BreakingTheWaves's Amplify Diary

A Young Feminist's Wish List

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:39:00 -0500

Yesterday on the Huffington Post, Feminist Majority Foundation President Ellie Smeal outlined President Obama’s strides for women during his first 100 days in office, concluding, “the work President Obama and his team have accomplished for women and girls in the first 100 days is impressive.”

Indeed it is. As young women we have President Obama to thank for cheaper birth control and EC over the counter for 17-year-olds, as well as stronger equal pay protections and the new White House Council for Women and Girls.

Yet, as President Obama said last night during his address on his first 100 days in office, this is only the start. Since gratitude never radicalized anyone and there is always something more to fight for, here’s my young feminist activist wish list for President Obama’s next 100 days:

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Come One, Come All, Watch Me Die

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 07:52:00 -0500

Probably because I’m a former documentary film subject, I’m fascinated by the ethics of voyeurism – how much is too much to show to the world? What’s privacy worth compared to the potential costs and gains of fame? And, once it’s happened, how can you know what’s innately you and what’s a result of being filmed and put out there for the world to see? Is there a difference?

Enter Jade Goody, a 27 year-old Briton whose rough, drug-heavy background and foul mouth landed her on the UK’s Big Brother six years ago. Following the show, she became something of a national sensation, selling books, perfumes, and drawing international scorn after making racist remarks about a fellow reality show contestant.

Now bald from chemo and weakened by her losing battle with cervical cancer, Goody is playing out her death where she got her start: in prime time. “I’ve lived in front of the cameras, Goody said, and maybe I’ll die in front of them.”

The mother of two young sons, she claims the large sums she’s received from various British production companies and magazines are the only way to ensure their livelihood after she’s gone. She also claims she wants to raise awareness about getting tested for cervical cancer and indeed she has; doctors across the EU have reported a 20% increase in young women requesting the screening.

Not surprisingly, her decision to make what many consider the most private moment a public spectacle and her openness about exploiting the media frenzy for financial gain have raised some eyebrows – and even drawn some classist and sexist criticism from a right-wing British politico.

I think Jade Goody has every right, as we all do, to die the way she pleases. I also think it’s savvy and perfectly in line with today’s culture to milk every red cent out of those willing to pay to watch so that her children will lead more comfortable lives – what mother doesn’t want that?

As for her two boys, they’ll likely one day be grateful that their mother was a reality star – along with stories and pictures from their father and grandparents, they’ll have hours of video of their mother’s mannerisms, thoughts and personality once they no longer remember her.

But there’s another reason that Jade is choosing to live her last days in the spotlight: she wouldn’t know anymore how to do it any other way.

Jade has no doubt realized that her life has been ‘made’ on television – certainly she’s wondered over and over what her life might have become had she not been chosen for the Big Brother show in the first place.

No matter who she was before, her life over the past six years has become inhabiting, creating, and manipulating the persona of ‘Jade Goody’ for the British public. To stop now would be the equivalent of giving up her identity and all that she’s worked to become. She has to die on TV because she only exists, even in death, to be observed by others.

Perhaps the legacy of reality television is this group that Jade Goody exemplifies, human examples of the principle that to observe something is to change it. And maybe all of us who’ve grown up in the era of instantaneous confessions and status updates are, to some degree or another, dependent on being observed to feel like we exist.

I guess that’s why we’re so in love with the instant fame reality TV promises. I just can’t stop wondering what would have become of Jade Goody had the cameras never found her, had she not become a persona to be consumed by the public. How many people have noted or cared if she died then?

Feminist Blog Sampler Platter

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 15:18:00 -0500

It’s been a long week. And was it really less than two weeks ago that I dragged my posterior to DC just to freeze it off with ten billion other shivering, excited people?

Yeah. And a lot’s happened since then that’s been swirling around in my brain asking to be written, so I’m offering a blog sampler platter for this week’s menu – a little like Emily’s Guilty Pleasures, with a dash of L.Michael Gipson’s influence, blended with my weekly specialty of feminist outrage and controversy. Bon appetit!

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How to Get Rich on Your Vagina, or, What I Learned In Womens Studies

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 12:06:00 -0500

Natalie Dylan, a 22 year old women’s studies grad from California, has been the buzz of the blogsphere since she put her virginity up for auction on the internet and announced that the bidding reached 3.8 million this month. She describes it as a money-making “sociological experiment” inspired by her college experience with women’s studies courses.

Natalie Dylan is in a privileged position. She’s white, college educated, and has access to the mainstream media. And no matter what anyone thinks about what she’s doing with her virginity, she’s within her rights as an American citizen to do it. She can, and does, even call it a feminist act.

But, with her privilege Dylan should know that by no means is her idea original – men have been buying and selling women’s hymens since Bible times, and the practice continues in both the East and West in various forms. And while she proudly notes that she will get her pick of the many men willing to pay top dollar for her first time, most women don’t have such choice in the matter.

New York Times’ columnist Bill Kristol recently wrote a heart-wrenching plea to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to take immediate steps to end sex trafficking all over the world. He introduced us to13 year old Ling Pross of Cambodia:

She was kept locked deep inside the brothel, her hands tied behind her back at all times except when with customers.

Brothel owners can charge large sums for sex with a virgin, and like many girls, Ms. Pross was painfully stitched up so she could be resold as a virgin. In all, the brothel owner sold her virginity four times.

It doesn’t say for how much, but I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t 3.7 million – and I can be pretty damn sure Ling Pross didn’t get any of it to go to graduate school.

Think I’m being dramatic? After all, Natalie Dylan wasn’t kidnapped and sold to a brothel, she contacted a brothel herself in order to auction off a commodity on the “one level on which men cannot compete.” She claims that she’s reclaiming her sexuality and flipping gender bias into an example of American entrepreneurship. If the sucker will pay, who’s to stop him? It is hers to sell, after all.

Ok. She can do that. She – the individual, meaning a straight, white, educated, American – can and will subject herself to probes to prove her virginity, hob nob it up with television pimp Dennis Hof and net enough cash and blog buzz to start a singing career if the “family and marriage counseling” idea doesn’t pan out.

Ironically, she can do it because of the gains on the women’s movement.

But in the process she is without a doubt reiterating that, in an era that is purported to be post-feminist, women’s bodies are simply capital, their worth is between their legs. And by implication, she is establishing that she’s worth far more than most women by virtue of birthplace and will forever be worth less as a woman in general the day after she does the deed.

She can do it, but it doesn’t mean she should. The signals got crossed somewhere – sexual liberation wasn’t hard won so that we as young women can participate in our own subjection and call it progress.

In fact, the privilege that she and I share comes with the responsibility of making the connections between a culture that has spawned the bidding war for her virginity and the sex tourism that delivers customers to Ling Pross in Cambodia – and making it very clear that anytime women’s bodies are put on the market, the woman is never in a winning position.

In any situation where women’s bodies are being trafficked, legally or illegally, there are undoubtedly fat cats, usually male, sitting around counting the dollars (or Cambodian riel, as the case may be). What percentage will Dennis Hof and his Bunny Ranch get of Dylan’s asking price, for instance? Something tells me she will see a whole lot less of that bounty by the time the whole thing is said and done.

I wonder what else she’ll come up short of after this experience. One of the privileges that Dylan enjoys that the women who are not just playing at prostitution don’t is that, after she takes the money and runs, she’ll have the opportunity to explore how amazing sex can be when neither partner is participating in the other’s exploitation.

Dylan concludes that she might be an “early adopter of a future trend.” I certainly hope not. Western capitalism combined with some shaky feminist philosophy does not a statement make – quite the opposite, in fact.

Unless she’s pulling one over on us all. Her auction has prompted numerous discussions about the status of women in this country and she actually made Fox News say the word “maidenhead” on the air. I hope when the big exchange comes she’ll refuse the money and instead publicly post the names and photos of the wealthy bidders for their wives, girlfriends, and daughters to see how much they might be worth in comparison. Or, get in good at the Bunny Ranch and write a devastating tell all on the whole slimy operation.

Or she can take the money. Go to grad school, write a dissertation on the experience and then give the rest of the spoils to an organization like Equality Now that works for an end to domestic and international sex trafficking. That, at least, would be something shaped like progress.

Twilight's Unsubtle Messages

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:23:00 -0500

A week ago, I’d never heard of the Twilight series and certainly never thought about how dead boys might have sex (or not) with living girls. Then the New York Times went and called the new film a “vampire romance for the hot-not-to-trot abstinence set.” Just taunt me into seeing it, why don’t you?

(For anyone who has, like me, been living under a rock, a synopsis is here.)

One thing’s for sure: Twilight has proven once and for all the power of the young woman’s purse and put to death, hopefully more successfully than the movie’s characters, the myth that stoner boy comedies are more lucrative for Hollywood than movies with young women at the center of the story. Theaters across the country sold out first day midnight screenings and the film is the third all-time best seller for advance tickets on Fandango.com – an impressive haul anytime, but especially during an economic crisis.

The movie is the adaptation of the first of four books about Bella and Edward by author Stephanie Meyer. I haven’t read any of the books – though I have read some complaints about them by fellow feminists – so I’ll have to leave the adaptation comparison questions to someone else.

The most interesting thing about the film was the audience with which I saw it– a mix of giggling teen and pre-teen girls and their moms. The angst of awkwardness and the aching desire to be “normal” was almost palpable in the theater and the action on the screen reflected the feelings back to us in perfect imitation. Maybe that’s why they like it so much: Bella is normal, not too pretty or too smart (annoyingly), but she attracts the very not normal, beautiful and smart, boy catch of the school. What more, it seems to ask, could a girl want? (Oh, gag me.)

The film also buys into some of the abstinence-only stuff, as promised by the NY Times reviewer. One of my pet peeves about ab-only is the gender stereotypes it sells about male and female sexuality, like that male sexuality is uncontrollable. This leaves men feeling like they are monsters just waiting to explode. Edward Cullen plays this role to a T, continually beating himself up for almost losing control (i.e baring his fangs) around Bella. Although he is trying not to bite and kill her, the message that teen sexuality always leads to something sinister is barely hidden.

I also have to wonder about the message of celebrating a young woman falling head over heels with someone who says, over and over, he can and would kill her. Why do women, onscreen especially, always fall for the dangerous ones? Bella’s self-preservation instincts are nil on all counts, from wandering alone in dark alleys at night to throwing her head back to show her fanged boy toy her neck. I just kept thinking her celebrated adoration seemed a bit akin to saying “he just drank six beers and wants to drive you home, how dreamy!”

My roommate had a more sinister thought about it, though, that really made me think. Perhaps the attraction of Edward, to Bella and to audiences, is that of all the violent, irresponsible, selfish things men can and do do to women, he pointedly chooses, once again over and over, not to. Does that simple designation make Edward chivalrous? No. Human(e)? Most definitely. And that’s the part that worries me.

Column Debut: Breaking the Waves

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 13:26:00 -0500

Howdy, everyone and welcome to Amplify! I’m honored and excited to be part of Advocates for Youth new site for youth activists to share their truth and speak their mind – and I can’t wait to read your stories, rants, raves and ideas for changing the world!

I’ve been part of the Advocates for Youth family since I was fifteen years old and an activist for youth’s sexual rights for over a third of my life. I was born and raised as a Southern Baptist evangelical in Lubbock, Texas and took a virginity pledge at fifteen with an abstinence-only program at my church – led by the pastor that also taught the “secular” abstinence-only-until-marriage program at my school. As you probably know, these don’t work so well - my town had some of the highest rates of sexually transmitted infections and teen pregnancy in the country.

After a friend whose boyfriend had told her she couldn’t get pregnant her first time did, I joined a local youth commission working to get comprehensive sex education into the schools. I could hardly believe that the teachers and the administrators were refusing to give us information that could save our lives and that no one was saying anything about it. I realized if we wanted our rights, we were going to have to use our voices.

We organized events, passed around petitions, got the support of local doctors and the national media, and started work on getting a much needed Gay Straight Alliance in the high school. After three years, the school board refused our proposals and the city de-funded the youth commission – effectively, so they thought, getting rid of the pesky youth so obnoxiously asking for the tools to make healthy sexual decisions.

Unfortunately for the city officials, a documentary film crew had been following us the whole way and the footage they gathered became The Education of Shelby Knox, a film that won an award at Sundance and is now used in high schools and colleges across the nation. While Lubbock still has an abstinence-only policy, a city commission has been appointed to consider comprehensive sex education – and the pastor who had been scaring students for years is not so welcome in the schools anymore!

I left Lubbock, went off to the University of Texas, and began traveling across the country with the film, telling my story and listening to those of other young people. The more I traveled and talked to young women about their sexual health and rights the more I started to make the connection between controlling women’s reproductive options and controlling women in general. I was becoming a feminist, one story at a time.

Now, at 22, feminist would be the first word I use to describe myself, loudly and proudly. I know that scares some people – but feminism has gotten a pretty bad rap from those who are opposed to our goals. After all, the dictionary definition is “the advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of political, social and economic equality. Who can argue with that, especially since one half of the population can’t really be equal until the other half is as well?

Feminism isn’t about restricting or telling you what you can do, or just for a certain type of woman or just for women at all – feminism is about hearing your own experience in another’s story and understanding that there is nothing wrong with you and nothing wrong with them, but that there are social systems in place designed to make you both feel inferior – and that has to change. Feminists go about this in a lot of ways – organizing on campuses, petitions, performances, gender-bending, writing, speaking – the possibilities are endless and I hope to highlight a lot of them here, in Breaking the Waves.

A note on the name: The feminist movement has been divided into “waves”, with the first wave being the suffragists who won the right to vote, the second wave being the most visible as the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970’s, and the Third Wave being young women born between 1961 and 1981. Am I (and you) the Fourth Wave? I don’t know – and frankly I don’t care all that much, hence the name of this column. The point isn’t what we are called, but what we do and the stories we tell.