Women in the Media & Eros on Campus

[zalena]

Rebecca Traister @ Salon on women in the media:

What provokes such fury, over Carrie Bradshaw, and -- for a flash -- over Gould... is that in a media landscape in which there are a severely limited number of spaces for women's writing voices, the ones that get tapped become necessarily, and deeply inaccurately, emblematic -- of their gender, their generation, their profession. More annoying -- and twisted -- is that those meager spots for women are consistently filled by those willing to expose themselves, visually and emotionally.... So rather than being troubled by the fact that Gould -- or Bushnell, or Bradshaw, or whoever -- has the spotlight, why not question why so few other versions of femininity are allowed to share it?

Also: Eros on Campus by William Deresiewicz in American Scholar. He also brings up the issue of woman-as-intellectual, but in a less direct manner. This meandering essay deals with the professorial stereotype and the erotic intensity of learning. Note that there are not very many examples of female scholars/professors in this essay, even if he does bring up the inevitable and unenviable spectre of devoted females and maimed men [essay on that one of these days] in 19C literature. What do you expect from someone who keeps going on about the Platonic and platonic ideals. (Though I'm not entirely sure he is accurate about Plato---or platonic anything---if there's anything I'm certain of about those Greeks it is their deep and abiding affection for the variations of love...between men.)

Both essays made me want to read Elizabeth Hardwick's The Genius of Margaret Fuller all over again. Somehow she nailed the ugly-duck awkwardness of being a thinking woman. One, I fear, that has not entirely abandoned the ladies of the profession, or even those 'damned scribblers' outside of it.

Comments

[srotu27.livejournal.com]

Both interesting pieces. I'm not sure that I agree that there are "severely limited... spaces" for writing women's voices, but I guess it depends on your definition of the media landscape. It seems to me that opportunities for women's voices have never been less limited than they are today, and with the democratization of media brought on by blogs, there are thinking women saying interesting things everywhere you look. I do agree that, despite my fondness for her, Carrie Bradshaw's life and mine don't look a lot alike, and that's not wholely accidental. Few of my single-girl 30-something friends have the Manolo lifestyle, either. The size of podium enjoyed by women like Bushnell is definitely out of proportion, and there is something unsavory about the rumpled sheets for women writers only thing, though I don't know that I consider Bushnell an exemplar of the "thinking" woman. Maybe power-savvy, but not thoughtful, gracious, multi-dimensional... many of the other things that I'd look for in someone I held up as a positive example to others.

The other article was entertaining. I thought of another example of a professor sleeping with his student (though, I can't be sure he's a humanities professor--- IMDB says "university research scientist") and the longsuffering wife--- "What Lies Beneath," (2000) Harrison Ford, Michelle Pfeiffer. I liked what he had to say about good teachers redirecting eros to the topic, not themselves, what he referenced about lighting a fire, not filling a bucket. I think he makes some good points about our lack of spiritual vocabulary and cultural concerns. It dovetails nicely with the discussion at the bar after SATC, where two people at the table mentioned that their parents put them on the Pill just as they went to college. I know my mother warned me against falling for a professor--- she was absolutely sure I would.

I've never read Hardwick. Maybe I'll look into it.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

You MUST read Seductions & Betrayals her book of essays on women writers. I only found out about Hardwick's existence when she died last year. But she is a entertaining, original, and very easy-to-read literary essayist. I felt annoyed no one had told me about her before. However, The Genius of Margaret Fuller appears in another book of her essays on American writers called Sight-Readings: American Fictions.

I fell for a professor, but I knew it was an intellectual crush, and he was very good at redirecting the eros to the topic at hand. It also didn't hurt that I thought he was gay. My greatest disappointment was that there weren't more classes like his for me in college.

The discussion re: college and the Pill actually disturbed me a little bit, but I was worried my filter wasn't working so that the following might come out wrong. T's response, "I'm not a dog, you can't fix me," kind of aligned with my thoughts, which were something along the lines of: 'parents should ask their daughters if they want to go on the Pill, not dictate that this is the way they will be handling their fertility.' However, the equation of college and sex is pretty funny, particularly since the persons who had this experience were already sexually active.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

P.S. I think women's presence in the media is growing, but it is definitely less than men, and tends to hinge on their sex. Not only in a rumpled sheets kind of way, but the fact that we still need to point out that so-n-so (Maureen Dowd, Gail Collins, Manola Dargis) are women columnists. We don't go around pointing out that the men are men columnists, or that they represent the men's point of view. The difficulty of being seen as representing all women rather than an individuistic point of view, or one that aligns with a particularly political line of thought, is an enormous challenge still facing the women in the media today.

[srotu27.livejournal.com]

I don't disagree that there is a disparity between the number of feminine and masculine voices and that there is still ground to be gained, I just thought she overstated it, given how much progress has been made and how much freedom and opportunity we enjoy in comparison to women almost anywhere else in the world.

I completely agree that people putting their daughters on the Pill because they're going to college, regardless of the daughters' thoughts on the issue, is over the line--- it doesn't show any respect for the daughters' abilities to make informed decisions. I understand where it's coming from, but it did seem... yucky, to be technical. My father calling a shot like that from the sidelines would have bothered me a lot. Luckily, it wasn't done in my case.