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June, I think maybe we have reached a profound truth about our respective conditions. By Satran rules, I bet lesbians are always young and moms are always old. So we could do the same exact things and they would convey opposite meanings. BDD is one example, but there are many more: Overalls. Combat boots. Widow’s peaks. Labradors. Boyfriend jeans ... I could go on.
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I’m gearing up for the intense decade envy sure to set in when I watch the season premiere of Mad Men on Sunday night. Pity the aughts; we just can’t compete with the crisp suits, crystal decanters, and Bloody Mary breakfast meetings of the ’60s. And we may have brought back the pencil skirt, but it’s not the same when Joan’s not wearing it.
Still, there’s one thing that 2009 has to offer that the Mad Men time period can’t compete with. (Well, two—we have Mad Men.) Yep, Twitter. So on Sunday night, a crew of Double Xers, and we hope a bunch of you, will gather in the Twitterverse to discuss the show live. You don’t have to be an expert Twitterer to take part. Here’s all it takes:
—Log onto Twitter by 9:59 p.m. on Sunday.
—Search for #xxmadmen to see what’s been said.
—If you have a comment, be sure to append #xxmadmen to the end, so everyone in the TV-Tweet group sees it.
—Use the @ system when responding to other TV Tweeters, so they know you’ve replied. (For Twitter novices, that means you say @theirname when you’re responding to someone.)
You'll also probably want to follow those of us who will be taking part: Hanna, Jessica, June, Nina, Noreen, and me. No word yet whether Ashton and Shaq will be joining.
Photograph of the Mad Men cast copyright 2009 American Movie Classics Company LLC. All rights reserved.
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The latest issue of Marie Claire has an article by Ying Chu on the supposed phenomenon of "Asian trophy wives." The basic premise of the piece is that several recent instances of young, beautiful Asian women getting involved with older, rich white dudes—e.g., Wendi Deng and Rupert Murdoch, Ziyi Zhang and financier Vivi Nevo, violinist Jennifer Chun and George Soros—constitute some kind of culturally relevant trend. And that trend is icky, but icky in a totally different way than the normal ickiness you feel when an old guy shacks up with a much younger, hotter lady.
Now, I'm not about to pretend that race doesn't play a role in sexual attraction. And I won't pretend that the white man / Asian woman pairing—not unlike the black man / white woman pairing—doesn’t carry some heavy cultural baggage. But this particular attempt at sociological analysis does nothing to move the discussion forward.
First, there’s the baseless psychoanalysis. Take this, for example:
Were these tycoons consciously courting Asian babes? Do any of them qualify for the unnerving "yellow fever" or "rice king" moniker? It's unsavory to think so. But after two or three failed attempts at domestic bliss with women of like background and age, these heavy hitters sought out something different. Something they had likely fetishized.
Why is it "likely"? How could Chu possibly know this? (She doesn't quote any of the men directly.) Later, she suggests that these women might be marrying older white guys as some kind of "renegade" act against their straight-laced upbringing. Well gee, that’s nice and infantilizing. Even if you don't want to believe that there's genuine love in these relationships—a possibility Chu mentions briefly, but doesn't seem to give much credence to—isn't it possible that these women were attracted to—oh, I don’t know—money, power, glamour, security, adventure, or any of the other perfectly grown-up things these particular relationships might provide?
Lumping all of these couples together and then reducing their individual complexities to the point where it’s purely a racial calculation isn’t helpful or illuminating. I mean, take Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn, the couple that the piece leads off with. Does anyone out there really think the most problematic, uncomfortable part of that relationship is the racial difference?
Other bloggers, like LaToya Peterson over at Jezebel, have pointed out that the article casually reinforces as many stereotypes as it seems to want to dispel. ("Overachieving Asian good girls," "emotionally repressed Asian dads," and the continent-wide mandate to revere one's elders are all presented as fact—within a single paragraph!) Jessica Wakeman at the Frisky calls Chu out for objectifying the women as much as their partners allegedly do. To wit: "Asians (in addition to African orphans) are hot commodities right about now—status symbols as prized as a private Gulfstream jet or a museum wing bearing your name (neither of which goes so well with a frumpy, aging first wife)."
Finally—and this is my beef with most un-nuanced discussions of "the Asian fetish"—the article doesn’t put much faith in the Asian women’s agency. Chu herself notes that most of the women she’s talking about are accomplished, educated professionals. Why, then, would she want to even suggest that they’re comparable to “concubines” and “mail-order brides”? Chu brings up globalization as a reason why Asian women are such “hot commodities” now, but it doesn’t seem to occur to her that globalization has also created more opportunities for foreign-born women to gain power, money, education—and entrée into upper social echelons on their own steam, with or without a “silver-haired Western suit.”
The kicker really finishes it off. “Asian women dating white men may never really know if it's a fetish thing,” Chu writes. Um, if you don’t know if your partner is only with you because of a “fetish,” you’ve got other problems to worry about. Does Chu really think her Asian sisters are that dumb?
Would Marie Claire have possibly run this piece if weren't written by an Asian woman? (Chu was born in Shanghai.) Or, for another thought experiment, try to imagine an article just like this, except about black women or Latina women. I can’t see it.
I’m glad Marie Claire wanted to run a think-piece about race—I just wish it hadn’t been this one.
Photograph by Getty Images.
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Hanna, I also flipped through How Not to Act Old in a state of mild confusion—I love to text and Twitter (young!), but I prefer high-waisted pants and concerts that end at a decent hour (ancient!). I suspect these minuses and pluses all even out and leave me at ... my actual age. Oh, well, at least that's easy to remember.
However, I must take issue with one thing you said: The "dowdy" "mom" coiffure is the same as the "butch dyke" 'do (hereafter the BDD)? Rilly? I've sported the BDD for some years now, and I think you've misread its message. You seem to think that the BBD is saying, "I've stopped spending ages futzing with my hair each morning because I'm old and I've given up taking the trouble to make myself presentable." You're so wrong. In fact, it says, "Check out my awesome hair, which was achieved without applying chemicals or spending precious minutes blowing hot air at my head. (And just think how even more fabulous it would look if I made the slightest effort.)" It is, as the French might say, insouciant.
BTW, I can't believe you admitted to vacationing in France, which, Pamela Redmond Satran points out, is strictly for the wrinklies. If you want to be phat and youthful, you've got to go to Berlin, Croatia, Syria, or Libya. See you in Dubrovnik!
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The New York Times reports that Yale University Press is publishing a book on the Danish Muhammad cartoons and their violent aftermath. After consulting with various experts in Islam and counterterrorism the press decided not to include the cartoons in the book, nor any other depictions of Muhammad—even benign historical ones—out of fear of the bloodshed that could result. This Yale decision—and the original decision of newspapers in this country not to publish the cartoons—is the way America, and the West, undermines what it stands for by supinely giving up its core value of freedom of expression. The author of the book, Jytte Klausen, a Dane who now teaches politics at Brandeis, only went along with this censorship because she was given a choice: Agree to the removal of the cartoons, or forgo publication. That's a choice whose outcome is caving in to religious fanatics. I hope her books points out the richness of the irony that the world-wide riots, vandalism, and ultimately death of 200 people was because of offense taken to a dozen cartoons in an obscure Danish newspaper that depicted Islam as, uh, violent. Lausen is quoted as saying she believes the cartoon riots were not spontaneous, but orchestrated by fanatics seeking power in the Muslim world. But one result is that the Western world hands fanatics the power to decide what we publish and what we read.
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In a horrifying case, a Philadelphia-area man has been sentenced to 120 years for producing child pornography. John Jackey Worman’s crimes were uncovered after one of his long-time victims (there were approximately a dozen, including at least one infant) went to authorities. What good soul helped her realize that she could—and should—speak up? Dick Wolf, apparently:
A teenager who had been abused for several years tipped off authorities, after watching an episode of Law & Order about child sexual abuse. She only then realized it had been wrong, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Rotella said.
No word on whether it was Special Victims Unit, Criminal Intent, or the original flavor of L&O. The franchise rightfully takes a lot of heat for being formulaic, sensational, repetitive. If the crime appears to have been solved by 40 minutes past the hour, well, the convicted individual is likely taking the heat for someone else (usually the person you’d least expect). The PSA-style of SVU often irritates me, particularly when the detectives, just sitting around the police department and discussing the latest heinous crime or head-shaking teenage trend, spout off “shocking” stats about rape or sexting or drug use as though they spend their downtime memorizing press releases from nonprofits and advocacy groups.
Apparently, for one teenager, Law & Order’s heavy-handed attempts at education were successful and eventually led to getting a pedophile away from kids. But this does raise the question of how someone could reach her teen years without learning that message elsewhere. Apparently Worman’s girlfriends helped him procure victims, so it’s possible that the L&O watcher’s mother wasn’t exactly teaching her the difference between a good touch and a bad touch. Whatever the case, that’s some good PR for Law & Order, particularly given SVU’s recent “message placement” partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
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John H. Richardson’s Esquire feature on abortion doctor Warren Hern is the best profile I’ve read in a very long time. It’s an emotionally complex piece of writing about an emotionally battered man—abused by his patients (“you should all be killed,” a 14-year-old asking for an abortion tells him), disturbed by the violence of his work (“I think we're hardwired, biologically, to protect small, vulnerable creatures,” he tells Richardson), attacked by even the pro-choice crowd for refusing to deny the ugliness of what goes on in his office. The relationship between abortion providers and their patients seems more fraught, because it's more intimate, than the relationship between abortion doctors and their politicized critics. As Hern’s Spanish wife tells Richardson:
When I was aborting in Spain, I finished the abortion to a young woman, first trimester. When I finish this procedure, she sit on the table, see me to my face, say, Oh, doctor, you are really nice, you are such angel, how do you kill babies? I say, I'm sorry, I don't kill any baby. I aspirate gestational sac. You kill your baby.
All of this occurs against the backdrop of desperate women, many carrying hideously deformed, doomed fetuses, for whom Hern is the only hope. He comes off as a man too honest to hide behind ideology and far too good to leave these women stranded. It amounts to an incredibly damning indictment of absolutist, keep-your-hands-clean moral purity.
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No debunking of the Miyazaki cult here! Yes, Dana, please do report back about how your daughter fares when you take her to Ponyo. That dilemma of a few scary moments plagues me, as a parent, for so many kids' movies. As a fellow worshipper, though, I assume Miyazaki puts them to good and necessary use here.
Your strategy of talking through the story line and the harrowing bits beforehand is a great one. It saved us from serious meltdown when my husband and I let my 6-year-old son Simon finish the first Star Wars trilogy, by watching The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, as many readers urged us to do after I wrote about his Star Wars obsession.
This whole question of how to handle scariness in movies and DVDs is part of why we started our section for reviewing kids' fare, XXtra Small. I'd love to hear from readers about what you think of the ratings we devised.
Image from Ponyo courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures.
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Emily, when I saw the title of your last post ("Worshipping at the Shrine of Hayao Miyazaki"), I was afraid you meant it sarcastically, and that you were going to debunk the cult of the great Japanese anime director. If you had, I would've had no response except, "Gee, I can't help it if it's trendy to swoon over his work—I just do. "It's nice to hear that you and your kids are also unironically floored by Miyazaki's exuberant imagination (and as a parent who's watched at least part of My Neighbor Totoro nearly every day for the past year, it's helpful to have a guide to which of his movies comes next in the growing-up cycle.)
Your question about what age his latest movie, Ponyo, would be right for is one I'm actively struggling with right now. While I was watching it, my pleasure was augmented tenfold by the image of my 3-year-old daughter flipping out as all of her favorite things (Magical transformations! Iridescent bubbles! Swimming! Brave girls performing heroic rescues! Queens of the sea with long flowing pink hair!) came together in one glorious rainbow-hued bundle. Honestly, I think if she saw this movie she might disintegrate from pure joy. But I can't decide whether the scary parts, which include personified ocean waves with angry eyes, a moment when a child is left alone to fend for himself during a flood, and at least two near-deaths of the main character, would be too much for her or not. I sat her down at my computer last night to watch some Ponyo trailers, hoping to gauge how frightening those images were, but in her excitement at the prospect of getting to see a movie at a real theater, she waved away any possible downside (yep, she's her mother's daughter all right). I think I'm going to risk it and just take her this weekend, after recounting the whole story a few times so she knows that (spoiler alert!) the titular fish-girl and her loved ones make it through to the end just fine. I'll report back and let you know whether my own fish-girl does the same.
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As always, the French end up looking like idiots when they ban certain items of Muslim wear. In the latest flap, officials at a pool in a Paris suburb banned a woman for wearing a “burquini,” the latest fashion in Muslim swimwear. Surely some Muslim entrepreneur invented this thing, with its fetching name, to draw the French into a fight. As always, the French begin their objections by making up sober-sided bureaucratic rules—pools don’t allow loose clothing, arms can’t be covered, the clothes could contain “molecules and “viruses.” Then, by the end, some French official admits the real problem, which is some first-wave feminist frustration: ''We are going back in civilization,'' said the town mayor. “Women have fought for decades for equal rights with men.” But the Muslims are a step ahead. The burquini is clearly a matter of self-expression, Photo shoots show smiling women in stylish burquinis, or Baywatch, the Burquini edition. The burquini happens to coincide with current fashion—a long shirt over leggings. The jogging women in these photos look anything but oppressed.
Photograph of women in burquinis courtesy of Ahiida Burquini Swimwear.
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