Mind the Gap

Today I’d like to talk about a certain type of reality TV show: the kind that follows a group of people, over several weeks, in a quest for self-improvement and a better life.

Let’s start with the above beaming benefactress, Gillian McKeith. For those of you who don’t know, she is a holistic TV nutritionist, who believes that chlorophyll is good for you to eat because it’s full of oxygen. On the plus side, thanks to her we have more delicious, tasty blueberries and cranberries in the shops. On the downside: everything else about her and then some is terrible. Her usual schtick is to get a bunch of people on a show, either celebrities (such as Pop Idol winner Michelle McMannus) or regular people, in order to reform their dietary habits. She then shows them a table full of a week’s worth of their diet – typically reddish brown and oozing with grease. She then shows them a table full of what she would like them to eat in a week – more of it, and it’s all green and delicious-looking. Except the contestants are always futile ignorami who don’t like vegetables, so she persuades them that vegetables are nice – not by steaming them lightly with a bit of butter, but by grinding them, raw, into smoothies, and making people drink them.

But first things first: she needs to examine stool samples, which she then badgers the contestants about, telling them in no uncertain terms that they are bound for premature coronary meltdown. In the case of Michelle McMannus, she actually got a trolley full of pig fat to show her how much excess weight she was carrying. I don’t know if she does that to anyone else.

Over the course of the next few weeks at the price of much effort and bullying, our heroes will stoically and virtuously shed at least some of their excess weight. I seem to recall poor Michelle cried (although it’s hard to remember, she seems to cry very easily), and wasn’t allowed parsnips or a glass of wine on Christmas day. I was quite amazed at her willingness to be humiliated by this dietary Thatcherite, but then again she did go on Pop Idol.

I find these programmes strangely magnetic, and very hard to resist, whether McKeith is involved or not. I can think of two more quite memorable ones.

One time I saw this programme on Channel 5, where this club owner named Marcella was being reformed by two very stern ladies vis-à-vis her dietary habits. When Marcella was around, she was all sheepish and apologetic about her body and her eating habits – one thing she was chastised for was her fondness for cheese, and her chaotic sleeping pattern. When she wasn’t around, the two stern ladies poked long sticks at a blown up image of Marcella’s underwear-clad form, pointing out the various folds, flubbery bits, her yellowish skin colour. Interestingly, they attributed foot fungus to poor circulation due to being overweight. And there I was thinking it was, well, a fungus. I mean, it’s called “athlete’s foot”. And Marcella didn’t look all that athletic, but neither was she exactly what you would call fat. Anyway, the weeks went on, and she was found to be lacking in willpower to follow her diet – always the voice of the cheese calling from the back of the fridge: “I am eeeeevil! Come and eat me!”. So one of the stern ladies dispatched herself to Marcella’s house. I think I switched channels then, but you could tell by the click of her heels on the pavement that she meant business.

The other programme I saw on TV at a hotel in London. I think it was on ITV. It had little to do with diet, in fact the mealtime advice dispensed seemed more conducive to an early grave than most things I’ve seen on TV. But who cares! Because this lucky family were going to win a trip to Florida! That is, learn how to manage their finances in order to afford such a trip.

Enter the family: mother who works as a part-time cleaner, father of indeterminate profession (possibly a factory foreman), a little boy and girl, and an evil, selfish blonde teenage daughter (estimated household income: not much). They think they can’t afford to go on holiday in Florida, but they’re wrong, because they are being visited by a lady TV presenter (estimated income: oodles), who is going to teach them how to budget properly (cause that’s how rich people get their oodles of cash: they’re not stupid, unlike poor people). The first thing is to reform these people’s shopping habits.

A trip to the supermarket reveals that the selfish husband and kids are too reliant on brand name foods. These are to be banished in favour of value tins of baked beans. But think of that lovely, tacky resort in Florida, which will prove that you are paragons of virtue! Next, the kids need to get jobs. The two younger ones do quite well, and the teenage daughter already has a job in retail. But she commits one huge act of selfishness: she spends £50 of her own earnings on a dress for a party. Thankfully, she is being stalked by the TV presenter, who catches her in the act and tells her off in front of the whole shop. The mother gets a second job as a flower-arranger (cause that is the kind of job you can just walk into as a part-time cleaner with no qualifications). The father agrees to be a little less of a male chauvinist pig and helps out around the house a bit.

Result: they prove themselves, only just, to be worthy of a trip to a resort in Florida that’s worth maybe a week of the presenter’s pay. They’ve abandoned those vices of the working classes: a healthy diet, and free time. They’ve learned to be better people and care for each other. They’re stupid, so they needed a TV presenter to come and tell them.

Yeah well, it was ITV. But there is something distinctly Thatcherite about these programmes. If you’re fat or sick, it’s because you’re ignorant or stupid, not because you can’t afford good food. If you can’t afford to take your family to a resort on holiday, it’s because you’re weak-willed and incapable of budgeting, and you have vices: you spend £2.50 on a pint sometimes, or at the most £50 on a dress. And what’s with all these bossy alpha females, telling women what to eat and do, poking sticks at images of their cellulite like they’re a map of a possible exploratory trip to the volcanoes of Iceland? And what’s this telling mothers they’re too soft with their kids? Why is the TV covered in these cast-iron nannies from TV-Land telling people how low and unsophisticated they are? You’ll also notice that the women in these shows are distinctly less liberated than their TV-presenting counterparts. But that’s because they have bad habits because they’re poor. See? Equality is a privilege, not a right: some are born with it, others have to live on baked beans for it, or possibly rob the sperm bank in order to produce a nice rich people’s baby. If more people understood this, they would live richer, fuller lives! Or maybe they’d finally start throwing pies at those interlopers poking through their garbage.

The Second Carnival of Radical Action is up at She Who Stumbles.

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

gay (13x)
lesbian (6x)
sex (5x)
shoot (4x)
death (3x)
gun (2x)
bitch (1x)

Hat tip: Sour Duck

I’ve been wanting to do a post on cartoon housewives for a while, and then while searching for pictures of Marge Simpson I found a number of sexualised images of her. That’s not too surprising, since she’s a cartoon character, and there seems to be no small amount of fantasising over cartoon characters going on, possibly a result of all the organ-devoid, magical non-sexual sex going on in the movies and on TV. Among these images I found this, which I’d like to share:

“Marge Simpson has hit the cover of mens’ magazine ‘Maxim’, and we have a shot of the cover for you. The issue (April 2004) is available at newsstands right now. Buyers will have the choice of buying two covers, one with Paris Hilton in a revealing outfit, or Marge Simpson oozing out oomph in a sexy low-cut dress while scrubbing the floor. I know which one I’ll be picking up. “She’s every man’s ideal wife: curvy, wild-haired, and willing to accept a fat, balding, drunk loser as her knight in shining armor, till death (or Patty and Selma) do them part.”

No, I hadn’t seen it before, and so I’m experiencing some degree of cognitive dissonance.

Anyway. In this post I’m going to focus specifically on two cartoon housewives, Marge Simpson of The Simpsons and Matsuko Yamada of My Neighbours the Yamadas. I’m not going to focus on the cultural differences between a US housewife and a Japanese housewife too much, since I don’t know enough about them. I just think these are two brilliant, subtle depictions of what it’s like to be a housewife: the domestic servitude, the opportunities abandoned when embracing matrimony and family life, the hidden responsibilities. Both cartoons also offer great portraits of average, working-class masculinity which I’ll also go into a bit.

Let’s start with Marge Simpson. I don’t need to introduce The Simpsons, a show so brilliant and era-defining that notoriously reclusive author Thomas Pynchon came out of seclusion twice to be on the show*. It was consistently brilliant for all of eight seasons (with the odd minor hiccup), and even now that it’s less than brilliant, it’s still often one of the most entertaining things on TV.

The first thing you notice about Marge, aside from her towering blue hair, is that she’s very much the traditional wife and mother: she can pack lunches for all her family in ten seconds, knows the whole family’s blood types, is preternaturally tolerant towards husband Homer, and is very insistent on going to Church every Sunday.

Yet Marge is also completely amazing at everything she tries: painting, starring in a musical, being a cop, bodybuilding, and yes, baking and embroidery.

Yet none of those enterprises last more than an episode, at the end of which she’s usually back to spending most of her day at home alone with the baby. She makes some effort to show that she’s happy with her lot, yet there are quite a few instances where it becomes clear exactly how frustrated she is: she gets addicted to gambling; she goes mad with stress, parks her car in the middle of the road and gets arrested; and finally, she gets so lonely she actually prods Maggie deliberately to make her cry so she can comfort her. Much of this is explicitly blamed on the fact that she is completely self-effacing and her needs are ignored by her husband and kids, while managing not to demonise them either. Homer has his own dreams crushed for different reasons, as has Bart (even though he’s only 10), and there are signs that the same fate is lined up for Lisa, and that she only gets to be the brains of the family now because there’s very little an eight-year-old girl can do to change anything.

Matsuko Yamada is a character in Isao Takahata’s brilliant three-hour-long anime, My Neighbours the Yamadas, which chronicles the daily life husband and wife Matsuko and Takashi, their kids, and grandma Shige. The movie is based on a long-running newspaper comic strip.

There are some notable differences with Marge. For one thing, I found no sexualised images of her when searching for images. For another, in the movie she’s not particularly amazing at anything, except maybe obtaining the TV remote from her husband at the issue of a wonderful ballet worthy of a pair of Jedi Knights. She’s also not particularly amazing at being a housewife: in fact, she is proudly mediocre at cooking and does the rest of the work just because it’s expected of her, and, as with the Simpsons, her husband and son aren’t particularly proud specimens of masculinity either (although with them as with Matsuko, there is no underlying, squandered genius as there is in the Simpsons). Once again, the brains of the family are the two least empowered members: little Nonoko and grandma Shige. The dog also looks like he could produce satire worthy of Peter Cook, if he could only talk.

The most touching (and slightly terrifying) part of the movie, for me, is the one where the husband and kids are going off to work and school one by one, and are all suffering from memory problems, leaving things behind, coming back for them, and forgetting something else (a phenomenon enigmatically attributed to the large amount of ginger in their diet). After they’ve all managed to leave, Matsuko is left at home alone with her mother-in-law, and nothing to do with her day whatsoever than talk Shige into making sushi and watch some TV.

The other moment I found touching was when husband Takashi fantasizes about saving his wife and mother from a gang of scary motorcyclists, having just had his masculinity undermined, disguised as a masked hero. At the end of the chase you can see him trying to decide whether to reveal his identity, and shame them, or revel in the quiet satisfaction that they don’t know what he’s really made of, maybe keeping the revelation for when he needs it most (“I ate all the noodles?! Well, I’ll have you know that…”). But of course, it’s all a fantasy, and much like Homer Simpson, he’s no knight in shining armour, he’s a pudgy office worker, and Matsuko is neither princess nor domestic goddess: in fact she’s an oblong squiggle who’s bad at cooking.

But these expectations don’t matter much, as the movie communicates through a rousing chorus of Que Sera Sera while the family float through the sky holding hands in a ten-minute grand finale.

Both these movies portray dysfunctional nuclear families in quite a positive light, and in so doing, question the need for family values, ideal wives and husbands and perfect kids. In fact, both show exactly what about family life prevents individuals within these families from being completely fulfilled. You get the feeling that these families are united precisely because they’re dysfunctional and they accept it, and that maybe perfect families don’t exist, and that the myth kind of ridiculous.

But the thing that talks to me the most is the situation of the girls and women, particularly the housewives. Matsuko is a little older, but Marge Simpson is only supposed to be six years older than me, and though I have no intention of ever getting married, there is still a definite risk for any woman in a long term heterosexual relationship to end up falling into those gender roles, and to stop trying once you’ve had the relief of finding a partner who wants an equal rather than a housewife. There is also the element of expectation for women my age to be married, the idea that these roles are innate. So it’s refreshing to see the frustration of housewives so sympathetically portrayed, and there’s maybe a slight feeling of revolt against these expectations expressed in each of these cartoons: where action heroines embody some of our hopes, our fears are expressed through the likes of Matsuko and Marge.

*though some sources say he did it for the complementary jacket that is bestowed upon all guest stars

From Stonewall Cymru.

A major survey of Britain’s secondary schools has revealed that almost two thirds of lesbian and gay pupils (156,000 children) have been victims of homophobic bullying.

The School Report, the largest poll of young gay people ever conducted in this country, presents a shocking picture of the extent of homophobic bullying undertaken by fellow pupils and, alarmingly, school staff.

Key findings are:

· Sixty five per cent of lesbian and gay pupils have experienced homophobic bullying
· Of those, 92 per cent (143,000) have experienced verbal homophobic bullying, 41 per
cent
(64,000) physical bullying and 17 per cent (26,000) death threats
· 97 per cent of gay pupils hear derogatory phrases such as ‘dyke’, ‘queer’ and ‘rug
-muncher’ used in school
· Half of teachers fail to respond to homophobic language when they hear it
· Thirty per cent of lesbian and gay pupils say that adults - teachers or support staff - are
responsible for homophobic incidents in their school
· Less than a quarter of schools have told pupils that homophobic bullying is wrong

The survey of 1,145 young people, conducted by the Schools Health Education Unit for Stonewall, also highlights the consequences of bullying for gay pupils. Seven out of ten of those who have experienced it say it has adversely affected their school work. Half of those bullied say they have missed school as a result.

“These deeply disturbing figures should serve as a wake-up call to everyone working in education,” said Matthew Batten, Stonewall Cymru’s Policy Officer. “This is a damning legacy of Section 28, which deterred schools from tackling anti-gay bullying for so long. This remains one of the few sorts of bullying about which too many schools still take no action. It blights the lives not just of gay children but of thousands of pupils perceived to be lesbian or gay too.”

The report does demonstrate significant benefits when schools intervene. In schools that have said homophobic bullying is wrong, gay young people are 60 per cent more likely not to have been bullied. The incidence of anti-gay bullying remains higher in ‘faith schools’.

Matthew Batten added “We know in Wales many teachers want to do the right thing by tackling homophobic bullying but feel they don’t have the tools to do so or they worry they won’t have the support of senior colleagues. Schools and local authorities that are engaging with our Education for All campaign are realising that they can make a real difference.”

Case studies available on request

Notes
The School Report survey, of 1,145 pupils, was conducted by the Schools Health Education Unit on behalf of Stonewall. 48 per cent of the sample is girls; 12 per cent attend private schools.
There are four million pupils in British secondary schools. Government actuaries estimate that six per cent of the population is lesbian or gay
‘Section 28’ of the 1988 Local Government Act made ‘promotion’ of homosexuality unlawful. It was widely understood by schools to forbid them from addressing anti-gay bullying
Publication of the School Report was made possible with the support of Ian McKellen, IBM and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation
Stonewall Cymru is the all-Wales lesbian and gay equality organisation. www.stonewallcymru.org.uk

Just a quick post to share some great posts I’ve read recently on prostitution. The first is from Lucky White Girl, it’s actually from February 2006 but I only just found it (hey, I didn’t even know what Blogger was four months ago!), which excellently sums up all sides of the debate and puts forth a Marxist-Feminist angle on the issue:

But why is it one of our best choices? Why are our bodies the most valuable possession we have as women? Just getting more money isn’t the end all and be all of liberation. It is not liberation if it preserves the underlying structure of inequality. There’s something inherently wrong with a system that makes women’s bodies their most valuable possession.
It comes down to examining where the locus of control is placed. And in a globalized neo-liberal economy very few people (any at all? considering that corporations are the new citizens?) retain the locus of control. And this is the problem, with arguing that prostitution is a choice. Any choice made out of economic necessity is a false choice because the locus of control is not within the individual.

The other one is from Kaktus at Superbabymama, who highlights the tendency among feminists to objectify sex workers and just reduce them to a symbol, forgetting that they’re human beings just like anyone else and they don’t spend all their time Prostitutionizing with capital P:

Do you get it? These are not just some blurred Prostitutes with a Capital P; when you walk past them and only see that they fuck guys or they give blowjobs and so to you they are permanently debased and no longer human, you are just as guilty of the same objectification you blame the patriarchy for.

I got this from this French left-wing email list I subscribe to, it’s the testimony of a 65-year-old woman who was arrested on the way to a peaceful protest of the G8 (my translation, I stayed as close as possible to the original text).

“I was among the 1200 people arrested by German police in the Rostock area during the G8. It was Tuesday 5th June at 3.30 in the afternoon. There were 45 of us in a bus which had left Reddelich camp to travel to the area near Rostock Laage airport, where a demonstration was taking place. On the way down the autobahn between Rostock to Berlin, the bus was stopped by the police. We were made to get off the bus one by one and searched, then we were placed inside a rectangle formed by the police cars. We waited there for roughly two hours, standing in the rain, without access to our rain gear which was in our bags that the police had taken, and we didn’t know what was happening. Among us was a mother with a two-year-old child.

With the help of legal aid, I have pressed charges and demanded the cancellation of the expulsion order.”

I’ve posted about this site before, and mentioned that the entirety of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States is up, for free. Having read a few chapters of it, including his History of the 20th Century, I highly recommend it. This chapter is of particular interest to feminists, as it links the oppression of women to private property and consumption, and mentions the status of women among early American societies. Here’s an extract:

Societies based on private property and competition, in which monogamous families became practical units for work and socialization, found it especially useful to establish this special status of women, something akin to a house slave in the matter of intimacy and oppression, and yet requiring, because of that intimacy, and long-term connection with children, a special patronization, which on occasion, especially in the face of a show of strength, could slip over into treatment as an equal. An oppression so private would turn out hard to uproot.

It would be an exaggeration to say that women were treated equally with men; but they were treated with respect, and the communal nature of the society gave them a more important place.

I’ve also had a browse of the rest of the site, and there’s a lot of interesting reading there, including such authors as Malcolm X and Noam Chomsky, and plenty of interesting-looking stuff I haven’t read yet.

They are very much about reiterating “the rules” of appearance for women (Edit: Or, rather, a certain group of women in rich western countries. I don’t want to imply that I think all women on the planet are held to the same beauty standards). Just a cursory glance at a few issues tells me the following. The women with whom the magaziens are concerned are expected to be obsessed with their weight. It’s bad to be too thin or apparently anorexic (naughty Victoria Beckham and Kate Moss), but other women are applauded for losing weight (well done Geri Halliwell) because it’s bad to be too fat. Of course what counts as “too thin” and “too fat” changes from page to page and depends on various factors, such as the celebrity in question’s popularity at this moment. Some women are applauded for being “curvy,” but this is almost always followed quickly by a story that they are now worried about their weight and considering a drastic diet or surgery (Charlotte Church is pregnant and “ballooning,” Lily Allen has gone from proud to considering plastic surgery for her size 12 body). Cue a little bit of sighing over the pressures on women, which comes across as rather dissonant in magazines devoted to maintaining those pressures. Appearing with any evidence of pregnancy on your body (naughty Mel B) is repulsive and losing your baby weight is an absolute imperative. Women who lose their baby weight quickly are applauded, as long as they don’t lose it “too fast” and appear “too thin.” Losing your baby weight quickly is obviously not possible for most women, being as most women don’t have access to elective c-sections, nannies and personal trainers. Appearing to be ageing (bad Kate Moss) or being photographed without makeup (bad any famous woman caught on camera while popping out for a pint of milk) is a big no. You are only allowed to appear without makeup if you’re someone designated the status of a “natural beauty,” whatever that is. Plastic surgery is deemed good or bad depending on whether the woman in question is considered acceptable and what she’s had done, but anyone who has the awful experience of plastic surgery going wrong will be roundly mocked. Sweating is horrid (naughty America Ferreira) as is appearing with any sign of body hair. Wearing the wrong clothes is bad, but again what counts as wrong changes from page to page and woman to woman. And so it goes on. You must not be too fat, too thin, look your age if older than 29 after which you must appear younger than whatever your age is supposed to look like; you must not sweat, have visible body hair, go out without makeup unless you are “naturally beautiful,” wear the wrong clothes, show any physical evidence of having had children, etc. Oh, and no matter how beautiful and sexy you are, he’ll probably leave you for someone else anyway.

Interestingly, the only women I found given almost unqualified approval were “real life” extremes, a woman who was still a size zero after having had 13 children and a woman who was still a size 12 with naturally “perky firm breasts” at the age of 55. Clearly these are not bodies your average working woman could aspire to.

The magazines also treated Beth Ditto and Amy Winehouse as alien life forms, women whose appearance is so far beyond acceptable that they’re offered as exceptions that prove the rule – freaks, basically.

Clearly, the content of the magazines has as much to do with the current state of capitalism and consumerism as it does sexism, for this media is largely about selling stuff to women. What’s interesting, from a feminist perspective, is how they use longstanding oppressive narratives about women to try and achieve this.

Probably the most important message here is not only that women should place most of their sense of self worth and esteem in their physical appearance but that, crucially, they must not be able to win in this respect. As Marilyn Frye writes in her essay “Oppression” that, “One of the most characteristic and ubiquitous features of the world as experienced by oppressed people is the double bind – situations in which options are reduced to a very few and all of them expose one to penalty, censure or deprivation.” The women’s magazines illustrate one double bind, definitely not the worst or most importnat one by a long shot, but one that does cause a lot of misery. No matter how hard you try to follow the rules and embody the ideal in terms of physical appearance, you will never really succeed because the doorposts constantly shift and, no matter what you do, you will always be exposed to penalty and censure. The apparent contradictions are therefore essential to the narrative because it is essential that women must always be fair game for criticism if a state of female anxiety, despondency and intense self-scrutiny is to be produced.

Some might argue that these magazines are meant to be reassuring, letting women know that even Kate Moss can’t escape the ageing disease, but the fact that the images are surrounded by advertisements for diets, makeup and beauty products, suggests that they’re about undermining women’s confidence. After all, if Kate Moss is really a plain woman, what hope do you, 40 year old mother of three working in Marks and Spencer, have of ever being considered attractive by anyone? You’d better get shopping fast if you don’t want people to be sick at the very sight of you.

I think my own rather visceral reaction to these magazines comes from my feeling that they’re underlined by a palpable loathing of the female body put across through a stream of images which reiterate a sense that women’s bodies are, at best, deficient and, at worst, disgusting. Over and again they suggest that there is something deeply wrong about being a woman, something potentially horrible, which always threatens to make its appearance, no matter how good you think you look, this inherent repulsiveness always lurks beneath the surface. It is your job as a woman to try and prevent it from becoming visible.

Some members of the group put forward the suggestion that the women’s mags are as bad, if not worse, than the men’s magazines, a view which might inspire a collective sharp intake of breath, but this feeling may have its root in a sense that the women’s media is more insidious. Whereas lads’ mags have an obvious shouty “Hurrah for sexism, Yay for objectification, in your face feminism, In. Your. Face” tone, the women’s magazines have a sly “This is for your own good, this is what women are like, this is what women think” tone. Whereas lads’ mags present one type of woman as attractive, the women’s magazines seem to conclude that no woman is really attractive: all women are potentially, if not actually, disgusting. In any case, we generally agreed that you need to look at the women’s mags alongside men’s mags and that the women’s mags are objectifying in their presentation of women’s bodies as things to be judged.

There is a new article up at Alternet by Barbara Ehrenreich, about the widening gap between the richest and the poorest. Go read it! Here’s an extract:

On May 16, a millionaire couple in a woodsy Long Island suburb was charged with keeping two Indonesian domestics as slaves for five years, during which the women were paid $100 a month, fed very little, forced to sleep on mats on the floor, and subjected to beatings, cigarette burns and other torments.

Some of America’s slaves are captive domestics, like the Indonesian women in Long Island. Others are factory workers, and at least 10,000 are sex slaves lured from their home country to American brothels by promises of respectable jobs. CEOs and slaves: these are the extreme ends of American class polarization.