The following is a blog post that has been adapted from an essay that I wrote for my class on Television Criticism. The professor asked us to look at the politics of Nickelodeon and decide whether or not it had a "feminist agenda." It was clear from the lecture that the answer being looked for was yes but I decided to complicate things just a bit!

In order to decide whether or not Nickelodeon has a feminist agenda it is important to, first, decide what a feminist agenda would comprise of. According to Webster's dictionary, The widely accepted definition of feminism in today’s society is, “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes." This is a very simplified definition; most modern feminists acknowledge the wide intersections of oppression and seek to create equality with race, sexual orientation, ability, and other areas as well.

Since feminism is, at its core, about equality then a television station with a feminist agenda could simply be any station that seeks to represent men and women of all ethnicities, ability status, sexualities, and so on proportionality in their programming. A feminist television station could also be one that tries to create equality between these groups with proactive programming. Thus, in order to decide if a television station, Nickelodeon in this case, is a feminist television station we must look at two factors: whether or not its programming equally represents all types of people, and whether or not its programming seeks to further the cause of feminism.

Out of the six animated cartoons that Nickelodeon is currently producing and airing new episodes of, only one (The Mighty B) features a female lead (Nick Toons.) The live-actions shows are more balanced; two out of the four feature female leads (Teen Nick.) While it is true that early '90s "girl power" shows like Clarissa Explains it All broke new ground, it does not seem as if the success of this show changed the makeup of Nickelodeon programming, at least not for very long. It’s been over ten years since the final episode of Clarissa Explains It All and Nickelodeon’s shows are still highly male dominated. 

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With everyone so eager to share their opinion on the historic health care bill that just passed, I figured I’d throw my two cents into the ring. Rather than provide you with an opinion on how I think this is going to play out, I’m simply going to lay out the provisions of this bill (as best as I understand them from a survey of articles that range from The New York Times to Fox News to Feministing.) I couldn’t resist throwing in a little opinion though… which is why the provisions are categorized into Good, Bad, and Questionable. I hope this helps make this whole debate just a little bit more comprehensible.

- The Good:

Most awesomely, this bill will expand insurance coverage to thirty-two million uninsured Americans. This will be accomplished, in part, through insurance exchanges. These exchanges would allow small business owners, and uninsured individuals to buy insurance through state-based exchanges that include subsidies for people who make from 100 to 400 percent of the federal poverty level.

The bill also puts strict regulations in place that will (hopefully) ban insurance companies from charging higher premiums or even denying coverage of people with preexisting conditions, as well as ban companies from charging higher premiums for women. It would also require insurance companies to provide maternity care.

This bill will also expand Medicaid so that people who make up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level will be covered, and close the Medicare “donut hole” which is a costly gap that vastly pumps up the price of prescription drug coverage for senior citizens. The bill will allow parent’s insurance to cover their children through the age of twenty-six.

- The Questionable: With a few exceptions, this bill would require all U.S. citizens to purchase insurance or pay a $695 annual fine, and require businesses with fifty plus employees to provide them with insurance or pay a two-thousand dollar fine per employee every year if any employee receives federal subsidies for purchasing insurance. (However, the employer mandate has been removed by the Senate.)

- The Bad: Essentially, women’s health was thrown under the bus in order to pass this bill. Obama’s executive order that all abortion funds must be kept separate from any federal funds used in supplying health insurance will essentially cause all insurance companies to drop abortion coverage altogether; the alternative for the companies (maintaining records that separate out special ‘abortion funds’ from money that the policy-holder pays directly without government aid) is a record-keeping logistical nightmare.

This article by Jon Walker says it best: “The system of exchanges and affordability tax credits could easily be modified to ensure federal funds are not used to pay for abortions, while still not taking away the ability of women and small businesses to buy insurance packages that cover abortion. Having an individual mandate that forces women to buy insurance, but also a law that prevents them from getting insurance that covers a legal medical procedure, is a disgusting abuse of women’s rights.”

The other major fail in this bill concerns immigration. This bill as it stands would not allow undocumented immigrants to buy insurance on soon to be established exchanges, even if they are willing to pay the full cost out of pocket, with no government aid. Not only is this policy cruel, it also makes no sense fiscally.

Walker explains it well: “The more undocumented immigrants that pay for their own health care, the more taxpayers save by not being forced to pick up the cost of undocumented immigrants’ uncompensated care when they use the emergency rooms.”

What Comes Next? Recognizing that, for the most part, this was a big step in the right direction is integral; but that’s all it is, a step. Now its time to bring the focus squarely onto reproductive rights (including access to safe, legal abortions for people of all income levels) and push to get some pro-choice legislature through as soon as possible. Another push to make it so illegal immigrants can purchase insurance will hopefully happen as well, since denying them coverage, even when they can afford it, is detrimental to both the health of our country and the health of the people we are refusing to cover.

I started this post ages ago and then left it for awhile because I didn't know where I was going with it. After yesterday's blog, I think I've figured it out. So first, what I wrote then:

On Black Friday I braved the malls for an hour or so with a friend of mine, mostly because we wanted to see what the fuss was all about (in the parking lot on the way out we decided that we never needed to do this again... people go CRAZY on Black Friday!) On this shopping trip I bought some nail polish in the chaos and then promptly forgot about it, until it turned up under my bed today and I decided to use it to paint my nails.As I was staring at the bottle while my nails dried (not much you can do with wet fingernails!) I started to think about the name of the polish... Love & Beauty. In fact, Forever 21's whole makeup line is called Love & Beauty which got me to thinking about the connection that we CONSTANTLY make as a society between, you guessed it, love and beauty.

Last time I posted, I wrote about forgetting beauty norms and embracing the idea of being ugly because, why should we care anyway? Wouldn't we all be much happier if we were free to present ourselves in whatever way we liked best, rather than following beauty conventions? Today I'd like to acknowledge the hurdles & limitations that stand in the way of doing just that; the ways in which society enforces our obsession with beauty. Then I'd like to analyze these "incentives" for being beautiful and explain why it is all just silly, anyways.

Relationships are often the biggest pressure-point when it comes to being beautiful. After all how will we ever attract someone to love us if we're not "pretty." I don't know... lets take a look. Just a bit of digging on google quickly uncovers something impressive. Based on psychological studies the idea that most people have (I have to be attractive in order to attract someone to love me) is not necessarily accurate. Rather, love seems to follow the age-old adage: love is blind. Sure some psychologists claim to have discovered the "golden ratios" for facial beauty but there are just as many studies out there that show people who are in love tend to see their partner as attractive regardless of what the societal standard may be! Inner awesomeness seems to radiate outwards and create positive associations, regardless of appearance. For instance:

" In one study, 70% of college students deemed an instructor physically attractive when he acted in a friendly manner, while only 30% found him attractive when he was cold and distant. Indeed, when surveyed for attributes in selecting a mate, both males and females felt kindness and an exciting personality were more important in a mate than good looks. Thus, to a certain degree, beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder."

At the end of the day its important to keep in mind that looks will fade one day. You shouldn't choose a partner or seek to attract a partner based solely on the way you look - because that is not the way to fulfilling relationships. Peoples bodies change and grow all of the time; in order for you to accept those changes, your partner (if you choose to have one) should not only be accepting, but be supporting of the natural changes your body goes through. I'd rather have relationships (romantic or otherwise) with people who like me for who I am rather than what I look like any day - wouldn't you?

This is where the nail-polish and consumerism in general comes in; I find it striking how the company choose to link love & beauty together like this. I mean, the beauty part makes sense since nail polish is a "beauty" product... but love? This is a very blatant example of how companies like to capitalize on our human longing to be loved in order to sell a product; in this case the product is makeup, but more generally the "product" being sold is always a particular look that someone has deemed beautiful. Our magazines, television, movies, clothing stores, makeup stores, even grocery stores (diet foods!) all use the "beauty incentive" to sell us products to some degree. In this way beauty is incredibly dis-empowering.

Companies create a beauty ideal and instill a wide-spread societal desire to meet that ideal; those same companies sell products that promise to get us closer to the ideal; companies make sure that the ideal remains constantly unreachable (for instance, look at how much models keep slimming down... always skinnier than is achievable by the average person) so that we "have to" buy more products in an attempt to reach it. Lather. rinse. repeat.

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I have spent a large portion of the last year working to help others see the beauty that they posess, both inside and out, through poetry, discussions, blog posts, performance art, and so on.

This mission comes after years and years of struggling with my own demons; in fact, I've been fighting to feel pretty and worthwhile for so long that I think, maybe, I have lost sight of the bigger picture. In my quest to help myself & others feel beautiful, I’ve stopped asking questions. Questions like…

What is beauty, anyway? How can EVERYONE be beautiful?

Why do I even want to be pretty? Why are beauty and self worth so intertwined in our culture?

Why does it feel more important to be beautiful than nice, or smart, or interesting, or funny... or any of the other awesome traits people have?

Now, I’m not saying that all of the work that I (and so many others) have done is worthless by any means, but at the same time I have to ask…

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There’s about a million and one things that I want to do with my life at this point in time.

I can still feel myself buzzing from the success of the play that I helped to put on.  (More on that soon, promise!) I want to take that show and blow it up, make it bigger and better and do it again and again until I have reached out to so, so many more people.

I want to work with Rape Crisis Centers and find some way to educate men and women to the point where we all understand what rape is and how we can avoid it. (The only answer? Rapists need to stop raping.)

I want to be a sex therapist, I want to help women and men who struggle to accept their bodies and let themselves feel good.

I want to do family counseling, specifically I want to help families to accept their children, or siblings, or cousins, or partners who are different from them (maybe even queer, if you will, in some way.)

I want to work with eating disorder survivors, helping to broaden the definition of eating disorders to something that comfortable fits the experiences of everyone who suffers, and then find a way to end that suffering for them once and for all.

I want to work for a suicide prevention hotline.

I want to write novels for young teen girls that encourage them to be smart and bold and to love themselves just as they are while they never, never stop reaching for their impossible dreams.

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(I decided to keep posting body image-related stuff from my past today -- since I am so busy with this play project that I mentioned on my other blog post. I can't wait until it is over and I can reflect here on Amplify and hopefully even share some video clips!)

A recent class discussion on body image really got me thinking. The professor shared a very apt analogy about pants and how they can make or break someone’s whole day. She asked us to think about our skinny pants; the pair that most people have, the pair of pants that make you elated when you can fit into them and miserable when you can’t… for some people those pants spell out the climate of their whole day. She likened life to those pants; some days, they fit, everything goes right and you love yourself; other days, you can hardly you’ll them over your hips, you feel defeated and huge…you wonder why anyone would even want to look at you. Its scary how easily I could relate to this metaphor.

This is when I began to wonder why it had to be this way. In the last few months I have made great strides in feeling better about my body, loving every inch of it… but even I still had that size-too-small pair of skinny jeans just sitting and taunting me in the drawer.

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Earlier this month, my school celebrated Go Red for Women day with a table that attempted to raise awareness about heart health for everyone. While I appreciated their efforts, I felt as if the event left a lot of very important, yet underreported, information out so I decided to remedy that here! This is coming a little bit late for the national holiday but that's okay, heart health is definitley important enough to talk about any time of the year.

I was incerdibly surprised to learn this, but, according to the U.S National Library of Medicine the symptoms that women tend to display when having a heart attack are often different than the ones doctor’s usually associate with heart disease. Although chest pain is the most common heart attack symptom in women and men, women can also have a heart attack without having any chest pain; women also often lack the radiating left-arm pain that is commonly associated with heart attacks.

Fatigue, nausea, shoulder and jaw pain, headaches, and muscle spasms are all heart attack symptoms that show up in women much more often than in men; since many of these symptoms can be attributed to stress, heart disease is often overlooked in women.

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I'm posting a body positive piece today because (hopefully) this week I'm going to be premiering a monologue show about body image that a bunch of students at my school helped to produce! It's a project I have been working on for almost a year now and I am really excited to see it become a reality :) The show is part of an Eating Disorder Awareness Campaign that we're doing at my school - I'll try to blog more about it later in the week! But for now, here's part of one of the monologues I wrote:

I remember coming home in tears, hating myself over the fact that I’d been made fun of on the bus in middle school for my hairy legs. I remember wearing jeans even in the summer because my “thunder thighs” embarrassed me more than I was willing to expose. I remember purposely buying tight tank tops to wear underneath clothing to suck in my “gut.” I remember counting calories in a little blue notebook to the point of obsession, the point where I finally just had to say STOP, I’d rather keep the ten pounds then lose my sanity along with them. I remember wondering if boys wouldn’t date me, girls wouldn’t befriend me, because I was too heavy, too hairy, too ugly. Like millions of other people of all ages and sizes, I keep these thoughts locked deep within my heart; luckily for me, unlike many others, these thoughts are only memories.

Transitioning to college was a strange and exciting experience, however, the biggest change for me wasn’t sharing a room, spending so much time on out-of-class work, eating in a dining hall, or even being away from home… the biggest change for me was a mirror. At first it was funny: why would someone ever place a full length mirror in the bathroom, directly in line with our toilet? Then it was a bit annoying: why do I have to watch myself pee? Eventually, it became enlightening.

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