Football and the Super-Fem

For most of my life, I was an anti-sports girl.  In junior high I loved baseball (we had a storied franchise then, the Baltimore Orioles),  but I quickly lost interest once in high school, as baseball became a distant memory compared to so many other things...music, popularity, BOYS, BOYS, BOYS.

The years passed quickly.  Love, college, marriage, work, babies.   No time for much of anything but relationships, raising those beautiful kids, trying to fit some writing in in between.  Turns out creating brilliant, kind children takes a helluva lot of time.  Then, suddenly (it seemed), they were gone.  Creating their own lives, their own nests.  Returning to mine from time to time, but they were launched.  And where was I?

I'm a passionate person.  I always say, I go from 0  to 100% in no time flat.  So if I take an interest in something, it becomes a passionate interest.  Few things cans sustain that intensity of feeling.  Writing -- yes, but it needs inspiration.  Learning? Yes, but I need to find things worth learning.  Politics?  Here's where I get off the train.  Turns out, the inspiring don't inspire the great unwashed, of which I surely am.

One Sunday in September I watched a Ravens game with my husband.  We'd been ticket holders for ten years to the Terrapins, so football was not unknown to me.  But I had not caught the bug.  This time, this game, I did, because we were playing the Pittsburgh Steelers, our avowed arch enemy.  I found myself watching, and asking questions.  My interest was further fueled by the fact that we won.  We not only won, we prevailed.  I think the score was something like 35 -7. 

After that, I found my interest grew in leaps and bounds.  I watched ESPN.  I read articles.  I bookmarked Ravens blogs.  I talked to the men at my local gym, all avid Ravens fans.  I asked questions of my very patient, very bewildered husband.    And I learned.  I love learning.  And in football, as in life, there is a hell of a lot to learn.

Football is a passionate, emotional sport.  I am a passionate, emotional female.  Do I like injuries?  No.  Do I like to win?  Yes.  Am I loyal to my home base?  Yes, as any mother is.  So it is a natural fit.

Now I get it, after all the years of not getting it.  Football is a metaphor for life.  Tough, gritty, passionate, to be played with all your heart.   The Ravens are an emotional team.  So the glove fits this girl. 

I'm in love with football, and the Baltimore Ravens.  I don't know where this will lead, but I'm excited to take the journey.   All my fellow football sisters, join me!

We're okay with the L, G, and B.. how about the T?

The world has come a long way since "The Rocky Horror Picture Show."  That cult classic, a favorite when I was in college, was always considered "way out there", mostly because of its very offbeat plot, involving transvestites and transsexuals.  Conventional movie theatres wouldn't show it during regular hours, so it became a midnight special, and it has remained in that time slot for an amazingly long running.

                                 

The sight of Tim Curry in women's clothing and high heels was a shock to my college self.  I guess I had never thought about transvestites.  They were about as far from my teenaged existence as Martians.  When I did think about them, I have to confess it was with a bit of disgust.  Why on earth, my very sophisticated self thought, would a man want to dress up and act like a woman?  Such people lived in a subterranean world, not only to me but to the vast majority of people, because that is where we consigned them.

One evening not long ago, my mate and I were bored and looking for a movie.  We both like sports and ESPN specials.  We happened upon a movie called "Renee". 

Out of curiosity we watched it and were spellbound from the first.  "Renee" chronicles the life of surgeon and tennis player Renee Richards, born Richard Raskind.  In her life as Richard -- she was born male -- she was a ladies' man, tennis wunderkind, Naval officer, and all-round high-achieving male of the alpha-male variety.  But she had a secret -- she wanted to be a woman.  She knew that was her true self.  She became one of the first to seek gender reassignment, at a time when that surgery was fairly primitive.  She went on to try and compete as a woman in the U.S. Open, and fought fierce opposition to do so.  Many felt she had an unfair advantage in having a man's height and physique, despite the surgery and hormones she had taken.  Eventually the Supreme Court ruled in her favor and she did play, although she did not place highly.

Renee's life was an unhappy one, and one that makes one reflect deeply upon our society and the judgments we put on those who are truly born different.  Most of us accept our gender unthinkingly.  But for a significant minority, it isn't that easy.  We've come a long way toward accepting sexual differences.  But transsexuals remain on the outer edge of acceptance.  Watching a movie like "Renee" really brings the realization home...we are still so primitive in our embrace of all humanity, of those who don't fit at all in our little preconceived ideas of normalcy.  Isn't it time we saw transgendered people not as freaks, but as our own selves -- just with a different gender identity?

Barbie, Barbie!

When I was a little girl, the Barbie pictured above, circa 1963 or thereabouts, was the dream doll of most of us baby-boomers.  Girls, that is, although my brother would also participate in Barbie-play, via his G.I. Joe, who we deemed to be a much better boyfriend than that vanilla-flavored Ken.  For the times, she was quite daring.  She wore make-up, was anatomically quite developed, had cool clothes, including those sexy pumps, and was - in short - everything we thought we one day wanted to be.  I spent hours with my girlfriends in imaginative Barbie play.  My mother and grandmother were not quite approving, finding Barbie a bit too adult-like for their little girl, but there was little they could do about it.  My aunt gave me the Barbie one day after I had been sick, and my mother had to give in.

I was about eight at the time.  Although I was one of the last to get the doll, that was about the right age.  Much has been written about the evolution of Barbie, the way she reflects the changing role of women in the country and indeed the world, but this is the way Barbie looks nowadays, to the three-year-olds who receive her as "just another toy":



Quite a change.  Of course, she looks like she blends with the times, and she still has the traditional Barbie characteristics -- lots of make-up, cool clothes, simpering look.  But the age at which she is deemed acceptable for little-girl play -- three or thereabouts -- and the sexiness of her clothing, all make the concept of "age compression" a very real concern.  Most mothers I know blow off concerns about their daughters being corrupted by Barbie.  But as a baby-boomer who grew up with the doll, I can see that her evolution is very much in keeping with the times.  My question is, what will Barbie be next?

From "Playboy" to "Last Tango in Paris" -- The Mainstreaming of Pornography

A benchmark in “adult entertainment” was reached when Playboy was first published in 1953.  The idea that a magazine for “men” -- a magazine that celebrated nudity and was considered so lewd that it had to be sold in a thick brown wrapper, yet was able to be brought into suburban homes -- was a daring experiment that changed the way pornography was marketed forever.  That first issue of Playboy, which Hugh Hefner  created in his kitchen, sold over 50,000 copies.  The centerfold for that issue was none other than the iconic Marilyn Monroe, although her picture was taken from a pin-up calendar.  Interestingly,  Fahrenheit 451,  the classic  Raymond Bradbury science fiction novel, was serialized in three issues of the magazine.  The publishing of serious fiction in an “adult entertainment” magazine speaks to the very complexity of Hefner and the Playboy empire.  Yet I contend that it is this very dichotomy that made the beginnings of “legitimate” porn seep so stealthily into the mainstream culture.   Many people claimed, legitimately, that they bought Playboy for the articles, not the glossy, airbrushed spread of nude models.  This brought the magazine into America’s living rooms and made it a mainstay of American culture.

Two decades later, and along comes another groundbreaking cultural phenomenon, the Bernardo Bertolucci film Last Tango in Paris.   The film, starring Marlon Brando and the as-yet unknown ingénue French actress Maria Schneider, chronicles the affair of the 45-year-old American expatriate living in Paris (Brando) and the 20-year-old Schneider, who meet quite by accident in a Paris apartment, and begin an anonymous affair – literally anonymous.  They don’t know each others’ names, nor do they know anything about one another.  They are to meet at the apartment, where they experiment with sexual fantasies that include sado-masochism.  Wildly controversial from the onset, the movie is nevertheless beautiful to watch.  While watching images of the gorgeous Parisian streets, listening to the sexy jazz riffs of Gato Barbieri, who wrote the score, and caught up in the intensity of Brando’s acting, it is easy to forget what is really going on here.  A young girl, casual with her body as she may be, is nevertheless totally manipulated by an older man with emotional issues to resolve.  He leads her down a dangerous path, a path that so terrifies her that her only way out is to shoot him, just as he learns her name for the first time.

Both Playboy and Last Tango in Paris are artistic, and, some might argue, provocatively  intelligent, portrayals of blatant sexuality.  For most of us, sex is the hum underneath the reality of everyday life.  These vehicles elevate it to the first level.  But does the art of “pretty” pornography simply pave the way for the much more disturbing “Hustler”, “Penthouse”, and  hard-core pornography that so degrades not just women but all of humanity?   Where is the divide between “art” and “pornography” – when you take away the pretty wrapping, is it really any different?

"What Is It About Men?"

Amy Winehouse - What Is It About Men - YouTube

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzsRZx5gzWg       While reading this week's assignment, "Carrie Bradshaw's Queer Postfeminism", for some reason I was reminded of the late Amy Winehouse's song "What Is It About Men?" Amy Winehouse, dead at 27, was an entire generation removed from the feminists of the '70's.  Comfortable in their sexuality, women of this age group compete alongside men with full equality.  Yet, just as Carrie Bradshaw and her friends discovered, all is not equal in love and sex. In her song, Amy asserts her right "to take the wrong man as naturally as I sing."  Yet she finds this trait -- the troubling attractions to men, and her inability to resist them, "destructive.".  Her moral compass is askew.  She laments her "aggressive side" that compels her to take whatever she wants, regardless of the consequences. In "Sex and the City", Carrie and Mr. Bigg have an illicit affair after he has married and while she is in a committed relationship with another man (see Season Three, 'Easy Come, Easy Go').  She puts up a token resistance to this, but finds their hook-ups in increasingly tawdry hotels irresistible.  She may say she wants stability, but when it comes along, it has the face of Boring written all over it. Enjoying a sense of sexual liberation unknown to women in the 50's and '60's, thanks to their '70's sisters, these women take what they want.  But does this freedom leave them any less empty?  At the end of the day, Amy Winehouse bemoans: "my destructive side/has grown a mile wide", while Carrie and her friends just don't seem to get it -- it's friendship first, then sex, if it's a relationship you're seeking.

Stop Watching Bridal Shows! (or, it doesn't have to be a Downer Experience)

We are having a wedding in my family.  And it will have no resemblance to the shows we've seen clips of in class.  Hopefully, the lovely bride-to-be will never have an expression like this one:



This young lady looks to be getting a major migraine.  I've often noticed the tendency of human beings to act like lemmings; if one jumps off a bridge, just about every other one will follow.  That is the only way to explain the insanity, the incredible intensity, of the whole bridal experience nowadays.

Once again, thanks to this class for showing how the media manipulates the masses.  My children don't really watch television.   However, they have both been in enough weddings to know they don't want any part of the "traditional" fixings -- only the love, honor, and cherish part.  So, when they decided to get married -- my older son and his beautiful girlfriend -- they decided they would have a quiet ceremony in a lovely art gallery in D.C., which is where they live.  Laura went shopping one Sunday with her best girlfriend and found a gorgeous, affordable dress that she immediately fell in love with.  No angst there.  She e-mailed me the picture and I gave it my hearty approval.  After the ceremony, family and a few friends will have dinner at a favorite D.C. restaurant.

If it is all a little quieter than my husband and I would like, we can always offer to give them a party in our backyard.  Tents, flowers, something tasteful.  But that will be their call, too.  No Bridezillas here, and no Monster mother-in-laws either.  Thank God!

Kardashian Grrls

I have a guilty pleasure – I am a closeted (or not so closeted) watcher of the Kardashian reality shows.  I’m not sure how it happened – was it the heat waves this summer, my own minor surgery, too many boring baskets of ironing to plow through – however it happened, thanks to streaming and Netflix, I was able to watch all six seasons in a sort of mindless daze. 

That’s an awful lot of Kardashian at once.  Part of the fascination, I admit, is that I am part Armenian myself.  I thought it was cool that these dark-eyed, ebony-haired young women with features so much like my own were seen as super-glamorous, hot reality-show celebs.  After all, I grew up in the era of the Clairol commercials, “Is it true blondes have more fun?”  Although I have long reconciled with that media blitz and truly do like my own more exotic heritage, stuff like that sticks with you.  So part of it is that I love seeing the Kardashians described as “gorgeous” and “hot”.  It wasn’t so very long ago that brunettes couldn’t possibly be gorgeous or hot, unless they were movie stars.

Then one afternoon, out of curiosity, I googled their father, Robert Kardashian.  I remembered him from the O.J. Simpson trial.  And I was surprised to find this picture of Kim Kardashian with her father:

Kim is reportedly around fourteen years old when this picture was taken.  I think she looks a lot older – more like twenty.  But what struck me was her beauty, natural and pretty much unadorned.  She doesn’t really look anything like this Kim Kardashian:

Obviously, she is older in this picture.  But her nose, which looks so much like my own in the picture with her father, looks narrower.  Her  eyes look narrower, too – is that because she’s wearing her famous pointy false eyelashes?  And she has a sort of world-weary look about her.  That sweetness, that innocence, that exotic girl-next-door quality, is totally gone.  Now she has breast implants that she shows off at every opportunity, a boadacious butt (there was even one episode of the Kardashians that “proved” Kim hasn’t had butt implants by showing her butt getting x-rayed), and wears so much make-up that when they show her without it she is practically unrecognizable.

Whether or not Kim Kardashian has had plastic surgery is hotly debated on websites that are devoted to that sort of thing.  I think, looking at the picture of herself with her father, that it’s pretty indisputable that she has.  She still looks Armenian, but she’s taken the stamp of authenticity off herself.  Now she looks like a Hugh Hefner version of a beautiful Armenian/American babe.  And I think she’s lost something in the process.

Women Wrestlers: Empowerment or Degradation?

I admit I've never been into wrestling, male or female.  Women bodybuilders left me cold, too -- I could see the benefits of being strong, but never thought a muscle-bound female body was the least bit attractive.  Since becoming something of a gym rat and fitness addict for the last seven years, I've done some rethinking on the subject of women invading and succeeding in such a male-dominated sport.  The question about women wrestlers, especially as depicted on WWE, raises another question in my mind:  Are these women empowered because they are succeeding in a traditionally male-dominated field, or are they degrading themselves (and other viewers?)

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As much as I rail against the violence in any sport, even football, which is America's passion (and I love it, too), female-on-female violence seems especially bad.   Men seem to get off on it, which is upsetting, but the images of two women -- the fairer sex, if you will -- down on a mat, getting each other into head locks and grabbing one another's hair -- just makes me want to cover my eyes.  The first thing that comes to mind is the male jeer:  "Cat fight!" whenever two women get into it.  I've always hated that phrase.  Unfortunately, when I see two women in a physical confrontation, that is immediately what I think.   We think we should be better than men, at least in the area of decorum.  I was raised to "act like a lady".  Keep my skirt down, keep my voice down, don't swear, and certainly never, never hit someone. 

The women on WWE are so far from that it could be comical, if it wasn't so disgusting.  I know the fights are scripted.  I know they are being paid.  And I know people (especially men) love to watch them.  They are invading a male-dominated arena, and I suppose there's something to be said for that.  But somehow the price doesn't seem worth it. 

"Mr. Mom"

In the 1983 movie "Mr. Mom", Michael Keaton plays a corporate executive who is downsized - laid-off, in the vernacular of the day -- and, after being unable to find new work, decides to take on the traditionally female role of caregiver to he and his wife's (Teri Garr) young children.  She is offered a job in advertising, much more highly paid than is credible for someone who has been out of work for as long as she has, but it's Hollywood, so they write it the way they want.

Mr. Mom (1983) Trailer - YouTube
	www.youtube.com/watch?v=solr1W5idNYJan 10, 2008 - 1 min - Uploaded by depplover63 Hilarious! Michael Keaton rocks! "Wanna beer?" "It's 7 o'clock in the morning!" " Scotch?"

Believe it or not, this was pretty groundbreaking stuff back in 1983.  The stay-at-home Dad was virtually unheard of, and most conservatives were incredulous that such a thing could even occur, much less work.  And it really didn't work out very well for the Micheal Keaton character, either.  He struggles hilariously with appliances, is hit on by a curvaceous divorcee, forgets to pick up his children, and at one point just quits shaving, getting dressed -- he even starts popping beers at 7 a.m.  He feels underused and his self-esteem is in the toilet.  His wife, meanwhile, is not having a much better time of it.  Her kids have forgotten who she is, and her marriage is starting to crumble.

So now it's 2012.  "Mr. Mom" seems dated, right?  But I have a couple of friends who are stay-at-home Dads, and things have worked out okay for one, and not for the other.  One of my friends is also a part-time musician, playing local gigs.  He has a son and a daughter who are also musically talented, and his wife is a flight attendant.  They all seem fairly happy.  My other friend doesn't work at all outside of the home, and is raising two sons.  His wife was laid off a few years ago, and has struggled to find work that paid nearly as well as the old job.  She's gone half the week, which their younger son dislikes.  The older son is sullen, disrespectful to his father, and flunked out of college.  I've found myself wondering if a nonworking father can really be a role model to teenaged sons.  The old "Get a summer job or else" doesn't have much force when Dad doesn't work and goes off to the local gym to work out every day.  It doesn't seem fair -- lots of women do the same thing  -- but somehow it just doesn't seem to go down too well.  My friend has started to look like the Michael Keaton character lately.  I don't think he's drinking, but he's stopped shaving, and wears his bedroom slippers to Safeway.

This whole male-taking-on-female gender role thing has a long way to go.  "Mr. Mom" was released 28 years ago.  Seems like a long time, but we haven't come a long way, baby.

From June Cleaver to Murphy Browne

As part of the huge mass of humanity known as the baby boomers, I have had a front-row seat in viewing the enormous societal changes in the American landscape.  I was born in 1954, a time when gender roles in the U.S. were pretty much firm and fixed.  Women were homemakers and mothers, and men went out to work to support the family.  The television shows of the time - "Leave it to Beaver", "Father Knows Best", and even "Lassie" perpetuated the myth of the "ideal" family of that era.  The women who had found fulfillment and excitement working outside of the home during World War II were quickly sent back to domesticity -- usually inside a Playtex girdle.  Even among college-educated women, the choices were few.

Some of my peers look back with longing to that seemingly simpler time.  I am not one of them.  Rigid conformity was the order of the day, and to deviate from that conformity was to face certain social rejection.  Families depicted in the television shows of the era are white, heterosexual, and the shows themselves show a sanitized America that in reality did not exist.  The reasons behind the perpetuation of this myth are too complex to be addressed in a blog post.

Anger erupted in the sixties, and women and African Americans began to protest their enforced roles.  Television did begin to show women in roles other than that of domestic goddess, but generally the entertainment industry was slow to embrace societal change.  When the movie "An Unmarried Woman", starring Jill Clayburgh and Michael Murphy, came out in the 1970's, people were shocked to see a divorced woman actually find happiness and fulfillment after her philandering husband left her.  That was one of the first movies I can remember showing a woman actually owning her life, not depending on a man for her complete happiness.

Television lagged far behind.  Women were seen in roles as spy and cop - "Mod Squad", "Honey West", -  but the domestic goddess was an archetype television was reluctant to give up.   Even "The Mary Tyler Moore Show",  a seventies comedy about a single female journalist, portrayed Mary as ultimately marriage-seeking.   "Murphy Browne" was the pioneering woman of T.V. land.  Determinedly single, undomesticated, and an unwed mother, she defied all cultural stereotypes.  But she wasn't allowed to exist until the 1990's.

I like these times better.  "Modern Family" is an intelligent comedy showing the new face of the American family, and no one really thinks twice anymore about the concept of a working mother or a gay couple raising a family.  History will keep evolving, and hopefully  television will reflect the changes more quickly than in the past.