The Style Section, Again?

T: The New York Times Style Magazine, February 27, 2011

Feminist icon Gloria Steinem wrote a piece for the New York Times today about female politicians and the gender gap in voting.  It’s a smart, succinct censure of the media for what she sees as a common failure, when talking about women in politics, to separate the serious thinkers and policy-makers from the “sideshows.”  She argues that women vote for women, and men, who represent their issues, which explains why leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Olympia Snowe benefit from the gender gap, while their Mama Grizzly counterparts like Michelle Bachman and Sharron Angle don’t.

Until the media understand that the majority of a constituency picks its own leaders, we’re all in danger of missing the main event.

You know what else makes us in danger of missing the main event, and helps explain a bit about why, as Steinem points out, the world didn’t know more about Gabrielle Giffords before she was almost assassinated in Tuscon last month?

Because pieces like this still end up in the Women’s Fashion section of the New York Times Style Magazine.

I get that Steinem’s writing is accompanied by some lovely black and white photographs of the brilliant (and, yes, quite stylish) women mentioned in the piece.  Still, I spent the whole time reading it actually hoping that she would mention their clothes, because at least then there would have been some tiny relevance to the fashion issue.

See, this ridiculousness actually made me hope that I was reading yet another article about smart, powerful women’s clothing choices.

Read Full Post »

“Let the word go forth”

There’s something in the air at the end of January, and not just everyone’s favorite frozen ice crystals.  The last few days have been awesome for historical anniversaries.

January 20 was the 50^th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s first inaugural address, that soaring speech that makes you feel like it’s possible that America could live up to its own ideals.  I have a book of Kennedy’s speeches and other writings, from a seminar I took in college, titled simply “Let the Word Go Forth.”  Every time I see it I hear JFK’s voice in my head, and I feel a little more optimistic.  Rhetoric can’t change the world all on its own, but it can certainly do something to get ideas caught in peoples’ heads.

(Incidentally, I’m just noticing that that book is currently sitting on my shelf between Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty and a collection of medieval primary sources called, pedantically, Classics of Western Thought.  How is that both totally fitting and completely nauseating?)

For filing under Best Birthday Ever: January 20, 1961 was also my mother’s 7^th birthday.  On my 7^th birthday George H.W. Bush was declared Time Magazine’s “Men” of the Year.  Mom wins. (Correction, from the Department of I Know What Year My Mother Was Born, Honestly: That was her 9th birthday, not 7th.  Sorry, Mom!  Same point still applies.)

January 22 was the 38^th birthday of Roe V. Wade, celebrated by feminists as a great step forward in equality and women’s health, and taken by Republicans as an excuse to once again make sure that women making their own reproductive health choices (except, maybe in the way that Republicans would like them to decide) remains a taboo in American society.

So, JFK and Roe v. Wade are important, but my favorite late January historical anniversary is actually today’s, January 23, which, in 1849, was the day that Elizabeth Blackwell received her medical degree- the first woman in America to do so.  The Blackwells and their extended family (including Lucy Stone, and Antoinette Brown) are my favorite American historical family – feminists, doctors, suffragists, abolitionists, ministers – and that’s just the women!

Also of note this weekend: Rebecca Traister’s latest article, awesome as always,  this fabulous piece (though I may be a little bit biased towards the author) about Gabby Giffords, women in politics, and girl power, and, in case you didn’t know it already, I <heart> Rachel Maddow (the fun starts at about 1:12).

One more thing – Friday marked the one-year anniversary of a way less cool thing: the Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court decision.  How’s your democracy doing now?

Read Full Post »

Women in Journalism (or, More Feminist Ranting)

I was recently putting together a list of female journalists (no, not just for fun, although it was quite fun), and I’m reminded yet again of how much of a boy’s world journalism is. Except, these days it’s not so much that there aren’t any female writers out there, or that there’s just the one His Girl Friday smacking around the befuddled sexist male reporters in the newsroom. There are women – awesome, brilliant, gifted writers whose articles are always thought provoking and sometimes game-changing.

The problem is where you find them. If you go to the top newspapers, a large percentage of the women you will find there are writing in the Lifestyle sections: food, fashion, design, real estate, women’s issues. I’ll repeat that last one: Women’s issues are in the lifestyle sections. Because men’s issues are, what? Business, Tech, Politics – those all get their own section. But women’s issues are something other, and nebulous, so when you have someone writing on them at all she (and it’s always she) gets stuck in Lifestyle.

Salon, though I’m a fan, is one of the worst perpetrators of this marginalization of “women’s issues.” They have some of the best in the business writing on beats like gender, women in politics and global women’s rights – and they get stuck in the “Life” section. The brilliant Rebecca Traister’s pieces are lumped together with sex advice columns and TV reviews (ok, sometimes she wrote the TV reviews – but then again, TV reviews aren’t always crap.) Last month I spotted one of these juxtapositions that was so ridiculous I had to archive it.

Foreign affairs, violent anti-choice rhetoric, and…smelly beds? It’s like eating a box of Oreos and suddenly pulling out a graham cracker. Neither are bad, necessarily, but they don’t belong in the same box.

And this is their idea of “Life”?

Not to say that Salon is all bad on the women’s empowerment front. The editor-in-chief is Joan Walsh (at least until she steps down in the near future to pursue book projects – and is replaced by a man. Sigh.). They do have smart women writing on interesting and important topics. But compare the number of writers with a Y chromosome on the editorial staff of the Life section (one – the advice columnist, which is awesome in its own right – out of four) to the number of male writers on the News/Politics and Tech/Business sections (four out of four).

This, my friends, is where the rub lies. So, let’s get more women writing, more women being published in the “hard news” sections, and get “women’s issues” out of the Lifestyle sections. Who’s with me?

Read Full Post »

The F word

…No, not that one.

Maybe it’s because my new job is in the male-dominated tech industry (heck, it’s in an industry, which is weird and slightly earthshattering for me)…

Maybe it’s because having said job has chilled, just a bit, my outrage over the popular conception of the “20-Something Slacker Generation” – my piece about which still hasn’t gotten much beyond “Arrggghhhhhh, everyone is so stupid!”, and therefore has not seen the light of the interwebs…

Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading Rebecca Traister’s fabulous new book on women in the 2008 election, Big Girls Don’t Cry, one line of which, about Hillary Clinton’s perceived vs. actual “willingness to kowtow to assholes” has been stuck in my head for days…

Whatever the reason, I’ve been thinking a lot about feminism lately.  And I don’t seem to be the only one.

The Nation is full of feminism (vrai and faux) this week.

There’s a new version of Wonder Woman coming to televisions sometime soon.  Produced by the guy who made Ally McBeal.  (Oh dear).

The “enthusiasm gap” between Republican and Democratic voters in the midterms seems to be linked to a gender gap in likely voters.  Some hypothesize that this is because men tend, on a whole, to be more conservative than women (and conservatives are more hyped up this election cycle.  In case you haven’t noticed.).  Others think its because men completely lose their minds and sense of self if they lose their jobs, while women, naturally, don’t really care about work and are totally fine being laid off.  Because, what, it lets them go back to the things they really want to do, have dozens of babies and take care of their menfolk?

The Sarah Palin-created “Mama Grizzlies” are trying to claim not only feminism, but Susan B. Anthony (that’s nothing new), and smart girl-ness.  (I am so offended by so much of that, but I’m going to save it for another day)

But, thankfully, in solidarity with all of us smacking our foreheads about all of that, the ladies of EMILY’s List say, “Oh, Please.” http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2010/08/17/emilys-list-targets-sarah-palins-mama-grizzlies/

And a couple of “chick-lit” authors raised holy hell started an interesting and wide-ranging discussion about the gender divide within the elite world of “literary” novels, and the high-profile reviews of them.  And so Franzenfreude was born.

Even as some bemoan the current crop of younger feminist leaders, with their blogs and their heels, I say the conversation is alive and well, and that’s saying something.

Read Full Post »