So, so many books!
Now that classes have ended for the semester, I have regained my ability to read for fun! As a result of this new-found free time and renewed joy in leisure reading I have spent a ridiculous amount of time at various bookstores over the last few weeks.
Yesterday I found myself at Barnes & Noble for an hour or so, just to get out of the house. I really didn’t want to add to that already GIGANTIC pile of books to be read, so I decided to spend some time looking at books that I knew I would never want to buy. This is how I ended up flipping through Glenn Beck’s An Inconvenient Book: Real Solutions to the World’s Biggest Problems. (Link goes to the Google Books preview.)
First off: save your money. Glenn doesn’t actually solve a single problem, he just complains a lot about how messed up our culture is and makes extravagant claims about how conservatism could fix everything from troubled marriages to oil dependency.
What struck me the most, though, is the whole chapter in his book devoted to body image.
That’s right, the man who just recently spent eight minutes pretending to vomit on his show, in response to a skin cancer PSA that Meghan McCain took part in. In the PSA McCain wore a tube-top and positioned her body so as to appear naked (the point of the PSA was to equate leaving the house without sunscreen to leaving the house without clothes.)
[I'm not the BIGGEST Meghan McCain fan, but her response to Beck has made me like her that much more!]
Beck continued on to advise her to:
“Put some extra clothes on. Like, lots of extra clothes … has she thought about a burqa, just to be extra safe.”
Meanwhile, in his book (which came out before this whole mess) Beck wrote about the need for the modeling industry to truly enforce standards that promote models who look like the “average” American woman (… like Meghan McCain?) or, at the very least, discourage models from becoming life-threateningly thin. He also talks a bit about the societal pressures that young women face in regards to their body image. (You can read most of the chapter for free, here!)
Yes, he said plenty of problematic things in this chapter too: for instance, constantly referring to young girls as “prostitots” complete with a “charming little drawing that shows a “prostitot” growing up. However, mixed in with the problematic messages, there seemed to be a man who genuinely wanted his daughters to grow up in a world where they could feel comfortable in their bodies.
How is this the same man who went on to fake vomit in response to a woman’s body on his national radio show?
Glenn gives some pretty solid advice in his book, bringing the responsibility for protecting young people’s body image onto the parents:
“My family has an unwritten rule, if you wouldn’t spend time with someone in real life, then don’t let them into the living room via your television set either. It seems simple, but these days we’re not just letting people into our living rooms; we’re letting them right into our kid’s bedrooms. [...] Celebrities only have power because we give it to them.”
- Glenn Beck, page 67 of An Inconvenient Book.
This isn’t the whole solution, but cutting out negative media messages is a great start to helping to shape positive self-esteem for yourself and those around you. May I suggest starting by cutting Glenn Beck out of your lives? (After all, you wouldn’t want him vomiting all over your living room!)
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Also, a sidenote to anyone else with a WordPress powered blog: working in the new distraction free mode really is convenient. I love how the sidebar slides down the page with you as you type!
I have a confession to make. Despite the fact that Donald Trump is a terrible businessman, a ridiculous politician, and just not a good person… I have been addicted to The Celebrity Apprentice this season. The Next Great Restaurant (and my enduring love of terrible reality television) already had me watching NBC on Sunday nights and, before I knew it, I was tuning in to the Celebrity Apprentice each week too. It’s a terrible show that rarely makes sense (why was tonight’s episode three hours long?!) but I enjoy the mental vacation it allows me to take so I continue to watch week after week.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I have a few things to say about tonight’s episode.
After losing their challenge this week Star Jones, Marlee Matlin, and Meatloaf were sent outside so that Trump could consult with his two advisers. While outside, Meatloaf and Star continued the argument they had been having in the boardroom. When addressing Star during this conversation (which was not friendly or positive in any way) Meatloaf called Star Jones sweetie. I immediately cringed when this happened, and I am so happy to say that T did as well, because we both recognized how condescending this interaction was.
Upon watching this my mind immediatley jumped back in time, to the job that I was working two summers ago. One day a Professor came in and needed help using the stapler, so I showed him how to do it. He most likely felt embarrassed that he needed help using the stapler, because once he was done he made sure to throw a big, “Thanks sweetheart!” in there. Now, I know this is one of those scenarios where I’m going to have people coming out of the woodwork to call me an angry, humorless feminist for being annoyed by this… but I was. In that context, with the tone that was used, sweetheart felt like a tiny reminder that I was still somehow beneath him. Even though I had just taught him how to use the stapler.
Maybe if I had known this man I would have felt differently.
Maybe if our interaction hadn’t been one that threatened his authority (just a little bit) by making him look silly, I would have felt differently.
Maybe if there were any kind of equivalent to this type of comment that men regularly deal with, I would have felt differently.
But as this situation stands, I was left (just a little bit) annoyed, feeling like I had witnessed another (tiny) instance of sexism that plays into the web of (just slightly) frustrating events that build and build and build into the brick wall that is oppression.
The scenario on the Celebrity Apprentice was much less ambiguous than mine. Honey, sweetie, dear, darling… these terms of endearment are all lovely when used properly, in the right context. An argument, however? That is not the context. Meatloaf knew this, on some level, because in an argument when someone calls you sweetie the implication is calm down you silly sweet thing, you’re getting all riled up for nothing. Isn’t it?
A random tweet on the episode: Star Jones wanna get mad at Meatloaf calling her “sweetie” but they done called you “fat”, “turkey neck”, and “payless queen” before?
Clearly, the way to render feminism obsolete is to take the glass ceiling down and use it to replace all doors with automatically opening glass doors!
To me, honestly, sweetie is the most frustrating out of all of these. Why? Because other people will acknowledge that being called fat, or turkey neck, or payless queen is insulting. Getting people to acknowledge that referring to you by a term of endearment when you are not close, and not happy with one another in that moment is not okay is a very difficult task, as we saw in this week’s board room. Trump layed into Star for being frustrated by this exchange, but still she stood her ground and ultimately got fired (for other reasons).
I feel the same way about the persistent door opening trope. If you’re opening the door for me because you got there first, or I was carrying something big and you’d like to be courteous… that’s awesome! Despite what you’ve been told about angry feminists, I am not going to get mad at you for helping me out regardless of your sex/gender identity. What frustrates me is the assumption that men must open doors, carry things, pay, etc. for women because women are the weaker sex and men are the providers.
Mother’s Day is coming up this Sunday! In honor of this, we’d like to share with you Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation which was sent to us the other day by Barbra Harrison, a Women’s Center Director from the ’80s, via Lee Sennish! (Thanks to both of these wonderful women!)
Mother’s Day originated after the Civil War, as a form of protest regarding the death and destruction of the war, by women who had lost their sons. Mother’s Day was created in 1858 by a community activist named Anna Reeves Jarvis. Jarvis organized Mothers’ Works Days in West Virginia, with the goal of improving sanitation in Appalachian communities of West Virginia. During the Civil War, Jarvis and other women left their families to care for the wounded on both sides. Jarvis also spent her time during the war as a peacemaker, calling together meetings to try and convince men on both sides to end the fighting.
In 1872, Julia Ward Howe proposed an annual National Mother’s Day for Peace. This is the original proclimation that she issued:
Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.
Americans celebrated Mothers’ Day for Peace on June 2 for thirty years after this proclamation. In 1913 Congress declared that the second Sunday in May would be Mother’s Day.Many activists mark this proclamation as the turning point where Mother’s Day became commercialized and focused on honoring mothers through gifts and fancy meals (consumer goods) rather than through activism and the pursuit of peace.
Personally, I would love to reclaim Mother’s Day for Peace by keeping this activist perspective firmly in mind this Sunday. I play to talk with my family (at Mother’s Day Brunch) about the origins of this holiday and what it means, as a start in reclaiming it. I also plan to make a donation to the activist organization of my mother’s choice as a means of reclaiming those roots. What do you think?
This editorial posted recently in the Wall Street Journal made me wonder, along with many other bloggers.
Feminist hand-wringing about the wage gap relies on the assumption that the differences in average earnings stem from discrimination. Thus the mantra that women make only 77% of what men earn for equal work. But even a cursory review of the data proves this assumption false.
Upon reading this I didn’t know how to feel. Part of me was hopeful that this really was true because that would mean one less battle left for the feminist movement.
That hope was quickly dashed, however, as I remembered the chart that I had helped to make for the last Pay for your Privilege Bake Sale I had helped to run at my college: the wage gap doesn’t just exist across gender lines, its also firmly in place across lines of race, sexuality, and gender expression. Even if Carrie Lukas was right, and there was no longer a gap between men and women’s earnings, what were the chances that the wage-gap in regards to race/sexuality/gender expression had also gone away? (Not very high apparently.)
So there is still a problem but maybe, just maybe, there really isn’t a male/female wage gap anymore and that fight can at least be dropped. I was hopeful, yes, but another, bigger, part of me was doubtful… so I did what any good critical thinker would do: I went looking for that data myself.
Lukas’s first claim is as follows…
The Department of Labor’s Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.
I trust this analysis more than Lukas’ because this one actually includes a chart so that I can see the data, instead of making claims. The New York Times piece reveals that time actually does play into the wage gap, but not in the way Carrie Lukas claims…
As you can see, among workers who work at least 40 hours a week, men still significantly out-earn women.
But as soon as you drop below that 40-hour-a-week mark, the reverse happens: Most women make more than men who work equivalent hours, with the exception of workers who put in fewer than five hours a week.
Now this data is also flawed, as it does not control for the type of job worked nor does it have an even number of data points per category, only the number of hours, but it still casts some doubt onto the WSJ article in my mind. The NYT author hypothesizes that, since men are more likely to work full-time jobs it would make sense that they would be more likely to out-earn women when the hours were longer.
Lukas’ second claim is as follows:
Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.
Now this I found suspect, for a few reasons. First of all: to claim that women” gravitate” towards jobs that are more comfortable/less risky/etc. is at least a little bit disingenuous. Sure, plenty of women purposefully choose jobs that have these qualities, but there are also plenty of women who want to be lawyers, or doctors, or contractors, or other less convenient more stereotypically “masculine” jobs who face an incredibly tough road simply based off of their sex. If you’re constantly facing the assumption that you are less fit for your job, based solely off of the reproductive organs you posses, it stands to reason that you’d be more likely to give up and choose a career path with less struggle involved. Simply put: women (and men) don’t make decisions in a vacuum – since gendered expectations are a part of our every day lives, it stands to reason that this particular piece of social conditioning would play some role in the options that we perceive available to us and, thus, pursue.
Beyond that though, I have no idea where she is getting these numbers because she didn’t cite a single source.
