genfem
A fair question. Two quick answers:
1. Those of us lucky enough to live in the most progressive parts of the world tend to focus on how good we have it, and yet we still haven’t achieved true gender equality.
2. I’m over trying to pitch women’s magazines. If the story isn’t about slimmer thighs for summer, they’re just not interested.
This stuff is important, I’ll try not to make it too dry.
Models Are Getting Younger
Lottie Moss photo by Fashion Copious
From a Daily Beast article about Kate Moss’s 13-year-old aspiring model sister, Lottie:
This year, high-end fashion labels have embraced pretty young things like never before. Though runway models have an age minimum of 16, there are no regulations that dictate age in editorial spreads and ads. As The Daily Beast first reported, Miu Miu chose Hailee Steinfeld, the 14-year-old star of True Grit, as the face of its fall 2011 campaign. Thirteen-year-old Elle Fanning appeared in Marc Jacobs ads, and 10-year-old French sensation Thylane Blondeau caused a stir with her racy photographs.
The friend who sent this to me added, Lottie is modeling “because Kate Moss’s family desperately needs the money” (that’s sarcasm, btw, Kate is worth around $80 million).
Lottie, you’re 13-years-old. Try out for the tennis team, make something for the bake sale, or just be the hottest 7th grader at whatever school you go to. There’ll be oodles of time to exploit your legs and cheekbones to sell products.
An Elegant Statement on Race, Class and Gender in the Art World
A group walking through “Like A Patient Etherized Upon A Table: MOCA Goes Dark” via Twitter
My husband and I went to an event at MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles) last night where small groups of people at a time walked blindfolded throughout the museum. We would walk a few steps, following the sound of jangling keys until it stopped. Then a museum security guard (a few of them volunteered to be there) would read us a snippet of T.S. Eliot or another modernist poet.
The point was to parallel the loss of vision with “the bewilderment that many experience when viewing contemporary art without a point of entry.” But my takeaway was different. There was something so powerful about the security guards as the main event. The voices that read to us were black, or female, or clearly speaking English as a second language. It felt like a commentary about the art world - who stars in it, curates it and consumes it (the crowd last night was mostly white and I imagine that most of the works on the walls that we couldn’t see were created by white artists), versus the security guards who stand there invisibly working their day jobs.
In a way, it was the most radical art show I’d ever been to, and the most unexpectedly affecting. Driving home we passed by the Occupy Los Angeles tents outside of City Hall. They too seemed to be silently on guard for our benefit.
Just Click On It
I went to a screening of PBS’s “Women, War and Peace” at the Feminist Majority Foundation in Los Angeles this week, followed by a conversation between Mavis Leno, Gayle Lemmon and Katherine Spillar. It was my first feminist event in LA and I assumed the crowd wasn’t going to be as hardcore as the feminist crowd in New York, but I could not have been any more wrong. It was possibly the most accomplished room of women I have ever been in. Everyone had written a book, shot a documentary, started a nonprofit, or in some cases, all of the above. These women knew their stuff and they were very much aware of the power of their own voices.
Among the many interesting things Gayle Lemmon discussed was a strategy to increase coverage of women in media. The strategy is simple: Click on stories about women. In the new media world, clicking is voting. “You click every single time and it’s a vote,” Lemmon said. It’s so obvious, but somehow I never thought about it that way. “You are being watched more than ever,” she explained, “and you are weighing in to a larger extent than ever.” The part that she didn’t say but I added in my head was: Even if you don’t read those articles, click on them anyway. We know that this is how news decisions get made and we must take advantage of that knowledge to get women’s stories heard.
The truth is, Facebook status updates comprise much of my news consumption. I get sucked into insipid slideshows about what dresses Michelle Obama has been wearing. But I realize now that if I’m not casting my vote with page views (and time spent) for articles about women, I’m perpetuating our society’s fixation on men as protagonists.
It’s extremely difficult, by the way, to find stories about women. When you’re done reading this, go to nytimes.com and see if you can find any. When you search “women” you’ll get mostly Style section pieces. The same search on wsj.com yields hard hitting journalistic pieces like “Sarah Jessica Parker and her Akris Ai Bag.” But keep looking and you will find stories about women in business, women in politics and women’s health. And whether or not you have the time or inclination to read them at that moment, click on them. It’s a tiny bit of activism that goes a long way.
Important (From NARAL)
It’s a terrifying thought: being pregnant and facing a serious illness or injury.
What if your doctor told you that the situation was so serious that continuing your pregnancy would place your life at risk? It would be tragic, but you’d probably want the very best health care, to have all of your options available, and to be treated as quickly as possible.
Now imagine being rushed to the emergency room – and the hospital refuses to provide the emergency abortion care you need to save your life.
The anti-choice majority in the U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to give hospitals this “right” – to refuse to provide lifesaving abortion care to women who will die without it. Don’t let the U.S. Senate do the same.
Changing My Name
The thing that has surprised me most about marriage so far is that everyone assumes that I’m changing my name. Even in this day and age. Even living in the fairly liberal city of Los Angeles. Cards were addressed to us as Mr. and Mrs., I received a monogrammed robe with my new monogram, someone even sent us a large metal front of the house sign customized with my husband’s last name.
It’s not that I’ve never thought about changing my last name. I have. But it’s a form of rebirth I don’t think I welcome. I can’t imagine my husband changing his last name. We’ve discussed it, but he has the same hesitations I do - his name is his brand, and deliberately or not, he has spent his life cultivating his brand, just as I have spent my life cultivating mine.
I’ve been surprised to see my feminist friends change their last names. My doctor friend, my hedge fund friend, my lawyer friend. I understand that it’s a polite way of telling the outside world that you’re married. But why is the outside world entitled to that etiquette? Perhaps taking your husband’s last name is romantic the way wedding rings are romantic. But my husband and I both wear wedding rings.
The name thing might sit more easily with me if it wasn’t so normative for heterosexual couples. I bet my gay married friends with different last names don’t receive cards addressed to Mr. and Mr. Only One of Their Last Names. I wasn’t expecting so many people to change my last name for me. It serves as a reminder that even in our “post-feminist” society, husbands are still shruggingly thought of as heads of the house.
