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Noreen, I haven't read the Vanity Fair profile of my girl crush Tina Fey yet—maybe it makes me a new-media traitor, but I like my Vanity Fair, New Yorker, and other long-form journalism best when I can read it on paper instead of my computer screen. With that caveat, I do think that Tina Fey herself is acutely aware of and conflicted about her babification. 30 Rock regularly addresses how women try to look right for their jobs, whether it's in politics or TV. In one episode, Alec Baldwin's character tells his congresswoman girlfriend, who confessed that reconstructive surgery after a bizarre accident left her "much better-looking," that he "thought she made love like an ugly girl. So present, so grateful." One story line in Season 2 addresses how a lead actress' weight gain will affect her career, with Baldwin's corporate exec character advising, "She needs to lose 30 pounds or gain 60. Nothing else has a place in television." (He gets all the best "so-wrong-but-so-funny" lines ... I hope you'll add me to your quote-swapping list, Noreen!)
Even more fascinating in 30 Rock is how Fey portrays herself. Her character, Liz Lemon, is mocked by her superiors and subordinates for her clothes (her shoes are called "bi-curious," her favorite necklace is a broken rape whistle, her date-night dress makes her friend think she's headed to a funeral), her poor social skills, and her body. ("Are you finally going on a diet?" someone asks her in one episode.) It seems that Fey might have become a hottie, but she still writes like she's the awkward girl in the ugly dress. I'm not sure I entirely agree with Jezebel's Jessica, who has argued that "Tina Fey's self-deprecation is good for women," but I do like to see the two sides of Fey battling on-screen—her relatively new good looks and the lingering sharp wit and bitterness cultivated not necessarily by being ugly, which I don't think she was, but by being a bit different, a big awkward, a bit uncomfortable.
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Like you, I watched the Britney documentary on MTV. What really bothered me wasn't Britney's mental state (at times she was sparkling, charming, hilarious—performing send-ups of her father that sent her entourage into stitches) but the way she was being treated. Britney's conservatorship (which is rarely implemented legally unless severe mental disability can be proven) denies her any rights whatsoever beyond those of a 7-year-old. Her father makes her breakfast. Her assistant picks out her clothes. She's obviously still heavily medicated, and the paparazzi following her make her a prisoner in her own blacked-out SUV.
Which brings up the question: If Britney's capable enough to record an album, two videos, a documentary; perform on hundreds of TV shows promoting said album; AND rehearse for an upcoming stadium tour, isn't she capable enough to maybe have a bit more control over her own life? Yes, I infinitely prefer this glossy, funny, sad, sedated Britney to the crazy, bald trainwreck who attacked a pap with an umbrella, stripped to her underwear in the middle of a paparazzi storm, and drove incessantly from drugstore to drugstore in a bright pink wig. But I do think she's being manipulated.
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This Vanity Fair profile of Tina Fey, written by Maureen Dowd, has been making a big splash in the blogosphere the past couple of days, mostly because the thesis, boiled way down, seems to be that Fey's only made it big since she lost weight and prettied up her look while keeping her decidedly non-diva personality. For the most part, as a huge Fey fan, I lapped up the profile uncritically. What struck me, though, were the accompanying photos (to echo Nina's point about the power of a magazine's art department). Annie Leibovitz styles Fey as Wonder Woman-ish on the cover and Sasha Fierce-era Beyonce in the music video shots—obvious Glamazon girl power images. Then there are the shots of Fey in a low-cut white button-down and killer red pumps, which are supposed to be Fey as her own sexy librarian self, right? But I couldn't get rid of the feeling it was another reference to, perhaps, another tart social critic who's gotten a lot of buzz for using her feminine wiles to her advantage—the outfit and pose look an awful lot like a Maureen Dowd pastiche. So what's Vanity Fair trying to say—is it just a clever reference to their smartly assigned byline? Or are they explicitly setting up Fey as the new, updated version of Dowd, the smart, pretty woman all the dorky girls want to become? (For the new millennium: now younger, more neurotic, on TV instead of in those dying newspapers.) I trade 30 Rock lines with friends the way I e-mailed them Dowd's columns a few years ago. Fey certainly was the woman with the most incisive political satire this election season, and that's not even her day job. But did she only get to supplant Dowd in that role because she became more Dowd-y than dowdy, someone for whom the attendant sexy self-possession of a Beyonce reference isn't so crazy?
The piece closes with these lines:
Everybody wants to be Tina Fey, I tell her. Who do you want to be?
"I don't want to be somebody else," she says.
And why would she?
I'm not sure Vanity Fair entirely agrees.
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Planned Parenthood has an alternative for Indiana shoppers who were uninspired by this year's exceptionally bleak and cheerless Black Friday. Instead of stocking stuffers, residents of the Midwestern state can instead give their loved ones gift certificates in increments of $25 that can be credited toward any of the organization's services and products from birth control to abortions.
According to Chrystal Struben-Hall, VP of Planned Parenthood in Indiana, the gift certificate campaign will provide options to women who, in light of winter expenses and the economic climate, may have shunted health care costs to the bottom of their priority lists.
Struben-Hall maintains that the certificates aren't specifically intended to dissuade the cost of abortion, but critics of the program have objected to the lack of an official restriction preventing this. I have less of a problem here. In theory, the financial empowerment of women to take advantage of their right to use contraception or abort seems like a good idea to me. And while the organization would certainly take a financial hit if the demand for abortions and birth control slumps along with the economy, Planned Parenthood's marketing scheme seems motivated more by genuine concern than capitalism. Struben-Hall's point about women's health care sinking in priority during economic hard times is a valid one. And if women feel financially pressured to cut corners on birth control or regular pap smears, this could lead to life consequences for them that persist even after the recession subsides.
In practice, however, I can't imagine a scenario in which the presentation of a $50 gift certificate to Planned Parenthood would be either desirable or appropriate. Which market is Planned Parenthood targeting here--the boyfriend-husbands? The parents? Forget the holiday sweater that's worn once out of sheer politeness; these certificates--be they for morning-after pills or pelvic exams--take the reception of unwanted Christmas gifts to new levels of awkward, potentially encroaching upon more than a woman's fashion sense. At best, the certificates may be considered an unsolicited bodily imposition. At worst, they could be (and have been) misinterpreted as commercializing some extremely personal choices that have already received an uncomfortable amount of criticism this year.
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Nina, I agree with you that the worst thing about Alex K’s New York Times Magazine article this past Sunday—about her surrogate pregnancy and motherhood—were the slyly critical pictures and Alex’s class-cluelessness. Moe suggests (as do many others) that adoption might have been less genetically vain than surrogacy. But that suggestion presumes adoption isn't exploitive—and, after a year spent investigating problems in international adoption, I can tell you that's not always so.
Sometimes adoption is good for all concerned, especially if the child is older, sick, or has special needs. But not everyone is prepared to take on those needy children. Far more people are lined up for healthy infant adoption—which isn't easy, it turns out.
News flash: Worldwide, there are more families seeking healthy infants than there are healthy infants in need of new families. Some of the international adoption programs are arguably surrogacy in disguise—but without real payment or protections for the birth families. In some countries, a significant portion of women appeared to have been getting pregnant to sell the babies; in others, babies were being coercively purchased or defrauded or even kidnapped away from the birth families. (The big exception is China, where the adoption program is carefully overseen, but China has become more restrictive.) And that doesn't count the birth families whose children were defrauded, coerced, or flatly kidnapped away from them. (For detailed and heartbreaking stories about this, check my institute's Web site, where we've been posting our adoption documentation and research.)
Adoption depends on tragedy and loss of some kind—like organ donation, except with less oversight or regulation and with much more money to be made for the brokers. As with organ donation, in adoption there are more people on the list than there are children available. I haven't looked as deeply into domestic adoption but have heard enough to know there ARE coercive practices and serious regulatory failures; birth mothers DO get coerced, and adoptive parents get less consumer protection than if they joined a gym.
In surrogacy at least everyone goes into it with eyes open; the surrogates are screened for their emotional stability and are more or less fairly compensated. I’m guessing it’s less exploitive than renting out the body parts that Meghan and Hanna are discussing below. But maybe that’s just me.
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Meghan, this is why I am looking forward to Sudhir Venkatesh's book about the new world of high-end prostitution. In his Slate piece on Eliot Spitzer, he previews some of his findings. The Internet has made it possible for prostitutes to fly solo and not get burned. They interview potential johns in public places, usually expensive restaurants. They "date" for a long time—sometimes months—before agreeing to pair up. They may even hire a private detective to check the guy out. For the men, these relationships are about boosting their egos. "The last time I met him, I gave him a bath," one such call girl told Venkatesh. "I told him he was the most sensitive man I'd ever met. I never tell him he's a piece of shit; I make him feel like Superman." About 40 percent never do anything physical beyond light touching or petting.
Venkatesh is a sociologist. He interviewed several hundred sex workers for his book. So why do we have trouble believing this scenario? I think its because we can't get beyond the image of Belle, the prostitute with the heart of gold. She is always there for Rhett and plays her part but then sighs heavily when he walks out the door. It's hard to accept that women can just participate in the theater of romance without getting caught up. When they do pull it off—Linda Fiorentino in the The Last Seduction, Nicole Kidman in To Die For, they are sociopaths or spies. So, ladies, could you pull off a fake romance?
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Sometimes I feel like I am the last sane person to insist on not believing the worst about everyone. I never believed Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country or faked her pregnancy to cover up Bristol's. I don't believe our economic crisis can be blamed on greedy jobless people who signed onto mortgages they knew they wouldn't be able to afford. I don't even believe it can be blamed entirely on evil rich bankers like Dick Fuld and Joseph Cassano or their evil deregulation-happy allies in the federal government. I don't believe Angelina Jolie is an evil tyrant who forces Brad Pitt to fill a vial with his own plasma and promise to adopt three more impoverished children every time she finds a text from Jen on his iPhone. And so yeah, I did not believe Michelle Obama demanded—in the grand tradition of … well, at least two neglected spouses of high-achieving but invariably tragically flawed black men I can think of (if Sasha Fierce counts as Jay-Z's wife)—a $30,000 blood diamond in exchange for her campaign trail toil.
It's not that I necessarily want believe the best about people. It's just that there is obviously a lot more money in making people look like assholes. Sometimes they truly are assholes, of course. The other night I was watching the (seriously highbrow) competition reality program Stylista in the company of one of its two "judges," Elle editor Anne Slowey. Again and again, I found myself glancing over at her wide-eyed, pleading for her to assure us of the contestants: They can't truly be this despicable, right? Ha! Wrong. They were indeed just that horrible and more! Because they'd learned how existence works from reality shows!
Most people behave badly—or vulgarly, or selfishly, or materialistically—because they believe they must, that that is how it is, that it's a cruel world out there and they've got to get what's theirs, etc. I'm entirely too constitutionally lazy to have ever adopted this philosophy myself, but I'm always gratified when someone more motivated than me recognizes it to be a lot more trouble than it's worth. Which brings me back to Michelle Obama, or more specifically an anecdote I read once about her brother Craig:
Her brother would have the same epiphany while working on Wall Street. He had earned an MBA from the University of Chicago and gone to work first for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and then as a partner in a boutique investment firm. For a while, he enjoyed his wealth, then realized that the job wasn't making him happy.
"I'm so embarrassed to admit it," Craig told a New York Times sports reporter in 2007. "I had a Porsche 944 Turbo. I had a BMW station wagon. Who gets a BMW station wagon? It's the dumbest car in the world. Why would you buy a $75,000 station wagon?" Concluding that "I've got all this stuff, and it hasn't made my life any better," Craig, in his late 30s, left investment banking for a job he loves: coaching basketball.
Now, I don't want to entirely condemn buying useless crap. I am not trying to start the Great Depression here. I'm just pointing out that there are more affirming ways of going about one's life than, say, stampeding to the front of the Black Friday line to get the cool new thing, especially if it's just because you assume that everyone else is doing the same thing, too.
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Has anyone else read this designed-to-provoke piece in the Daily Beast about a young woman and her sugar daddy? “Melissa Beech,” as she calls herself, is a senior in college in Pennsylvania. He is a businessman with a seven-figure income and a profile on seekingarrangement.com, a “dating” Web site (a misnomer if I ever met one) for men and women seeking to enter into a relationship based as much on cash as romance. They meet cute when she interviews for a job (like, a real job), and he suggests instead that she join him in a…. mutually beneficial relationship. They meet and discuss it over dinner. She draws some lines (no sex till she gets to know him). He interviews her to find out what books she likes and whether she reads the newspaper. She seems to feel that this is kind of him. Soon they strike up a deal and begin dating and sleeping together; he spends, she estimates, $5,000 a month on her and takes her to places like the Borgata (the “poshest” hotel) in Atlantic City, N.J. She sees this as a “great career” and a way to score Christian Louboutins, to boot.
Now, I love Louboutins as much as the next girl. And as someone who didn't have a lot of money in college or afterward, I know just how good the money must feel. But what is troubling about the piece is the way the language of romance keeps intruding on Beech’s supposedly cool-headed business calculus. She writes that she is “swept off her feet” by the guy; she speaks about the possibility of seeing “the most amazing and beautiful places” with him; she describes waiting three months before she was “ready to make a physical commitment to him,” and describes him as a “lifelong friend.” The last may end up being true. But she has not made a physical commitment to him, and he has not made one to her. They have entered into a contractual financial relationship about sex, a relationship that’s gilded with the patina of romance but has none of actual density of it. Because what’s certainly true is that she is sleeping with a man who is willing to pay her to fulfill his needs while promising nothing in return, and as soon as his needs change, or she stops fulfilling them, the business arrangement will be over, and she’s going to be left feeling majorly alone with her bills, her heart, and her red-soled Louboutins. She’ll also have developed a habit of expecting this kind of material status in the world. Maybe she truly is the type of young woman who can see clearly that her Sugar Daddy’s ultimate withdrawal has nothing to do with her value in the world. But by putting a quote on her value, and selling it to him, she’s made it very complicated for herself, to say the least.
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Because my taste in entertainment can tend toward the awful, last night I spent 90 minutes watching "For the Record," a faux documentary starring Britney Spears as the fallen pop starlet trying to stage a wobbly comeback. In sum total, it was pretty sad. The tired-looking, droopy-eyed, beweaved Britney comes across like a horse that's been ridden to the brink of exhaustion, and yet her minders continue to drive her onward, regardless of the fact that she's a barely functioning zombie on the verge of collapse. (All in service of a new album, fittingly called Circus.) In a nice deconstruction of the spectacle, Choire Sicha deems Spears "sick," and she sure looks it. Shots of the girl in action reveal her staring dully out car windows as the paparazzi bum-rush her ride, spacing out in chairs as she gets dolled up by makeup artists and hairstylists again and again, seemingly grinding through one more day to score a comeback that she denies she needs to make to regain her Princess of Pop title. The only time she lights up is when she's looking in the mirror.
While Britney's personal "revelations" range from the mundane to the strange—"What was I thinking?" and "Everyone shaves their head" among them—what's really mind-boggling is the constant swarming of the cameras around her as she attempts to live her life. This time, we see the view from inside the feeding frenzy—and it's pretty tragic. As her caravan emerges from a subterranean parking lot, the mechanical door rolls up to reveal a crowd of onlookers that resemble the Earthlings encountering the space aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Without a doubt, what we're watching is a 21st-century freak show, and Britney is its star. Since the show aired, some bloggers have denounced Spears for courting the cameras that she claims she wishes would leave her alone, but the fact of the matter is that the slobbering media hounds work for us, the American public, and if Britney Spears is a monster, we're the Dr. Frankenstein who made her.