To be honest, I don’t normally pay attention to the JUNO Awards. Often reflecting what major radio stations are playing as opposed to what Canadians are actually listening to, the Junos have in the past seemed…”out of touch” is a nice what to say it, I think.

This year, things appear to be a little different.
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Canice Leung, fantastic feminist columnist for The Metro, wrote a terrific piece about our exciting new project, the Shameless Wire.

Help us make this project happen. Donate today.

Full text of Canice’s column:

As many women do in university, I took a few women’s studies classes. I remember in one mostly female class of 40, the teacher asked who was feminist; my hand was among a sparse few that went up. But in class discussions, my classmates’ thoughts on gender roles or reproductive rights made clear that’s exactly what they were.

It’s an apt example of how necessary gender studies are; that young adults can dismiss feminism as radical yet recognize the cornerstones of the movement is evidence of this.

Fortunately, two initiatives are underway to change that.

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Wow. I’m a big fan of Terry O’Reilly’s radio show The Age of Persuasion and I watch more Mad Men than I like to admit, but every time I think I’m a savvy mediaphile who’s completely immune to shock tactics in the world of advertising, those zany ad execs prove me wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.

Hit the Bitch is a Danish anti-violence-against-women campaign that works much like a video game where you’re supposed to, well, beat up a woman. Your mouse or webcam controls a big, hairy, manly arm that slaps and punches a very realistic avatar of a woman, complete with sound effects and bruises that appear on her face. Your “performance” is ranked on a scale that goes from PUSSY to GANGSTA (we’ll get to the racist implications in a second). I was not able to complete the game, because I must be a pussy (& proud to say it!) but according to the AdFreak researchers, who are more dedicated than me, when you’ve successfully reduced the woman to a tearful pulp the game calls you an idiot. Well, on behalf of all abused women worldwide, thanks a mill’.

Yeah, so I didn’t really want to include an image from the Hit the Bitch website, since I figure we see enough images of women being abused and victimized, so here instead are Thelma and Louise, who fought back. Enjoy!

The AdFreak piece already makes several strong points about the absurdity of the site (people who think it’s okay to commit violence against women will enjoy it, while people to whom it’s revolting won’t be able to look at it for more than a second; it makes violence against women into a game, which is not okay no matter what the message), and personally I tend to agree that doing something in the name of a cause I support doesn’t equal carte blanche. Plus and besides are there so few images of victimized and abused women in the world that we need to start making more of them? I’d be curious to know where other people stand on that, but before I open up the floor I want to comment on what to me is maybe the most disturbing aspect of this ad, which is the conflation of violence against women and what the makers seem to suggest is a “gangsta” or hip-hop lifestyle.

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One more thing to get excited about for the upcoming weekend: Angela Davis, activist, writer and professor, is speaking at McGill University this Thursday about the case of Oscar Grant, a young black man who was shot and killed by transit police in California on New Year’s Day 2009.

Aaaaand… Davis is going to be interviewed on my radio show earlier that day! Tune into Venus on CKUT 90.3 FM (you can listen online as well, just follow the directions on the website) around 1:30 this Thursday the 1st. This is a great opportunity to hear an activist icon being interviewed in a non-mainstream- media setting. You can bet you’ll hear questions and answers you wouldn’t get anywhere else.

An activist poster of Davis from the 1970s(?)

From the Media@McGill press release:

“Oscar Grant was a young Black man returning home by way of the Fruitvale BART station after celebrating the New Year. This was the only excuse the cop needed to end Grant’s life execution-style. Maybe Oscar was too loud, too proud, too Black. Maybe he was too calm during the taunts of the police. Or maybe it was for nothing at all.”

Coming only days before the inauguration of Barack Obama – as the world’s media was proclaiming the dawn of a new “post-racial America” – the case of Oscar Grant demonstrated the depth and complexity of the relationship between media, race and power.

Renowned human rights activist Angela Davis will reflect on this issue in a Media@McGill / Beaverbrook public lecture entitled “Media, Race and Power: The Case of Oscar Grant”.

Angela Davis is an American political activist and university professor who was associated with the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Today, Davis continues to work for racial and gender equality, gay rights, and prison abolition and is a popular public speaker, nationally and internationally.

Thursday, October 1, 2009 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Room 132, Leacock Building, 855 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec

Even in Canada it’s been hard to miss the coverage over the last couple of weeks of the murder of Yale Grad student Annie Le.

In Slate on Thursday, Jack Shafer posted a rant about the extent of the coverage, in which he complains about the media’s obsession with crimes that take place at Harvard and Yale. The opening sentence, “If you plan to be murdered and expect decent press coverage, please have the good sense to be a Harvard or Yale student or professor” really sets the tone for what follows, which misses a lot of the other factors involved in this case.

In a blog post, Colin McEnroe takes Shafer to task for his flippancy, and gets to the heart of what it is about this murder in particular that has everyone scrabbling for the latest updates.

A comment on McEnroe’s blog reads:

“As a working woman, the fact that this horrific crime happened in the work place, during a work day, with lots of people in the building and all those cameras scares the daylights out of me … When I returned to work in Hartford on Wed I discussed this with several women at work. We all seem to feel the same. We are shocked, we are sad, and we are frightened.”

I think this is really important. What Shafer doesn’t get into even slightly, McEnroe points out, is that a lot of people are caught up not on the fact that this happened at an Ivy League university, but that it happened in a building with 75 security cameras. More significantly, it happened in circumstances in which so many women could easily imagine themselves.

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Just read a great article over at Bully Bloggers about Caster Semenya, the South African runner who recently underwent gender testing after she won a gold medal in Berlin. Incidentally, she also recently underwent a makeover, presumably with the purpose of quelling the panic that ensued around having a gender-ambiguous athletic hero. It’s disturbing on many levels, and the article’s author, Tavia Nyong’o, does a great job of tying in historical ideas of race and gender and how they play into what seems to be a good old-fashioned gender panic in the media, both for those who accuse and mock the runner and those who defend her. “If ever a case called for an intersectional analysis that included queer and trans perspectives, as well as anti-racist and anti-imperialist ones, this is it,” she writes.

Interestingly, many forums seem to agree that Semenya must feel “humiliated” (see link above), as much as at the gender testing as at the makeover, which makes her look like a “normal” teenage girl (whatever that means). Although I absolutely agree that no one should be subjected to gender oppression in the form of forced or coerced adoption of gender norms, it strikes me as odd that these media outlets tie “feminine” to “humiliating” so easily, while simultaneously continuing to push the same old agenda of representing attractive femininity as slim, delicate, long-haired and white. And preferably in a bikini. The cries of “she’s beautiful just the way she is!” seem a weeeee bit forced. In any case, I do recommend Nyong’o’s article for an interesting and challenging (if somewhat gender-studies-lingo-heavy) read.

Semenya in action

Did someone say “gender is fluid”?

The New York Times has published a really interesting article called The Women’s Crusade, as part of a special issue called Saving the World’s Women: How changing the lives of women and girls in the developing world can change everything. It’s a thorough and informative take on the oppressions faced by women worldwide, especially, as the title suggests, in developing countries, and how these problems might be remedied by foreign aid and investment. The authors suggest that by supporting women and girls in areas like education, healthcare, and small business, not only the lives of those women may be changed for the better, but the quality of life in society, and the world, at large. To which I say: hear, hear. And also: No duh.

The article is not without its problems, but it’s a worthwhile read, especially for those of us in the Western world who may not always have much insight into women’s struggles globally. It’s also a potent reminder that feminism is not, and is very far from being, “over,” as some of us in North America seem to want to tell ourselves.

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At this point criticsising PETA’s tactics might might seem like beating a dead horse (is that considered animal abuse?); we’ve already seen evidence of their gross, misogynist tendencies in the name of getting people to go veg and be nice to bunnies.

But come on. Really?

Animals: 1. Women: 0. Thanks, PETA.

Just for that, PETA, I’m going to go out and harass a gerbil. Then I’ma eat a steak. Rare. Take that, dirtbags.

This week, one of my friends informed me of the premature passing of filmmaker John Hughes, a man who practically defined youth culture in the Eighties with his brat pack movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty In Pink, and The Breakfast Club. We were discussing our favorite Hughes films, our favorite brat pack members, our favorite soundtrack song, when someone brought up Sixteen Candles.

We all remembered loving Sixteen Candles when we were younger, but when we rewatched it as adults, we found certain aspects disturbing. There was the racist comic relief provided by the Asian minstrel/exchange student, Long Duk Dong, and there was the scene where Jake Ryan, Molly Ringwald’s Object of Affection, passes off his car and his bitchy cheerleader girlfriend to The Geek, the lovable loser portrayed by Anthony Michael Hall. The girlfriend has had too much to drink and has passed out in the front seat. Instead of, I don’t know, doing something crazy like driving her home, Jake Ryan, Dreamboat Extraordinaire, gives her to The Geek, telling him to have fun (read: have sex with her, she won’t even remember in the morning). Wow. Thanks a lot for that wonderful message, John Hughes.

I’m not trying to hate on the man. After all, he gave the world the forever-awesome scene of Jeannie Bueller kicking Ed Rooney in the face. But I find the casual and unremarkable depiction of men trading a woman as a commodity disturbing. Unfortunately, sexual assault and violence against women is running rampant in Hollywood. Rape or the threat of rape appears in everything from comedies to action movies. Hollywood takes our terrifying culture of misogyny, which has most recently gifted us with a massacre in a fitness club, and turns it into a punchline. And it’s becoming more and more common.

I rented Blindness and found myself sick to my stomach after a 10-minute gang rape scene. My friend Trancer was grossed out by the threat of rape playing a part in the new Terminator movie, especially offensive since the franchise has spent over two decades as a bastion for strong female characters. In response, she decided to make a list of all the movies in which sexual assault or rape occurs. The list doesn’t judge the quality of the movies. As she states, “Some of these are good movies, some are bad and some are *really* bad! Some of these deal with the issue seriously. Most of them don’t.” And like the Guerilla Girls statistics comparing the number of exhibited women artists versus the number of female nudes on display in museums, Trancer decided to compare the number of films depicting men being sexually assaulted or threatened with sexual assault with the number of films depicting women being sexually assaulted or threatened with sexual assault. The current count, just based on reader submissions?

MOVIES IN WHICH WOMEN ARE SEXUALLY ASSAULTED OR THREATENED WITH SEXUAL ASSAULT: 179

MOVIES IN WHICH MEN ARE SEXUALLY ASSAULTED OR THREATENED WITH SEXUAL ASSAULT: 15

Click more to see the list as it currently stands. Have another film to add? Leave it in the comments. Let’s see exactly how big this list can grow. Let’s “show how commonplace and totally cliched sexual violence against women (while presented as entertainment and something that only happens to women) has become.”

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