I get excited about the Golden Globes and Oscars every year, and while I do admit part of it is for the fashion, it’s mainly for the actual talent that is awarded. However, over the years I’ve come to realize that it’s more about politics and popularity than the work put in. Mo’Nique touched on this with her own acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actress in Precious in 2010 when she said, “I would like to thank the Academy for showing that it can be about the performance and not the politics.” Worsdale describes the Oscars as “an institution whose values undercut your legitimacy and your work as a person by choosing only to honor a select demographic of voices, not including voices that artfully and accurately speak to your experience.”

Kathryn Bigelow’s Best Director win for The Hurt Locker in 2010 was a first for women in directing. At the time of this win the statistics for this category were a bleak 4 nominations for women out of 82 years and 400 nominations total. On The Hot Pink Pen, Jan Lisa Huttner examines the lack of films by or about women in Oscar nominations. She points out that “films by women have a greater chance of success if they are about men (e.g., The Hurt Locker),” and “films about women have a greater chance of success if they are by men (e.g., Black Swan).” Films that are in fact “both by & about women are sometimes nominated, but rarely win anything (e.g., Winter’s Bone). Huttner believes the reason this keeps happening is because “most film critics are men, therefore men are disproportionately represented on film festival juries, and in film critic circles.” With that being said, I agree with her conclusion that male film critics are not deliberately excluding films made by and about women, but instead “they like what they like, they consider their own views “the norm,” and they don’t really consider the idea that their own views might be biased.” After Bigelow’s win in 2010, the Best Directing category sadly returned to an all male nominee list in 2011 as well as this year…and so the trend continues.

Jamilah King points out that the Oscars “generally ignores nuanced stories by and about people of color,” and fill the list of nominees with white actors and actresses each year. This year The Help brought a Best Actress nomination for Viola Davis, as well as Octavia Spencer for Best Supporting Actress, and Best Picture for the overall film. However these nominations for women of color come from a film that created a lot of controversy. WAM!mer Melissa Silverstein explains that much of the criticism comes from the fact that the film “distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers,” along with the “lack of attention given to sexual harassment and civil rights activism.”

Melissa Harris-Perry expressed this frustration well on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell when the film first came out. She noted Viola Davis’ talented portrayal in the film, but that “in 2011 Viola Davis is reduced again to playing a maid” instead of seeing “that exquisite acting projected onto the kinds of roles that Viola Davis truly deserves.” Davis herself is frustrated with the reality that “there aren’t a lot of roles out there…if you have two great roles for an African-American actress in a year – one actress can cover it. So if there’s five really good black actresses out there, and that one actress gets it all, then the other four can sit for the next three years.” My hope is that next year the Oscars will finally be an awards show that gives recognition to the deserving members of film. In order to move toward this, we need to show the industry that people want to see films about women, starring women, and made by women.
Take some time to explore what’s out there besides the blockbusters that are produced to continue the white male dominated trend in films. Check out Pariah and We Need to Talk About Kevin, which are still in theaters, and keep track of great new films coming out by following the posts on Women and Hollywood, Colorlines, and The Hot Pink Pen. We need to show the industry that people want to pay to see projects made by women and starring women.

Harris-Perry is an author, professor and Twitter maven. Her writing is deeply critical and thoughtful with regard to the complex matrices of gender, class, race and sexuality in the public sphere, from the pop to the political. In her recently published “Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America,” her topics run the gamut from “Their Eyes Were Watching God” to Michelle Obama.

Prof. Harris-Perry has been a contributor on other MSNBC shows, notably the Rachel Maddow Show, where she guest hosts when Maddow is out of town. Check out her recent appearance on “the Colbert Report” for a sense of her sharp wit, humor and steadfast principles. As she has become somewhat of a celebrity by nature of these kinds of appearances and her regular column in the Nation, she is no stranger to controversy. Her live-tweeting of “the Help” this summer attracted its own media coverage, as she wrote that the film “reduces systematic, violent racism, sexism & labor exploitation to a cat fight.” In September, her column in the Nation was based on the idea white liberals were abandoning President Obama not because he was doing a bad job, but because he is a black president.

Melissa Harris-Perry getting her own show does not mean that the cable news industry or the entertainment industry at large is no longer racist or sexist. The fact that a black feminist public intellectual is anchoring a Saturday morning talk show is certainly exciting, but it does not create a sudden paradigm shift; this is no quick fix. As she said to Stephen Colbert, Prof. Harris-Perry isn’t just any black feminist public intellectual, but also, to many, represents the trope of the strong black woman. As she discusses in “Sister Citizen,” most stereotypes of African-American women have been outwardly created; she asserts that, however problematic, this particular trope was created by black women, and so represents a different and internalized pressure.

As she writes in “Sister Citizen,”

The strong black woman is not meant to be Pollyanna…Her sometimes explosive anger is part of what distinguishes her from the ideal of white femininity. This right to own and express anger is among the more potentially powerful psychological and political elements of the construction of black women’s strength. That the black woman is not denied an angry voice within an authentic definition of her femininity makes her a powerful ally for both black men and white women in their political struggles (215).

Her show, which is still untitled, is part of a new push for weekend ratings on MSNBC, and her celebrity as well as her controversy will certainly be helpful to the network. As she pointed out, her stature has certainly been powerful on both the Rachel Maddow Show and PoliticsNation with Rev. Al Sharpton. She is an important face, name and ally on the network. She is not, however, another journalist, pundit or performer, at least in the traditional sense; Harris-Perry is first and foremost an educator. In the MSNBC press release about the show, Prof. Harris-Perry said that she sees this as a “chance to have a much bigger classroom,” meaning that while she is teaching, she is aware that there is an audience, and that they are going to raise their hands with questions and comments. I am sure, however, that she’s going to make everyone do their homework.

Her show begins on MSNBC at 10 a.m. EST on February 4^th, the first Saturday of Black History Month. Everyone should watch, so she has a great first weekend ratings-wise. The more people who vote with their remotes, the more likely it is that not only will Prof. MHP be able to do more and interesting things with her time, but would set an important precedent for the women who might come after.

The film is intense and complex, but leaves the audience with a feeling of hope by the end. As WAM!mer Miriam Perez says on Feministing, “Nothing was wrapped up with a pretty little bow, but you left feeling some faith in the resilience of our community to persevere in the face of adversity.”

There are many moments of relatable humor in the film. Scenes like a family dinner conversation leading to Alike’s parents being questioned by their daughters about their high school memories give spots of humor to the story. These moments and the feeling of hope that Miriam describes allow Alike’s story to be shown in the full context of her character’s life so that the viewer can really connect to what she’s experiencing and how it all intersects for her. It also lets you see how the issues of gender identity and sexuality covered in this film are relevant to your own life, even for those of us who might not have thought we’d be able to relate to them before. On Autostraddle, Spectra also puts it well when she says “whether or not you are part of the LGBT community, expect to “aww” and cringe several times per scene, as both the acting and directing create a winning combination for unlocking the most powerful tool in social change: empathy.”

Go see Pariah, and learn more about this awesome film through the links mentioned above as well as Citizen Radio. Get the word out!

One new show starting this month, Work It!, has me particularly concerned about TV tropes currently accepted on our airwaves. The plot centers on two men who lost their jobs in the recent recession and are struggling to provide for their families. Since men and women are equal now, women have all of the jobs (just like the feminists wanted, right?). So in order to earn a living, they are forced to dress as women. No, seriously.  Check out the trailer.

Not only is this show perpetuating dangerous myths about the recession and women’s advancement, but it mocks queer and transgender identities and repeats the same ridiculous stereotypes about men and women we’ve been hearing for decades.

I recently had it pointed out to me that Work It! is similar to a show from the 80’s called Bosom Buddies. I’m not old enough to remember watching it, but this raises two interesting points. One, the plot of Bosom Buddies does not seem to revolve around women taking all of the jobs, so these shows seem to have gotten more sexist (or at least more aggressively anti-feminist) over time. Two, networks apparently do think we’ll laugh at jokes from twenty (or fifty) years ago. Home Improvement was funny… let’s see if we can do it again. This line of thinking isn’t quite what I would call “high-concept comedy.”

People have told me that these shows aren’t that bad. It’s just a joke, and seriously, why can’t you ever take a joke?  But I like to counter with the idea that these shows aren’t very good either. The comedy, and that’s a term I use loosely, relies on viewers accepting various ideas about gender as facts of life. We know that’s not the way life really is. We know all women aren’t really humorless spoil-sports—we know all guys aren’t really thick-headed macho men. It’s just a show, and we’re all supposed to laugh at the irony.

But if they aren’t using those stereotypes to say anything constructive, they’re just repeating them. The fact that we know they’re not true is irrelevant, because we still have to see them everywhere we look. We have to take homophobia, sexism, racism, and the general idea that middle class white people are the only people worth watching as a given, or we don’t have a sense of humor.

While I would love to think that ignoring these shows would make them go away, I know that’s not actually the case. Whether or not I pay attention, shows like this are still being pitched, written, shot and watched. We can hope for specific shows to get cancelled, but the general themes don’t seem to be going anywhere.

For crying out loud, though, it’s 2012 already. I want flying cars, I want a cure for cancer and I want to be able to watch television without seeing tired stereotypes repackaged in shiny new boxes. Why do all of these things feel equally impossible and far away? TV is shutting me out, and I want a more productive solution than shutting it off.

A rape culture is a complex of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women. It is a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent. In a rape culture, women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself. A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as the norm.

In a rape culture both men and women assume that sexual violence is a fact of life, inevitable as death or taxes. This violence, however, is neither biologically nor divinely ordained. Much of what we accept as inevitable is in fact the expression of values and attitudes that can change.

Emphasis mine.

This latest wave of frustration was set in motion by a post on CampusBasement.com entitled “10 Ways to Fool a Sorority Girl Into Bed.” The post has since been taken down, but lives on forever in screenshots (and our nightmares).

The list includes advice such as:

2. Keep refilling her cup. Soon she will be unable to walk and need a place to “rest.”

4. Once she is sufficiently intoxicated (and only then!) say something that would earn the hashtag #failedpickuplines. She’ll stare at you in admiration.

7. Make the lighting in the room very dim. Once she says, “I’m sleepy,” you know you got that bitch on hold.

10. When the moment is right… move in for the kill. Like a tiger.

Not surprisingly, this “article” was met with some criticism. Shortly before it was taken down, Campus Basement added the following disclaimer:

This article has generated a tremendous amount of interest from readers. Campus Basement would like to clarify that the author meant absolutely no harm when she posted it, and our staff firmly understands that no means no. For more information on how you can help end sexual assault and abuse, visit www.takebackthenight.org.

Also we posted our community guidelines yesterday, please take a look: http://www.campusbasement.com/pages/community-guidelines. This article is from a sole individual and doesn’t reflect the views of Campus Basement.

There’s a lot to unpack here. Firstly, “interest” is a weird way of spelling “rage.” Secondly, there is a difference between not meaning harm and not doing harm. While this could have been intended as some sort of satire, it is unfortunately too close to reality to be taken as a joke. One in four college women report surviving rape or attempted rape. Approximately 2/3 of assaults are committed by someone known to the victim, and 38% of rapists are a friend or acquaintance.

While the author might have been kidding, the prevalence of these crimes shows that the attitude of rapists is exactly as cavalier as the hypothetical rapist making this list. Call me a humorless feminist if you want—I fail to find anything remotely funny about rampant sexual assault.

What’s more, if the author actually intended for this to be a dark and revealing satire, there are ways to go about it that don’t involve victim-blaming. Take Leigh Hofheimer’s article about Rape Prevention, which includes such items as:

1.       Don’t put drugs in women’s drinks.

2.       When you see a woman walking by herself, leave her alone.

3.       If you pull over to help a woman whose car has broken down, remember not to rape her.

4.       If you are in an elevator and a woman gets in, don’t rape her.

If the Campus Basement post was meant to highlight the prevalence of sexual assaults on campus and serve as an actual warning to fellow students, it did so through the very means we should be trying to prevent. Framing the woman involved as stupid or shallow sends out the message that it is their fault, and only other people are raped.

This line of thinking tells us that if we follow certain rules, dress or act a certain way, we will not be raped. We are told rape victims are not someone we know; rape victims are not us. Furthermore, the idea that rape can or should only be prevented by the victims themselves takes blame and attention away from the real culprits: the actual rapists.

Of course Campus Basement is not unique in perpetuating these ideas. The Pennsylvania liquor board recently launched an ad-campaign against teenage drinking, saying teens that drink too much will end up raped. A recent study found that several popular men’s magazines were indistinguishable from the language used by rapists. I am not calling out Campus Basement because they are the only example; I am calling out Campus Basement because they are one of far too many examples of what I and countless others have been repeating for years: We live in a rape culture, and I am sick of it.

If you feel like I do, that blame for a rape should never be placed on the victim and there is nothing remotely funny about sexual assault, then you should speak up. Until it is made clear that even one rape is too many, that no sexual violence is acceptable, people are going to continue to normalize it, and I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.

The 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence is an international campaign originating from the first Women’s Global Leadership Institute sponsored by the Center for Women’s Global Leadership in 1991. Participants chose the dates November 25- International Day Against Violence Against Women- and December 10- International Human Rights Day- in order to symbolically link violence against women and human rights and to emphasize that such violence is a violation of human rights. This 16-day period also highlights other significant dates including November 29, International Women Human Rights Defenders Day, December 1, World AIDS Day, and December 6, which marks the Anniversary of the Montreal Massacre.

The 16 Days Campaign has been used as an organizing strategy by individuals and groups around the world to call for the elimination of all forms of violence against women by:

raising awareness about gender-based violence as a human rights issue at the local, national, regional and international levels

creating tools to pressure governments to implement promises made to eliminate violence against women

strengthening local work around violence against women

establishing a clear link between local and international work to end violence against women

providing a forum in which organizers can develop and share new and effective strategies

demonstrating the solidarity of women around the world organizing against violence against women

For WAM!s contribution to this very moving event, we focused on 16 women and/or groups taking a stand against gender-based violence. Here they are again (in alphabetical order).

Joanna Chiu, Leader in Media Outreach for SlutWalk NYC

Days For Girls

Sady Doyle, Founder of Tiger Beatdown

Jaclyn Friedman, Founder of Women, Action and the Media

ImMEDIAte Justice

The Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition

Emily May, Executive Director of Hollaback!

Jina Moore, author of “How Not to Write About Rape”

The Nobel Women’s Initiative

Elizabeth O’Donnel, Founder of HelloLadies.com

Audacia Ray, Founder of the Red Umbrella Project

Erika Smith, Take Back the Tech!

Spectra Speaks

Trust Black Women

Jessica Valenti, Founder of Feministing

Michele C. Weldon, Author of I Closed My Eyes

We would like to thank all of our participants for the work they do, and for making our very first 16 Days campaign a lot of fun. If you’re as inspired as we are, you don’t need to wait until next year to take some action of your own.

Sady Doyle started Tiger Beatdown in September 2008, because she was bored, and also for some reason no-one wanted to publish her various long-winded ramblings on gender. Since then, she has conned various sectors of the Internet into publishing all sorts of various long-winded ramblings on gender, and has also gotten them into newspapers and/or magazines! And then some magazines hired her, specifically the Rookie and the In These Times. Her name is right near Kurt Vonnegut’s, on the In These Times masthead, which means his vengeful ghost has an 89% chance of visiting her if her column is bad. His vengeful ghost would be elderly and charming! And really into Mark Twain! So good luck to her on that!

In addition to blogging for Tiger Beatdown, she has written for Bitch, Salon, The American Prospect, and The Atlantic just to name a few.

One thing that makes Sady Doyle such a great fit for WAM! Is that she uses the media to engage in thoughtful and funny dialogues about sexism and gender issues from many angles. But, watch out, we’re going to get all meta-analysis here; she also uses her voice in the media to talk about the media, and about the sexist backlash that can come with that territory.

For example, she was involved in a  Twitter “frenzy” (as Keith Olbermann called it) in response to her online activism about  the Wikileaks trials and media coverage of Julian Assange. But where he called it a frenzy, we would agree that it was a protest:

I was frustrated with the way the Julian Assange rape case had been treated by fellow left-wing media figures, including Keith Olbermann, but especially Michael Moore, who minimized the accusations while pledging bail money to Assange. I didn’t know yet that he had also misrepresented the accusations against Assange  (they’re for rape, not that his “condom broke”) on Olbermann’s show. I tweeted a joke, about hoping a bunch of rape survivors pulled a “Roger & Me” outside of Michael Moore’s office, and directed it at Moore’s Twitter. Then it hit me: The dude’s on freaking Twitter. He can hear me. More accurately, he can hear us.

I suggested that people frustrated by Moore’s actions tweet at him until he responded. Anti-rape activist Jaclyn Friedman suggested we use a hashtag, and came up with one, #MooreandMe. I wrote a blog post. And it was on. Thousands of tweets, links from every corner of the blogosphere, and — surprisingly — a response, that evening, from @KeithOlbermann himself.

You also might remember the #MenCallMeThings trending topic on Twitter recently.

To find #Things for #MenCallMeThings, I had to look back through anonymous hate mail, hate blogs about me, conservative-blog and MRA-blog posts about me, random Twitter trolls, and at comment threads that were particularly nasty, sure. But in with the rest of this, I’ve also quoted a popular male liberal blogger, a pop-music writer who publishes at some of the same places I have, a friend-of-a-friend whose “urban biking club” my boyfriend was once thinking of joining, and a published YA fantasy novelist with lefty politics. What matters is not which guys said it: What matters is that, when you put their statements side-by-side, they all sound like the exact same guy. And when you look at what they’re saying, how similar these slurs and insults and threats we get actually are, they always sound like they’re speaking to the exact same woman. When men are using the same insults and sentiments to shut down women and “feminine” people, across the board, then we know what’s going on. And we know that it’s not about us; it’s about gender.

Her online activism recently earned her a social media award from Women’s Media Center.

If you like Sady Doyle’s style, you should head over to Tiger Beatdown or follow her on Twitter. And, “If you would like to hire Sady, profess admiration for Sady, ask Sady questions, and/or send Sady your various lyric poems about reading the Internet, you can reach her at tigerbeatdown@gmail.com.”

How did this groundbreaking legislations get passed? It took years of hard work by hundreds of activists and thousands of concerned citizens, all responding to the tireless leadership of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC), our focus for Day 15 of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence.

Led by Gunner Scott, a former WAM! presenter, the MTPC describes themselves this way:

The Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC) is dedicated to ending discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression.

We envision a world where persons of all genders are treated with respect and fully participate in all areas of society, free from fear of prohibition, harassment or violence based on their gender identity and/or expression.

To that end we educate the public, advocate with state, local, and federal government, engage in political activism, and encourage empowerment of community members through collective action.

That means MTPC doesn’t just advocate for (and win!) grounddbreaking civil rights protections for trans folks at the state level, they also foster community with events specificially designed for trans people of color, trans youth, and other groups typically marginalized within trans communities, agitate and educate for better media coverage of trans issues, collect stories of trans discrimination in order to inform and focus their advocacy work, and much, much more.

And that transgender civil rights bill? It’s not over yet. According to the MTPC:

The final version of the Transgender Equal Rights Bill passed by the legislature unfortunately does not include protections within public accommodations. MTPC and our coalition partners fought hard to try to get public accommodations restored in the Senate version of the bill, and were unsuccessful in doing so. Although this bill does not include public accommodations, this is a historic and important victory in the fight for achieving transgender equality in Massachusetts.

“This is not the end of our fight, and MTPC is committed to getting public accommodations protections for our transgender youth, adults, and families. MTPC plans on introducing a bill for the 2013 legislative session for those public accommodations protections,” said Gunner Scott, Executive Director of MTPC.  “For now, let’s be proud of the difference this bill will make in the daily lives of thousands of people across the state who need jobs, a safe place to live and access to education.”

You know what to do to get involved. Just click here.