Today is Equal Pay Day, and the National Women's Law Center is encouraging blogging and other activity in support of the cause. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 helps a great deal, and corrects an atrocious Supreme Court decision, as well as congressional opposition to the same bill in 2008. If you're not familiar with Lilly Ledbetter's story or have forgotten some of the details, Dahlia Lithwick wrote a great piece on the case and the congressional opposition almost exactly a year ago. And this video is the first of a series on Ledbetter from 2007:
I thought Lilly Ledbetter was one of the more inspiring speakers at the Democratic National Convention, although since it was early and short many people missed it. But this should not be a partisan issue. And it's admirable that Ledbetter has been working to ensure that others receive the fair treatment she was denied.
Equal pay should be a no-brainer. Pay should be based on merit, not gender, sex, race, sexuality, religion or anything similar. Jobs that are sometimes deemed "women's work" – teaching, social work, nursing – also tend to be undervalued and under-compensated. There's more that's needed to improve the American workplace, and some of them are society-wide measures. Card check for unions would help. So would decent, affordable child care, parental leave and universal health care (as one of my married-with-kids friends has often pointed out). It's no coincidence that countries with more women in government have enacted those before the U.S. has. There are many things we can do to make a more equitable, more pleasant, less distressful society, and equal pay is one of them.
At the Republican National Convention, the familiar conservative politics of spite were on full display. However, there was also the Messiah imagery used to tell John McCain's POW story, and constant camera time for baby Trig Palin. It may not have approached Madonna-with-child territory, but the RNC was hitting Mom-The Flag-and Apple Pie Moose Stew awfully hard. As Rick Perlstein observed:
Richard Nixon always pulled out stories of cute children and animals at crucial moments. Trig, passed from hand to hand between Palins and McCains with the rhythmic regularity of a Bob Fosse routine, is Sarah Palin's Checkers: attack me, and you're really attacking him.
There was also a persistent theme of deferring to authority, specifically male authority. Authoritarian themes from movement conservatives are hardly shocking. But the pick of Sarah Palin as VP made gender play a more prominent role.
This is a hindsight observation, but it's not surprising that the Republican Party went with a female vice presidential candidate before ever offering a serious female presidential candidate – albeit 24 years after the Democrats ran with Geraldine Ferraro (at the same rate, the first female GOP presidential candidate will run for 2032). Palin presents herself as feisty, colorful, folksy and an eager attack dog, willing to brazenly lie, repeatedly, in public. Still, the male authority angle really hit me on Thursday. I thought Judith Warner articulated the dynamic well in her piece "The Mirrored Ceiling":
Because the Republicans, very clearly, believe that real people are idiots. This disdain for their smarts shows up in the whole way they’ve cast this race now, turning a contest over economic and foreign policy into a culture war of the Real vs. the Elites. It’s a smoke and mirrors game aimed at diverting attention from the fact that the party’s tax policies have helped create an elite that’s more distant from “the people” than ever before. And from the fact that the party’s dogged allegiance to up-by-your-bootstraps individualism — an individualism exemplified by Palin, the frontierswoman who somehow has managed to “balance” five children and her political career with no need for support — is leading to a culture-wide crack-up.
Real people, the kind of people who will like and identify with Palin, they clearly believe, are smart, but not too smart, and don’t talk too well, dropping their “g”s, for example, and putting tough concepts like “vice president” in quotation marks.
“As for that ‘V.P.’ talk all the time … I tell ya, I still can’t answer that question until somebody answers for me, What is it exactly that the ‘VP’ does every day?” Palin asked host Lawrence Kudlow on CNBC sometime before her nomination. “I’m used to bein’ very productive and workin’ real hard in an administration and we want to make sure that that ‘V.P.’ slot would be a fruitful type of position.”
And, I think, they find her acceptably “real,” because Palin’s not intimidating, and makes it clear that she’s subordinate to a great man.
That’s the worst thing a woman can be in this world, isn’t it? Intimidating, which appears to be synonymous with competent. It’s the kiss of death, personally and politically.
If you watch the Sarah Palin biography video (apparently bumped from Wednesday to Thursday because Giuliani blathered on too long), it does show Palin with her mom and sisters, but also makes a point of mentioning her going on "pre-dawn moose hunts" with her father. This may be more to emphasize her NRA, reg'lar folks credentials. The video also casts her as apprentice to John McCain, which given her stunning lack of qualifications to be VP isn't that surprising (if unconvincing) a pitch. There's a bit of a deference to male authority thing going on, but "moose" gets at least three mentions. At least in the video, they're selling her folksy side and her fake reformer image more than anything else. (Like virtually all the RNC videos, it also features a gratuitous key change or two in the cheesy synth score.)
However, take a closer look at the bio video for Cindy McCain (narrated by Gary Sinise!):
The first two minutes are almost completely focused on Cindy McCain's father, whose story is presented in a way that mirrors John McCain's, from his decorated military service, to being shot down, to meeting his wife, to being a super-patriot. Cindy's presented as Daddy's Little Girl. (The synth score is especially cheesy in this piece, with an angelic chorus to start.) Her first meeting with John of "love at first sight" of course omits that he was dating her while still married to his first wife. Cindy's humanitarian aid, even if overblown here, does speak well of her. Still, I was really struck by how strongly her relationship with her father was emphasized. I think part of this, like the humanitarian footage, is an attempt to deflate the critique that the McCains are obscenely wealthy and out of touch, 'cause Cindy's dad was a reg'lar guy who made good. But there's also a very, very strong theme of reverence and deferral to male authority. There's little mention of her mother or her daughters. She does all her work to "honor her father," "her father was the inspiration," and "not a day goes by since she lost both her parents that Cindy doesn't think of her father's simple, Western words..." I thought the creepiest passage was "John McCain encouraged her to go far beyond what she thought she could do – helped her find a path to serve a cause greater than herself..." Even though the film does give her several rah-rahs to herself, and the John McCain-showing-her-the-true-path bit emphasizes the same war hero-leader story they're trying to sell with Saint Johnnie, overall the Cindy narrative is one of honoring her father, and being lost and then guided by her husband. It's a story of trusting authority, but specifically of deferring to male authority. I think it ties in well with the Messiah theme subtly woven into the McCain narrative, but even more strongly into conservative notions of the proper social order.
One of the great myths social conservatives truly believe is that if everyone just minded their place – that place to be determined by social conservatives, of course – everything would be just fine. It feeds naturally into the "elect someone like me, competence be damned" approach that Palin satisfies, just as George W. did before her (although Bush was pushed even harder by the media than Pailn has been to date as "authentic," and in Bush's case, a superior choice to that more competent, damned snob, Al Gore). I tend to think of the insistence on deference to male authority, the Daddy's Little Girl dynamic and young women wanting to please their fathers as very Southern, just because I'm most familiar with seeing it there, but of course it's all over the United States and in many other countries. In small doses it's not so bad, I suppose, just an expression of typical parental affection and anxiety, but in extremity it can become toxic, domineering and repressive. I don't think all the cultural tropes of the RNC can necessarily be fought by Democrats, either, at least not openly and directly. But I do think it's useful to realize what the pitch is, and what makes the authoritarian conservatives of the Republican base tick. Among the diehards, those who still claim they approve of Bush, some may even realize they're getting screwed economically by the elites within their own party, but simply hold social issues more important than economic ones. A restored social order – perhaps restored to a mythical perfect past that never really existed – is not only a key goal, it's the clear and obvious solution to all our problems. The right sort of people will do right by them and the country. Plus, even if Bush has been doing a lousy job, those goddam liberals would do even worse, and can’t be trusted, any more than anyone else who's Not Us. The Democrats talked about foreign policy and terrorism during their convention, of course, but they didn't use the jingoistic, xenophobic, Manichean language favored by competing scumbags Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, nor the McCarthyist rhetoric of the mendacious Lindsey Graham. Never underestimate the politics of fear, spite, simple solutions and comforting nostalgia.
Regardless of how one feels about the new book Confessions of a Video Vixen, I think we can all agree that our lexicon is all the richer for the introduction of the new term “video ho-ing.” Speaking as a former high school English teacher, I can confirm this one will get wide usage. Last year gave us “wardrobe malfunction,” and now “video ho-ing” seizes my #2 spot for the year so far (#1 to follow shortly in another post). I’m still unclear as to who specifically deserves credit for this term, so before inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary, further research is warranted.
The Washington Post offers two interesting articles on the book. The first is a general article which observes, among others things, that the sinner-finding-redemption book is a tried and true formula. Vixen’s author Karrine Steffans, fomerly “Super Head,” claims to be a writer first and foremost, and perhaps the book possesses sincerity beyond its commercial aspirations. Still, it’s certainly true that the “I once was lost but now am found” narrative allows for wallowing in salacious details of sex, drugs, and scandal while assuming a stance of piety. Often the authors have mixed feelings about their pasts, glorifying their behavior even as they claim to decry it. (If you listen to Henry Hill’s commentary on the Goodfellas DVD, he’s grateful to be free of some of his murderous associates, but you can tell he also misses those amazing seats at the Copacabana.) Meanwhile, Vixen’s book cover ain’t exactly a recruitment poster for the convent.
WP writer Donna Britt’s scathing reaction to the book comes in part from interviewing a DC mother of two daughters. One can disagree, but one sentence hit me hard:
"The perception is that if you dress or act a certain way, you'll be taken care of."
This used to be called the Prince Charming myth, where the Prince swept in on his gleaming white charger to rescue the poor hapless woman, who was supposed to wait patiently for this external savior... (Perhaps Steffans’ film deal will be with Disney, who can redo Snow White as Pimp Charming and the Seven... oh, I just can’t finish that sentence.)
On a related note, Slate recently featured a good article on Liz Goldwyn’s HBO doc, Pretty Things, about stripping in the burlesque era. Reviewer Rachel Shteir observes that:
The problem with Pretty Things is that the story Goldwyn really wants to tell is how striptease transformed her from ugly duckling to sexually confident swan.
and
Goldwyn worships the strippers as models of sexual self-empowerment, but the film is confused by the projection of her own post-feminist ideas about sex onto these women, and her desire to wield the kind of sexual power she sees them as having had.
Goldwyn is not the only woman ever to feel this way, and surely her feelings of empowerment are positive for her. Yet these three articles taken as whole do underline that not every choice is right for every person.
Pop culture narratives have embraced “the makeover” as a vehicle for feminine transformation for ages. (Innocuous or not, the final message of Grease appears to be: if he doesn’t like you way you are — change!) However, in the past decade many pop culture narratives have also pushed the idea that a woman is only truly liberated if she is overtly sexual. Madonna clearly feels it’s her calling to writhe about on a stage in front of a thousand people in an S&M brassiere and dental floss, but does Laura Bush feel the same? I think not! (Jenna Bush, perhaps...) Now, I have yet to meet a single straight man who enjoys listening to Madonna outside of a dance club context, but her shtick is plainly her shtick, and not something someone else has chosen for her.
In this day and age, must a young woman be chaste, or perceived to be so? Must she be overtly sexual? It’s natural for teenagers especially to try out a variety of identities and roles as they search for the right one... but must there be only a narrow range of identities to choose from? This is ultimately why I found these articles interesting, because “identity politics” usually involves trying to limit or disparage someone else versus embracing and expanding identity (witness the nasty terms “oreo” and “banana.”) Cornel West has bemoaned that “black culture” is assumed to be street culture and cannot be anything else. Barack Obama had a line in his rousing speech at the Democrat National Convention that referenced “the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.” Finally, on Ebert & Roper, Roger Ebert, when reviewing Friday Night Lights, observed the football-obsessed culture that envelops high-school kids in Texas and wondered, what about the kid who wants to do drama instead?
Perhaps Karrine Steffans can address these issues in her next book. (Let’s give the drama hos some love, too.)
