Nothing Happened to Demi

I do not regularly read The Daily Beast, but through that wondrous pipeline of information and crap known as Twitter, I came across a vapid and pointless article by Gina Piccalo called "What Happened to Demi?" - as though Demi Moore had suddenly vanished, or shown up somewhere with no legs, or had gone catatonic.

No, Piccalo is just being what she probably thinks is a feminist but is really just a pseudo-feminist concern troll. To wit:

Demi Moore has apparently been domesticated. It’s evident in the way she touches that sleek Cher-hair self-consciously, how she so frequently refers to Ashton Kutcher as “my husband.” It’s in her coy indignation about the media’s focus on her looks, even the girlish way she speaks to the Webcam behind Buddy Holly frames in her YouTube videos. That ball-busting $12 million woman who was the Demi Moore of the mid-1990s would eat this fey facsimile for lunch.

Domesticated. As though she's a feral cat or something. And because she's not running around in G.I. Jane mode all the time, she's an airhead? Because she calls her husband "my husband", she's...what? A doormat? Yeah, JEEZ DEMI, what are you THINKING? Real feminists only refer to their male partner by his name or maybe as "the penis". I'm not sure what we decided on at the last convention.

Piccalo gets even more direct about it:

At the Los Angeles press conference for her new comic indie drama The Joneses last week, Moore, 47, looked great. But whatever claim she has to feminism or authenticity or even Hollywood star power felt especially stale on this afternoon.

And what exactly caused her claim to feminism and "authenticity" (!!) to be compared to a day-old bagel? Well, she had the AUDACITY to wear an expensive dress and heels. I KNOW RIGHT, a woman in Hollywood showed up a press event in fancy clothes. The movie is apparently about the ills of consumerism, so I guess Piccalo thinks she's being all perceptive and observant by mentioning this. But what did she expect - that Moore would show up in an outfit from Kmart? She's a person, an actor - not a character in a movie. Even if Moore supports the concepts in the film, her support isn't decimated by her desire to still wear expensive shoes. I care about the environment, but I don't carry a reusable coffee mug with me. I know, I'm such an asshole. And probably not a feminist, somehow, in Piccalo's world. (Because also: what, precisely, the fuck does feminism have to do with how a woman dresses? I thought we liked the idea of not judging women on their clothing choices, but I guess that was another change to the rules that I missed the memo about.)

A few paragraphs down, Piccalo uses the word "hubris" to describe a recent quote from Moore in UK Elle, in which Moore declares that when she said, years ago, that she wanted it all, "[i]t was coming from a desire for balance. I wanted to remove the limitations that I felt were being imposed on me.” Call me naive - or don't actually, because bullshit, I do not see hubris in that quote. A touch of pride and self-interest, sure, but that doesn't translate to extreme arrogance for me. Wanting balance in your life and wanting some control over how your very public life is proceeding is pretty understandable, actually. Wanting to feel like you can have things the way you'd prefer them is natural, especially for someone in a position of power who is able to actually make it happen. It's amusing considering just before this, Piccalo was criticizing Moore for what she saw as caricature-like behavior, and now she's calling her arrogant for saying something entirely common and human. So picky!

From there, she goes through a run-down of Moore's career, noting the blockbusters she notched in the 90s. Then she mentions how Moore's marriage to Bruce Willis ended and her mother died, and that "[s]he did one last film, a romantic drama Passion of Mind that proved once and for all that her days opening a blockbuster were over", and hey, I don't know about you but I know if my marriage ended and my mother died, the one thing on my mind? BOX OFFICE RATINGS, BITCHES. Yeah, no. Piccalo is essentially mocking Moore for this change in her status which came after two negative life-changing events. Way to go! Your feminism sucks.

After reading this piece, I really wondered what Piccalo's editor was thinking, not to mention Piccalo herself. What was the point of this? Why did she think there was a need to write a long article about her personal disappointment in a certain female actor's insignificant actions? It really felt like sour grapes, or just spite maybe. "What happened to Demi"? Nothing happened to her. She's living her life, and even if she has said that she "seemed to lose her way" as Piccalo states, it's nothing that doesn't occur in basically every human life at one point or another, and sometimes multiple points. So she loves having glossy hair, so she speaks in a soft voice, so she tweets as @mrskutcher - so what? Ms. Piccalo, it doesn't make you a better feminist to say another woman isn't one for things like this. When she starts filming ads for crisis pregnancy centers, or campaigning against fair pay initiatives, get back to me.

SCOTUS Wishes

Scott Lemieux has a brief post over at The American Prospect about the nominees we might see in an ideal world to fill the Supreme Court seat of soon-to-retire Justice John Paul Stevens. Any progressive who's been awake for the past few months has likely already accepted that whoever the nominee is, he or she would not be our own first choice (or second or third for that matter, sadly enough). Obama has been, shall we say, letting us down somewhat lately.

But hope springs eternal, no? I know very little about most of the names being tossed around (with the exception of Ezra Klein's awesome fucking suggestion), but Lemieux is partial to Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan, and after reading up on her and watching this, I'm inclined to agree:



Her focus on the tone and the terminology that the Court used (and I'm not certain which decision she's discussing here, though it sounds like it could be this one from April 2007 regarding late-term abortion) is extremely important and not often present in public commentary on how we talk about abortion. As she says:

"...the decision is written in a tone in which the pregnant woman is referred to almost entirely as "the mother", although these women have made the decision that they do not want to be mothers now. The fetus is always referred to as "the unborn child". The doctors are not referred to as "physicians" but as "abortionists"..."

I'm very pleased that she recognizes the fault with this phrasing, because it clearly sets up the anti-choice argument as being the right one, the default one. Women are "mothers", fetuses are "children", doctors who perform abortions are nothing more than that. It comes from the conservative standpoint which is heavily influenced by opinion, whereas the liberal standpoint is much more objective - pregnant women are pregnant women, fetuses are fetuses, and doctors are doctors. It's not a radical view, it's a rational view. It's a view that doesn't look through a lens of personal opinion but rather just assesses the facts. We need a lot more of this in the discourse, on abortion and many other topics, and Karlan has a handle on that.

Of course, she's also gay, so the GOP would lose their shit if she were the nominee - because anyone who isn't white (or far-right non-white), hetero, male (or non-feminist female), and Jesus-following would be nothing but a wild and crazy ACTIVIST JUDGE BOOGA BOOGA. In RWNJ world, a member of a marginalized group is incapable of any aims other than destroying and subjugating the oppressive classes. As flattered as I am that they think us so ambitious and mighty, I'm also seriously sick and fucking tired of the ludicrous idea that those who've had so much power for so long are ever on the verge of losing it all because someone else manages to capture a shred of their own.

Virginia Is For Lovers...of Slavery?

With all due respect to Virginians who aren't racist assholes...

What the fuck?

Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) has quietly declared April 2010 Confederate History Month, bringing back a designation in Virginia that his two Democratic predecessors — Mark Warner and Tim Kaine — refused to do.

"Refused to do" - yes, well...decent, non-hateful people generally do refuse to pay homage to disgusting and shameful periods in history. But apparently McDonnell has no such qualms. How nice. And by "nice" I mean excuse me while I imagine throttling him.

People often try to claim that waxing nostalgic about the days of the Confederacy totally doesn't mean they're racist because, you know, it's just their HISTORY. As though it's somehow a character flaw, or an insult to your state or your family name or whatever, to recognize the fuck-ups of the past. Or as though ever admitting that the United States has maybe kinda sorta been a shitty place for certain people to live at times means you're a traitorous heathen who might as well poop on the flag and run off to dry hump Osama bin Laden.

The proclamation apparently makes no mention of slavery, which is not surprising but is incredibly mind-boggling. Think whatever you like, racists, but wanting to celebrate "Confederate History Month" is wanting to celebrate slavery, pure and simple. You are celebrating a time when an entire group of people, because of the color of their skin, were treated like garbage, like objects, were specifically deemed to be less than whole. You are honoring laws and policies that labeled human beings as property. You are longing for a time when your beloved South wanted to secede - which sure doesn't sound patriotic to me - in order to continue these practices, rather than face the reality of NOT BEING SLAVE OWNERS.

That is what you're doing when you support "Confederate History Month". If you're okay with that, I suppose I can't change your mind, but you at least have to be honest about what it means. Don't tell me you're not racist - the belief that all people are of equal worth no matter their skin color is in direct opposition to the practice of enslaving a people based on their skin color. If you don't like being called a racist, then somewhere inside you, you know it's a bad thing to be. So take a step back and think about what kind of person you claim to be, what kind of person you want to be and what kind of person your words and actions say you are.

Celebrity Celebration: Ellen Page

In the interest of full disclosure, I never saw Juno, and still don't care to. Seriously, just thinking about the phrase "honest to blog" makes me want to stab myself in the face. The only Ellen Page movie I've seen is Hard Candy, and well...eh, just click the link if you're not familiar. If you are, you know what I'm talking about. (Pause for ouchie cringing.)

However, of course I know the basic plot of Juno: teen girl gets pregnant and decides to have the baby so it can be adopted. Aw. Of course, the other path the movie could have taken - and the one I'm going to wildly guess happens more often in real life - is that Juno could have had an abortion. OMG THE A WORD! But anyway, I do recall some feminists talking about the movie and lamenting that, once again, abortion was basically treated like Voldemort, if Voldemort was, you know...a medical procedure. And that some anti-choice people thought the movie was just lovely and see? You stupid cruel bitches, look how nice it is to carry and give birth to a baby you don't want IN THE FUCKING MOVIES WHERE EVERYTHING IS FAKE.

So anyway. Today I came across this interview with Page in The Guardian. The whole thing is pretty great, but the main passage making me want to hug her and thank her and give her cupcakes is this:

How did you feel about the controversy aroused by your role in Juno?

I was like, you know what? You all need to calm down. People are so black and white about this. Because she kept the baby everybody said the film was against abortion. But if she'd had an abortion everybody would have been like, "Oh my God". I am a feminist and I am totally pro-choice, but what's funny is when you say that people assume that you are pro-abortion. I don't love abortion but I want women to be able to choose and I don't want white dudes in an office being able to make laws on things like this. I mean what are we going to do – go back to clothes hangers?

Oh, listen to my pro-choice heart go pitter-pat! This is the stuff that feminists have been saying for YEARS but most of us don't have the same platform or level of popularity that someone like Page does. And while there are certainly other feminist celebrities, more often you hear women in music and Hollywood backing away from the term and the politics, because ew, right? Feminism. Ick.

When she says that saying you are pro-choice makes people think you are "pro-abortion", she seriously hits the bulls-eye. I've heard the term "pro-abortion" bandied about by anti-choicers many times, as though anyone who supports a woman's reproductive freedom is just SALIVATING over the thought that said woman might have an abortion, and oh pleeeeeease please have an abortion because we just love them so much, we CAN'T GET ENOUGH!

No. As Page says, it's not about wanting to have an abortion, it's about wanting the choice should you need to make it. And that choice should be made by the woman facing it, not by random strangers - who, as she says, are mostly white dudes, ahem ahem STUPAK - who, as far as I can tell, just might be salivating over the thought of going back to the days of clothes hangers that Page mentions. Oooh, I know, that's so mean of me to say, but hey - wanting to punish women as the total sluts they are for getting pregnant is the anti-choice shtick, so forcing women into a dangerous back alley procedure would fit in well with that twisted fucknut way of thinking.

And I do not doubt for a moment that she's right, that if this movie had been about a teen girl getting pregnant and deciding to get an abortion, and what that whole process is like, people would have been fucking scandalized. How DARE they make a nice and not-completely-shit-talking movie about abortion! Why...it's like they think it's NOT totally evil or something! Anti-choicers would have picketed outside theaters and written miles of freaked-out text about how appalling and inappropriate it was to portray abortion as something normal.

The funny thing is, even though celebrities are fairly far from what "normal" is for most of us, they can help so much with "normalizing" things. Why else do we see random celebrities selling products in commercials and print ads? Because advertisers know that when we see that, we think "Hey, if Celebrity I Like likes it, it must FUCKING ROCK. I want it!" Usually this is done with lipstick or face wash or god damned yogurt...but if it could be done with women's rights? If Ellen Page could make a few people say "Yeah, that's awesome, I want that!" about women's equality? Cause for celebration, indeed.

Let's Get Meta!

Subtitled: Blogging About Blogging – everyone loves to do it!

When I started this blog, it was mostly out of a need to rant and blather. Having no one around to hear it, and not wanting to just grouse all day in comment sections of other blogs, I thought, “Do it already. Give in. Start a blog like everyone and their mother.” (Oh God…does MY mother have a blog? Let’s not think about that right now.)

While every random person who chooses a pithy blog name and a pre-made template that conveys their personal serious-but-still-fun-because-LOOK-purple-links attitude probably secretly hopes to become a Big Blog that is linked in other Big Blogs’ blogrolls and in their linkfest posts and have people say “Oh yeah, I read about that on ”, I think we also all realize that’s rather unlikely. I don’t care much about it at the end of the day, but one issue that arises from not having readers and not being known is there’s no pressure on you to keep it up. No one commenting on old posts saying “Hey, where are you? Everything okay? Why haven’t you written about this, that, or the other thing?” No one emailing links to outrageous (in the good or bad sense) articles and asking you to write about it in that way that only you can. No one tweeting their despair at the silence of your keystrokes. When no one laments your absence, it’s hard to maintain a presence, even if praise and page views aren’t your lifeblood.

So, eh…I let it go for a while. One of the good things about casual blogging is that it’s easy to pick it back up, right? Even though I do now have someone to listen to my rantings – and who actually seems to enjoy it, because he’s totally amazing like that (lucky me!) – I would like to get back in the habit of working out my thoughts and forcing them into somewhat-sense-making sentences. I plan for it to last.

Famous last words, right? Good thing it’s just the internet.