feminist dead ends

I was surprised when the usually discerning and perceptive feminist blog Feministing recently brought attention to the article about how the six big differences between men and women have been debunked. Below is my paraphrased version of these supposed myths vs realities. 

Men want "sexy," women want "status": U-Michigan psychologist Terri Conley and colleagues claim that when in an actual situation of finding a mate (such as speed dating) these differences evaporated. 

Men want many sex partners, women want far fewer: Apparently this myth exists due to some mathematical errors. Calculating an average does not offer clear data. Men need to affirm masculine ideals and thus tend to inflate numbers. However, when told that they are being given a lie detector tests, they are truthful and it turns out that men and women sleep with an equal number of partners in their life. 

Men think about sex more than women do: In empirical data provided by a study in the Journal of Sex Research, psychologists asked research participants to record their thoughts throughout the day. Men thought of sex 18 times, women 10 times "but men also thought about food and sleep proportionately more than women. That suggests sex doesn't hold as vaunted a position for men as you might expect."

Women have far fewer orgasms than men do: Again, a mathematical error. While it seems like men have more orgasms, women are not far behind and are likely to have as many when in a committed and considerate relationship. Women just do not do that well in hook-ups. 

Men like casual sex more than women do: While studies show that women turn down casual offers whereas men do not, the problem here is that women being propositioned by strangers do not imagine he is any good in bed. "When women are asked to consider a hypothetical offer from someone more familiar or very attractive, they become much more receptive. Likewise, gender differences in one-night-stand interest evaporated when men and women were asked to consider sleeping with someone famous."

Women are pickier than men: Here psychologists’ claims that womens’ picky attitudes are bound to dating rules. Since men conventionally are meant to make the first moves, it allows women to be choosy.

Now that we are done with our salacious pop psychology fix for the day, lets get to why this particular article does not deserve praise from feminists at all. On the one hand, living in a real world defined by conventions and rules when it comes to mating between men and women, these supposed differences may be weighing on our minds and to know that some of this is untrue might be empowering. But really, empowering only in a witty-bar-repartee-prehookup-banter kind of way. The biggest hindrance to the debate about feminism is the entire framework of difference. By this I mean a preoccupation with the ways in which men and women differ and in what ways can we prove or disprove those differences. All the six myths above – being with a lot of partners, focus on looks, frequency of sex, embracing casual sex – all these are problems that are really about constructions and constrictions of masculinity and by extension, they affect women’s lives. 

For the article to be feminist, it would have to use a reverse strategy and we could then arrive at the more relevant questions – for example, what are women’s issues and anxieties with regards to sexual fulfillment or how are women with multiple sexual partners judged or labeled and it’s impact on a collective psyche, or what are the challenges women face when finding partners of equal standing in terms of looks or income. By addressing these questions with a women-first approach, we can really delve into something as opposed to squeezing women into the limited space given to them in discourses of masculinity.

Popular culture tends to extract the most schematic, brief and simple points from theories propounded in academic ivory towers. There is indeed a small victory in being able to enter a mainstream internet space and have in-your-face, bold ideas about women and men come to the fore in a normalized way. However, even with great advances in feminist thinking, we still remain under the sway of what I’m calling “biology fundamentalism” – quite simply that men and women have natural, biological differences and those lead to social inequalities. Biology, an honorable study in itself, is constantly used as a tool to propagate horrible prejudices whether applied to homosexuality, interracial intercourse, racial supremacies and many others. It seems that there is still a carte blanche of biology fundamentalism with regards to gender where there is a merry and relaxed attitude towards conversations about men and women being embedded in natural difference. There is no need for Judith Butler to rap us on our knuckles to remind us yet again that biology is socially constructed too and examples of that are all around us.

The simplicity and brevity of feminism as experienced in the mainstream arena obfuscates the complex and difficult process it took for feminist thinkers to arrive there. To take somewhat masculine preoccupations as an a priori and to view them as women-centric is first of many hurdles. What may be groundbreaking for pop culture can become a dead-end for feminism. 

dudes, bros and the women they hate to love

-written in joint disdain by Bhakti & Laxmi

The Story with the Stats

I recently watched I Don't Know How She Does It, a movie where a frazzled Sarah Jessica Parker juggles career, kids, marriage and friendship. The film was about the current state of affairs that the modern mother has found herself in. Though light in its tone, I was surprised by the careful and critical depiction of the genre of books known as mommy lit. The commentaries by Christian Hendricks resonated with me; they were tough, sarcastic and undeniably feminist. While it espoused a cliche, white heteronormativity, it was refreshing because it was not about landing some guy but about doing well in career and with your kids. When I looked for reviews on rottentomatoes.com, it only rated at 17% from critics. It was not the first time I had come home from a women-centric film and found that it rated atrociously, with critics saying the harshest possible things. When it comes to dude movies, however, its a completely different story. Take a look at these revealing stats:

Knocked Up 90% - A story about a set of greasy, unfortunate looking young men who smoke pot all day and the grimiest of them all ends up with a hot babe with an amazing tv career. 

I Love You Man 83% - A story about a vulnerable (read pathetic) guy with no friends who friends out with a greasy, sleazy guy who waxes eloquent about farts.

Hangover 78% - A story about some attractive and some greasy, potbellied guys who take roofies in Vegas and do things like pull out their own teeth and trash their hotel room. Some of them still get hot babes, especially the tooth guy.

And then here are stats for the equally annoying chick films...please note that these are not romantic comedies but female-bonding films even though critics constantly rate them based on romance criteria. 

Baby Mama 63% - A hilarious, hip movie about a woman trying to have a baby and the comedy of surrogacy that ensues. Starring attractive, profilic, insanely talented women like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler

Sex and the City 1 - 49% and Sex and the City 2 - 15% - An occassionaly funny, mainly sappy movie with fabulous fashion and talented actresses propounding (though poorly) some feminist ideals. 

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 77% An extremely charming coming-of-age film about teenage friendship that shockingly rates less than Hangover!

Lets forget about the pot-bellied, pot-smoking, trash-talking dudes for a moment and see how their six-packed, ball-dunking, trash-talking bro counterparts rate: Best Man 71% or The Brothers 63%. While the bros do poorly compared to the dudes in our pathetic society that lacks the most basic critical tools to understand African-American context or culture, they still rate higher than sisterhood movies. For example, the less recent How Stella Got Her Groove Back 48% or Phat Girlz 23%. 

To understand the exceptional case of Bridesmaids, read here. 

Machismo to Mess-ismo 
What is the malady at hand? Well, the most obvious issue is the unadulterated worship of male chauvinism. While the trend towards chauvinist narratives is hardly new, it is the particular form that it has taken which poses a big problem for us women who have to deal with the outrageous trends that arise in real life thanks to the fictive lives in these movies. Once upon a time, masculine ideals were perpetrated through dashing action heroes who were sauve and skilled. They beat a villain to pulp, sipped a martini and swirled breathless girls to tango music, all in a days work! What kind of role models do these overweight, jobless, broke, vulgar, messy and crass guys espouse? It seems that socially we have taken a turn for the worse - from the raw machismo of the previous times, we are now applauding farting, unkempt hair, lack of focus or ambition and a porn collection. 

Trash Talking
The direct outcome of these films is that men feel it is now okay to take trash-talking about women to the next level. Characters of women in most of these films have gone from adorable bimbo or nurturing angel to that of brittle bitch who stands in the way of anything the man may enjoy such as bachelor parties, porn, guys nights, pot parties and other shallow and vulgar pastimes. Attractive women that these men have miraculously snagged interrupt every possible moment of male camaraderie. The first topic among the male friends focus on how to "get" women, that is, how to get laid without getting the woman in question to fall madly in love with the greasy guy. The second focus is on pure women-bashing. All these women are desperate to get married, have kids, they are constantly in the pursuit of plotting home-making, plotting monogamy and mainly snooping and stalking even though not a single one of these characters seems remotely eligible for so much attention to be heaped on them. Though the men in dude movies are clearly losers, thus vulnerable and thus lovable, it is the bro movies which astound a little more. These hunky African-American males are all ivy-league educated, moneyed guys with all kinds of worldly experience, success and an erudite vocabulary, yet they spend their male bonding time mindlessly dissecting women in a manner that seems to hark back to the middle ages. Women-bashing is rampant here too but almost worse because the characters are supposedly so classy. 


Overall, it is so sad that these ineligible males view themselves as prized candidates whom women are waiting to entrap. They are chronically contriving to keep these women off and are perennially playing these women to keep them in check. These are such unlikely scenarios but the tragedy is that they have started to pass off as truth. Men romanticize these mindsets and  it is changing the fabric of relationships and courtships for the worse today. Some months ago, the New Yorker article on Anna Faris made a big splash by exposing sexism in Hollywood. The moguls of dude comedies claimed to follow some basic rules for date nights. I quote: "1) Men Rule: Men decide which movie a couple will see on any given weekend, and any hint that a film involves fashion, pedicures, or female troubles is "man-poison" --- 2) Men are simple. Don't confuse them: Men just don't understand the nuances of female dynamics...Male movie-goes care chiefly about the male star and his buddies --- 3) If a woman is the star, it better be a romantic comedy." Hollywood may swear by these rules but it is upto women to take date night into their own hands. Real women have never been more different than their on-screen avatars. They are stronger, more successful and less likely to settle than ever before. There is an embedded subjugating tactic within these films that I would urge women to not respond to. As for the men, I only have a simple question: Do you really want to be like these guys? I sincerely hope not. 

storm in a tomato soup can!

After spending much time rooting for fasting impresario Anna Hazare, urban Indians have found another food related event to controvert. A Valencian festival called La Tomatina is being hosted in Bangalore where tomato pelting will synchronize with hot DJ spins. This has enraged some conscientious Indian youth who are busy signing petitions and calling for boycotts against this fairly silly event, as they refuse to "ape the West." Not only do I find this to be a laughable lament for an urban Indian, I want to add that the inspiration for this event is the recently celebrated Bollywood flick that is largely the Indian yuppie's homage to foreign holidaying, in that case, in Spain. I am not in any way supporting the idea that one must be anything but repulsed by hip, food-wasting events in poor India. But what about all those Hindu rituals of pouring milk over deities, or throwing rice at weddings or other celebrations. I somehow don't think one can exempt those occurrences from the same argument. It also makes me fairly irritable that people are quick to denounce the Western corruption of the Indian goodness. Lets not waste food, I agree. But let's protest that with some self-awareness please!

children's "lingerie", an oxymoron?

Scandals hold up the best possible mirror to society. Through the moral, aesthetic or ethical limits that a scandal may push, we are forced to connect to the most righteous side of ourselves. Scandals are rarely about the subject at hand but about the levels of tolerance, hypocrisy and contradictions we practice on a daily basis. Recently, a french company that is claiming to make lingerie for children aged 4 to 12 years has become a subject of a lot of uproar and bashing. Jour Apres Lunes has photographed a lot of young girls prancing around in frilly underwear, tank tops, bikini tops with make up and oversized pearls on. They are also in the heels of a controversial photo shoot in French Vogue. Whats the problem? Well, television pundits, bloggers and critics seem to find these young girls overly sexualized and their adult-like, flirtatious stances have been deemed "a pedophile's dream."
 

While it seems like the perfect opportunity to vent at the French and their loose sexual mores, it is also time to reflect on something France's most prolific philosopher once wrote. In Mythologies, Roland Barthes has a small vignette on Toys where he observes, "All the toys one commonly sees are essentially a microcosm of the adult world; they are all reduced copies of human objects, as if in the eyes of the public the child was, all told, nothing but a smaller man, a homunculus to whom must be supplied objects of his own size." He argues that toys prepare and embed the child into an adult world from the earliest possible stage. We turn our children into consumers, not creators or innovators. In every single culture in the world, nothing could be farther from the truth.

hating on online dating!

Trust the New Yorker to take on a hip, progressive subject and give it an unnaturally depressing, smug and aged spin. Nick Paumgarten recently chose to tackle the epic phenomenon of our times - online dating. As we excitedly began to read, the very beginning signaled trouble! The dull historical approach became evident with the first sentence:

"In the fall of 1964, on a visit to the World’s Fair, in Queens, Lewis Altfest, a twenty-five-year-old accountant, came upon an open-air display called the Parker Pen Pavilion, where a giant computer clicked and whirred at the job of selecting foreign pen pals for curious pavilion visitors. You filled out a questionnaire, fed it into the machine, and almost instantly received a card with the name and address of a like-minded participant in some far-flung locale—your ideal match." [ Read article here]

It was not just that Paumgarten was referencing antiquated notions like World Fairs, pen-pals, staid pavilions and machines that whirred but the fact that it seemed like this article had very little interest in the tantalizing psychological and social intensities of online daters that make this phenomenon exciting. Instead, he chose this fuddy-duddy historical route talking about programmers and pseudo-science behind it all. We were not wrong in getting all of this from the first paragraph.

straight people, get a life!

Ever gotten that sense of self-revulsion and embarrassment when you find your hands automatically clicking on a predictable and shallow advice column on dating, sex, love or relationships? I must confess that it is a rare day that goes by when I haven't clicked on some pseudo-psychology column written by seemingly eminent PhDs and supported by the most suspicious of surveys. Why are these little columns so addictive?  

At the surface level, there is the obvious - anyone involved in dating and love issues is often in puzzling, murky territory and and there is nothing wrong in resorting to some pop psychology suggestions to figure out if things are working out or wondering if you're reading every line and signal wrong. Sounds harmless enough so far. But....

It is the actual advice and the reality about straight men and women that it posits which is deeply perturbing. These days, I find that people are bored to tears about any debate that harks back to gender relations, gender representations and gender equality. The idea that kiosks filled with women posing half-naked, half-starved on magazine covers are being objectified, or the fact that the US is weak on strong female leaders, or that our obsession with celeb weddings and princess gowns keep us confined in a tight heteronormative bind are all notions that people roll their eyes at. The list of excuses is long and analytically abortive: so passe, so lame, we are so over it, this aint the fifties, I already fulfilled my gender bender college course requirement, I have a gay friend....so on and so forth. 

Nothing reflects the backward and constantly regressing mode of our heterosexual selves as these advice columns. Loosely speaking,they are divided into a few main categories - dating, understanding men and sexual tips. The sexual tips category more or less fulfills the role of erotica, the highly narrativised tips are meant to titillate and offer a little sneaky reading pleasure. While it is not exactly a progressive way of discussing sex, at least the focus on female orgasms redeems these passages a little bit.