by | February 16, 2011

Opting in: Get involved in dialogue about media and the body

by Nina Bahadur

Narratives about the body are everywhere. Billboards, TV adverts, newspapers, blogs, and movies objectify and sexualize the female body. Reality shows like America’s Next Top Model and Extreme Makeover promote a worryingly narrow representation of beauty. Magazines aimed at 16-25 year old women are filled with calorie-counting tips, ab-crunching exercises, and designer dresses.

There is little to offer for those of us who want to leave our abs un-crunched and calories un-counted. TV shows and magazines claim to represent the everywoman, but there is an incredibly limited range when it comes to what passes for a “real body” in today’s media. Christina Hendricks (Mad Men), Amber Riley (Glee), and Sara Ramírez (Grey’s Anatomy) are the most diverse bodies we see on primetime TV these days.

Being bombarded with images of women leads to self-comparison and questioning. Do we fit in? Do we not? Can we change? Should we change? What do we like about ourselves? What do we hate about ourselves?

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by | January 21, 2011

Blog for Choice: Memphis’ Teen Pregnancies

by Cory Barrows

This post is part of NARAL‘s Blog for Choice Day 2011.

Without a doubt 2010 proved to be a tumultuous year in the realm of reproductive rights.  The swift overturn of the House to the GOP, as well as the party’s sweep of state legislative seats, is hinting at an even more turbulent future for reproductive healthcare.  From the anti-choice bills of last year to Wednesday’s measure to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the setbacks to the pro-choice world are immense, but not insurmountable.  But while the politics pose a perplexing situation, my major concern for choice in 2011 lies elsewhere, in the manifestation of America’s need for a healthcare system that specifically allows for abortion coverage.

As the country recently discovered, a high school in Memphis, Tennessee has nearly ninety female students who are pregnant or who have had babies this school year.  Frayser High School, nestled in one of the city’s poorest and most crime-ridden areas (and there are plenty of those in Memphis), has fallen in line with Memphis City Schools’ policy of abstinence-only education by enacting a plan called “No Baby!”  This “educational” campaign, according to Deborah Hester Harrison of the non-profit organization Girls Inc., is designed “to help girls gain the knowledge and resources needed to prevent unplanned pregnancies and to give them the confidence to just say ‘no’.” Having grown up in Memphis and experienced the abstinence-driven lesson plans being pushed in schools, there is plenty I could say about this new campaign and about “sex education” in Memphis in general.  I can remember in eighth grade health class coming up with slogans to encourage myself and my classmates to abstain: “Sex can wait–masturbate!” “Pet your dog, not your date!” The options were limitless and the laughs were in abundance among myself and my prepubescent friends.  Nevermind that three of the ten girls in that class would become pregnant by the time they graduated high school and that probably 50 percent of the girls I knew in middle school had babies by the time they could legally drink.  Nevermind that several students in the class believed, for far too long, that “pulling out” was a basically foolproof method of birth control.  Nevermind that the teen pregnancy rate in Memphis is 16 percent, while the national average is 10 percent.  There are so many “Neverminds” to this situation that it’s jarring.

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by | January 10, 2011

Quick Hit: A Mormon Virgin’s Visit to Planned Parenthood

By K.b. Rodriguez

There’s a beautiful piece in the NY Times about a woman’s visit to Planned Parenthood. The article discusses how she chose to visit Planned Parenthood despite her being a virgin and single, and it really touches on how Planned Parenthood is available for much more than abortions- a fact I learned this summer while interning at the headquarters. It’s not mentioned in the article explicitly, but actual abortions are only about 3% of the work Planned Parenthood does, with the rest related to sexual health and education and legislative work. I highly recommend reading this article, if only to read a wonderful story of an individual’s experience with her cultural ideals.

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by | January 9, 2011

Tonight I’m ‘Loving’ You?

by K.b. Rodriguez

Over break, I finally had a chance to catch up on some new-ish top 40 hits. Among them was Enrique Iglesias’ ‘Tonight (I’m loving you)’. I found it really catchy and knew most of the words by the time I came back to Princeton. Along the way though, I realized that I had one key word wrong. The actual lyrics aren’t ‘I’m loving you,’ they’re ‘I’m f*cking you.” Hmm. My first thought was that it was a bit vulgar and of course the radio stations had to change the lyrics, but why to loving? I suppose lyrically it works better than, say, banging, but still, loving?

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by | December 31, 2010

UConn women’s basketball team sets record with 89th straight win; media doesn’t care

by Lydia Dallett

In case you don’t read ESPN.com or watch Sports Center regularly, you might have missed the history made a few weeks ago when the UConn women’s basketball team won their 89th straight game, routing Florida State 93-62. The streak created an uproar in the sports world with many commentators asking if women’s basketball would finally receive the credit (read: media attention) it deserves. What’s so significant about 89, you might ask? It’s greater than 88, the previous record set by the UCLA team in 1974. The UCLA men’s team.

Already without equal in the NCAA, the Huskies have garnered both praise and condescension for their incredible success. Some argue women’s basketball is nowhere near as difficult or competitive as men’s basketball so the records shouldn’t be compared. Others—including the UConn coach—believe that the team has proved that female athletes are underrated and underrepresented by the mainstream media. Outspoken coach Geno Auriemma argued, “Because we’re breaking a men’s record, we’ve got a lot of people paying attention. If we were breaking a women’s record, everybody would go, ‘Aren’t those girls nice, let’s give them two paragraphs in USA Today…give them one line on the bottom of ESPN and then let’s send them back where they belong, in the kitchen.’”

Given that 90% of Associated Press sports reporters and 95% of sports editors are male, Auriemma’s sentiments are unsurprising. The huge imbalance in media coverage is by now common knowledge and a quick read-through of comments on basketball blogs suggest that, to many sports fans, women’s basketball is essentially a joke.

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by | December 21, 2010

Rape is a Very Serious Issue

by Katie B. Rodriguez

*Trigger Warning*

Rape is a very serious issue. In her Democracy Now debate, (which I highly recommend watching) with activist Jaclyn Friedman, Naomi Wolf, a feminist journalist, repeats this phrase multiple times. Friedman, the keynote speaker for SHARE’s Take Back the Night this past April, agreed wholeheartedly with this statement. One of the difficulties was, however, coming to an agreement about whether the case they were discussing was ‘serious enough’ for a rape allegation.

 

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by | December 15, 2010

“The work of a school”: Punishing a victim of sexual assault

by Kristen McCarthy

Could you cheer at a basketball game for the student who raped you? Could you shout his name when he took free throws? What happens if you choose to remain silent when the rest of the cheerleaders yell this student’s name?

For a cheerleader in Texas, not cheering for the student who raped her led to her removal from her high school cheerleading squad. This happened a few months ago, and a lot has been said about this on the Internet but, if you’ve missed it, here’s what happened.

The young woman, identified simply as H.S., claimed that, when she was 16, two fellow students at Silsbee High School, assaulted her at a post-game party. A court declined to indict the men for sexual assault. In September, one of her assailants, having pled guilty to the lesser charge of Class A assault was sentenced to two years of probation. He came back to school and remained on the school’s basketball team, during which cheerleader H.S. refused to cheer his name during games.

H.S. fulfilled her role as a cheerleader. She participated in all the cheers for the team as a group. Her only refusal was to shout the first name of the man who assaulted her. School officials, in an extremely disturbing display of disrespect, told H.S. that she had to scream her assailants name with the rest of the cheerleaders. If she refused to do this, she would be kicked off the cheerleading squad. When H.S. was kicked off the team, she sued the school for violating her First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

While I find this whole incident very troubling, what concerns me most is the decision by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. If you’re interested in reading the full text of the decision, you can find it here. The court ruled that, as a cheerleader for Silsbee High School, H.S. was “contractually required to cheer for the basketball team” whose roster included her alleged rapist. The court was unsympathetic to the psychological distress that could potentially befall the student and rejected the allegations made by H.S. that the school had violated her Fourteenth Amendment rights by forcing her to cheer.

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by | December 9, 2010

Princeton’s No Fat Talk Week (and its backlash)

by Shirley Gao

54% of women would rather be hit by a truck than be fat.
81% of 10 year olds fear being fat.
90% of high-school-aged girls think they are overweight.

These are the statistics that motivated the Eating Concerns Advisors (ECA) to sponsor a “No Fat Talk Week” from Dec 6 – Dec 10, modeled after this national campaign. (The ECA is a group of Princeton University undergraduates dedicated to spreading awareness about eating disorders, body image, and healthy weight management.) ‘Fat talk’ is the phrase used to describe the statements that seem inevitable—even required when one, say, goes clothes shopping—in today’s society. It’s things like “I feel bloated” or “Her love handles are out of control.” It’s “Wow, you look great—have you lost weight?” or “I can’t wear that dress; I’m not skinny enough.” It reinforces an unreasonable thin ideal and negative self-esteem.

Some people just don’t get it. On PrincetonFML, students posted comments such as:

  • “Am I the only one that doesn’t really care about somebody’s self-esteem/image issues? I’d much rather support a Fat Talk week were we combat obesity or something, that’d actually be something concrete…”
  • “It’s just one of these cheap “awareness week” tricks that are running rampant in contemporary American society”
  • “In that case, they should probably call it ‘Shut-up and Work-out’ week–because if fat talk qualifies as a cultural obsession, being fat does so many times over.”

These comments seem to suggest that because ‘dialogue’ or ‘awareness’ aren’t concrete, they can’t produce concrete results. But how can we have results before we acknowledge one of its greatest obstacles, namely the culture we have created around body expectations? It’s ironic that someone would support the fight against obesity and not the fight against psychological struggles; the latter is a tool that can be used to address the former.

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by | December 7, 2010

Spotted: Feminists at Princeton

Check out blogger Lydia Dallett’s article in the Daily Princetonian! It’s a fantastic  response to the recent discourse on Princeton feminism.

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by | December 5, 2010

One man’s response to the “Two Kinds of Feminism”

by Charles Du

What is feminism? You could get a million different answers, all complicating each other, challenging each other, each a part of the mosaic that makes up this thing called “feminism” – whether second-wave, third-wave, fourth-wave, or whatever. Feminism, today, is about contradictions, about individuality, about disputing the things that used to be taken as essential to being a feminist. And so when feminism is reduced to just “two kinds” by this op-ed by David Mendelsohn ’12 in the Prince last Tuesday, a response is necessary.

In his article, Mendelsohn tells the story of a friend who felt offended by his offer to help her carry a table, and extrapolates his experience in order to declare that there “seem to be two major camps of feminists,” one group that focuses on “real modern issues,” and another, evil one comprised of people who “actively look for evidence of sexism and find it everywhere,” and who are “giving real feminists a bad name.”

I’m not suggesting that Mendelsohn had other intentions when he offered to help, nor am I questioning his assertion that he “cares deeply about equality issues.” What I am saying is that he doesn’t understand that feminists can’t be shoved into two opposing camps. Furthermore, these supposedly insignificant, unimportant, trivial matters that he finds unworthy of our time and respect are actually far from inconsequential.

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