litbitch

Stiffed

Susan Faludi's exhaustive examination of the desperate state of the American man, Stiffed, connected, surprisingly, to one of my favorite recent topics: obsessive self-disclosure.  Her conclusion, in large part, is that without a common purpose, a sense of community, a shared goal, men are left with the dregs society has provided as a replacement: consumption.  In the absence of something to create, we consume.  Fame, beauty, money become goals rather than pleasant by-products and are, necessarily, unfulfilling. 
And here we are back at facebook, where commenting on one's life, displaying pictures of oneself and one's activities, in short showing, becomes more important than doing.   Kids are more likely to say they want to be famous than describe what they might do to become so.  Yahoo "news" and the tabloids are full of information about people who are famous for being famous.  While I am optimistic about the work that was put into Obama's campaign (however I feel about the blind sycophancy that sometimes accompanied it), and the moves toward local food, abstaining from the purchase of new products, and active environmental responsibility, the culture at large pushes us toward filling the hole with stuff and image.  What we look like, how we describe ourselves, what we are "a fan of" or how we feel is more important than what we do.  Even non-doing, meditating, sitting, isn't real unless it's in a facebook update.  I'm condemning myself as much as anyone with this; when bored at work I seek continual validation of my clever statements on that goddamn "social networking" site.  I'm just struck by how everything I've been investigating lately, everything that annoys me, excites me, scares me - it all connects.  And the solution, again and again, seems to be putting the wallet away, digging in the dirt, paying attention to what I do, engaging with the world, and, maybe just a little bit of shutting the fuck up.  Hey-yo.

what's pissing me off today

I'm skipping the message of love & joy for the day.  Really, how much of that can the average reader take?

Found this website referenced in a Bitch magazine article while bussing home from rehearsal last night. I've always been a little wary of cosmetics, not only because putting unnecessary stuff on my skin scares me a little (and I've got a genetic predisposition to flawed skin), but also because I like the way I look in makeup, and I don't want to start hating my natural face any more than I sometimes do.  But I'll put on lipstick and mascara occasionally, and of course I lay on the foundation for plays.  Poorly.  A year of makeup class in college didn't do shit for my skill level.

But I digress...

Did you know that Minnesota and California are the only states to ban mercury in cosmetics? (Since they are clearly looking out for me in particular, I expect Illinois to be next, with my brief homestates of Arizona and Colorado to follow in the next decade.)

Did you know that, while the EU has banned 1132 ingredients from being included in cosmetics, the U.S.'s Cosmetic Ingredient Review, a distinctively non-independent safety panel, has outlawed a whopping (... wait for it ...) 9? 

Did you know that even among those chemicals toxic or cancerous enough to be included on the US watchlist, the FDA has no power to prosecute companies using these materials, and that manufacturers are not obligated to disclose when they decide to use them?

Did you know tests on that American teenage girls (not that America is unusually obsessed with unnatural and narrow idea(l)s of beauty or anything) have revealed that they carry chemicals in their bodies that lead to cancer and hormonal defects - chemicals commonly found in cosmetics?

Is this an argument for more government regulation?  Yes.  The lack of oversight and enforcement is appalling.  But ultimately, I believe we have to be responsible for our own education and our own choices.  Skin Deep lists, apparently, every damn product they could get their hands on and ranks them by "hazard level" (go to FAQ for an explanation of the rankings).  I don't know if I'm tossing everything that sits in my mostly unused box of free lipsticks and old blush (I do have a play opening in a few weeks, after all), but I'll probably get rid of most of it, and I'm definitely checking the list before I purchase any replacements.

Oh, and since I'm bordering on the pedantic here, let me throw in a blatant plug for Bitch magazine.  They continually bring issues like this to my attention, and while not every topic they address is something I agree with or find compelling, the writing and formatting are of such high quality that they usually suck me in.  They nearly went under as a real magazine last month (I loathe reading things online), and got saved by devoted readers (tax-deductible donation!).  If you haven't flipped through this treasure, give it a looksee for me.

I don't want to believe this

I am a feminist.  And I love men.  Not just as objects, but as people.  I know it's considered narrow-minded in many circles to say there are differences between men and women, and I've always seen gender as a wheel more than a binary, but insomuch as I can categorize the Y chromosome as "male", I generally prefer men to women, at least on a superficial level.  I've experienced far more sexism from woman-hating women than I have from men.  So as much as I think it is important to be a feminist, and to be aware of gender restrictions, stereotypes, prejudice, and violence, I guess I still find it hard to accept the pervasiveness of raw male sexism in this country.  How pervasive?  Pervasive enough for a gift store to prominently display a life-sized Hillary Clinton nutcracker cutout in their window in downtown Minneapolis.  I was disgusted by the joke gift earlier this year, but today I stopped and broke it down. 

What the fuck makes Hillary a ballbuster?

Given, I didn't follow the campaign closely, but I cannot think of one instance in the last 16 years in which Hillary did anything demeaning to men or said anything emasculating.  (And if she had, you can be sure I would have been hearing about it ever since.)  If that is the case, Hillary Clinton is a ballbuster because of one of the more of the following characteristics:

she's female

she's smart

she's educated

she's ambitious

she's independent (not politically, but that's another issue)

she's confident

she's accomplished

she's trying to move in on a traditionally male role

And if any one of these things make her a nutcracker, then there are some sorry, pathetic, weak fucking men in this country wasting their energy protecting their shriveled sacks against every woman I know. I've laughed at holocaust jokes.  I've laughed at child molester jokes.  I won't even apologize for it.  But there is nothing funny about the hatred and fear directed at the idea of a competent woman.  I can't say there is more racism than sexism in the US, but it's still okay to be openly sexist.  People would not have stood for a comparable mockery of Barack Obama.  Repressing our racism doesn't seem to have done much good in the last 20 years, so maybe keeping that vitriol out in the open will help people acknowledge and address it. On the anniverary of suffrage, it is particularly nauseating.  Perhaps the cutout was supposed to be symbolic of the horrific consequences of having given women the right to vote.  Let me play the elder statesman (ha!) here and say to all of the young women who think that we're in a post-feminist era: look around.  Equality is not another word for "sexual freedom".  It ain't nearly over.

(solid speech, btw)

It took a male Brazilian director to make a feminist thriller?

Watched The Constant Gardener last night, which has been languishing in the Netflix envelope for weeks.  Really impressive, on so many levels.  Creepy as Ralph Fiennes is (he just is - maybe it's the Nazi thing), he's wonderful in it - shy and geeky and confused and repressed and quietly, subtly fawning - truly a delicate, beautiful performance.   Weiss is flawless, too, but his performance is, perhaps because of the nature of the character, more nuanced.  I was also charmed by the marriage.  Despite this being an issue film, the relationship between them is based on something outside of the temporal issues of the day.  Tessa is not an ideologue, she is a smart and sympathetic human being trying to help people.  You see this the first time she is introduced, and she loves Justin independent of the fact that he is not actively involved in her cause, is even unwittingly tied to the people who are fighting against her. The Buddhist in me was touched by this.
As far as the story, what struck me beyond the politics and  unsurprizing evil corporation stuff was the reversal of traditional gender roles in the film.  She is putting herself in danger.  She is protecting him.  She asks him to marry her, and does so (affection aside) not for money, or security, or children, but to advance her career, or mission, as it were.  He is up nights waiting for her to come home.  She is the one whose love,  loyalty, and constancy are in question.  Plot aside, it is directed and performed in such a way that the occasional and necessary remarks from authorities about "the bitch" and "reigning her in" resonate only as a sign of the fear and violence of the moneyed class. and there is no question that Justin is going to ignore them, ignore them as if he didn't even understand what they were talking about, as if controlling his wife were beyond his frame of reference.  And please don't argue (or do; you'll just be proven sadly wrong) that he is the one driving the action in the film, that she gets killed off (this isn't giving anything away), so it is a male-centric story.  He spends the entire film trying to figure out what she already knew.  So a big yay for the rare feminist political thriller.

one caveat: