Adding To The Conversation: Women And Media

Barbara: So last week Ashley Judd asked us (and by “us” I don’t mean The Middle Ages specifically, but wouldn’t that’ve been cool???) to “join in—and change—the Conversation” about women and how we’re seen and represented in the media. In case you missed it, she wrote this biting piece for the Daily Beast in response to the overwhelming attention she’s received lately based SOLELY on her looks. She’d wanted to ignore it at first, but then she got mad. And then she knew she couldn’t sit back anymore and “take it”. She needed to speak out.

Now Ashley isn’t the first person to speak out against this kind of thing, but I really believe one of the reasons themes keep repeating themselves in our blogs here or in our conversations in life or in society in general is that we need to keep remembering—and reminding each other—to adjust. Because adjustment is so incremental (another common theme here!), we need to practice working and re-working our gears toward the truer and clearest path toward compassion and acceptance.

Why was Ashley lambasted? Because she’d “had work done” … or because she hadn’t. No one (in these articles) talked about how she’d scored a strong lead role in a new TV show, that she was setting a great example for strong female characters, one which didn’t need to be overtly sexualized to be interesting. No, the articles were all about her looks. And the mean-spirited writers of these pieces were usually (maybe exclusively) women! She calls it a misogynistic attitude. Not anti-male, but anti-female. That we are so conditioned to deconstruct each other that this is the only conversation worth having in our media right now: the insulting speculation goes viral, the nasty comments pile up, the media jumps in to ride this next wave of escalating vitriol. Ooh, we love to hate each other!

Now, I almost didn’t talk about this here because I know we’re not of this ilk. I’ve seen it over and over in how we support each other and celebrate our spiritual wellbeing. But then I also realized that if we don’t talk about it here, we’re missing a chance to spread the consciousness of a really important issue. We can put our feelings into words here—and everyone will have slightly different words—and we can make a difference in how women and men talk about women.

As an actor, I obviously have had to give my looks a lot of thought. But I was almost never cast as the “beautiful” girl, was almost always as the sweet mom. And so I didn’t really feel the onus of needing to look a perfect way. That said, the “beautiful” girl roles are usually the most exciting. And I do remember the whole “is she fuckable” question that was applied to who would eventually be cast in any given role. And, yes, this question gets applied to male actors too. But I’ve never been in a position where my looks have been scrutinized, picked apart, and spit upon like Ashley Judd has. People say Ashley was “asking for it” because she chose a career that puts her in the public eye. I have news for you: people who want to be actors are almost never in it for the fame. Is fame seductive, can it twist you around? Most certainly. But fame is really only part of the equation for an actor because if you’re famous, well, then you get to work—and actors want nothing more than to work (you can’t perform a little show by yourself, for yourself, the way you can, say keep a writing or drawing journal or dance or sing). People become actors because they have a deep-seated need to communicate with other people, to help share the human experience by showing you yourself. We’ve needed actors as story-tellers since the beginning of Man. Why would we excoriate them for not looking like some increasingly bizarre notion of "perfect"?

As a now “middle-aged” woman, I see my role in society shifting, my looks changing. Of course, I ask myself from time to time if I would ever get “work done”.  Funnily, this is probably the one instance when I have been guilty of deconstructing a woman’s looks: when she’s had so much work done, her face looks like an unnatural mask. I don’t know where to look; I blurt out how “great” she looks because I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. And what am I doing when I do that? Implying that in her natural state, the one where she looked utterly like herself, she was somehow not lovely?

I had lunch with an acquaintance a little while ago. I had only met her once when we’d had an amazing dinner together years before. When we got together the second time, I was delighted to see her again. She asked if she looked different; I said no, she looked exactly the same! It was just so great to see her! But she was disappointed. She’d lost a lot of weight, changed her hair colour, and felt like she’d shed some old unhappy, unhealthy version of herself. I was gobsmacked. I swear, my connection with her had been through her eyes, through her spirit that one night, through her stories. I guess how she looked hadn’t made as strong an impression on me as how she WAS. Sure, she looked great the second time, but she’d also looked great—to me—the first.

I think, like with health and wellness issues, how we look is only important as far as how it makes us FEEL. And we all need different things to make us feel good, don’t we? But we’re also making it harder to FEEL good about ourselves when so much focus seems to be on how we LOOK.

By reading or passing around the nasty garbage about how this person has cellulite and that one has wrinkles and the other one is “puffy-faced”, we are giving this kind of discussion weight. We need to stop valuing each other and ourselves for how good we look (or not). It’s not “innocent banter” or “silly gossip”. It insinuates. It snowballs. It corrupts. It undermines. And it is so IRRELEVANT.

Think about it: the people we really admire, the ones we really love, the deepest, realest connections in our lives have nothing to do with appearances.

Maybe if we practice believing it, we might actually one day believe it.

Deb: This is a subject I have wanted to tackle for some time and have had in my notes and on my mind.  Thank you, Barbara, for bringing it up. I have continued to marvel these last years about the continued and growing attack on woman—by women. I have much more to say on it, but it will be for another time. Right now and for this post, you have nailed it. But I must say, I think the conversation should continue at The Middle Ages. I think we have just landed on a theme that deserves some length of time. I might even suggest a spring theme if you will. I will build on what you have written if you like and you do the same. A great dialogue will ensue, I am sure. For women and for men, we MUST start setting new ground rules. We must. It has lost its way ... mostly, but not entirely. Not by a long shot.

Barbara: Yes, let’s do it!!! 

PS Tomorrow, Annette is going to guest-blog here about her own hilarious encounter with trying to walk this delicate line!

Sheeple Are People Too

Barbara: I was not going to write about this. I don’t know; maybe I didn’t want to rant at you again, maybe I hoped something funny would happen to me over these last few days and I could tell you about it and we could all laugh and laugh. But as often happens with my most tenacious thoughts, they really dig in their claws until I let them have a few moments in the spotlight. As my threshold for pain has lowered dramatically in my middle years, I’m gonna go ahead and do my little rant. Also, nothing funny happened to me. So please feel free to disagree with me here (ironically, I have a high threshold for debate).

Remember when I posted that Kony 2012 video the other day? And I’m sure you all know how it just exploded since then, both in viral hits and in discussion, rhetoric, and vitriol. The thing is, I did do a bit of homework before I posted—and I knew there was some controversy about the facts, history, and worthiness of the charitable organization behind the video (Invisible Children). If you read our comments section, you might’ve read the part where Brianna and I discussed some points and issues. The reason I went ahead and posted the story to the blog was because I was so excited that a “cause” had ignited the hearts and minds of millions of people—and at that time, mostly young people. This was for me a sign that it was possible to have care and concern generate a contagious momentum. The fact that the video hits have now topped a 100 million people absolutely astounds me—that’s right up there with such deep and world-changing Youtube fare as “Charlie bit my finger” and Justin Bieber’s “Baby”.

And, maybe because I’m a glutton for punishment, and maybe because I really really do love debate and turning issues over and looking at them from other sides than my own, I ended up mostly reading articles about this phenomenon (is that the right word?) that basically lambasted this effort and vilified anybody who made or supported the video. And I could totally understand their points: yes, we should do our homework before blindly committing to something, and yes, there might have been mistakes on the part of the filmmakers, and certainly there might be hundreds of important issues not addressed in the film. But I did—in my own homework—trust that these young people really wanted to make a difference. And I didn’t wholly trust all the facts of the naysayers either.

What I really didn’t get, what I struggle now to understand, what confuses and annoys me is the anger and insults hurled toward people who are trying to make a difference (even a possibly misguided one). In one article I read, they actually called the video supporters “sheeple”. Cute play on words, I’ll grant them that, but so very insulting. And I started to worry—maybe needlessly—that all these millions of people who decided to take up a cause and stand up for something fundamentally wrong ... would now feel like idiots. I know that I certainly vacillated between righteous anger and self-conscious embarrassment. Within minutes of posting the Kony link to her Facebook, a beloved was castigated by foaming critics of the film until she felt compelled to take it off her page. Because I had already decided to trust the good intentions of the filmmakers (for right or wrong) I worried that they would now feel like dolts who should crawl into a hole and lick their wounds, instead of feeling proud that, after spending 9 years in and out of the jungle, getting to know the story and its victims, aligning with those victims, dreaming of and then following through on their plans to help them, they managed to document a film (which is either a good or bad one) and tell it to the world. I highly highly doubt they had visions of personal wealth dancing in their heads. I can’t imagine they dreamed in their wildest dreams that “viral” would mean anything more than a few million hits, if that.

Is this what we want to do? Is this how we want to feel? Please, yes, let’s debate and discuss how to take care of the good of our planet—we’re bound to disagree!—but please, let’s support our often maligned and underworked sense of compassion. Do we want to be those people in our homes who hear the woman screaming outside but don’t call the police because we’re afraid of being judged stupid, deemed wrong, or making a mistake? Not me, baby, not me.

It’s not our fault or the filmmakers’ fault that this happens to be the medium that brought awareness to such a huge amount of people. If only it had been for a less controversial issue; if only it had been made in a less controversial way. But it wasn’t. This is the piece that broke through on a scale which journalists and humanitarians the world over, sadly, could not achieve. And the beauty is, if we do learn to raise our voices, even in misguided ways, we get used to raising our voices. Then we get used to doing a bit more and a bit more. Today it might be clicking on a video, tomorrow it might be doing more and better research, the day after it might be going to our governments. And if there are issues around the issues that need to be brought to light, the conversation can—and will—shift and change accordingly. But we’re talking, people, we’re talking! We are not sheeple. We are all in this together.

Maybe that old axiom “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” should be “good intentions paved the road away from hell”.

PS I talked to Deb and Charlotte about this before I posted and it led to some lively discussion. Charlotte emailed me this link (after I’d written my piece, just fyi!) and it seems fitting to add it here. This is by Nicholas D. Kristof and it appeared in the op-ed section of the online New York Times; he actually addresses several of the negative articles that I read and shares a similar dismay over the denouncement of the filmmakers: “The bottom line is: A young man devotes nine years of his life to fight murder, rape and mutilation, he produces a video that goes viral and galvanizes mostly young Americans to show concern for needy villagers abroad — and he’s vilified?”

Also, it seems fitting to end on a high and related note: yesterday the judges of the International Criminal Court released a unanimous decision to convict Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, a Congolese warlord, for turning thousands of children into soldiers.

Deb: Barb has already very nicely represented my point of view so I will not take too much time in my comment. I feel very much as she does: “but they are doing SOMETHING!” And I agree that I do not think that the motivation behind the film was a get-rich-quick scheme. If that were the case they could have picked a much easier, safer, more comfortable subject. Growing up in the 60’s and seeing protests and being a part of them (smaller ones) it is great to see people rally behind an unjust cause. People can certainly decide what to do with their hard-earned dollars regards charity, but it is tough to look away when the truth is being raised. Awareness is worth gold. 

Occupy Me

Barbara: Can of worms time maybe, but that’s what a blog is for, isn’t it? Certainly ours is—I want to be as honest as I can with this great community of amazing souls. So here goes.

I was thrilled to the core of my being when people started peacefully occupying cities around the world, taking a stand against corporate greed. And I watched (or tried to watch as coverage—certainly in the beginning—was and is spotty at best) with bated breath, wondering what would happen and how it would all unfold, wishing that no one would get hurt and no violence would erupt. Of course, my best wishes couldn’t stop pain or violence from happening, but that’s—truly—another story.

Why does the Occupy phenomenon touch me so? Oh, there are questions everywhere about what they stand for and is it legit and who’s the leader, and on and on in boring, pedantic circles. I’ve read the articles that insist that people got themselves into this shit by buying into the dream (that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is). I’ve even read a ridiculous rant against young people wasting their time getting degrees in Sociology and such as there is no use for do-gooders in the world and therefore no money to support future jobs in these fields, that these naïve dreamers should instead have been savvy enough to study, say, Mechanical Engineering, for which there are and will be jobs aplenty.

Really? I’m well past my undergrad years, but I have the good sense to know that if I was just starting out I would have to commit myself to something that I a) believe in and b) have some talent or natural ability for. I couldn’t have studied my way to a Mechanical Engineering degree if I’d tried. It’s ludicrous. For better or worse, we are all designed to fulfill different community needs. And this, by the way, is why the community has to support each one of us.

And please don’t tell me you don’t want to support the so-called “lazy people”: because then I’m going to challenge you to convince me that the waitress who slings hash at the local diner doesn’t work as hard as anyone else, doing so for little money, no security, and no benefits. And yet, would you want to live your entire life without the delicious comfort of hot coffee, eggs over easy, bacon extra-crispy and buttered toast (or whatever)? I’ll say it again: We are all designed to fulfill different community needs. Are there lazy people out there? Sure, but their numbers are miniscule beside the staggering number of dedicated, work-to-the-bone, or desperately unemployed masses who can’t get a leg up. They are lazy drops of water in a world-sized bucket.

I won’t lie and tell you that I’m out there on our city streets, occupying Toronto. I’m not that kind of gal (although she’s inside me somewhere, in spirit). I’ve always been an armchair cheerleader, whether for sports or politics. I’m too cautious, too afraid to fumble the ball, too—no other word for it—uncoordinated. But I know when I see a game that rouses me to my feet, gets my blood spinning, spurs me to shout out “Go Team!” at the top of my lungs.

The Occupy phenomenon makes me believe we can and will stand up for one another and that we will insist that we conduct ourselves with honour and compassion. Make money, people, I don’t care about that, I really don’t think most people do. Get rich, spend it how you will. But don’t make it in what would, under ordinary circumstances, be considered criminal and then pretend that’s how business is done. Don’t sell me a bill of goods and then scream that I should’ve read the fine print.

This is my mantra for Occupy: Transparency.

That’s it, in a nutshell. I want the truth. I want all the cards on the table. If you make a mistake, I will accept that. But not if you pull an ace from your sleeve and pretend it’s fair play. Do the right thing—or what you truly believe to be the right thing—in everything you do. Then inform me of your process.

Oh, and one more thing, my unsolicited advice: Occupiers, why don’t you go home to bed every night? Get a good night’s sleep, go back in the morning, freshly bathed and fed. If you don’t, they will tear down your tents, warning of vermin and pestilence, death and violence (and, of course, they will turn out to be right in this). But if you give them nothing to dismantle … they will have nothing to dismantle.

Go Team!

Deb: The world shifts every so often and lately it has shifted to the point where its axis is up its rear. Pain not withstanding, it has provoked us to the point where we are all listening. The generations following Boomer have raised their peaceful fists to say that they are “Mad as hell and they aren’t going to take it anymore.”

Okay, redundant yes, but when a power phrase works, it works! The difference is, they aren’t willing to die for it anymore. They are too smart for that and too savvy. This isn’t Kent State. They won’t be taken shockingly or naively. They know their rights and their cause.

And most of all, they know they have no other choice. The youth are responsible. They are speaking up. We must listen. Because we have listened before. And it worked. At least, for a while it worked. Until it didn’t and needed to be worked again. But this generation has the power of their parents behind them. The parents that walked, that did the sit-in, that did the protest. They understand and they are walking hand in hand with their children, sometimes literally and sometimes figuratively.

And they know there is nothing to fear. Because ... each generation has to step up. If they are going to look their children in the eye. Different issues. Same passion. 

Barbara: When I wrote my opener today, I had NO idea that Deb's son Luke and his incredibly articulate, lovely girlfriend had participated in Occupy Montreal and were featured in this CBC news clip. You can see curly-headed Luke right behind the announcer, and when the announcer turns to interview a young woman, that's our Megan!! Serendipity.

Worried Sick

Barbara: Susan Sontag wrote a famous essay about “compassion fatigue” (I couldn’t find the essay itself, but this is an excellent article that discusses it). If you don’t know it, she talks about how there’s a real danger that we can become immune to the tragedies around us because we are so inundated with images depicting them. She calls this phenomenon “compassion fatigue”.

I don’t know about you, but I am not in danger of succumbing to compassion fatigue; I’m at risk of collapsing under the weight of fatigue brought on by my compassion.

I am virtually vibrating with my concerns and fears for Japan right now, never mind that those concerns are piling up on top of recent worries about New Zealand and renewed ones about Libya and Haiti, and on and on. I try to drown myself in my work, which helps in the moment, but I come out of it exhausted and inexplicably weepy. I feel powerless. I feel impotent.

Lori Landau posted an interesting article yesterday about her own thoughts on this. Lori suggests that in order to take care of the world, we need to take care of ourselves first. This is such a simple and powerful logic, I have to repeat it here. We’ve blogged a lot about personal trials and tribulations and how to lend a helping hand in times of need. But a unanimous consensus among us is that in terrible times, we are bound to “hit a wall”. This is when we most need a break to recuperate and heal. For each of us, this process will involve something different. Lori recommends meditation. Her point—and rightly so—is that through meditation, we can also increase our communal energy. And that communal energy can bind us together and give us an exponential healing power, even in the worst of times.

Now I am terrible at meditating. I’ve tried it to little avail. But I can see the beauty and truth in joining spiritual forces and BELIEVING. If there is one thing that exemplifies the best of the human spirit, it is our ability to prevail, adapt, and grow. We can’t give up now. We have to believe in ourselves, in each other, in good. Let’s not get so fatigued that we succumb to it, that we settle, that we give up. “Believing” might not be meditation in the classic sense, but it’s the kind of meditation I, for one, can grasp. It gives me energy when I most need it.

Deb: Barb, wonderful food for thought. I too have been struggling with this. I look at the photos and it looks exactly like a disaster movie. It looks unreal and surreal and as a result, it is hard to grasp. So I find myself instead focusing on the individuals.

I was struck by a photo in the newspaper of a little boy. He must have been around three or four. He was standing in front of a man in full radiation gear, as the man waved a wand over his tiny self. His eyes were wide and his little arms and legs were spread-eagle. He looked not terrified but aghast. At least as aghast as a tiny boy can look. And I sat staring at the picture of his sweet face and thinking that no matter what happens in the rest of his life, this is the defining moment. He will never ever ever forget this moment. It will shape who he is, and who he will become.

I have meditated since I was twenty. I kept it up for years and years. I picked it up during menopause and it was a great help, but since then I have strayed again.

So Barb, you have inspired me to slip into my Transcendental Meditation and send loving thoughts of peace and hope and healing to the Japanese people. And as I repeat my mantra, I will think of them, one human at a time, through the face of one tiny little boy.