Bitch Blogs

Use your imagination: an interview with the women of Sociological Images

Kjerstin Johnson — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 21:06:41 +0000

From PBR to Pampers, Lisa Wade and Gwen Sharp of the blog Sociological Images look at the cultural significance of the graphs, cartoons, and advertisements we usually take for granted. I spoke with Lisa and Gwen for our Mad World podcast about how the blog got started, how to "pull back the curtain" on advertisers, and why exactly the "mediocre male" is such a prevalent trope found today.

Stream it below, Subscribe on iTunes, or download at archive.org. Transcription coming soon.

This project was made possible in part by a grant from Oregon Humanities (OH), a statewide nonprofit organization and an independent affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which funds OH's grant program.

Have we come a long way? An interview with Jean Kilbourne

Kjerstin Johnson — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 21:05:07 +0000

Jean Kilbourne made the first Killing Us Softly film in 1979. Now with several books under her belt and Killing Us Softly 4 out this spring, Kilbourne obviously hasn't stopped her activism in media criticism--whether it's following the increased sexualization of children in ads or calling out the alcohol and tobacco industry. Kelsey Wallace spoke to Kilbourne, a member of Bitch Media's National Advisory Board, on the phone about trends in advertising and gender, the state of media criticism today, and Kilbourne's future plans. You can order Killing Us Softly 4 at the Media Education Foundation. This interview is part of our Mad World podcast on gender, advertising, and identity in a mediated world.

Subscribe on iTunes. Download at archive.org. Transcription coming soon!

Mad World: The Podcast

Kelsey Wallace — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:55:31 +0000

If you like reading our Mad World series on gender, identity, and advertising, you're going to *love* listening to the podcast! Click on the player below to hear interviews with the folks from Sociological Images, Jean Kilbourne, and much much more. You can also download the podcast from our iTunes channel or our archive page.

A preview:

: 30 Intro

1:13 An interview with Lisa Wade and Gwen Sharp of Sociological Images. Listen to the full interview here.

14:50 Vox Populi: What do you think are the worst stereotypes in advertising?

19:50 An interview with Jean Kilbourne, author and creator of the Killing Us Softly series. Listen to the full interview here.

31:00 Outro

Bonus! This Mad World podcast features music from Secret Cities and was produced by Julie Sabatier, host and creator of Destination DIY. Transcript coming soon!

Size Matters: The Carrot and the Stick

Tasha Fierce — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 19:55:09 +0000

Size discrimination is an unfortunate fact of life for many fat people working in a corporate environment. Fat workers are often passed over for promotions, denied raises, and told outright to their faces that they are undesirable to clients. Not only that, fat employees on average earn 1 to 6 percent less than employees whose weight is considered "normal." Fat people are also often the scapegoats for rising corporate health care costs. What protections are there for those facing size discrimination? Being classified as "overweight" generally does not entitle you to protections under the Americans With Disabilities Act or the ADA Amendment Act of 2008, however, under the ADAAA being classified as "morbidly obese" or having health problems considered "weight-related" does. The larger you are, the more likely you are to experience size discrimination, and the more protections you have under the law. But those who are not considered "morbidly obese" also need to be protected, and unfortunately there are no laws that prohibit discrimination based on weight.

As if size discrimination wasn't enough to deal with, many workplaces are instituting weight loss incentive programs, which further marginalizes fat employees. Incentive programs that include rewards for departments or teams that lose the most weight create a hostile atmosphere in which fat people are shamed for not being able to lose significant amounts of weight. For example, an alumna of Stephens College in Missouri recently pledged to donate $1 million to the college if the staff loses a collective 250 pounds by January 1, 2011. This puts undue pressure on fat staff members who may or may not be able to lose enough weight to contribute "their part" of the collective 250 lbs. The dean herself is expected to lose 25 lbs. to receive an extra $100,000 in addition to the $1 million. Since the dean accepted the challenge on behalf of the college, she apparently has no problem with being pressured to lose that much weight. I doubt the rest of the staff was consulted before the challenge was accepted.

Another type of incentive plan was instituted by Whole Foods that involves lower health care costs for those who maintain a certain BMI. Now, we know that BMI is not the best way to measure health in individuals. This program stigmatizes those who may be unable to reach a BMI considered to be within the "healthy" range, regardless of what their real indicators of health may show. In fact, this program could be seen as encouraging some to be at a weight UNDER what is actually healthy for them just to be in the "Platinum" group, since a BMI under 24 could potentially only be achieved by some people via losing unhealthy amounts of weight. Furthermore, the size discrimination inherent in this incentive program demonizes fat people by attributing high health care costs to those with higher BMIs and penalizing them for their perceived inability to lose weight. Why is it the business of your employer what your BMI is?

Legislation prohibiting size discrimination is desperately needed as more and more people are considered "obese" by the medical establishment and corporations continue to intrude further on fat employees' personal lives by taking stock of their supposed health indicators. The carrot-stick incentive programs being adopted contribute to the marginalization of fat workers and promote the idea that rising health care costs are the fault of fat people in general. We don't need to pathologize fatness by having it considered a disability just to fight size discrimination. We need size to be included along with race, age, gender, sexual orientation, etc. as protected under anti-discrimination laws.

B-Sides: The Thermals Get Personal on Personal Life

Kelsey Wallace — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:18:45 +0000

Do you know what today is? It's Personal Life release day! If you're a Thermals fan (and you know I am), you've been excited for this day for a while now. And you won't be disappointed, because Personal Life delivers all of the energy, catchy hooks, and sing-along lyrics you've come to expect from these cuties. Check out their latest video if you need proof:

Pssst... You can also preview the new album at NPR First Listen, and if you live in PDX you can see The Thermals live this week at MusicFestNW (oh, and you can see us there too!).

Push(back) at the Intersections: Veronica Mars and the Straw Feminists

s.e. smith — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:13:40 +0000

On to another work by a male creator that is sometimes treated as feminist: Veronica Mars, which aired on UPN from 2004 to 2007. While I don't think creator Rob Thomas set out to make a feminist show, there are definitely some feminist messages in the show. There are some shockingly anti-feminist ones too.

For those who haven't seen it, Veronica Mars revolves around a teenaged detective. The show starts with her in high school and concludes with her in college, allowing her to grow up a bit over the course of the series. Like Nancy Drew, Veronica Mars is no shrinking violet. She's creative, she's tough as nails, she's aggressive, she's a good investigator, she has complex relationships with other people.

She's a pretty strong female character, although one of the things about the show that irks me is the way she see-saws between partners, as though she is somehow incomplete without a boyfriend. There are other great women on the show, like Mac, who is delightfully nerdy but also has a tough streak, and Parker, who is initially depicted as a vapid blond but turns out to have hidden depths (like Veronica herself).

The good things about the show: It depicts sexual assault and rape, exploring what happens when you are ignored when you try to report it, and depicting the fallout of sexual assault for survivors. Veronica Mars also explores class issues, forcing people to confront the divide between rich and poor as we see it play out between the characters. There's also some interesting racial stuff, including non-white characters who are allowed to be something other than stereotypes, are interesting, and talk to each other about things beyond the white characters.

The bad things: Well, there's the revolving door of Veronica's boyfriends. There's also the 'feminists' in the final season. Veronica herself never IDs as feminist and we don't see the F-word thrown around much at all until we meet an aggressive women's group at the college that's like your worst stereotyping nightmare. They're man haters, they're willing to frame people for crimes they didn't commit while they themselves commit rape, and they ride roughshod over numerous other characters.

I have a hard time calling this show feminist, given that. Yes, it depicts some strong women doing awesome things and it challenges some oppressions, and, to be blunt, it is one of my all time favorite television shows ever. But the fact that the only feminists we see are gross caricatures is really frustrating. Even though they are understandably angry, given that the campus has been plagued with a rapist over multiple semesters and nothing has been done about it, even though I think there is a place for violent, aggressive resistance, this was not the place to show it. People didn't consider the fact that the feminist group was justifiably enraged, and went over the line, they took away the idea that all feminists are irrational people who overreact and actively participate in oppression.

You could consider it a meta-criticism on feminism, but I doubt Veronica Mars was delving that deep, you know?

I feel like people watching the show who haven't really been exposed to feminism were internalizing some feminist messages until they got to the actual feminists, at which point they learned that feminists are bad. What's more important, the delivery of the message, or naming the ideology that goes with it? I'd rather that people be doing feminist things and not recognizing them as feminist than doing nothing at all, or doing actively anti-feminist things (and sometimes calling them feminist), but I also wish that depictions of feminists in pop culture were not uniformly awful. Few shows are even willing to call characters feminist at all and positive depictions of feminists and feminism are thin on the ground.

I don't know if Thomas really thinks that this is what feminists are like, or was trying to make a commentary with the caricatures that just didn't resolve itself, but it left me with a sour taste in my mouth. Surely, a criterion for considering a show feminist is that if it contains feminists, they shouldn't be caricatures.

Right?

Adventures in Feministory: Norma Rae

Kelsey Wallace — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 19:11:20 +0000

Today is Labor Day, and while the most significant impact this has for many of us is on our wardrobes (see you next year, white pants) the holiday actually serves as a celebration of the contributions of American workers.

I'm sure I don't need to tell you that women have had a significant impact on the history of American labor politics. From the Atlanta Washerwomen Strike in 1881 to Jane Addams' Hull House, women have always kicked ass and taken names in the name of workers' rights. However, this is a pop culture blog and I am a self-proclaimed pop culture addict, so I say we celebrate Labor Day 2010 with an awesome pop cultural representation of women and labor politics: Norma Rae.

Norma Rae is based on the true story of an unlikely labor organizer, Crystal Lee Sutton. Sutton attempted to unionize the textile factory where she worked, and was fired as a result. When the bosses came to take her away, she took one final stand. Said Sutton, "I took a piece of cardboard and wrote the word UNION on it in big letters, got up on my work table, and slowly turned it around. The workers started cutting their machines off and giving me the victory sign. All of a sudden the plant was very quiet…" (Norma Rae fans will recognize that scene from the film—isn't it awesome that it really happened?)

I don't want to give away the whole plot of Norma Rae here and spoil your post-BBQ plans to watch it tonight, but I do want to recommend it to everyone as a rare film that makes labor organizing seem kinda sexy and definitely awesome. Labor organizers work long, hard hours with little recognition, and it's great to see them play the heroes every once in a while (it doesn't hurt that there are tons of cute people in the movie, either).

It might seem a little cheesy to celebrate a movie on Labor Day when there are so many amazing women fighting for workers' rights all over the world, but a major motion picture like Norma Rae has the power to influence millions of viewers to care about labor politics. The real Crystal Lee Sutton died last year, but her legacy lives on in Norma Rae. Check it out, and have a Happy Labor Day!

Racy Thoughts: No Media Sensation Without Representation

Alex_Alvarez — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 18:11:10 +0000

Having grown up in Miami, a place where being Latina placed me firmly in the majority, it didn't occur to me that many, many people in this country receive the bulk of their information about Latinos (that's my label of choice for people of Latin American background, by the way, for the purposes of this blog—"Hispanic" is a term I find problematic and often misleading) from The Media™. As a member of this odd group myself, I can say, unequivocally, that we're generally not to be trusted with most things, but most definitely not with anything relating to women, gender, sexuality, or race and ethnicity.

"But you don't look like J-Lo" is something that's been said to me, out loud, without a hint of irony. I think my reaction at the time was laughter, but also more than a bit of disbelief at how little the world outside my bubble seemed to know (or care) about Latinos and Latin America.

The main reason, I've since decided, is that categories are terribly important to people, both as a means of creating a sometimes helpful way to understand others, but also out of a genuine lack of interest in getting to research a given group on a deeper level. Skimming the surface suffices when the ocean gets a little too deep and stormy, to lay some metaphors on y’all. If Jennifer Lopez was, for this person, the cultural touchstone, the totemic symbol of what a Latin female looked, acted, dressed and sounded like, anything that deviated from this was a fluke or a negligible anomaly.

So what does any of this have to do with feminism? What it comes down to, basically, is the freedom—and the responsibility—to represent oneself rather than allow others to focus on a token member of a given group and make assumptions.

At one point, I had decided that "Latino" and "Hispanic" were far too broad and vague to be useful. How could an umbrella term that hoped to describe Quechua-speaking Bolivians, Chicanos who had been in the U.S. for multiple generations and spoke only English, and Cubans with roots in Africa who spoke Spanglish possibly be useful? So I figured "Cuban" would suffice as a response to "So, like. What are you?"

Eventually, I stumbled upon a Latino blog I began to read regularly. When I learned they were hiring, I decided to go for it and apply for the position, despite finding the label problematic. As I began to interact with our readers—people I had a lot in common with, even despite our differences—I realized how important the term Latino could be, especially given that many people don't have the luxury of choosing whether nor not to subscribe to certain identifying groups. Here's this label, which along with all the positive and negative connotations you didn’t sign up for, wrapped around you like a garland and it’s up to you to make of it what you can.

The thought process behind self-identifying as Latina also helped me become a feminist: I couldn't change the way people viewed me based on the categories I'm assigned, but I could be an active, not passive, member of a group that was trying not only to level the playing field, but also provide a platform for people to represent themselves. And that's the main reason I think that identifying as Latina (as opposed to just being Latina) and as feminist are important, and are evangelical movements. You live and speak and work according to a set of beliefs while having this all observed and analyzed through several filters of cultural and social expectations, and you attempt to convert more people to something that amounts to more than a cause—it's part of a system that shows, publicly, that cultures are not unchanging or monolithic. No one person or voice, no matter how popular or prevailing, could ever accurately represent feminist thought or Latin culture.

In that same vein, I'd be remiss to begin a blog on the intersection of race, gender and pop culture without mentioning that, in reading various other blogs on all three topics, I’ve kept happening upon the same complaint: that pop culture and many feminist publications often exclude or oversee the unique perspectives offered by women who aren't white. So this blog, then, is a group effort, with your comments and experiences forming an integral part in fostering a thoughtful and inclusive discussion on feminism. Bienvenidas.

Bitchtapes: Musicfest Northwest

Kjerstin Johnson — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 21:14:24 +0000

Who needs overpriced beer and heatstroke when you can enjoy a music festival in the comfort of your own city? That's how I feel about Musicfest Northwest, taking place in Portland next week from September 8-11. Bitch Media will doing special daily blog posts on the upcoming acts. Don't worry--we won't flood the interwebs with any more updates on the Walkmen or The National, we'll be covering queer and female artists who maybe aren't getting as much attention as the bigger acts. PDX-ers can be informed about which shows to catch and non-locals can look forward new music, mp3s, and videos from shows. This week's mix is emblematic of the Pac-NW unknowns and international stars playing Portland next week. From New-Orleans bounce to artsy-dance and folk rock, hopefully you'll find something you like!

1. Dirty Mittens - The Small Things
We've covered the Dirty Mittens before, and it's good to see they're still going strong down the road! (Berbati's Pan, 9/11)

2. Shonen Knife - I Wanna Eat Choco Bars
This all-female trio from Osaka has been keeping power chords and pop music beats for almost thirty years now! They toured with Nirvana back in the day, and now headline their own candy-coated rock shows all over the world. (Mississippi Studios, 9/10)

3. Big Freedia - Gin in My System
Recently profiled in the New York Times Magazine's feature on bounce music, Louisiana's Big Freedia is the absolute "Queen of Bounce," touring and performing tirelessly to get as many people shaking their butts as possible. (Roseland Theater, 9/9; Holocene, 9/11)

4. Lovers - Figure 8
Portland's Carolyn Berk heads Lovers with fellow artists Kerby Ferris and Emily Kingan. Not many acts can say they're playing both MFNW and the Time-Based Art festival. (Rotture, 9/11)

5. MEN - Off Our Backs
If you've been waiting to see JD Samson's MEN, they're headlining an awesome show that's sure to induce non-stop dancing and pit stains. (Rotture, 9/11)

6. AgesAndAges - No Nostalgia
AaA promises a good show--their six members were all enlisted to replicate a the intricacies of a studio recording on stage. And those vocals! (Bunk Bar, 9/11)

7. Laura Veirs - I Can See Your Tracks
Accomplished singer-songwriter Laura Veirs strays off the acoustic path with moody, poetic tunes. (Pioneer Courthouse Square, 9/11)

8. Y La Bamba - Fasting in San Francisco
Haunting, pleasant, and pretty, Y La Bamba's charm comes mostly from the vocals and songwriting of Luz Elena Mendoza, who has infused Portland's indie-folk vibe with "old school Mexican 30's music." (Someday Lounge, 9/10).

9. Sallie Ford and the Sound Outside - Danger
I've been following Sallie Ford ever since she and her band killed it at a Bitch benefit show last summer (and they were the openers!). (Berbati's Pan, 9/9)

Size Matters: The Fat Tax

Tasha Fierce — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:12:20 +0000

It's become general knowledge that class influences weight. Working class families often don't have as much access to healthier foods as middle and upper class families do, and working longer hours means fast food can be an appealing option for those with little time. So if fat folks, and specifically fat women, are more likely to be working class, why does it cost so much to clothe yourself as a fat woman? Why are more fashionable clothes in larger sizes so damn expensive?

You might be tempted to think that it's the extra fabric (ha ha), but we all know most clothes cost a great deal less to make than they sell for. Thin people have fast fashion outlets such as Forever 21 and H&M to turn to when they want fashionable clothes at low prices. But Forever 21's plus size division, Faith 21, offers clothes of the same quality yet at higher prices. Torrid, a fat fashion mainstay, has much higher prices than their parent company Hot Topic. And stalwart fat fashion store Lane Bryant is well known for their outrageous prices in relation to quality and stylishness. I jokingly call the higher price of plus size women's clothing the "fat tax," but it's a sad truth.

Working class women are already often stereotyped as slobbish and homely in the media. Add fat to the mix and you have an explosive combo of perceived unattractiveness. Some would argue that the lack of access to fashionable clothing is unimportant to working class women compared to their other struggles, which may be partly true. But feeling good about how you look is something that all women should be able to experience, not only because of societal pressure to look a certain way but also for personal self-esteem. If fashion is something that is important to you, or even if you just want to stay out of muumuus and stretch pants, this is an issue that affects your everyday life.

As a middle class fat woman, I find the prices of plus size clothing to be a barrier as well. I can afford a $50 dress or a $40 sweater here and there, but scoring several items of clothing per shopping trip is something that rarely happens unless I'm shopping at a thrift store—and thrift stores are not exactly bastions of stylish fat women's clothing. It seems as if because there are so few fashionable options for fat women compared to thin women, we really are subject to a kind of tax, because where else are we going to go? As designers and stores are becoming more fat friendly, more options for cheaper clothing are cropping up, but mainly for women on the smaller end of the fat spectrum. You want a size above a 20, you're pretty much limited to a few expensive stores.

Some crafty people take this as an opportunity to make their own clothes, but this option is not realistic for everyone and the choice to DIY involves some class issues as well. Unfortunately there's no simple solution for this problem. As more and more fat women demand access to fashionable clothing and make their demands known to the fashion powers-that-be, hopefully fat fashion stores and clothing lines will lower prices to a more reasonable level. Until then, save your pennies.