Feminist Questions for this Fall's Television Premieres

I love television.

When I am not being a “good” doc student, I am a self-professed television-connoisseur.  If I’m not doing research, I’m writing about the media.

Transparency is incredibly important in what I do, whether it’s research, therapy or writing.  I write as a white, European cis-gendered woman of ‘average’ physical build who grew up on a farm in rural Ohio.  I identify as a 20-something, spiritual, middle class, bisexual, woman (although, very flexible regarding binaries of attraction).  I am able-bodied, but when I was 19 I had a stroke and could not walk and was, in many ways, dis-abled.  After rehabilitation my personal and social identity shifted back into able-bodiedness.  And, one of my strongest identities – I identify as a Feminist.

If anyone else watches television – even just a little bit – I hope you’ve seen the variety of shows that have either premiered or started another season this fall.  Some of these shows are absolutely thrilling (I’m slightly hooked on The Blacklist, but that’s beside the point) and all of the shows can provoke some interesting, feminist-oriented questions in one way or another…

Television – a huge media source – is one of the most fascinating things that we encounter.  Below I touch on some shows that have stood out for me this season.  I encourage you all to be effective media consumers and question the portrayals of women and other marginalized groups (whether by race, religion, sexual orientation, ability, etc).  Fictional or not, critically analyze what you watch! 

Once Upon A Time.  We are in the third season and, if you have been paying attention in any way, the show combines every single possible fantasy/fairy tale character into one giant, thick, interesting plot idea.  Complicated, but still captivating.  One character was presented as bisexual on this show – because I do not want to provide any spoilers, you can see anarticle (and the clip) here.

Positive LGBT representation in television is rare if it presented at all – we do have a few shows, but a character coming out as bisexual is a really good first.  Any other shows you can think of that allow a character to come out with a non-binary sexual orientation?  Thumbs up for that character development in OUaT! 

Super Fun Night.  Rebel Wilson is an interesting character.  This is a new show this season – Rebel has two friends and the show centers around documentary-esque theme of her ‘crazy’ life.  Now, the issue that I see coming up over and over again is fat shaming.  From the first episode the joke always comes back to Rebel’s weight.  Her body becomes the joke.  Her body is the joke.  Most scenes, in some way, use Rebel’s character in a way which exposes her in public (e.g., skirt torn off by an elevator), or talking about how “non-sexual” she is.  Here is a clip with the character and her sister – listen for the punch line regarding Rebel and the bikini at the pool.

Thoughts? That is just one of hundreds of jokes about Rebel’s weight in this show.  Approximately 90% all the punch lines in this series have involved her weight in some way.  Now, there are numerous debates regarding who can use jokes and humor and whether or not it is “okay” if the joke falls back on the joke teller – but that is beyond the scope of this brief review. 

Now, this show just started – sometimes shows start off with very strong stereotypes and begin to level out… I hope that happens with this show and they make an attempt to combat fat shaming attitudes and behaviors.

The Michael J. Fox Show.  This is a pretty impactful show for me this season as my grandfather has struggled with Parkinson’s Disease for almost 2 decades.  Michael J. Fox plays himself (but uses the last name Henry) in this comedy that, in some ways, makes the disease a little more visible and places it in the context of “real life.”  Fox addresses a powerful issue in this show: How he has been defined by his disease.  This trailer captures some of those initial scenes of the series.

A differently-abled identity becomes salient in a culture that privileges able-bodied folks.  One easy thing to do is look around your campuses.  Is campus accessible to a variety of different abilities?  Whether that means ramps in easy-to-access locations or functioning elevators in buildings with several floors, is campus accessible to everyone?  If there is an issue, bring it up.  It was a powerful moment to address the fact that on my campus that one ramp that leads into the building goes straight into a stairwell with no access to the ground floor.  No one thinks about it until someone needs to have access. 

Can you all think of any shows that present differently-abled individuals in the spotlight?  There is IronSide and MONK – what else?

I presented three television shows that stand out to me this season. What are all of ya’ll watching that bring up some feminist-oriented questions??

Written by Samantha D. Christopher

Down the Rabbit Hole: Feminism, Mothers, and Mass Media

“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”

-Morpheus, The Matrix (1999)

Do you ever feel that watching the news is like living in the Matrix?  As a feminist, I experience much of the mainstream news as a form of social amnesia, a way to forget what kind of society we live in.  I think this numbing sensation stems from fundamental naiveté about how to conceive of and grapple with core issues of inequality.  The result is that deeply ingrained disparities rooted in race, gender, class, ethnicity, ability, religion, nationality, etc., are often boiled down and oversimplified into dichotomies: man/woman, gay/straight, black/white, cis/trans.  Trending now is the father/mother dichotomy, particularly in light of the important steps women in business have taken to push this issue into the spotlight. 

As it turns out, fathers are at the top of the workplace economic hierarchy. In 2012, they earned more than men and women without children and mothers, with mothers earning the least of the four groups (U.S. Bureau of labor Statistics, 2013). So not only are women earning less than men, on average, but mothers working full-time are penalized while fathers are rewarded.  Over the past 10 years, psychological research that looks at gender and the workplace has continually demonstrated that mothers face a disadvantage compared to fathers and non-parents based on the way that they are perceived (Cuddy, Fisk, & Glick, 2004; Fuegen, Biernat, Haines, & Deaux, 2004). It appears that when women become mothers they are devalued in terms of workplace standards and seen as less competent and qualified while fathers experience bolstered status (Cuddy et al., 2004).  This disparity was highlighted in a recent NBC News Business article with the tag, “call it the mommy penalty versus the daddy bonus.” 

The truth is, the problem is not just about women choosing more flexible lower-status career paths in order to manage their families or foregoing children to pursue satisfying careers.  It’s also not just about the role stereotypes attributed to “mother” and “father.”  The problem is about the way that we understand families, our ability to ignore power and privilege, the way we think about sex and gender roles, and the lagging pace of attitude change.  Depicting the issue as “mommy versus daddy” is perilously deceptive because it obscures critical pieces of the puzzle of income disparity.  It also prevents us from conceiving of real solutions.       

For example, the intersections of race and ethnicity, class, and education significantly influence income disparities. Asian men and women earned more than White, Black, and Hispanic men and women in 2012; however, the disparities for Black and Hispanic workers were much larger (they earned between 70-50% of Asian worker’s median income) than those of White workers (earning between 80-90% of Asian worker’s median income).  It’s important to note that Black and Hispanic women had the lowest median incomes when taking race/ethnicity and gender into account.  Additionally, men and women with bachelor’s degrees earned almost twice as much as men and women with a high school diploma.  When we bring these different identity components into our discussion of working mothers’ experiences, we come closer to beginning to understand “how deep the rabbit hole goes.” To put it more optimistically, describing our society in light of the complex interactions of interlocking forms of oppression allows us to avoid the mistake of placing a Band-Aid over a massive crater in the earth. bell hooks aptly uses the phrase, “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe the system that enforces such inequalities.

I believe that it’s our task as feminists to “take the red pill,” to recognize the dangers of oversimplification, and trust that it’s worth it to continually question what we see, hear, read and absorb.

Written by Rachel L. Brosamle, M.A.

Objectification and Feminism

Once in awhile, women speculate that men respond negatively to feminist comments, claims, and complaints because they feel threatened by women. The threat may be as broad and general as a threat to their perceived (male) social power in today’s culture. I have wondered more and more why this speculation is made and if it is justified. Some male friends of mine have suggested that they are often very dismissive of cultural and societal themes of sexism and sexualization. Others express feeling uncomfortable with being blamed for sexism and supposed systemic issues that “apparently lower women’s value and perceived competence.” I would not want to be blamed either for something that I do not see myself as having a direct role or contribution, as many would wrongly claim to not play a part in systemic racism or prejudice. Yet, how these debates become personalized would be a worthwhile pursuit of understanding…

In my research process for my dissertation, I have learned from numerous studies that both men and women are responsible for sexist values and for objectification! In fact, when women perceive a sexualized woman, they tend to want to distance themselves from her. The mechanisms behind this apparent reality are largely unknown. But objectification certainly appears to be a lens through which we begin to formulate attributions and assign positive characteristics, such as worth and significance.

Perhaps it should have been obvious, but it recently dawned on me how san evolutionary perspective could explain to some extent the problem of sexual objectification. According to an evolutionary standpoint, women are drawn to men who have status and power to provide security and shelter; whereas, men are drawn to women who appear youthful, fertile, and are able to further the family line with bountiful numbers. In fact, I recently learned in social psychology that the most important characteristic men report looking for in women is physical attractiveness. In contrast, this quality did not make the top 10 for women when evaluating men!

An evolutionary perspective could explain how women perceive and why they distance themselves from other sexually objectified women, and perhaps it could even account for why men would respond negatively to feminist ideals and representatives who challenge those who are thought to and perceived as having social power. According to Fredrickson and Robert’s (1997) objectification theory, women’s appearances are evaluated and scrutinized much more than those belonging to men. The evolutionary perspective might help to explain why this occurs, but here is the question: Can it account for the negative impact this seems to have of women’s wellbeing and interpersonal functioning, as well-documented in literature?

Written by Nina Silander

Trust me, you’re a feminist.

This past summer, I took a multicultural and gender course in my doctoral program. Let’s overlook, for the moment, the fact that this course exists as a single entity and has yet to be instilled in the very curriculum. The class consists of those whom, I consider, to be well educated and highly informed. However, when the topic of feminism came up I actually heard a girl say, “ew, no, I’m definitely not a feminist.”

Now granted, I have been involved in advocating for women’s rights issues for over ten years now and had just finished reading Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Women, so I’ll be damned if smoke wasn’t pluming out of my ears. It was all I could do to stop myself from shouting “ If it wasn’t for feminism you wouldn’t even BE in this classroom right now!” But I refrained (which is rare for me).

In the 1990’s Pat Robertson famously said, “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” While I believe that this opinion is extreme and offensive, I think some of this sentiment still rings true for many people today.  And that’s the crux of it- feminism has an image problem.

Hear me out. If you identify yourself as a feminist today many people will immediately assume you are man-hating, bra-burning, liberal. And I’m not putting down those feminists who do hate men and bras- good for them. But, I feel it is important to highlight the fact that, as with every social movement, feminism encompasses a variety of political tendencies and ideologies. And the feminism that I have come to know and love is not about putting men (or anyone for that matter) down. It is about equality.

            So, I’m glad that I held my tongue in class. My yelling and general hell raising would have just put this girl on the defensive, and I did not want that. In reality, I think she highlighted, for me, what is all too true- that most people who don’t call themselves feminists don’t really understand what feminism is. And that’s a lot of people. Only one-fifth of Americans identify as feminists, according to a recent poll conducted by The Huffington Post.  According to the study, just twenty percent of Americans - including twenty three percent of women and sixteen percent of men -believe that they are feminists. But all is not lost. When asked if they think, “men and women should be social, political, and economic equals,” 82 percent of the respondents said they did, and just 9 percent said they did not.

            And so, I believe it’s important to engage people in an informed conversation; one that highlights how important the movement for equality is both in the United States and worldwide. I mean ask yourself, do you enjoy having the right to vote? the right to have dominion over your own body? the right to own property? That’s what I thought… trust me, you’re a feminist.

Written by Adrian Tworecke