I like to read reviews after I see movies.  Mostly this is because I fear spoilers, but also because too many films have been ruined by badly pitched expectations (Napoleon Dynamite?  Not funny, y’all).  So when I stepped into a theater last weekend to see The Kids Are All Right, I had only the vaguest inkling of what I was getting myself into.  One friend had liked it, another hadn’t; I knew that it was about lesbians and sperm donors, but mostly I wanted to see Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, and to see what all of the hype that I had been avoiding was about.

(Lots of spoilers after the jump)

I walked out of the theater with the same feelings that I usually have about “groundbreaking” romantic comedies – they never break as much ground as you want them to.  The film was supposed to be revolutionary in two senses; it dealt with a lesbian couple in a romantic comedy, and two of its supporting characters were children conceived through reproductive technology.  As far as I was concerned, it handled the first predictably (of course the lesbian couple’s relationship immediately begins to revolve around a heterosexual man) and the second inadequately, but I was grateful, at least, that both themes had appeared in a mainstream film.  When it comes to Hollywood, I take progress where I can get it.

Reading Emily Rutherford’s review, though, inspired me to do some background research into what exactly reviewers were saying when the movie came out.  And this was where the red flags began to appear.  Like Emily’s review, which incisively took the film to task for its inability to “move beyond the phallic gaze which lingers around so many portrayals of lesbians in our culture,” they focused almost exclusively on the three adult protagonists, Nic (Annette Bening), Jules (Julianne Moore), and Paul (Mark Ruffalo).  Much (virtual) ink has been spilled over Paul’s role in the film, and I leave you to explore the scads of commentary that has emerged on this topic.  But what really interested me – and what seems to have escaped the attention of almost all of the film’s reviewers – are the two children, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and the unfortunately-named Laser (Josh Hutcherson), both conceived using Paul’s sperm, but carried, respectively, by Nic and Jules.

Perhaps this is because I see a little of myself in Joni (and not just because she was named after Joni Mitchell and I was named after a Joni Mitchell song).  Although I’m now a senior in college, I vividly remember that summer, only three years distant, between high school and college, full of anxious waiting and awkward parties and skirmishes with my parents.  Wasikowska does an extraordinary job of projecting the profound unease that I felt at that age – uncomfortable in my body, I tried to pretend that I felt like an adult, and worried that everyone could see me failing.  But on top of all of this late-adolescent angst, Joni has the added stress of the knowledge that, having just turned eighteen, she can unearth the identity of her biological father, which her brother finally convinces her to do.

This is where the film really disappoints.  Given an opportunity to explore the tangled chaos of the way that our culture deals with families created through reproductive technologies, it focuses instead on the relationships between the adults (we do get to see more glamorized sex that way), and leaves the teenagers to be wise, funny, and ultimately half-baked supporting players.  They vacillate between thinking that Paul is super-cool when he takes them for motorcycle rides, and feeling super-betrayed when he sleeps with Jules.  Their insistence on connecting with Paul is never portrayed as more than curiosity, despite the fact that they know that it would devastate their mothers.  But it does not seem to have occurred to the filmmakers that these issues might have haunted Joni and Laser since their childhood, nor do they take more than a feeble stab at wrestling with cultural scripts about reproductive technology.

In an article in Slate last month, researchers Karen Clark and Elizabeth Marquandt detail their exploration of the families created via artificial insemination, and conclude that although adoption usually takes center stage, sperm donation raises troubling issues of its own.  Donor offspring in their study, they write, “are suffering more than those who were adopted: hurting more, feeling more confused, and feeling more isolated from their families.”

I took issue with Clark and Marquandt’s article for a variety of reasons, mostly because I don’t agree with their conclusion that biological parents are the only “two people whose very beings are found in the child’s own body,” but one point is well taken: we just don’t know how to talk about families created by reproductive technologies, a problem that goes for homosexual and heterosexual couples alike.  How do you explain to children, who are taught to ask where they came from, that test tubes may have been involved in their conception?  Do you tell them that someone “helped” create them?  And when do you start introducing this concept – when they’re two, or five, or ten?  Do you make the sperm or egg donor part of your child’s life?  And how do you explain their presence?

These are all questions that countless families are muddling through, by themselves, every day.  And my generation is the first that will have to look them squarely in the face, because these technologies are still relatively new.  Would it help to have more honest media depictions of the ways that families handle them?  Hell yeah.  Is The Kids Are All Right one of them?  Not really.  After meeting their father, Joni and Laser’s adjustment period is either non-existent or happens off-screen.  Questions about Paul seem not to have disrupted their dinner-table conversations in the past.  And when Nic slams the door in Paul’s face, saying, “This is not your family,” they seem to have no reaction except righteous anger at his interloping.

As I said before, my disappointment is measured with a certain amount of cynicism.  These issues are incredibly challenging, and I don’t know if Hollywood is ready to deal with them with the depth and maturity that they require.  Like Emily, I thought the film was watchable and enjoyable, but like many films that are the first of their kind, it lacks realism and sticking power.  Leaving the theater, I was left with one simple conclusion: the kids are all right, because the movie’s really not about the kids.

Earlier today the managing editor of Time, Richard Stengel, proleptically announced the cover to this week’s issue, at right. The woman is Aisha, and she lost her nose and ears at the hands of her husband; her crime was flight from his abuse. Fearing the outrage that has previously met photojournalists who choose not to intervene, Stengel informs us that Aisha is now “in a secret location protected by armed guards and sponsored by the NGO Women for Afghan Women” and “will head to the U.S. for reconstructive surgery sponsored by the Grossman Burn Foundation” and funded by Time. First she will become “a window into the reality of what is happening” in Afghanistan and, however disingenuously Stengel claims neutral intentions, a symbol of the humanitarian and feminist case for prolonged military engagement: in a headline, ‘What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan.’

The full story is on newsstands and iPads, not online. But by the looks of the preview and its accompanying photo gallery Time is staking out opposition to the only viable pathway to peace in the short-term: negotiations with the Taliban that would allow them some place in a postwar Afghan society. As the feasibility of the war comes increasingly under question, Time‘s article has Aisha ask its opponents the hard question: “‘They are the people that did this to me,’ [Aisha] says, touching her damaged face. ‘How can we reconcile with them?’” No one can look Aisha in the eyes and deny the justice of her request. Still, there is considerable danger in metonymically representing a military campaign for territory as a cultural campaign for women, or one woman. As Matt Yglesias notes, transforming norms in Afghanistan is not on the United States’ agenda; the very fact that Aisha’s tragedy came eight years into the war proves to Jezebel it cannot be. Time‘s cover thus moves beyond neutrality towards the war, even beyond defense of it, to argue for more or less total war: the complete elimination of the Taliban from society. In recognition of the impossibility of such an end, those waging the war have come to ask the opposite question: “How can we not reconcile with them?”

Of course the fact that Time released their defense of the cover online far before the story indicates that for many the cover will be the story, not Aisha. On that point a feminist’s concern is less with Time‘s effect on children (though we are reassured to learn they consulted “a number of child pyschologists”: a plural number!) than its entrance into the long history of utilizing Muslim women’s appearance to motivate continued public support for war. It may be more consequence than coincidence that, in some parts of the West, Muslim women’s appearance has become the war.

Lesbians in the media always seem to get the short end of the stick, no pun intended. It’s still somewhat of a novelty to see lesbian characters in films and television shows, and when we do see lesbian characters, we see them as lesbian characters, not characters who happen to be lesbians. We see a few more lesbian actors and TV personalities, yet many times we don’t even get to hear about their lesbianism, for whatever reason (perhaps it’s not moral enough for primetime?). When real (or realistic) lesbian lives are portrayed in television and the movies, it’s a great opportunity for lesbian lives to be normalized. But much in the same way that actors of ethnic minorities are sometimes deemed as token characters, lesbians (as well as other LGBT identities) are token characters, with their stories portrayed as token plot lines, hitting some stereotypes and failing to go much farther.

A few examples come to mind when I think about lesbians in current media. Ellen DeGeneres certainly pops up as a real life lesbian in the media. Although her wedding received quite a bit of press, and it’s not a secret that she’s married to Portia DeRossi, it’s rare for her to mention LGBT issues or that she’s a lesbian on her daytime talk show. She’ll throw in a comment here and there about Portia, and she even spoke on her show about Larry King’s murder, but her main role on TV is not to be a lesbian. It’s to be a talk show host. Whether or not being a lesbian helps her is another story, but it is refreshing to know that her success is most likely not based solely on that identity.

On cable, the women of Showtime’s The Real L Word, a reality show about lesbians living in California, are on the other end of the spectrum, and uncomfortably so. There was a lot of talk before the show premiered, though ever since, the hype and outrage seems to have died down. I succumbed to peer pressure and sat through the first episode of this reality version of The L Word, a now cancelled Showtime series about upperclass lesbians in Los Angeles, (in addition to promos and bits of other episodes). I wasn’t nearly as offset by the characters as I thought I would be, surprisingly. I found them to be (if not completely representative), realistic to some degree. Though there are stereotypes strewn about, such as the u-haul lesbianism of Nikki, Jill, and Tracy. Whitney, the player, however, somewhat defies lesbian stereotypes by not wanting to settle down. Her tendencies in this way are more similar to how a man might be portrayed in the media or on shows. Why the outrage then? If these are so-called real lesbians, then how could their own personalities be reason to complain?

It’s because regardless of how much of their personalities we’re seeing, our perception is based much more on how their personalities are woven by the camera. Have you seen those intro scenes at the beginning of every episode? Episode intros have featured the women answering questions like ‘What was your first sexual experience with a women?’ and ‘When did you first come out?’ Ok, I understand that LGBT issues are not always mainstream or personally relevant to many people who may be watching this show. I also understand that in a reality show like this, the audience wants to know the deepest, dirtiest, most scandalous secrets of the stars. And these women (as well as other reality show stars) are fully aware of this, or at least they should be by now. But I cannot fathom a show like The Real World or The Jersey Shore starting off an episode with questions like this.  Why the double standard? The optimistic in me says that by discussing lesbian sexual experiences so blatantly and easily, we can begin to normalize it. The realist in me though, thinks that this type of portrayal of lesbians only furthers the sexual objectification of lesbians that our society already reinforces.

I saw The Kids are All Right last weekend, and without going into a review of it (there are plenty of great ones already, including Emily’s), I can’t help but muse over the portrayal of lesbians in this movie as well. Advance reviews like the NYT’s hailed it as a great film about a modern, normal family. I say- perhaps too normal. If Ellen’s lesbianism is placed on the shelf during her show, and the women of The Real L Word are hypersexualized and objectified, then the lesbians of the The Kids are All Right are too normalized.

My opinions about the portrayal of lesbians in current media have varied, similar to how my thoughts about LGBT issues and how to go about fighting for rights have varied. Do we push our issues forward- fight the system from the outside instead of the inside? Or do blend in- normalize ourselves and at the same time risk loosing our differences? Perhaps instead we take some sort of middle ground (though in this case, maybe still not the ‘safest’) and remain true to ourselves- show the world who we are, faults and all and hope for change that way?

Media often times reflect true life, and vice versa. Regardless of my uneasiness of the shows I’ve mentioned, maybe they all have something to teach us about how lesbian (and LGBT) issues should be portrayed.

Image from incurable_hippie‘s flickr.

Spoiler Alert

Watching the trailer for Lisa Cholodenko’s movie The Kids Are All Right, you could be excused for thinking that you were getting a lesbian movie. The trailer does, after all, advertise a family headed by two women, Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore), who conceived their children via sperm donation—and what portrayal of lesbian-headed families in the media doesn’t feature some sort of plot point about sperm? Much of the commentary on this movie has centered around various points to do with Nic’s and Jules’ lesbian-ness, whether analyzing the authenticity of Bening’s and Moore’s portrayal of a married couple, or trying to puzzle through a scene in which the couple has sex while watching gay male porn. Relatively few of the reviews I looked at before I saw the film devoted much attention to Mark Ruffalo’s role as sperm donor Paul, and so I expected to see a movie about the modern middle-class American family which is also a lesbian movie, exploring the female leads’ relationships to their children and to each other.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. This is not a movie about Nic, Jules, daughter Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and son Laser (Josh Hutcherson); it’s a movie about Paul and his relationship to women. While Laser, a two-dimensional teenage-boy archetype, tends to fade into the background, the film dwells on Joni’s initially awkward but increasingly filial relationship to Paul; Nic’s nearly invariably hostile relationship to Paul; and Jules’ far more complicated relationship to Paul, which morphs into an affair as the suddenly-present father figure for her children promises to give Jules the affection and validation her spouse has grown too distant to provide. The audience is hammered over the head with evidence of Paul’s virility: he has passionate sex with various beautiful women who move through his life; he has passionate sex with a lesbian woman; and, of course, his entire presence in the film is justified by the fact that his sperm is responsible for the existence of two of its main characters. The rules of Hollywood, which help to dictate that the gay sex scenes will be awkward, dull, and obscured by bedclothes in contrast to the lusciously graphic straight sex scenes only underscore the already-obvious heterosexuality of this movie. (As one review asked, “How do heterosexuals keep from getting concussions from smacking into the walls and furniture? Should heterosexual adolescents be counseled to wear helmets during sex?”)

This is not really a movie about lesbians, for it is not a movie about women. Rather, it is a movie about one straight man and his interactions with a variety of women, two of whom are lesbians and one of whom the narrative has him bed anyway. It seems as if it is not yet possible for mainstream cinema to move beyond the phallic gaze which lingers around so many portrayals of lesbians in our culture. When Laser asks his moms why they watch gay male porn, they reply that, as we know, most ostensibly “lesbian” porn is produced with straight men in mind—but their own movie is a story of straight male privilege as well, in which the film’s very masculine straight man is allowed to take control of 104 minutes of narrative and screen time.

However, as a friend point out to me, Paul’s control over the narrative is not absolute, and nor is his control over the viewer. The fact that I cringed all through the scenes depicting Jules’ and Paul’s affair (which is quite a lot of the movie, really) demonstrates that the effect of the heterocentric narrative is actually to make the viewer uncomfortable, and it’s possible that the profound awkwardness of these scenes, and also the profound pity that we feel for Nic when she finds out about her partner’s infidelity, were intended precisely to remind the viewer that a rocky marriage, an affair, and the complicated emotions which go along with them are issues which carry powerful feelings and moral connotations, regardless of the sexual orientations of the characters in question. Moreover, although the film raises the interpretive possibility that Jules is having an affair with a man because somewhat-butch Nic isn’t masculine enough to resolve the anxieties of a heterosexist and homophobic culture, that possibility is dismissed by the end, when  Paul is quite firmly dismissed as “donor,” not “father,” and the two parents are sufficiently reconciled to drive eight hours together to drop their eldest child off for her first semester of college. The family which waves goodbye to Joni at a campus looking a little bit like Stanford’s (it’s hard to tell) does not need a husband or father, and it’s quite clear that Joni, at least, has turned into a capable young woman without one.

The Kids Are All Right is a watchable and at times quite entertaining movie. The dialogue is alternately touching and hilarious; while Jules is an awkward and weird character with whom I had difficulty sympathizing, she is nevertheless compelling, and Nic and Joni are both people I’ve known at some point in my life, and perhaps resembled a bit myself. Wasikowski’s portrayal of Joni, in particular, is complex and authentic, my favorite movie teenager in recent memory. And yet all three strong women must act in the shadow of Mark Ruffalo, while the audience is made to feel as if his assholishly bumbling character is somehow necessary to complement the more subtly human foibles of a very quintessentially middle-class American family. My desire to see a movie about lesbians, or even a movie where the protagonists are all women, is still unfulfilled: I can only hope that American cinema will eventually determine that it doesn’t need a straight man to make a good movie.

Trigger Warning

Last month, the Department of Justice missed its deadline to formalize standards set by the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission in 2009. These standards would, if enacted and enforced, work to end sexual assault in prisons and detention centers in the U.S. The commission is comprised of advocates, prison rape survivors, and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle, and called for fast action from Attorney General Holder to make the measures standard. Unfortunately, Holder did not act, because prison officials claim that putting these changes into effect would cost over $1 billion each year. That $1 billion dollars would translate to changes in training, facilities, and personnel that would put a major dent in the number of sexual assaults reported in prison– over 60,000 each year, according to the Department of Justice. It outlines a zero-tolerance policy towards prison rape, and methods for prevention, detection and response for facilities. A total revamping of the laws is absolutely necessary—an unacceptable 12% of juveniles in detention centers report being raped in the United States.

According to the disturbing reports of survivors it appears that the sources of abuse of prisoners are both manipulative prison staff (who clearly have no business being in positions of power, so it’s obvious more stringent hiring processes and employee reviews are needed) or by other prisoners, often in large groups. The tales they tell are quite graphic, and to read their stories–of being trapped in the place where they were assaulted, seeing their rapists day in and day out, and finding no recourse even when they find the courage to speak up with counselors—is quite painful.

Reading these accounts only further proved to me that prisoners need to be protected, and that for many, our prison system is the kind of psychological hell no one should experience, no matter their crime. But after a look around at popular television shows and the comments sections of the very articles I read for this article, it’s clear that not everyone agrees. One of my favorite shows on television, The Boondocks, broadcast a tone-deaf episode entitled “the Booty Warrior” this June that was basically one, looooong prison rape joke. Main character Huey’s neighbor, Tom duBois, has an irrational fear of prison rape, faces his fears by visiting a prison, and throughout the episode, faces down mean and menacing Black prisoners who try to get his “booty” without his consent. This drags on for thirty excruciating minutes. Creator Aaron McGruder is slipping hard if he thinks that this “creative expression” was more funny than tragic. It wasn’t. It only further trivialized the plight of men in prison, as if nonconsensual sex was okay as long as the assaulter didn’t want it “in a gay way.” By reducing this problem to a series of stale soap jokes, he slapped in the face the survivors fighting for recognition and justice. Gang rape is not a joke, and advice about holding on to your body wash in the shower is not going to cut it.

On Betty White’s May Saturday Night Live episode, she, as “Grandma McIntosh” tries to scare high schoolers straight, by threatening them with the promise that the “Wizard of Ass” is going to come get them if they end up in jail. My childhood idol Kenan Thompson, to the tune of the classic Oompa loompa song, sings of other prisoners “laying you down on the boiler room flat—what does your rear end think of that?” You guys? This is not funny. At all. This is happening, and all of Betty White’s posturing against animal cruelty is a strange contrast to her marked disregard for the sexual autonomy of  prisoners. Why is the systematic abuse of human beings less important than that of a dog?

When looking to the comments boards on these articles, I read comments like: “well, maybe this will deter people from going to prison,” or, “some of them should get AIDS for what they did” or,” hahaha, don’t drop the soap!” These frail attempts to defend the state of our sorry criminal justice system are pitiful. Rape is never okay. No crime is punishable by an incurable disease, and it is not acceptable to suggest that somehow it is okay for prisoners to be sexually assaulted because of their crimes. That is inhumane. It is not okay for facilities in a country that helped draft the UN’s declaration of human rights (and that feels entitled to criticize the human rights violations of countless other nations) to have its own exception for convicted criminals. That, my friends, is hypocrisy.

Something must be done. Holder still has the opportunity to standardize the laws, but if his hand-wringing before Congress in March (and the DOJ’s complete lack of a timeline thus far) are any indication, nothing will be done on the issue for quite a while—and thousands of prisoners will languish until he does.

Image from Still Burning‘s flickr.

For once, I applaud the fashion industry. Usually, when I think of fancy magazines and runways, I want to cry or yell to express my frustration at their generally limited portrayal of beauty as white and skinny. But recently, I had something to smile about. Givenchy designer Riccardo Tisci cast his transgender personal assistant, Lea T., in his ad campaign. Best of all, it seems like he didn’t do it as a ploy for diversity, but rather because he respects her, considers her “part of the family“ and thought that having a transgender person “exemplifies the masculine-feminine dichotomy” that he tries to portray through his line.

As a result of his decision and amongst a lot of hype, French Vogue, apparently the “the hipper sister of American Vogue,” has chosen to profile Lea T. with an article and a nude portrait in their next issue. As Salon’s broadsheet piece beautifully describes:

She is simply, arrestingly bare. With her long hair draped over her shoulders, Lea looks straight out of the Garden of Eden — and that is perhaps what’s most subversive about the photo: its ability to make us re-conceive of what we think of as “natural.”

Beautiful. Congrats, Riccardo Tisci and French Vogue.

I just watched Woman of the Year (1942, starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn) and hated it so much and for so many reasons that a) I wanted to share and b) am currently not capable of articulating anything beyond quoting directly from the film’s third act and giving my own summary of its final scenes.

MAIDEN AUNT: “You can’t live alone in this world, Tess, it’s no good. Success is no fun unless you share it with someone. I’m tired of winning prizes, they’re cold comfort. This time I want to be the prize myself.”

Climactic scene: feminist political commentator quietly cries as she learns the true meaning of marriage vows.

SPENCER TRACY: “You mean you’re going to live here with me and kiss me goodbye in the morning and wait for me to come home at night loaded down with pipes and slippers and stories about what you and the girls did all day?”

KATHARINE HEPBURN: “Yes, Sam!”

TRACY: “Gonna run up little curtains and sew buttons on my underwear?”

HEPBURN: “Yes!”

TRACY: “Cook and sew and put on your rubber gloves and wash the dishes on the maid’s day out?”

HEPBURN: “Yes, darling!”

Final scenes:

HEPBURN: “But Sam, you don’t understand! I’m going to give up my job.”

TRACY: “What are you going to do, run for president?”

HEPBURN: “I’m going to be your wife.”

Goes to make husband breakfast as proof of obedience and love. Husband smirks and watches from behind paper. Failure to make waffles correctly is tacitly equated to failure at womanhood. HILARITY. Husband and wife agree that wife can keep maiden name as surname, despite dangerous emasculation that this implies.

This is the second in a series of articles on women in popular music today; the first was about Ke$ha.

A common lament in the wake of Michael Jackson’s death last summer was that, at his peak, he had achieved a level of universal popularity that would be impossible today because of the fragmentation of popular culture in the Internet age.  That seemed plausible enough at the time, but now I’m not so sure.  Gaga, to be sure, is no MJ—after all, he was already one of the greatest musicians in the world at the age of nine.  But she has still gotten more popular, more quickly, more thoroughly excluding nearly everyone else, than any pop star has in at least ten years.  She is, without a doubt, “The One”—no one in music today can even begin to compete with her star stature, and we may have to go back almost as far as the King of Pop himself to find someone who does.  It is almost as though, after he died, his spirit took up residence in her body in recompense for the opening slot on his tour that he promised her shortly before his death.

Regardless of whether or not you believe in this sort of quasi-reincarnation, Jackson’s death, just over a year ago, was right when Gaga really started happening.  She had already appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone that winter, but back then she was little more than a novelty act with a few decent hits—“Just Dance” and “Poker Face”—and a lot of weird outfits, and there was little reason to imagine that she’d have much of a future.  But less than two weeks after Jackson died, “Paparazzi” dropped and it all started coming together.  “Bad Romance” came out in mid-October, followed a month later by The Fame Monster, and all the while Gaga’s fame was growing inexorably.  All of a sudden it seemed like she was all anyone wanted to talk about.  Her name flowed more and more effortlessly off of people’s tongues, as though they had been saying it forever.  More than anything else, this strange familiarity was the sign that Gaga had made it: by February it was like she had always been there—if anyone but her had kicked off the Grammys, it would have felt wrong.  Six months earlier she had been little more than a novelty act, and already the world was inconceivable without her.

Gaga’s overwhelming popularity is something of an enigma.  Last year, when she was clearly on the rise but had not yet taken over the world, most critics settled on the theory that people liked her because of the way she expressed, or maybe just epitomized, the image-obsessed world of the rich and famous.  For some this was a good thing: this Entertainment Weekly blog praised her as a “guilty pleasure,” calling her “our modern guilt personified.”  Others, like The New York Times, snarkily derided her for what they saw as nothing more than showy pretension without substance, and made fun of her “outfit made of bubbles”.  Both camps were quick to draw the convenient comparison between her and Madonna, and even the pro-Gaga camp clearly did not take her all that seriously.  Neither one could have guessed that in just a few months she would appear alongside Bill Clinton on the cover of Time magazine’s ”100 Most Influential People” issue.

But of course, she did.  She also sold out three back-to-back shows at Madison Square Garden in less than five minutes, made Barbara Walters’s annual “10 Most Fascinating People” list, and was one of the four people that Larry King selected to interview for his show’s anniversary week—the other three were LeBron James, Bill Gates, and President Obama.  Around this time the silly rumor that she might have a penis gave way to the serious rumor that she might have a life-threatening autoimmune disease; if before people were eager to discover some freakish tidbit about her private life, now they were just concerned for her health.  It is a testament to her popularity that, in today’s bloodthirsty culture of withering celebrity gossip, most people don’t even want to dig up any dirt on Gaga—they just want to be reassured that they won’t lose her.

The freak-of-the-week interpretation on which the critics had initially settled clearly needed revision, and they are still struggling to formulate a satisfactory explanation for Gaga’s enormity.  The most coherent new interpretation, as well as the most immediately relevant to this blog, was offered last month by feminist philosopher and New York Times blogger Nancy Bauer.  In an article entitled “Lady Power”, Bauer argues that Gaga’s appeal lies in the way the way she reflects and embodies the crisis of modern femininity.  Young women today, she writes, are faced with a confounding contradiction about who they are and how they ought to behave in the world.  On the one hand, they are assured, unlike previous generations of women, that “the world is basically [their] oyster.”  But at the same time, they find that they must conform to increasingly high standards of sexual attractiveness if they want to “get the pearl.”  Gaga, she says, “wants us to understand her self-presentation as a kind of deconstruction of femininity,” but cautions, citing Simone de Beauvoir, against letting self-expression slide into self-objectification.

This interpretation is decent enough, but Bauer might be wrong to construe Gaga’s underclothed theatrics as “frank self-objectification.”  Sure, she may be thin and well-proportioned, but by conventional standards her appearance is still far too strange to qualify her as a sex object—we probably won’t see her in Maxim.  And this strangeness is precisely what gives her image its critical edge: she is just weird-looking enough to disrupt the socially-hardwired arousal reflex that most stars just slavishly replicate.  She may not avoid self-objectification—that would be a lot to ask of any famous person—but she does manage to break apart the petrified equivalence of objectification and sexualization.  She makes herself an object of the gaze without automatically becoming an object of desire, which I would say is a far greater accomplishment than somehow avoiding self-objectification altogether.

That being said, I also have a much more serious objection to Bauer’s analysis and to the party line on Gaga in general, which is that they tend to forgo any mention whatsoever of her music.  This may not seem like a relevant issue for feminists, but it absolutely is: while we feel perfectly natural praising female pop stars for their canny self-presentation, their provocative or empowering public personas, and all the great things they are doing to subvert gender stereotypes, it seems for some reason that we almost always forget to praise them as musicians.  Feminism may be most in its element when dealing with direct challenges to the gender norms that are its primary concern, but it should be careful not to act as though these direct challenges are all women are good for, and forget the ways in which they are not just challenging the norms but rising above them.  By that token, feminists ought to consider the possibility that Gaga’s popularity might not have much of anything to do with feminism or gender per se.  Her secret might just be that she’s really, really good; that would surely be a far greater victory for feminism.

In an interview with The Independent last year, Gaga related a story from early in her career.  One night, after “a couple of drinks,” she was getting ready to play her set in front of an especially rowdy and inattentive audience.  “It was a bunch of frat kids from the West Village,” she said, “and I couldn’t get them to shut up.  I didn’t want to start singing while they were talking, so I got undressed.  There I was sitting at the piano in my underwear.  So they shut up.”  It was at that moment, she said, “that Lady Gaga was born.”  By taking her clothes off, she “made a real decision about the kind of pop artist [she] wanted to be.  Because it was a performance art moment right there and then.”

I see the story of Gaga stripping down to her undies in order to secure her audience’s undivided attention as a microcosm of her entire career, one that illustrates what I find problematic about her reception so far.  We should recall that, even though Gaga calls it, in hindsight, a “performance art moment,” all she meant to do at the time was to get the audience to shut up and listen to her music.  It’s understandable that she would want to endow her drunken gambit with the dignity of Art, but I wonder if this may have ultimately led to some confusion, on the part of both her audience and herself, about what her art actually is.

In the years since, if there is one thing she has consistently done extraordinarily well, it is getting our attention, with her infinite crescendo of outlandish outfits and enormous music videos.  One wonders, though, whether we might be paying attention to the wrong thing.  Yes, she is great at getting our attention—but could it be that she is too great at it?  Are we so transfixed by her attention-getting antics that we’ve forgotten to recognize her as the outstanding songwriter and musician that she’s become?  Are we talking so loudly about her clothes that we can no longer hear her piano?

Nancy Bauer writes that Gaga “keeps us guessing about who she, as a woman, really is.”  Well, I’ve got a guess of my own: could it be that, underneath it all—the mask made of disco-ball and the sunglasses made of cigarettes and the bra made of M-16 rifles—this supposed feminist performance artist is really just a rock star?  Could it be that simple?  It would explain why she is currently “The One”—nothing but the fact that it’s been years since the world has seen a rock star as galvanizing as she is.  Back when Michael Jackson held the crown, there were still plenty of other live contenders: Springsteen, Prince, Madonna, U2, just to name a few.  If Gaga is alone, perhaps the fault lies with everyone else, for failing to measure up to her—she just had the good fortune of appearing in a musical dry spell.

If that fateful night in the downtown club has stayed with her all these years, keeping her from fully releasing her inner rock star, another performance from just the other day may have helped to exorcise that demon.  Last Friday, after her first two sold-out shows at the Garden and before her third, she gave a performance for The Today Show that featured “You and I”, a song from her new album that she has debuted during her Monster Ball tour.  An enormous departure from nearly all her previous songs, “You and I” is a 70s throwback that bucks any and all spurious Madonna comparisons—it sounds more like Elton John, or maybe even “Hey Jude”.  And during her Today Show performance, she did something that could almost be construed as her take-my-clothes-off stunt in reverse.  She started the song wearing a ridiculous pair of disco-ball sunglasses that made her look like a bug; but as she moved into the chorus, she took them off and threw them aside, as if to say “I don’t need these anymore—I’ve got your attention, and now I’m just gonna sing my song!”

“You and I” should silence any doubts that she is worthy to become, after a ten-year drought, the first great rock star of the new millennium: when I saw her play it at the Garden on Wednesday, her tight choreography flew briefly out the window, and for a few minutes she just sat down at the piano (again in her undies) and pounded away, first with her hands but then also with her heel and eventually with her ass, her band accompanying her all the while.  Within the meticulously, sometimes overly staged spectacle of her live show, “You and I” was a burst of rock ‘n’ roll spontaneity that showed beyond a doubt what Gaga might be capable of if she realizes that, yes, she has our full and undivided attention, and she can feel free to do, and sing, whatever she wants—we’ll all listen, I promise.

Photo from Domain Barnyard’s Flickr.

There have been so many relevant news articles in the past couple of weeks. Here are some of them! (Thanks Laura for finding all of these great articles!)

Stoning too excessive a punishment for adultry? How about hanging?

Scary and icky: hacker remotely searches women’s computers for homemade sex tapes and naked pictures, and tries to extort them for homemade porn.

Would you freeze your eggs to keep your having-a-biological-baby options alive, people with eggs? Apparently, many people would! Especially med students.

There have been a lot of HIV-related stories lately:
The Global Fund pledges to stop the mother-child spread of HIV. Meanwhile, in Namibia HIV positive women are accusing the state of forcibly sterilizing them. In Asia, gay men are routinely denied treatment for HIV/AIDS.

Lately there has been a slew of stories about governments and corporations setting “quotas” of women in upper levels — and naturally, there’s been a lot of debate over whether this is fair and whether it is effective. They’re complicated issues! Here’s France setting quotas for women on corporate boards, India setting quotas for women in their legislature,Iraqi women taking on a larger role in politics , and Germany setting a quota for female managers. If you poke around on Wikipedia a bit, it turns out quotas are actually pretty common, for gender and also for marginalized ethnic groups and (in India) castes.

The Supreme Court ruled that public schools can withhold recognition from Christian (or other) groups that exclude gay students. Just Friday, a federal court in Massachusetts ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional, in a bid to push it to the Supreme Court.

Image from Matt Callow’s flickr.

President Obama’s new strategies have a way of taking on epic proportions, even when their proposals are actually pretty modest (inadvertent pun – no, not that kind of “modest proposal”).  Such is the case with the new National HIV/AIDS Strategy (NHAS), which was unveiled today.  The NHAS is the product of a 15-month fact-finding mission, in which members of the Office of National AIDS Policy (ONAP – so many acronyms, so little time!) criss-crossed the country, holding community forums and meeting with experts to discuss the proper way to implement the first national strategy on AIDS (I know – it’s staggeringly difficult to believe that after 30 years, this is the first national effort to combat the disease).  Its three-fold mission, to reduce the number of people infected with HIV, to increase access to care, and to curtail HIV-related health disparities, is both ambitious and bizarrely limited.

Although the strategy (you can read the report here) is centered around the admirable goal of reallocating and re-targeting resources and funding that have been used ineffectively or incorrectly, the near-omission of any mention of comprehensive sex education (or teens and young adults generally) is downright puzzling, considering the fact that young people between the ages of 13 and 29 comprise a quarter of new infections.  The report also does its best to disguise the fact that although the strategy will be dedicated to making sure that the $19 billion currently allocated for domestic HIV/AIDS programs is used more efficiently, there won’t be new money coming in.

There are some very good elements to the strategy, particularly the emphasis on the stigma that keeps some from seeking HIV testing and treatment.  Similarly hopeful is the acknowledgment that there are serious discrepancies in the ways that different demographics receive treatment: HIV-positive women are less likely to access therapy than HIV-positive men, services are far less accessible for people living in rural areas than cities, and HIV-positive African-Americans and Latinos are more likely to die sooner after a diagnosis than HIV-positive whites, to name just a few inequities.  If the NHAS can tackle even these two issues, then it will make some far-reaching gains.  But as a national strategy, it’s lacking in the scope necessary to deal with the epidemic.

The report mentions the devastating fact that a third of young people hold serious misperceptions about how HIV is transmitted, but doesn’t dwell it, giving cursory lip service to the need for adequate sex education.  Comprehensive sex education is never mentioned, and even more surprisingly, youth are also absent, despite disturbing new evidence from the CDC that revealed that over half of HIV-infected adolescents do not know their infection status.  It’s shortsighted, to say the least, to neglect youth education, especially when the infection rate remains static.

But Obama has drawn the most fire for neglecting to allocate more resources, or to set more ambitious goals.  Critics have pointed out, rightly, that state health budgets are being slashed daily, and that funds for AIDS programs are often the first to go – this is on top of the fact that there wasn’t very much money for these programs to begin with.   Housing Works was swift to condemn the strategy in dramatic terms; its CEO, Charles King, said yesterday, “The president’s plan is so flawed that it might actually represent a step backwards in combating HIV and AIDS in the United States.”  King’s main complaint was the president’s goal of reducing annual HIV infections by 25 percent over the next five years, which King said was both too modest and insufficiently funded.

I think it’s unfair to dismiss the NHAS in such sweeping terms; although it is limited, it also represents a hopeful step forward, even if that step is more symbolic than anything else.  And certainly, if Obama can reduce inefficiency and inequity in the way that current AIDS resources are allocated, that will make a difference in the epidemic, to which Americans seem to have become curiously inured.  Could Obama have done more, in creating this strategy?  Absolutely.  But the best thing to do right now is not to tear the NHAS apart (or at least, not completely), but rather to carefully watch its progress – while acknowledging that there is still a hell of a lot to be done.

Photo from Flickr.