 26, 2009.  Memories...]

Feminism has become one of the dirtiest “f-words” in the English language.  Although its specific origin can be debated, American feminism’s big break came as a result of the womens suffrage movement in the early 1900s, wherein white American women fought for the right to vote.  Additional concerns, such as sexual, reproductive, and economic rights were also present at the time, and continue to be key issues in following feminist “waves.”  When most people today think of feminism, they tend to associate the movement with women’s rights activists of the sixties and seventies such as Gloria Steinem, Betty Freidan, and their emphasis on the sexual liberation and labor rights of white American women.  Current feminist movements are continuously challenged – many American’s today see feminism as dead (“You can vote, you can work, what else do you want?”), unnecessary (“Third-wave feminism is superficial and only concerned with pop-culture”), or at the very least divided (“Your cause is less important than xyz”).

One of the most justified criticisms of past feminist movements (as well as many modern feminists) is its exclusivity: what about women of color?  In the 1970s bell hooks, one of the most outspoken feminists of color took up this question.  Although it took years, in 1981 hooks published her first book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism.  Inspired by her experiences as an African American student at Stanford University, hooks set upon the challenge of compiling a record of the true history of black women in America, unfiltered by white patriarchal historians.

The book begins with an examination of the slave life of black women.  hooks argues that black women were the greatest sufferers from the slave lifestyle, despite the historical understanding that black men were the most put upon as a result of slavery.  hooks explains that historians allege that black men were “emasculated” by slavers, that their inability to “protect” their women was a great loss.  However, she reports that the struggles that black women were forced to endure were much more widespread and painful.  On slave ships, black men were shackled together while black women roamed free on the boats, naked and vulnerable to the sailors.  On land, black men worked long, hard hours in the fields, while black women were expected to work in the fields, in the house, and often in the bed of her owner.  Black men refused to do “woman’s work,” while black women were expected to care for both their men and their owners.  In order to reduce affairs between black men and white women, any child born to a white mother was considered “free,” while children of black mothers and white fathers were born slaves.  In this way, the sexual lives of all women were controlled by the white supremacist patriarchal society, with the greatest sexual freedom allotted to the white man and the least to black woman.

Throughout the book, hooks describes the dual exclusion that black women face in America.  For example, black women were forced to choose to fight by the side of the black man for his vote or the white woman for hers, knowing that either way she would remain politically voiceless.  Later on, black women could choose between the Black Panthers fight for black equality within a patriarchal framework or the feminist movement, which emphasized the rights of upper- and middle-class white women without consideration for women of color. Black women are subjected to sexual discrimination within their racial group, and racial discrimination within their gender group.

Ain’t I a Woman is a difficult book to read.  As a young, white feminist I often felt the need to justify myself to hooks as I read her book.  For example, “I would never do that,” or “This was written almost thirty years ago, its not like that now,” or “But I’m from the north, we were never as bad as the south!”  I felt angry, defensive, and guilty.  I didn’t want to be responsible or accountable for the exclusion of others from a movement that has begun to mean so much to me.  I often wanted to put the book down and walk away, but…  I didn’t.  And as I continue to learn about diversity, race, gender, and politics I will keep bell’s lessons with me, facing the painful and hoping to come through it a better person.  Feminism is a complex and controversial movement, but many young feminists like myself do not see feminism’s primary concern as the rights of privileged White women – we believe that all human beings are created equal and that gender roles and judgments are harmful to men and women alike, across many cultures, and within diverse groups.  Modern feminism seeks to give a voice to the powerless and extend the rights of the privileged to everyone.

To learn more about bell hooks, visit these links, or to purchase Ain’t I a Woman from South End Press click here.

There were two things that had me pumped up about The Wild Things: 1. Jim Henson muppets, and 2. Karen O.  I was never very attached to the story as a kid, and was pretty sure that it was going to be a hyped-up-indie-fest as a film.  However, this was also during that period that I kept going to movies expecting little and being blown away (Away We Go, Jennifer’s Body, Paper Heart, and Whip It!), so maybe that explains the mild obsession that overtook me after seeing The Wild Things last fall.  The film, the soundtrack, and the book all made their mark on me, and all have a little feminist spin in my opinion.  Let’s break it down:

The Film

Sadly this trailer doesn’t incorporate the Karen O led music that really contributes to the feel of the film, nor does it capture what, to me, was the most meaningful theme: Max’s relationship with his mother.  What? you say?  His mother?  Please, this is a story about a naughty and wild little boy. On the surface, yes, but Max’s relationship with his mom is what gave the film depth.

Max is being raised by a single mother who has a new boyfriend, which can be hard on any kid.  It’s hard even into adulthood to understand split parents, and when a newcomer steps in things become even more difficult.  Max was already a pain-in-the-butt kid, and between a fight with his older sister and the apparent intrusion of a new man into his home, he loses it.  He runs away and winds up living among the Wild Things as their king.  And each Wild Thing offers us an insight into Max’s relationship with his mom.  Carol represents the possessiveness Max feels towards her; Alexander represents how ignored he feels; Judith represents his difficult and disagreeable side; Ira represents the doting and needy part of him; and the Bull represents the stoic role our society asks us to show when we’re really experiencing pain.  K.W. on the other hand, represents Max’s mom.

K.W. is warm, loving, kind, and is more complex than the other Wild Things can understand.  She has a different level of maturity, she needs relationships outside of the group.  Carol in particular is resentful of this and alternates between loving K.W. and not knowing how to express it and loathing her in a violent and possessive way.  This is a clear reflection of how Max has treated his mother on the night he ran away.  When Carol turns on Max for letting him down as a king, it is K.W. that protects him, hiding him in her mouth.  For a moment after it is safe, K.W. wants to keep Max, but she understands that as much as she loves him, she must let him go.  Whether Max has the capacity to understand this as deeply as I see it or not, this is the turning point where he realizes he needs his mother and must return to her, hopefully with a new respect for her as a person, not just a mom.

After the jump, an analysis of the soundtrack (including an interview with Karen O.) and the book

A production of To Kill A Mockingbird came to our small town this week, and having reread the book for the first time since 10th grade, I was thrilled to see it!  After finishing the book this summer, I poked my nose around the internet a bit to get a better idea about its critical reception.  I was surprised to learn that although it was originally heralded as a controversial and monumental statement about race relations in the south, the book has not been received favorably by many African Americans or feminists.

In reading the book for the first time in my adult life, I was able to truly comprehend the importance of the trial at hand – perhaps even in the 10th grade I was as naive as Scout, or maybe I just wasn’t that engaged in the reading since it was required.  Reading it after spending two years in a community that is even more homogeneously white than the community in which I grew up, the racial messages of the book were very prominent to me, and I came away feeling like I understood the hubub.  The fear, hatred, and judgment of the unknown, including (or maybe especially) racial differences, have become more visible to me in that time, and I felt the book did a good job of condemning such ignorance.

As excited as I was to see the play, suddenly the criticisms of the novel became clear and understandable to me.  As I sat in the theater, filled with college freshmen required to attend for their Creative Arts and English 1010s, I realized that the supposed triumph over one form of prejudice simply promoted various other forms.  And I feared that even if these homogeneous, pious young adults were paying attention to the most prominent message of the production, racial tolerance, the acceptance of sexism and classism were being reinforced.  What messages would these students really walk away with?

Read the rest of this entry »

The Beatles are very dear to my heart.  I know, everyone says that, but I really, really mean it.

My infatuation began in middle school, with sleepover parties spent watching Help! and Yellow Submarine, then was followed by a George Harrison inspired experimental phase with Hinduism in high school.  In college, I took a three credit humanities course on the music and impact of The Beatles, and for my 21st birthday I attended a Beatles tribute concert.  The recent release of the remastered catalog, as well Beatles edition Trivial Pursuit and Rock Band have caused me pain on a very personal level, as my graduate student budget can’t feed my addiction at this point.

However, between gifts and the bargain section at Borders, I have accumulated a respectable Beatles library of (hardcover) books about the Beatles, by those who actually knew them or are respected Beatles scholars (yeah, those exist).  Two of the most interesting books that I’ve read on the subject each came from very personal perspectives, and when taken together form an interesting picture of the men behind the band.  These books are the memoirs of Beatles wives Cynthia Lennon and Pattie Boyd.

Both stories start out full of romance and excitement. In Cynthia’s case, she had already met and started dating John before the Beatles had left Liverpool. Although John’s temper revealed itself early in their relationship, Cynthia’s love for him (as well as their unplanned pregnancy with son Jullian) led to an early marriage. She writes about their “secret marriage,” which was kept under wraps to increase the popularity of the band (four bachelors was more “marketable”), as well as being surrounded by John’s adoring fans, who unsurprisingly were less adoring of Cynthia.  Despite the crazed fans, Cynthia and Julian lived happily together enjoying the good life while John toured and wrote them beautiful letters from the road.

Pattie didn’t meet George until the Beatles had gained more notoriety, but with a history of modeling, she was more familiar with the limelight already.  Pattie was an extra in the Beatles’ first film, A Hard Days Night, and she and George fell in love at first sight.  In fact, one of the first things George said to her was “Will you marry me?”  Pattie laughed, and George asked “Well if you won’t marry me, will you have dinner with me?”  They soon were married, and, as a token of George’s love, Ms. Boyd is blessed enough to be the muse of the most covered song of all time, “Something.”  Pattie writes fondly of touring with the band, of fancy parties, and of the Beatles’ infamous journey to India to study under the Maharishi.

For many women (and some men) across generations, the idea of being married to a Beatle sounds like an absolute dream.  However, the honeymoon can’t last forever, and it didn’t for either woman.

The honeymoon’s over after the jump…

Persepolis is an easy to read, easy to understand, and easy to identify with introduction to the Iranian Revolution of the 1980s.  Initially published in two volumes, the graphic novel is Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of growing up in Iran as a part of a revolutionary family that did its best to exist in the new regime while dreaming of a better future for their country.  Marji is outspoken about human rights from a very young age, explaining that Marx was one of her childhood heroes.  This gets her in trouble often at school, making fun of the veil she must wear, speaking out about political prisoners, and dressing like a punk in the conservative culture.

After a family friend is arrested for harboring a young woman who came from a communist family, Marji’s parents explain the danger of being a political activist in Iran: because it is against the law to kill a virgin, the woman was married to a soldier the night before her execution.  Fearing for Marji’s safety, her parents send her to France to study at a boarding school before her outspokenness and unpopular beliefs can get her into bigger trouble than being expelled.

In France, Marji struggles to reconcile her feelings of loyalty to her country and family with her desire for greater freedoms than she will ever be allowed in Iran.  Furthermore, she is an outsider with such a dramatic history that her classmates think she is lying when she describes the tribulations she’s experienced.

Beyond being an introduction to the politics of the Iranian Revolution, Persepolis is a coming of age tale as Marji grows from a small child into a young woman.  While her experiences of the terror of war are more than anyone who has grown up taking safety for granted can even imagine, her personal struggles are easy to identify and empathize with, making the story easier to comprehend.

Persepolis has also been released as a film.  As Satrapi illustrated her memoir and was highly involved in the creation of the film, the story and art are consistent across mediums.

I thoroughly enjoyed both the book and the film. I recommend reading the book first, as a lot of details and background are lost in the film, but I commend the feature on being so accurate to the book. For those of us struggling to understand the current events of Iran, Persepolis is a fantastic introduction to revolution and divides that have been at work in the country for decades.

Not long ago, I spent a day at my favorite coffeeshop reading journal articles for fun – yes, this is a sign that I am a graduate student.  I recently subscribed to Psychology of Women Quarterly, and was engrossed in an article about women’s self-sexualizing behavior – in other words, women seeing themselves as sexual objects and engaging in sexually objectifying behaviors of their own volition.  The article reminded me of a book I had read about, but hadn’t read.  My favorite coffeeshop being in my favorite bookstore, I headed over to the women’s studies section and picked it up.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I remembered reading about Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, but I couldn’t remember if it was presented to me in a positive or negative light.  Flipping through the book and checking out the blurbs (“Culturally astute and not at all preachy.” – Psychology Today; “Feminism’s newest and most provocative voice.” – New York Post), I decided to give it a go.  However, another blurb caught my eye and perhaps should have been my first warning sign that despite not being “preachy” it was likely to be judgmental.  According to Kurt Andersen (author of Turn of the Century, which I’ve never heard of): “Ariel Levy understands that while we may defend to the death every woman’s right to look and act like a whore, it doesn’t mean we’re prigs if we find it unfortunate.”  Whoa.

In her book, Levy analyzes “raunch culture” from Girls Gone Wild to Playboy to gay bars, each of which are equally bad according to her narrative.  You’ll be hard pressed to find a feminist that finds GGW empowering, and we’re pretty split about Playboy, but it seems gay bars would probably make the cut as not explicitly bad for women.  In fact, I’m more likely to see these as markers on a continuum.  There is a difference between sexual exploitation of drunken college girls, consensual participation in pornography, and being allowed to express one’s sexuality in what one would presume to be a safe environment of like-minded people.  What’s more, in describing “pressure” to participate in GGW (which is more specifically blatant sexual harassment to the point of nausea on the reader’s part), Levy criticizes not the hooting frat boys, but the resigned young women and the women behind the scenes.  If we’re going to criticize GGW, why not address the multiple rape and sexual harassment cases against creator Joe Francis rather than the victims of his exploitation?

Levy portrays the world in strict black and white terms.  Good feminists appreciate the early women’s movements’ struggles against objectification and subsequently baulk at modern commodified sexuality.  Any woman involved in the sex industry (from college GGW to media and business CEOs), as well as any woman who is known for her sexual promiscuity (Levy refers to Paris Hilton and Tara Reid as “prizes”) are at best victims and more often traitors, void of all value as a “feminist” and ungrateful for what their foremothers fought for.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to a chance encounter in the Border’s bargain bin, I finally picked up Diablo Cody’s naughty memoir Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper. Yes, the Diablo Cody who wrote Juno.  And yes, she still managed to work a hamburger phone into the story.

Knowing enough about Cody to expect a snappy description of her year long foray into the sex industry, I braced myself for what proved to be an R-rated journey into the world of strip clubs, peep shows, and phone sex.

After stomaching the chapter on strip clubs from Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man, hearing the story from the other side of the stage was very interesting.  In many ways, the observations of both women were similar; the expressionless dancers, the bored connoisseurs, the secrecy and shame on both ends of the exchange.  However, while Vincent’s strip club experiences seemed wholly dissappointing and disturbing, Cody’s experiences range from empty to empowered as she strives to understand how she ended up on the pole and what her secret career says about her.

Cody’s memoir offers a first-person perspective on the world of sex work – short of outright prostitution Diablo dipped her toe into nearly every pool.  Her book never comes across as preachy, and is more observational than it is analytical.  It neither promotes nor condemns the sex industry, and Cody’s experiences never (okay, rarely) come across as traumatizing or upsetting.  In the August/September issue of BUST magazine, Cody has this to say about the lasting impact of stripping she has personally experienced:

I never internalized the shit that I did as a stripper and in the peep show.  For some reason, it did not affect me in as primal a way as it seems to affect other women.  When I think about that stuff, it’s still funny to me.  When I wrote about it in “Candy Girl,” I was laughing; when I read that book I still laugh.  I have never looked back on that stuff and felt ruined or hurt, wheras I’m learning to understand from talking to other women that they do feel hurt, they do feel exploited.  That they do look back on that stuff and want to barf.  I don’t know why I’m not like them.

Candy Girl, and perhaps Diablo Cody herself, seems to be a Rorschach test for feminists who are quick to interpret her work for better or worse.  In the interest of solidarity, I am less critical of Cody’s trendy lingo and hot topics than I am encouraged to see a female author and screenwriter climbing the Hollywood ranks and bringing these women’s issues into the spotlight.

Part Alice in Wonderland, part Nightmare Before Christmas, Neil Gaiman’s Coraline is one of the most fascinating children’s books I’ve read in a long time.

Coraline Jones is an explorer who loves adventure and hates recipes.  No one ever gets her name right (it’s Coraline, not Caroline), and no one ever has time for her until she stumbles into an alternate universe on the other side of a mysterious little door in her family’s new apartment.  On the other side of the door, Coraline meets her Other Mother, who has all the time in the world for her.  In fact, Coraline is the only thing that really matters to the Other Mother, who kidnaps Coraline’s real parents when she refuses to stay in the alternate world.  Coraline braves the tricks, traps and monsters laying in wait for her in order to save her parents and the other children who were kept by the Other Mother.  In the end, Coraline chooses the real world, with all its dissappointments, over the fantasy world offered by the Other Mother, and buries the key to the mysterious door to end the Other Mother’s game once and for all.

If you haven’t heard of the book, perhaps you’ve heard of the film, directed by Henry Selick (“The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “James and the Giant Peach”) and voiced by Dakota Fanning and Teri Hatcher.

It’s rare (in book and film) to find a story about a brave little girl who doesn’t depend on sidekicks or external factors to get herself out of trouble.  In fact, Coraline is more like Dorothy, who never lost sight of her purpose in the land of Oz and confronted her oppressor in the end, than Alice, who blindly stumbled through Wonderland until her spell wore off.  However, the film (unnecessarily) added a male sidekick (Wyborn) to spice up the action, or balance the gender ratio, whichever.  Despite “Why Were You Born” (as Coraline dubbed her companion), I enjoyed the film, and would recommend it (and the book) to girls and boys alike.

Coraline is a refreshingly empowering and unique character in an avant garde modern fairy tale.