I entered AcademiaObscura’s annual “Academics With Their Cats” contest . YES I’M THAT PERSON. Please vote for me because I’m untenured so this is literally the most important milestone in my academic career.
Orange Cat and I are on the last voting page, I look stunning in my white kitty collar and Max looks stunned she has to pose for anything not food.
Ok, let’s discuss. This is from UK-based Bodyform, a company selling period pads and liners. It’s part of Bodyform’s Red.fit campaign, which is about encouraging women to be active even when menstruating. The commercial is getting a lot of media attention for one overtly expressed reason, and another that’s less clearly articulated but still significant.
#1: it’s a period commercial that shows blood. Usually period commercials represent periods with blue liquid or ice tea or whatever else might be excellent stand-ins for expelled uterine lining. In this commercial, we’re not seeing expelled uterine lining (we know that periods are mainly not blood but expelled uterine lining, right?) but we are seeing bodies expelling a substance similar in color and viscosity (kind of) to periods.
#2: it’s a period commercial where women are doing real active shit rather than just chilling in a white room, or maybe swimming in a white bathing suit, or maybe getting ready for a romantic dinner date with hubby because everyone with periods is a cisgender heterosexual woman. Actually, it’s pretty cool that this commercial positively represents active female bodies and also positively represents the byproducts of that activity: dirt, blood, broken skin.
So these are two things to think about. And here are some other things to think about too.
#3: this is feminist consumerism. What is feminist consumerism you ask, because it sounds amazing!?! Actually, it’s capitalistic manipulation. It’s when a company gets you to buy their product by selling it via feminist or otherwise liberal and progressive messages and images about women. To be clear: the product does not have to align with feminism. The product might actually reinforce sexist ideas, or racist ideas, or limited ideas about gender. But we’re supposed to buy it anyway because of how its marketed. Here’s perpetrator numero uno: Dove sells beauty products. Women are supposed to buy beauty products to feminize themselves, make themselves pleasing to others, alter their bodies to better conform to hegemonic beauty standards. Here’s how Dove sells its beauty products:You’re perfect inside and out, don’t change. Except change how you smell and your natural oils and your wrinkles. Do it with Dove.
Ok, you get the picture. Feminist consumerism is the selling of something that might be entirely unrelated to feminist ideals or goals via words and images that our society associates with feminist ideals and goals.
#4: feminist ideals and goals are popularly depicted with that ol’ post-feminist chestnut “Girl Power.” Girl power women are strong, fit, ass-kickers, and desirably hegemonic too. This might be represented by, say, good looking, thin ciswomen trail-running or surfing or rock climbing. When these women get hurt, what do they do? They get up and continue on without crying or stopping to bandage that nasty head wound.
…except the blood from a gaping head wound.
It is awesome that these women can be physically strong and really good at sports (and apparently medieval knightery as well). But that’s not the only vision of feminism, and it’s actually a pretty privileged version of feminist ideals too.
#5: last but not at all least: that cool-as-fuck background music is “Native Puppy Love” by the cool-as-fuck A Tribe Called Red: three Indigenous individuals who mix native music, often PowWow singing, chanting, and drumming, with dubstep. A Tribe Called Red is cool-as-fuck and you should learn more about them.
A Tribe Called Red is getting some commercial visibility here and I hope some dollars too. Their music is all about Indigenous people using their own local or culture-specific music and performance practices to create new art. Their work is also a means for native people to expose non-native people to native culture, instead of what usually happens, which is White people appropriating, reducing, and commodifying native culture. But also, A Tribe Called Red is not credited in the commercial. And whereas A Tribe Called Red use images in its videos and during shows that highlight native bodies or deconstruct White-created images of native bodies, this song is laid under images of what appear to be non-native women, many of whom are engaging in activities associated with colonization (ballet obv, but also the knight thing is a bit crusadey for me).
Welp, off to colonize brown people.
Conclusion: is this commercial super cool or super problematic? I dunno. It’s using feminist tropes to get me to consume pads. But pads are used for a physical rather than a beatification process, and they’re not really a trendy or super expensive product either. The commercial is associating women’s bodies with blood and dirt and injury, but we aren’t supposed to see this as vile or even unfeminine. The relationship between how we should feel about women doing bloody activities and women with periods is clear: it’s not gross, it’s awesome. But also, am I going to buy this product because I want to be one of those kick-ass, tough-as-nails, bloody, post-feminist ladies with expensive workout clothes and a soundtrack of cool PowWow dubstep as the background to my White cis life? I JUST DON’T FUCKING KNOW.
Every year I get bad evaluations from students who are pissed that I’ve told them “the social sciences doesn’t offer answers, only questions.” Yes, they hate that. What it means is that value doesn’t always reside in the black or the white of a conclusion. There’s value in the ability to see and to name the gray, to understand what you’re consuming and why. Can I tell you to buy or not buy this product? To celebrate or revile it on social media? No. What I can offer you is all those critical thinking synapses we just built. And that’s cool too.
Saucy Scholar fans may remember my inaugural post was on the UC Santa Barbara shooting. I was teaching at UCSB, and I had also been a grad student there for five years prior. It was my first campus shooting. It was intense and traumatic to the campus community. It was shocking. It was unexpected. I immediately contacted my students to ask if they were safe and ok.
UCSB held a memorial service at the outdoor soccer stadium. Probably 25,000 people were there. As I was heading to the memorial, I saw a friend sitting at the campus bus stop, waiting to go home. I asked why he wasn’t going to the memorial. He said: “this is not my first campus shooting.” I remembered he was from Virginia Tech.
This morning I have been contacted by many people asking if I am safe and ok. You see, there was a shooting on my campus. The one I currently teach at. Like my friend, I can also now say this is not my first.
Lots of public figures are sending their love and their thoughts and their prayers. I don’t want that. I want outrage. I want shock. I want action. But we don’t do that anymore for campus shootings. They are upsetting but normal. School shootings are no longer aberrations. And they should no longer be unexpected by me.
This is now part of the life of the academic. This must now be part of the pedagogy of professors. In addition to job market advice and tenure advice, can The Chronicle and The Professor Is In start writing advice columns on ways faculty can deal with this?
This is how I ended that first post, the one on the UCSB shooting:
“I honestly don’t know how to end this. So I won’t. Because this is a conversation I’m going to have to have in every fucking class I teach from now on at UCSB. And it’s going to have to constantly evolve.”
I know that you know that enough has been written and said about Caitlyn Jenner. Lots of it good. Some of it sexist. Some definately thought provoking. But I just read this NYT article and, frankly, I’m pissed off. Please add this “woman=vagina=struggle” argument to my Saucy Shit List, which also includes this Feminist Wire argument about how only fucked up people care more about genitals than “chemistry.” These articles are opposite sides of the same coin: both make exclusionary decisions about what is and is not proper behavior, bodies, feelings. Then they use those ideas to explain why people who don’t feel the same are assholes. This is not cool.
Saucy Shit List Exhibit A: this NYT opinion piece called “What Makes a Woman?”* According to Elinor Burkett, Caitlyn Jenner is big fat FAKER because she expresses her womanhood as high femme. Burkett believes Jenner has reduced being a woman to “nonsense” such as wearing thick mascara and a cleavage-boosting corset, and walking around with nail polish until it chips off. What does make a woman? According to Burkett, its a) a vagina and b) the from-birth systemic oppression of vagina-wielders.
Important Point 1: there would be no such thing as trans if our society didn’t divide bodies into two sex categories, and then limit the every move of those bodies to two restrictive genders. If a body’s sex designation didn’t mean shit about that person’s gender identity, then that person would just do whatever the fuck they wanted and identify however the fuck they wanted and that would be that. But its not. One of two genders is thrust onto our bodies when we’re born.
Actually, while still in utero… enter gender reveal cakes!
That gender is so tightly entwined with our original sex designation that men can’t wear nail polish without getting shit for it, and they can’t use female pronouns and still comfortably identify as men. Woman doesn’t mean vagina. It means having your body inextricably mashed into a bi-gender role.
Important Point 2: Obv gender is a social construction because it can be done by any body (drag queens anyone?). But sex (as in male and female) is also social construction. You heard me. Sure, we all have unique, specific, functioning bodies. But the way we take those bodies and jam them into one of two sex categories is all society. Actually, lots of bodies don’t match up. It’s estimated that 1 in 1000 bodies don’t fit neatly into our bi-sex system. These intersexed bodies have non-binary genital structures, or they don’t have the match among hormones, gonads, and chromosomes we use to determine male or female. Don’t believe me that 1 in 1000 people are intersexed? Let me ask you a question: do you know what everyone’s genitals look like? Everyone in the world? What about everyone’s chromosomes, hormones, and gonads? You test those? And when the people who do see a lot of genitals and do test a lot of genetics—namely the medical community— identify an intersexed child, they do immediate genital surgery and/or pump hormones into the kid, often just weeks after birth. So yes, we make sex.
My dear NYT article, to say vagina=woman is to say that bi-sex social categories are the reality of bodies. Actually, we take lots of different types of bodies and overlay bi-sex onto them. And then we say “now you have a sex designation, do your gender dance!” The social gender dance is, in fact, the way we get to the category of female sex. And Jenner is doing it. Doing it like a boss.
Saucy Shit List Exhibit B: this Feminist Wire College Feminisms piece called “Dating Your Genitals.” Quinn Israel *seems* to take the direct opposite position of Burkett by critiquing those who define their sex, love, or relationship desires according to genitals. The gist is: “in the age of strap-ons, why do genitals matter, and why are certain types of body appearances even important? Those who choose their partners based on this shit (rather than CHEMESTRY) are either slaves to the system or transphobe assholes.”
Ok, this article’s not specifically about Jenner, but it’s a good example of some of the queer activist commentary deriding Jenner for using her money and privilege to present herself as a hegemonic femme white woman. Ie, Jenner is cast as either a slave to the system or an asshole that’s choosing to pass in a way that many trans people can’t, don’t, or won’t.
Important Point 3: If someone really likes flesh-and-blood penis and that’s more important than connection or chemistry or whatever, then fine. If someone has lived their whole life in a sex and gender system and their limited idea about sexuality has become embodied (a part of their identities that actually trigger bodily sensations), then cool. If someone has grown up dreaming about wearing corsets and mascara and nail polish until it chips, then let her do her.
Important Point 4: It bears repeating: Jenner should be able to do whatever the fuck she wants in terms of identity expression. Telling Caitlyn Jenner (or anyone else) how she should or should not/can or cannot do her is the same fucked up shit as our bi-gender and sex culture telling Bruce Jenner he couldn’t wear nail polish till it chipped off, or telling gay people they shouldn’t want to have sex with people who have similar genitals.
My dear Feminist Wire article, your problem shouldn’t be with people wanting a certain type of partner genital makeup or sex act or identity. Just like the problem shouldn’t be with Jenner’s gender choices. Its not identities or expressions or gender or sex or sexuality that’s the problem–its the social structures that rank some of these things over others. Women who exclusively date men with penises are more accepted in our society. Women who put on mascara and a corset and nail polish are more valued in our society. So instead of policing people’s choices, let look for ways to make all partner (or non-partner) choices equally legal and socially valid. And lets look for ways to make Jenner’s high femme equal to those individuals who do not have the desire, money, or access to present themselves in a similar way. And here’s a good place to start: #MyVanityFairCover
* The correct answer is: calling yourself a woman makes you one. The end.
Let me tell you a story. I woke up. I checked Facebook. A friend posted Taylor Swift’s new music video, Bad Blood. I watched it. I went on Twitter. Media-scholar-extraordinaire-turned-Buzzfeed-reporter Anne Helen Petersen posted about Bad Blood. Behold the exchange:
That’s a lot of academic class/pop culture sass packed into 140 characters. So let me take it back a bit. Taylor Swift is one of those “I’m not a feminist oh wait I just learned what feminism is and I’m a feminist” kind of feminists. This is great. We need more feminists defining themselves as feminists (I’m looking at you, Shailene Woodley). In fact, Swift attributes her understanding of feminism and evolution of feminist self-identification to pal Lena Dunham. So what is Bad Blood? It’s a music video full of badass-looking, dangerous-cool fighter women, played by many of Swift’s big Hollywood friends: Cindy Crawford, Mariska Hargitay, Selena Gomez, Jessica Alba. And yes, Lena Dunham.*
To recap: Swift is a woman who has publically minted herself feminist. She makes a video filled with famous powerful women known for playing powerful or feminist characters. All the female characters in the video are cool as fuck and dangerous as hell. BY GOD THIS VIDEO IS FEMINIST. Oh wait, no, its not. It’s a “postfeminist girl power montage of skinny girls who think ass-kicking in high heels and big earrings is not a poor idea.”
Our skin is unprotected from this fire backdrop. But we look amaz
So what does this 140 character Tweet mean exactly? Let’s break it down… 140 character Tweet style!
Postfeminist: 1) There was historical gender inequality but, because of past activism, we no longer need feminism. Needed it, did it, in post world. Yay?
2) Women’s educational and professional barriers are not systemic and so can be overcome with individual hard work. Work harder, ladies!
Girl power: Female empowerment exemplified via independence, self-sufficiency, and physical strength/violence/ass-kicking. Sisterhood here somewhere too
Montage: A film sequence of pretty pictures that speeds up time and is generally without substance.
Skinny girls: Postfeminist woman’s power is tied to the physical ideal: she has a hard body, skinny body, feminine body, light-skinned body. Hairless too:
Ass-kicking in high heels and big earrings: 1) Postfeminist woman’s power is tied to the social ideal: she is sexy, desirable, consumer of $$ products, and has a “cool girl” attitude.
2) Impractical crime fighting accoutrement:
Saucy Scholar conclusion: Bad Blood could be worse. And it could be better. See, Bad Blood exemplifies a very surface and superficial understanding of feminism. An ideology that women are empowered when they can ride motorcycles and throw knives, and wear latex outfits and high heels while doing it. This is not feminism. This is postfeminism. Because, sure, Swift is empowered. She’s rich as fuck and famous as fuck and she’s White and skinny and pretty. And yes, she’s called a slut because of her dating practices and people write sexist things about her because her songs are about her personal relationships. But she can overcome this with her money and her celebrity and her hegemonic looks. And all her skinny, pretty, wealthy celebrity friends who populate the video can too.
But this type of postfeminist sensibility doesn’t exemplify and doesn’t even begin to address a range of feminist issues. For example, women who don’t have the socio-economic status to consume products that would allow them to look awesomely cool. Or bodies will never achieve the hard, sexy, light-skinned ideal, not matter what they do. Or the systemic issue of portraying a woman’s sexuality as an object for entertainment and consumption rather than an expression of her own embodied desires.
I don’t think Bad Blood is harming anyone. Actually, I think it’s kind of fun; I’ve watched it like six times (ok, two of those times were to make GIFs). And Swift has taken what is basically a terrible song and made it into a hit. Bravo. But we shouldn’t think of Bad Blood as anything more than those things. It’s not feminist. It’s just some postfeminist eye candy.
And just FYI, if you take my Intro to Women’s and Gender Studies class, this is what you’ll encounter during week ten:
* Actually, my favorite part of the video was Lena Dunham: she didn’t appear in uber-feminine dress or makeup, and was only shot from the shoulders up, smoking a cigar.
[Warning: discussion of rape, and–clearly–Game of Thrones spoilers]
If you’re into pop culture and/or social media, then you have been inundated with commentary about what went down on the last episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones, “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken.” Specifically, producers decided to add a rape scene. Another one. It was the rape of Sansa Stark.
Yea, it’s this motherfucker again.
First the internet blew up with people who were outraged. Then the internet blew up with people who felt this outcry was unfounded because—for once—Game of Thrones handled a rape scene with gravity and respect. This is high praise for a show that’s known for salacious, body-bearing scenes of sexual violence. Rather than actually watching Sansa be raped, we watch Theon Greyjoy as he’s forced to witness the rape of a person akin to his little sister. As I’ve discussed before, this is the better way for media producers to portray scenes of sexual violence against women.
I certainly agree that this rape scene could have been—and has been in the past—handled much worse by HBO. So maybe HBO deserves a cookie. Or maybe it doesn’t.
Internet blow up around Game of Thrones is not new. The murder of Ned Stark. The Red Wedding. Joffrey’s demise. These scenes elicited scores of blogs, posts, and articles. But unlike the scenes I’ve just listed, the Sansa rape didn’t happen in George R.R. Martin’s books. Not with Sansa Stark. Rather, it was Sansa’s childhood friend, Jeyne Poole. Poole is a minor character who—after the murder of Ned Stark—is taken and trained as a sex worker, then passed off as Arya Stark and married to Ramsay Bolton. And yes, the consummation scene is scary and upsetting, largely because of how Theon Greyjoy is forced to play a role in it.
Know how I know all this? I’ve read all the Song of Ice and Fire books that Game of Thrones is based on. Yes, all of them. All the way through. And a lot of fucked up shit happens in these books. Rapes. A lot of rapes. I would guestimate hundreds of rapes. This is a conservative guestimate. Last year I was talking to a female friend who had also read the books and I mentioned how I was haunted by some of the rapes and frequently recalled horrific details. And my friend quickly said, “me too, me too.” This is first to highlight the lingering affect rape and sexual violence scenes can have on women. Second, to point out that there are an almost infinite number of rape scenes that Game of Thrones could have chosen from. But this is now the third—yes third—time producers have created a rape of a major female character in addition to those offered by the books.
So rather than debating how HBO handled the scene, I’d like to consider why the scene was added. As of yet, the Sansa in Martin’s books has not been raped. I find this significant because Martin’s not afraid of writing a rape scene and Sansa’s under constant threat of sexual violence. Yet she has—so far—been able to play the game of thrones in such a way so as to avoid this. HBO’s Game of Thrones took that away. Why? Well, one could argue that it was for coherence and consolidation. The Jeyne-Poole-as-Arya plotline is another piece to add to an already complicated puzzle. Or we could join the ranks of Amanda Marcotte and The Happy Feminist and argue that that it shows the “grotesque realities” of power and war. Or we could side with George R.R. Martin himself, who explains that no one was actually raped because Sansa is a fictional character.
But I think these positions miss an important point. When Martin writes rapes into his books, they bother me. A lot. But when HBO adds more of them, they aren’t being true to the books, and I don’t believe they’re trying to be true to the story or the realities of war and power. I think they’re trying to shock and titillate. They’re trying to get us to watch more.
HBO is not Schindler’s List. Don’t get me wrong, many HBO shows are fantastically complex. But HBO is widely known for attracting viewers with the type of sexualized, gritty, violent content that other networks can’t offer. That’s why on Game of Thrones, Littlefinger tells his diabolically complex and evil stories while prostitutes have sex in the background.
This was literally the least graphic image I could find of this scene.
When HBO shows scenes of human degradation and sexual abuse, its not so we will realize how horrific this all is, and work to change or prevent it in our own culture. These scenes are marketing tools; interesting and beautiful plotlines laced with titillation, violence, horror, and pleasure. And that’s what Sansa’s rape was. HBO took a beloved (at least by me) young female character and did something horrible to her, for ratings. I agree with “Race for the Iron Throne” super expert Steven Attewell that this scene had no larger purpose because it “did nothing to reveal character, or advance the plot, or critique anything about Westerosi society or about our own conceptions of medieval society that hasn’t already been critiqued.” It was done for ratings.
And I get this media game. Because we’re all talking about it, aren’t we? HBO for the win. But rather than creating more of these horror-rape scenes, HBO producers might as well as have just chosen from the litany of rape scenes already built into the story. And if they don’t—if they make new ones—then I have a hard time saying that this is simply fiction, or simply the reality of war, or simply a proper handling of a rape. It’s a way to get audiences to keep coming back. By offering them new and fresh sexual violence against women.
On an unrelated note, Brienne of Tarth is my motherfucking jam
Usually period commercials represent periods with blue liquid or ice tea or whatever else might be excellent stand-ins for expelled uterine lining. In this commercial, we’re not seeing expelled uterine lining (we know that periods are mainly not blood but expelled uterine lining, right?) but we are seeing bodies expelling a substance similar in color and viscosity (kind of) to periods.
Dove sells beauty products. Women are supposed to buy beauty products to feminize themselves, make themselves pleasing to others, alter their bodies to better conform to hegemonic beauty standards. Here’s how Dove sells its beauty products:
You’re perfect inside and out, don’t change. Except change how you smell and your natural oils and your wrinkles. Do it with Dove.
Meredith Heller 