Thursday, January 29, 2009 - Posts
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Let's hear it for PETA. The "vegetarians have better sex" ad, featuring hot women enjoying sensual interludes with various veggies, has become a certifiable viral video after NBC refused to air it during the Super Bowl, deeming it too risqué. (See some of the editing suggestions from NBC here-I imagine Victoria Morgan, VP of advertising standards, never imagined that during her career she'd have to ask a potential advertiser to cut the segment showing someone "screwing herself with broccoli (fuzzy)".)
The thing is, they've done this before, with a "too sexy" ad featuring Alicia Silverstone. The ad was slated to run in Houston but was pulled "at the last minute" by Comcast. I half (hell, I'll bump it up to three-quarters) suspect that they purposely make the ads overly provocative. This way, they don't have to pay the insane Super Bowl ad fees, and they still get the buzz. An ad that's "banned" for being overtly sexy is far more likely to get traction than it might if it's slightly less salacious and sandwiched between the commercial heavyweights of the Super Bowl. And talk about false advertising: As Nina writes in an "Explainer" today, going veg doesn't guarantee a better sex life.
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Last year, Broadway got Kristin Scott Thomas in The Seagull and Katie Holmes in All My Sons. In this month's lady-from-Hollywood-takes-on-an-English-class-classic, we have Mary-Louise Parker (Weeds, Boys on the Side) as Henrik Ibsen's notoriously difficult (in every way that phrase can possible be meant) Hedda Gabler. Hedda is one of the most iconic female roles in Western theater--Cate Blanchett came to New York with her own version just two years ago. Former Slate movie critic David Edelstein has a great essay in New York this week that asks, "Why, in spite of everything, is Hedda still the most popular girl in her class—and can anyone manage to get her right?"
"They all want to play Hedda, the female stars of stage and screen unjustly deprived of characters in the canon with real stature—despite the fact that she is a borderline psycho who resists our sympathy, and that Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler is an obstacle course over a minefield: creaky, exposition-laden, rife with the potential for unintentional laughs, bound by conventions of drawing-room realism. Beside Hedda, Hamlet is a walk in the park: At least he can talk to the audience, establish a rapport—help us to, you know, relate to his predicament. Chill Hedda is forever out of reach."
Edelstein is rather kinder to Parker than Ben Brantley was in the New York Times ("her Hedda brings to mind a valley girl who's given up cheerleading to be a goth because it's way cooler and it matches the place her mind's at now"). His ideal Hollywood Hedda, though, might surprise you:
"The only living English-speaking star who seems a perfect match is—laugh all you like—Angelina Jolie. I have no idea if she has the theatrical chops (movie stars who rule in close-up—like Julia Roberts—have a way of shrinking onstage), but Jolie has the size, the unyielding self-containment, the take-no-prisoners craziness, the will of a temperamental Greek goddess .... She could demonstrate, definitively, just as Ibsen did, why Hedda is the most alive anti-heroine in modern drama: It's what happens when you put a very large spirit in a very small box."
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Ladies! To the trenches! We've been slandered! Over at National Review's "The Corner," Lisa Schiffren bewails the "orchestrated deception" involved in the Obamas' (entirely traditional) hiring of a White House chef -- and dings the XX Factor in the process:
According the New York Times,
Sam Kass, who cooked for the Obamas in Chicago will now move onto the
government payroll as a White House chef. ... Who knew? I believed all that stuff about how Michelle was an
overburdened modern working mother, rushing from school dropoff to her
high-paying, demanding work at the hospital, to dress fittings, to
whatever it was she needed to do to support her husband's political
aspirations, back home to take care of her daughters. Call me naive,
but that model usually includes making dinner. ...
Didn't the women at Slate, among others, complain that there
was something offensive about Sarah Palin's apparent ability to raise 5
children, run the state of Alaska, run marathons, and cook those
mooseburgers—because it set the bar too high for ordinary women? But
they were willing to believe that Michelle could do it all, and keep it
all organic and healthy at that—because she has a law degree from
Harvard?
Yes, I left parts of Schiffren's post out, but no, it doesn't make any more sense when they're put back in. I do recommend reading the whole bizarre thing if you haven't gotten your day's dose of 17 laughs in yet.
To take Schiffren's post seriously for a moment, rather than perpetrating some kind of lie, Michelle Obama has long admitted to being a bit cooking-averse (here's one instance, from May of 2007). Schiffren's a journalist, right? Call me naive, but that model usually includes Lexis-Nexising.
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You are so right, Hanna - this snow cancellation thing always drove me batty when we lived in DC, not merely because of what it said about our region's "toughness", but because of the scorn that those last-minute school closures - usually after one snowflake - always demonstrated for working women. Scrambling together last-minute childcare, and/or bringing your child to the office is just about possible for middle-class parents, but was a nightmare for people who didn't have the sort of jobs to which they could bring children, and didn't have the money for childcare.
So annoyed by this attitude did I become that at one point I found myself shouting down the phone at a spokesman for the Montgomery County School System, who was placidly telling me that the real problem was the buses, which couldn't possibly run in a light dusting of snow. So let everyone drive, I said. The spokesman responsded, with icy triumph, "not everybody, Ms. Applebaum, has a car."
Of course, those who don't have cars can't afford child care either. I was so annoyed I wrote a column about it.
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Dayo, I agree with you on a number of things about contraception and economic prosperity for the country and for women—and disagree with Rachael's contention that contraception isn't related to jobs.
Let's be real: Most women (with the exception of lesbians like me) couldn't be 21st-century workers without contraception. Helping poor women pay for contraception keeps them in the workforce (good for the economy), keeps down maternity-related health care costs down (ditto), helps poor women not have more children than they can support (TANF costs reduced), incrementally helps expand health care coverage, and all sorts of other things that are good for the economy, for women, for children, and for the country. Yes, I salute Medicaid coverage for contraception!
What's more, I agree with Ruth Rosen's more recent analytical post explaining the right wing's philosophical objection to family planning at all. Here's a snippet from her brilliant explanation of why Margaret Sanger was repeatedly arrested for opening her pioneering birth control clinics, why she and her fellows were attacked so ferociously by the forces of Comstock, and why contraception is still being attacked today:
... the religious right's real agenda is not just to eliminate abortion, but to end the historic rupture between sex and reproduction that took place in the 20th century.... If reproduction ceased to be the goal, sexuality might become yoked to pleasure and that is quite unsettling to many Americans. That is the legacy the religious right has fought against, and it's that agenda that cut funding for family planning.
As I explained in my book What Is Marriage For?, when women won the battle over contraception, it blazed the trail for the acceptance of lesbians and gay men. Hurray contraception, both practically and philosophically! What's more, there's some disguised racism in the opposition to Medicaid-funded contraception; all "welfare" supports for poor folks get a racialized tinge in the cultural imagination (however false the imaginary picture).
And. Yet. I still don't get the angst over whether expanded Medicaid payments for contraception should or should not have been in the stimulus package. Can't we give Obama a chance to make this happen some other way? The man has been in office for all of nine days. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine! And in those nine days he has already done some amazing things for poor women—both symbolically resonant and immediately practical—like repeal the gag rule, appoint a female solicitor general, make Hillary Clinton (with her explicitly pro-women approach to foreign policy, dating back to the Beijing conference and beyond) our secretary of state, and support equal pay in the fabulous Ledbetter Act.
Look, Clinton went down in flames when he tried—right after he was inaugurated—to allow lesbians and gay men to serve openly in the military. The idea was right but the tactics were wrong—and the results were the disastrously restrictive Don't Ask Don't Tell policy. Can we give the Obamanauts another month or two—or call me crazy, three! —to work on Medicaid-funded contraception, which is so outrageously controversial, for the reasons Ruth explains, and more?
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Yesterday, Obama insulted our fair city by saying we can't "handle" a little bad weather. His spontaneous outburst to reporters came because his daughters' school was closed yesterday after an ice storm. With all due respect, Mr. President, this is the problem with public officials sending their kids to private schools. The real story in Washington this year was how D.C. public schools, usually spooked by a light dusting, didn't close after Tuesday's snowstorm, thanks to the tough-it-out policies of Chancellor Michelle Rhee. This is a longstanding gripe of mine, how private schools, even ones located in D.C., following the weather guidelines in Montgomery County, Md., as if they float above the actual city.
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Commenter jack_cerf posted a follow up to our Dating a Banker Anonymous discussion in the Fray, that perhaps sheds light on the modern urban tragedy of banker-boyfriend breakups:
"Last September Michael Daly of the NY Daily News did a piece on the economic indicator he called the High End Girlfriend Index ("HEGI"). Premise was that one of the conspicuous luxuries of life on Wall Street was to be able to afford the kind of woman who had ignored you in high school. Conversely, the crash led to their being -- very, very reluctantly -- let go. Daly quotes a New York lawyer as follows:
You have a Wall Street guy and he looks like one of the seven dwarfs," Hayes says. The schlub finds himself with a fabulous girlfriend such as used to brush past him as if he were a wall. He will do almost anything to keep her if his magic millions suddenly evaporate, even selling his watch and cuff links.
"The last overhead to go is a really high-end girlfriend," Hayes says. "If you're a short, ugly 40-year-old guy and you're throwing over a high-quality girlfriend, you're desperate."
The absolute economic low comes with a realization that Hayes summarizes in a sentence. "I can't afford her anymore!"
When he hears of one tumbling titan after another giving up a fabulous girlfriend, Hayes knows we are in the direst of economic times, no matter what the Dow says."
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OK, OK. Eve, you’re right. The bailout (whoops, stimulus—whoops, recovery) bill passed the House, without the family planning funds, and without any Republican support. So the big bad Democratic majority didn’t need to kowtow to Republicans after all—which means that Democrats are entirely responsible for the diminished support for women’s reproductive health. Maybe this is politically intelligent, but I don’t see how just yet.
To Rachael: I’m not particularly irked that this bill is saddling my generation with debt. Yes, this is a scary moment, about which I don’t think anyone knows enough, no matter which study which economist is brandishing. But, hyper-liberal that I am—and because in Washington, we get to call these things whatever is rhetorically expedient—I’m going to name all this cash a “strategic investment.” One that, in the case of contraception, is desperately needed in many Medicaid-qualifying households, and one that pays dividends in the long run—for individuals and, as I mentioned earlier, for Americans interested in expanding health care coverage. See Katha Pollitt for more on the topic, and on projected savings.
More importantly, providing birth control to underserved women should be solid political ground for Dems. Two thirds of the country supports birth control for teens. I don’t see why an aversion to GOP culture-warring—which didn’t stop passage of the bill—should be enough to get America’s hard-won Democratic leadership to fold like a cheap cocktail umbrella. So the Blue Dogs are howling—why no similar pressure on blue-state Republicans? Worse, this successful peer pressure allows Republicans to dismiss birth control and, say, new sod for the national Mall, in the same breath—though one is a public and personal health policy concern, and the other a matter of horticulture. (Both create jobs, but that’s beside my point.) At what point does the conciliatory tone that Obama so desperately seeks become an abdication of power? Because, let’s not forget what he told Republicans on Monday: “I won.”
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