the adventures of dr. diana york blaine

But I am supposed to be. And so everywhere I look I see stories about women who have hundreds of pairs of shoes. Shoes are a big deal on "Sex and the City" which I had never ever watched until recently. I don't need to watch a program that tells me what "women" are like; it wasn't even written by women. Now that I have seen a few episodes, it has only confirmed my impression that the show relies on negative stereotypes of women. And all of them are freaks in one way or another. Carrie's the one character who has some shot at being a reasonable human being, someone with a powerful voice and some authority--note AUTHOR is at the root of the word authority and she is a writer on the show--but she spends all her time and money on shopping for shoes and other crap like that. And on this one episode I just watched she had to be told that she had spent $40,000 on shoes because she was too stupid to figure that out for herself. No thanks.

Here's a nice ad for shoes. Look, it shows a corpse. Of a woman. In expensive shoes. Why aren't the people looking at the corpse reacting? They seem to be standing there casually. Hmm. Could this be because the corpses of women have become so commonplace in advertising that they are not suprised to see another one? Of course that's me trying to make sense of an advertisement, which is a lost cause. The advertisers just want you to notice their ad so you'll buy their product, and they need to manipulate you into doing this by any means possible because they sell you things that you ABSOLUTELY do not need.

Here's what this ad says: hey girl (because you are not a grown women with a life but a scared child who needs approval), you are valuable only because we look at you. You do not need an identity, or even a whole body, you just need to get attention. So be sure to bedeck your corpse in expensive and eye-catching accessories like shoes and you will be a success as we define success in feminine terms. If you just lie there quietly you won't say anything to offend us, nor will you have any desires that make us uncomfortable. Tom Jones' song "She's a Lady" notes approvingly that "she always knows her place." Well, we know what that place is, don't we? On our backs with our mouths shut!

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Haven't seen Corpse Bride yet. But I did see the trailer. It was not surprising to me that the film is not called "Corpse Groom." We do not associate men with the body, nor do we sexualize their images in the same obsessive way that we do images of women. In his review, Kenneth Turan describes the bride as "bony yet buxom" and warns us "(don't ask)" about this bizarre fact. Well, no offense Kenneth, but ASK! ASK! ASK! How can we sexualize images of dead women? How can we be bony yet buxom? Why do we have so many freaking images of dead women? What do these stereotypes mean for living women and girls? How can we enjoy our media if we constantly see ourselves degraded and objectified and undermined and humiliated and DEAD?

On the same page in the LA Times was a review for Reese Witherspoon's latest vehicle "Just Like Heaven." Well I don't need to see this one either to tell you about it. She's an impossibly wonderful pretty blonde woman/girl. Whenever a film begins with this character I always know she's toast. We don't let the impossibly good women live in our narratives. They die, tragically, so some man who is left behind can learn the true meaning of life. See "Sweet November, " "Autumn in New York," "The Long Walk Home," "A Walk to Remember," "Love Story," "My One True Thing," hell even "Finding Nemo." I could increase the list ad infinitum. Feel free to contribute titles. We can create a shrine and let them all rest in peace.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Don't miss the amazing Twisty's blog on Lucy, one of the most sexist shows ever to captivate the hearts of the American public.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 07:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am staying at a friend's house with cable, and so I finally watched "Nip/Tuck," which has come to my attention in part through the ghastly necrophiliac ad campaign of this year that showed a dead female body draped across the laps of the two doctors. The sexualized corpse has an enormous scapel stuck in her torso and obviously opposes the active, aggressive, alive males depicted in the shot.

I posted this image to my flickr site and was upbraided by several viewers for not watching or not liking the program. It's "good," one said, and the other one told me it's "a rich text," or some similar postmodern jargon for "good." They seemed defensive, which I am not, because I don't need to watch any more television than I already do, which is why I don't have cable in the first place, and I certainly don't need to watch programs that set men up as the doctors and women as the patients. "Rich text" or not, it's going to be sexist, you betcha.

And guess what, I was right. Last night's episode began with a heavy white male menacing two gay men, transgendered men perhaps would be a more appropriate term. He waved a pair of garden shears at them, implying that he was going to mutilate them with the sharp instrument. But no, turns out the shears were actually for plants. Ha ha, it's a joke, get it? It's the box cutter he's going to use on the humans, giving them the "boxes" they desire. Which one of you is the woman, though, he sneers, before setting off on his plan.

So while these may be represenations of anatomical males, the text feminizes them through their sexual orientation as well as their gender expression. And, as usual in a sexist narrative, to be female, or feminized, is to be disgusting and deserving to be degraded. The man with the power may have been an unpleasant character, but he was clearly in the superior position, and we were clearly to enjoy the humiliation and perhaps ultimately the mutilation of these two characters marked as female in the dynamic of the text.

I say perhaps ultimately mutilated because I turned it off at this point. There's no pleasure for me in watching misogyny anymore, not since I have learned to call it for what it is. I don't get off on the desperation and powerlessness of others, even in fancy slick popular postmodern "rich texts" like this one. Better to watch the abominable Laguna Beach, a show I had also been told was "good," which reminded me of being forced to spend time out of class with my least interesting and least intelligent students. At least it didn't ask me to enjoy female masochism--well not for the few minutes I could stomach watching it, anyway.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Saw a bumper sticker recently that read "Mary Kay, helping women for over 40 years," or some such nonsense. Helping us what?, I found myself wondering. Well, of course, helping us buy and sell make-up to each other. But what exactly do we have to "make up" for? Obviously we are being pressured to "make up" for something that we presumably lack.

Women have been defined by male parameters for centuries, and that definition has generally centered on exactly this principle of lack, of absence. We "lack" male qualities, those same qualities deemed valuable, whatever those might be as defined by current vogue. We "lack" male genitalia, according to this same misogynist perspective, cursed with withered appendages, or, more commonly, imagined as having none at all. I actually have students who believe that men stick out and women go in--that there's no female structures that correlate with the penis, no female genitalia save the hole. Our absence makes up our presence.

"Makes up," there it is again. Better make up girls, make up for what you lack, make up for what nature didn't give you. And then pray that it's enough to make up for your flaws. Don't ask what's in the make up, what carcinogens like paraben; don't ask who has suffered to make up this make up; don't ask what the effect to the environment is; don't ask what else you might do with that money you spend on this make up; don't wonder if the message that you need to make up for your failures corrodes your soul. Just hurry up, make up, and then as time passes, make up for lost time, make up for what nature takes away. Fill in those cracks, beg for male attention, move on to the plastic surgeon.

But don't forget, it's a losing battle, for if you play by the rules of this system and buy into the principle that you are flawed to begin with, you can never truly become that thing you are not. You cannot, by definition. As an alternative, you might imagine yourself lacking flaws that need to be made up for. If this seems unimanginable, I suggest that you imagine it all the harder. Let's make up for what sexism has done to us by rejecting the idea that we need to make up for a lack that we never had to begin with. I do. So can you. For the truth is, you're not lacking anything at all.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 08:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)