Lady Gaga expresses her hopes for the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, bans on gay blood donors, and restrictions and discrimination faced by teens in the American education system.  (She’s not super well-spoken, but she has some inspiring points – it’d be great to hear more of this type of thing from public figures in pop culture who, whether they like it or not and whether they admit it or not, are role models for many youth and adolescents.)

“There are so many archaic things floating around in the the government right now that are so misinformed and so wrong and it’s very confusing.  It’s very confusing for young people, especially, you know, 14 year-olds in high school that are getting sent home because they have t-shirts that say ‘gay’ on it, as if gay is a curse word or somehow inappropriate.  I just think that, in terms of education – sexual education, political education, and social education in schools – I think that it’s important to be specific about civil rights and a person’s worth.  No person’s worth any less than another human being based on their sexual orientation.”

You can check out more moments of Lady Gaga’s Larry King interview over at Jezebel.

I caved and watched the second installment of the Twilight series this weekend.  I thought I hated the first one, but my inner adolescent still compelled me to watch it twice.  New Moon, on the other hand, I could barely stomach just the once.  Because from what I can tell, the Twilight series is entirely about construing relationship violence, control, manipulation, and disempowering women as “romantic.”  Which, to me, means that Stephanie Meyer either has a much sadder background than we know about, or that she has been so privileged and pampered (and brainwashed?) that this kind of thing is the stuff of her fantasies.  And she thinks that we should pass this on to our youth.

Anyone who is reading this probably already knows the plot (and probably has stumbled upon this in a search for more fanaticism about their favorite Robert Pattinson and the Glory of Twilight), but in case you don’t here it is:

Edward’s family throws a B-day party for Bella, who gets the mother of all paper cuts while opening her presents (for serious, who has ever paper cut herself so seriously on WRAPPING PAPER that BLOOD DROPS ON THE CARPET?).  The youngest vampire in their little friendly foster family goes wild and Edward throws Bella into a glass table.  Resulting in more blood.  So Edward dumps Bella the next day under the pretenses that she’ll be safer if they go on as if they’d never met.  Which is a nice way of saying “my family wants to eat you so we (a family of vampires) are moving to Florida.”  Also, “I am a boy and I’m hurting you because I love you so much and I know so much better about your own welfare than you do.”  But not “sorry I threw you across the room into a glass table last night.”

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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.

Sady Doyle has an awesome post up at The Awl regarding the Rivers Cuomo of our adolescent angst.  Weezer was kind of a big deal to those of us who were teens in the 90s, especially those that considered our selves “different,” “alternative,” “artsy,” or generally non-jock (although I certainly knew quite a few members of the swim team who were big fans).  Weezer was for the self-declared geeks who enjoyed seeing rock stars wearing grampa sweaters and Buddy Holly glasses, because it gave us a little validation for doing it ourselves.

Weezer was what I listened to while I rode around my yard in circles for two hours every Saturday on our riding lawn mower.  Weezer was the little “=W=” I drew on my notebooks.  Weezer was one of the first concerts my friends and I went to only to be picked up by someone’s mom in a minivan.  Weezer was cool.

But Weezer was weird.  I mean, there was a quirkiness to the self-deprecating, kind of creepy music.  Rivers was this wiry little nerd that was cute and deep and non-threatening in most ways, but then he’d sing stuff about girls who put their make-up on the shelf when he wasn’t around and whose diaries he read and all kinds of other weird, not-so-lady-friendly junk.

I still listen to the Blue Album and Pinkerton (the new stuff never did it for me) on occasion, and ease my cognitive dissonance by telling myself that it’s all tongue-in-cheek, and after all, this guy is primarily focusing on how his ridiculous ideas about love don’t seem to be working out anyway.  But it’s nice to know that someone else sees the problems inherent in many of the messages.

Rivers Cuomo was the Michael Cera of his generation.  But he was a Michael Cera who played guitar, loud guitar, and he sang. Imagine Michael Cera in a stadium, screaming about how girls don’t like him back and it makes him sad sometimes, a guitar strapped to his hips. The power unleashed was nuclear.

And this:

“Pinkerton,” basically, is the album where Weezer got creepy. And there is a lot of creepiness to be dealt with. There is “Pink Triangle,” in which Rivers Cuomo Chases an Amy, laments, “she’s a lesbian! I thought I had found the one,” and presents the highly persuasive argument, “everyone’s a little queer, can’t she be a little straight?”

There is “Why Bother,” on which Cuomo hilariously declares that he has had two entire girlfriends, and he is never going to have one again, because we are all terrible. (Again, so that we’re keeping track of the emotion-to-age timeline: The man was twenty-six.) And then, there is “Across the Sea,” wherein… oh, God. Oh, GOD.

And this:

Rivers Cuomo is both Liz Phair and Liz Lemon. He’s the pathetic dork in the glasses who can’t get laid and has gone at least slightly bonkers over it, the one you hate to be like, but love to identify with, because it means you’re not alone in being such a reject.

I mean, that’s not some deep hidden misogyny you uncovered because you’re so paranoid/clever. Those are just the words. It’s like a musical installment of Twilight. If a friend were dating a dude who talked like this, you’d start leaving checklists of Signs That You Are In An Abusive Relationship all over her apartment.

Sady has incorporated so much awesome in her article that I can’t even explain it.  Go read it. It’s long.  Read the whole thing.  Then listen to Weezer in a new way.  Get nostalgic, get pissed, and smile fondly about the doodles on your 10th grade notebook.

Ahh, the late 90s.  ‘Twas an era of platform shoes, belly shirts, pastel nail polish and high-waisted mini skirts.  We loved our teen flicks, and we especially loved our teen romances about the bro who took a bet that he could get a date with the untouchable misfit.  Two primary examples of this theme are the hit films 10 Things I Hate About You starring Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger and She’s All That, starring Rachel Leigh Cook and Freddie Prinze, Jr.

10 Things I Hate About You is a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (but Shakespeare merits his own post so we’ll gloss over that here).  In the movie, younger sister Bianca desperately wants to date but Dad (who spends most of his time delivering babies to teen mothers) won’t allow her to until older sister Kat, who couldn’t care less about dating, does.  Enter the exchange of money to a dude (Patrick) to take out the untouchable female.  What works about this film is that although Kat is supposed to be a “heinous bitch” according to her peers, she is very likable to the audience.  She listens to riot grrls, she reads feminist literature, she’s socially conscious, she’s an independent thinker, she’s courageous and outspoken, and she is (rightfully) cautious in terms of relationships.  I can’t think of another teen film character that is as openly feminist.  And she gets the hunk in the end, who initiated their relationship as part of the deal but genuinely fell for this complex and charismatic woman.

On the other hand, there’s She’s All That.  When Zack, the most popular boy in school, is dumped by his girlfriend for a reality star he makes a bet with his buddies that he can turn any girl in the school into the prom queen.  After gruesomely critiquing every female to walk by for the remainder of the scene, the guys settle on Laney, the weird artsy nerd.  Like Patrick and Kat, Zack ends up falling for quirky Laney, but only after he has erased her eccentricities and given her a makeover (including haircut, eyebrow wax, low-cut slinky red mini-dress, and platform heels that she can stumble around in).  Laney discovers the bet, goes to the prom with another tool who has placed another bet on Laney (that he’ll sleep with her that night), and ends up in her romantically lit up back yard with Zack, who confesses that he developed honest feelings for her once he changed “got to know” her.

I don’t know what it is about betting on girls that hollywood deems a worthy plot, and the thought of this being a common high school phenomenon is nauseating.  However, in 10 Things we see that although this was a rocky way to initiate a relationship, Patrick comes to find (and quickly) that Kat is a fantastic woman as is, and is torn about accepting payment for taking her out.  He ends up using the money to buy her the guitar she had been dreaming of throughout the film and they get a happily ever after in which he is honest with her and she remains true to herself.  In She’s All That, we have a even shallower, more hurtful motive behind the initiation of the relationship, and ignorance of Laney’s value as a person, multiple and recurring betrayals, and Zack loses the bet (resulting in a nude graduation walk), but he “wins” the girl.

I remember watching these movies as an adolescent and thinking how cute the boys were, how cool the music was (in 10 Things, anyway), and how magical Laney’s makeover was.  The makeover is a classic adolescent fantasy – that with the tweeze of an eyebrow, trim of the hair, stroke of eyeliner and splash of lipstick any girl can be transformed into the popular, beloved prom queen.  And somehow the idea that that will garner male interest is romantic, not pathetic.  What if young women instead were bombarded with stories more like Kat’s: that being true to yourself, even when it’s not popular, is attractive and respectable, and all around cool?

Feministing had a great visual representation yesterday of the changes over time in beloved childhood characters.  I couldn’t think of any other characters to expand on, but I thought that the sexualization of these characters when it comes to costumes was worth noting.

Strawberry Shortcake

And so it begins.  It’s not like Strawberry Shortcake was lacking in the cuteness department, however her raggedy look apparently just didn’t cut it in these modern times.  Everything about her was neatened up, and her vibrant reds were subdued into girly pinks.  She became taller and thinner with flowing hair, big eyelashes, and modern clothes.  However, her traditional look is maintained in the adult costume (nothing like a sexy apron to compliment that too-short-for-your-stockings skirt, eh ladies?), which hypersexualizes the cartoon cutie.  Because costumes aren’t for playing with your identity, they’re for playing sexy.

Rainbow Brite

Unlike her traditional counterpart, Rainbow Brite is a girl from the future (check out her sweet moon-boots!).  However, just like Strawberry, Rainbow has gone through “the transformation.”  Her legs got longer, face got older, hair was made to flow more gracefully, and her waist was narrowed.  And, of course, in costume form her skirt was shortened even further, her wand became a phallic symbol to hold near the face with and moon-boots were traded for tall socks and stilettos.  This is not the future I hope to visit.  For more on Rainbow Brite’s makeover, check out this post at Feministe.

Dora the Explorer and that all time favorite, Barbie, after the jump.

“I think that when you’re in the public eye, you automatically become a role model, because people are reading about you and looking at pictures of stuff you’ve done. But, you know, no one’s perfect, everyone makes mistakes. I have made mistakes and I will make mistakes. I’m only human.”

- Dakota Fanning

From Daily Express via Jezebel.

Just for fun, I thought I’d pass along this internet musical I stumbled across.  It’s no secret that I have a deep love for all things Joss Whedon (mostly, anyway), and although he isn’t affiliated with this project in any way, Horrible Turn is a fantastic Dr. Horrible prequel.  Adolescent Billy and adolescent Hammer are right on.  Especially Hammer.  He cracked me up pretty much constantly.

Horrible Turn from Horrible Turn on Vimeo.