Tina Fey’s Bossypants may rescue her reputation as a feminist
Is Liz Lemon feminist enough?
If you identify yourself as a feminist, you probably already have an opinion on Tina Fey. Around the time 30 Rock debuted, everyone I knew was a huge Tina Fey fan. “She’s so gorgeous and smart and a feminist,” my friends would gush, holding their copies of the Tina Fey issue of Bust. (I am of course talking here about the maybe two other feminists I knew in high school.)
Then, as Tina got more and more exposure, something changed. Friends started making faces at the sound of her name, uncertain of how to feel. People started talking about the problems with 30 Rock’s female characters, especially Liz Lemon’s pretty, brainless assistant, Cerie. Complaints began to rise, particularly from the feminist segment of the population, who, in case you haven’t noticed, kind of expects a lot from its media. Continue reading
New children’s book celebrates the joys of diet and weight loss
What, you mean you can't tell this book is about exercise?
No child should be reading a book that has the word “diet” in the title, especially when that book conflates weight loss with attractiveness and personal happiness—hell, no adult should be reading that book, but I can’t tell you what to do with your life.
But alas, this world is full of things that shouldn’t be. Maggie Goes on a Diet is a new book for 6-12 year olds about a 14-year-old girl who—you guessed it!—goes on a diet, loses a bunch of weight, and thus finds happiness. This book has been raising a lot of ire (check out the tags on Amazon.com), and for good reason.
The book’s description says that Maggie starts to eat healthily and becomes a soccer star (both of which are great things for kids to do). So does the cover show her eating fruit, preparing food, exercising, or playing soccer? Nope!
That’d be putting way too much focus on activities rather than bodies, so instead the cover shows a fat little girl staring into a mirror holding up a dress that doesn’t fit her, dreaming about her thinner reflection. (Side note: I used to do that all the time at the height of my disordered eating. Coincidence? Doubt it.) Continue reading
Stuff My Dad Says (Female Empowerment/Pre-Oscars Edition)
The other day, my dad (age 71) was telling me (age 35) about his 8 favorite movies of the year, since the Golden Globes and Oscars were coming up, and it occurred to me that most of them (except for #8, Inception) have multidimensional female characters who are mostly strong and empowered. And what’s cool is that the movies’ purposes are not to show strong, empowered women per se, but to tell complex stories about people in general.
Jennifer Lawrence in "Winter's Bone"
My dad’s kind of a conservative, and I’m always pretty impressed by his support of good roles for women given the era in which he came of age. So I asked him to be a guest blogger. He’s not a writer, but he sent me a few words anyway. Given that he gave me this list before the Oscar nominations came out, I think he may have called a few of ‘em. Here he is.
Black Swan is many kinds of movies in one. Natalie Portman nails the role of a lifetime and not just because she studied ballet and dieted herself down.
Winter’s Bone: The main character, Ree (Jennifer Lawrence), takes us on a journey through her meager existence with many barriers in her way. Undaunted courage that we can all try to emulate in our own lives.
In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Lisbeth Salander, played by Noomi Rapace, is now in movie history as a special character with grit and more grit. There has to be a special mention just for being the new female anti-hero.
Morning Glory: Ah, almost all the critics hated it, but I liked it a lot. Harrison Ford played it straight and tough. Great cast but the Rachel McAdams love story part was a dud. People were laughing in the theatre. Very witty without being cutsey.
Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart in "The Runaways."
The Runaways was made on a shoestring budget, which is what the band member’s lives were like. The Runwaways were Joan Jett’s group, but the film isn’t only about her. And it’s applicable to today, showing the travails of girl rockers who are too young for what they are going through. The epilogue tells us that Jett’s anthem, “I Love Rock and Roll”, was rejected by 50-100 people before she produced it herself. What a shame.
Secretariat isn’t really about the horse but about the owner, Penny Chenery Tweedy (Diane Lane). In 1970, Tweedy leaves Denver, where she is a housewife, to go to Virginia to take care of the arrangements of her mother’s funeral. Her father, who she is very close to, has Alzeheimer’s. He then dies and she chooses a foal, Secretariat. She takes control of the farm and the horse’s management. There’s much in this film about the chauvinism of the age. I had many a tear.
To my dad’s list, I would add True Grit (Hailee Steinfeld, yes! All girls over age 14 should see this movie), Alice In Wonderland (so many reasons), and The Fighter (Amy Adams stands up for herself, but was also a really loving character).
Have you seen any of these movies? What did you think?
–Jennifer
Female desire and the princess culture
Peggy Orenstein's new book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, is a must-read.
Peggy Orenstein‘s new book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, hit stores this week, and it’s a must-read. It’s a page-turning exploration of “princess culture” and its impact on girls. Peggy’s also an About-Face supporter, having donated a special book club session to our November silent auction. We love this blog post written by Margot Magowan, and think it gets the message across that this book should be required reading.
– Michelle
Originally posted on ReelGirl and written by Margot Magowan:
Thank you Peggy Orenstein for writing the brilliant book Cinderella Ate My Daughter. Every parent should read this new, excellent analysis of the ubiquitous princess kid-culture and its various mutations in the world of grown-up women.
Orenstein, a NY Times journalist, mom, and writer takes on and deconstructs two (so annoying!) messages every parent hears if she dares to challenge the monarchy of these frothy creatures.
Myth number one: we’re just giving girls what they want! Continue reading
Portia de Rossi’s memoir: Important story, but may trigger those with eating disorders
By now, you’ve probably seen actress Portia de Rossi on Ellen, Oprah, and the cover of People magazine talking about her new book, Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain, which chronicles her eating disorder and how she recovered. Because I steer the About-Face ship, I figured I should know what all the fuss was about.
What I found was complicated. Unbearable Lightness is an accessible and difficult story that will be informative and helpful for friends and families of people with eating disorders who need to understand their loved one. But for those recovering from or in the throes of an eating disorder (or even for people with “those thoughts”), I thoroughly recommend staying away from it.
Reading de Rossi’s testimony, it was easy for me to recognize myself (overachiever, perfectionist, self-pressured, sensitive) and alternately to be horrified by Ms. de Rossi’s actions and thoughts as she sunk further and further down the drain of her eating disorder. While reading Unbearable Lightness, I said “That is messed UP!” aloud more times than I can count, while also feeling some intense compassion.
… I had barely any furniture. I had no chairs and no sofa, no coffee table. The only indication that someone lived there was my large collection of antique mannequins that were propped up around the living room. While I had always enjoyed them as an expression of the female form, the mannequins became useful as sometimes I measured them and compared my body measurements. I had just started measuring my body parts as a more accurate indication of my weight loss. Mannequins represented the ideal form. By comparing myself to the mannequins, I could take an honest look at how I measured up to that ideal. But mostly I just liked to look at their thin, hard limbs. (p. 159)
This is the story of a smart woman who still ends up falling for all the garbage we’re fed about being thin (which she admits to on page 286).
And then it was easy for me to see the widespread effects – to be reminded again of what the white, female culture of thinness does to so many of us every day. We’re fighting a misogynistic culture and media system, sisters, and you’d better believe that eating disorders and body image obsession are symptoms of that disease.
The Struggle
Here’s the very brief summary of Unbearable Lightness: At age 12, little Portia begins modeling, and starving herself (“dieting”) just before shoots to take off extra weight. Her mother reluctantly gives her some dieting tips. She binges after each shoot. The shoots get closer together, and she never learns to eat normally. She realizes she’s gay, and hides it for fear of losing her career. Years later she is an actress on a show full of thin women (Ally McBeal), she’s reducing calorie intake lower and lower, having an unhealthy relationship with her treadmill, and eventually being unable to move or bend her joints. Once she finds out she has major medical problems due to starving herself, de Rossi begins recovering – also a long, slow road.
Her story is special because of her successful TV and modeling career. But at the same time, everything de Rossi describes is a classic eating disorder symptom. The self-absorption. The competitive nature. The obsession with numbers. Blocking out the most prized people in your life to eat secretly, exercise secretly. The self-congratulation and superiority, the self-hatred and self-doubt. And obviously, the starving, bingeing, and purging.
The beauty in this book is the confident honesty that de Rossi uses to bring us through her story. Ms. de Rossi was like a frog being slowly boiled in her own thoughts and her culture’s expectations for her, and reading it feels the same way. But she never overdramatizes to pander to the reader. She tells it straight, tells you what she was feeling at the moment, never looking back to criticize herself. And somehow, emotion comes through as well:
The scale confirmed what I suspected. It read [###]. … It reminded me that no matter what I did, I could never win – that my body with its bones and its guts and its blood weighed in at what it felt comfortable being as a living organism with its own needs. It hated me and thought I was stupid for attempting to change it with my tortuous rituals of forcing regurgitation and starving it of food. It always had the upper hand, the last word. And the last word was [###]. (p. 128)
The most poignant, beautiful moment of Unbearable Lightness is when de Rossi is having a conversation with a doctor after she collapses on a movie set. We see four two-page spreads: on the left side of the page, there’s a quote such as “Okay. Your liver enzymes were extremely elevated, which are actually at the levels of cirrhosis,” and on the right side, a modeling shot of Ms. de Rossi looking glamorous and thin.
The juxtaposition will catch all readers by surprise. My heart skipped a beat and got caught in my throat.
Luckily for Portia, she realizes that when her body stops functioning, she has “lost” the game. She gives up, and begins the also-tortuous road to getting better and living a new life.
The Caveat: Trigger Central
I’ve said a lot of nice things about Unbearable Lightness, but it’s also hugely important to issue a big warning for this book: May be highly triggering for those with eating disorders or disordered eating habits – you know who you are. (A psychotherapist who works with About-Face tells us that many of her clients have been triggered by de Rossi’s story.)
Portia de Rossi at a book signing in LA
Other memoirs like this one have been big (i.e. the wrong kind of information) in pro-ED communities, and I would hate to see this one added to the list.
“But it must be so uplifting, because she gets better!” Right? Well, sort of. Ninety percent (272 pages) of Unbearable Lightness details de Rossi’s eating disorder, and ten percent (30 pages) is about her own, personal recovery. I certainly didn’t expect a full-on recovery book, and this certainly is not.
Everyone has a right to tell her story, and Ms. de Rossi, being an intelligent person, may have even thought about the possibility that she’d trigger others before publishing the book.
I have some questions I’d like to ask Portia that Oprah and Ellen didn’t ask. For example, whether de Rossi thinks the true root cause of her eating disorder was a media/modeling culture of thinness. And whether she still has days when she feels the old demons coming back to get her. (Maybe I’ll give her a ring.)
Metaphorically speaking, de Rossi’s story is one of a person who played limbo with her body until her back almost broke. Thank goodness that Ms. de Rossi is alive (very alive) to tell the tale.
– Jennifer B.
Portia de Rossi and other celebrities play the numbers game
Portia de Rossi's new book, "Unbearable Lightness," discusses the specifics of her eating disorder. Helpful or harmful?
Numbers are evil.
Here’s the perfect example. Yesterday morning, I gleefully parked myself in front of the TV to watch Regis & Kelly. I immediately regretted doing so as the lovely Ms. Ripa (who herself has been repeatedly criticized in the media for being too thin) rattled off the number of calories in an average Thanksgiving meal (hint: there are a lot).
Sure, it’s sort of fascinating to know the random holiday trivia, and yes, plenty of Americans get their grub on and seriously overeat on Turkey Day. But all dissecting the celebratory meal fat gram by fat gram might do is elicit a panic attack in anyone with food issues, not help anyone virtuously monitor their appetite.
I’m continually amazed and appalled at the onslaught of potentially damaging digits that get thrown around in the media. (You know what I mean: weights, BMIs, calories consumed, calories burned, miles run, inches lost, fat grams counted, etc. etc.) I imagine the deluge of facts and figures must be maddening enough for the average person, but as anyone with disordered eating or body image issues knows, these numbers can be triggering and potentially lethal.
Kelly's awesome, but I wish she'd keep the calorie counting to herself
Most recently, actress Portia de Rossi released her memoir, Unbearable Lightness. I applaud her for speaking out on her history with anorexia, but throwing around scale readings and calorie counts can sometimes provide toxic TMI for those seeking it out.
About-Face‘s Jennifer will read and review Portia’s book for the blog next month, but in the meantime, I’d caution anyone still struggling with body issues to seriously consider the repercussions of reading the nitty-gritty details of someone else’s suffering.
Because, admit it, numbers kinda suck.
– Michelle
Katherine Schwarzenegger’s new book tells girls to rock what they’ve got
Katherine rocks it on the cover of her new book.
Celebrity spawn doing good in the world? It’s possible!
Katherine Schwarzenegger (you may have heard of her dad, Arnold? Oh, and her mom, Maria Shriver.) is proving that growing up in the spotlight doesn’t necessarily lead to DUIs and diva behavior.
Rather than cash in on her famous name (hi there, Paris Hilton), Katherine is reaching out to young girls with her new book, Rock What You’ve Got: Secrets to Loving Your Inner and Outer Beauty From Someone Who’s Been There and Back, in stores today.
“I want girls to read this and feel that it’s OK to be themselves – and to understand that every girl can be beautiful no matter what size and shape she is,” Katherine said. “You don’t have to look like you’re on a billboard to feel beautiful. I really wanted to correct girls’ perception of that.”
20-year-old Katherine said she was inspired to write the book after she overheard her younger cousins talking about their bodies. “They’re 8 years old and were talking about how they don’t want to be fat, and how they want to be ‘sexy,’” she said. Gee, I wonder where on earth they could have possibly gotten ideas like those (it certainly couldn’t have been from images like this)?
Katherine with her famous mom and dad.
I’ll have to read the book before I can officially give her props, but I have to applaud Katherine for speaking out.
It’s hard enough to learn to accept your body for what it is. It must be much harder to do so with a former body-builder for a dad (according to a press release, Arnold was prone to “point out how many calories were in the muffin she was eating.“). And it must be infinitely harder to accomplish all of this under the intense, scrutinizing gaze of the media (nothing sells tabloids like stories of stars’ kids gone bad).
So, thank you Katherine, for at least proving a celebrity pedigree doesn’t always lead to disaster.
You can check out more about Katherine’s book here.
- Michelle
Joan Rivers: the face of feminism?
The comic contemplates her next revolutionary move in "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work."
She’s nipped, tucked, Botoxed, and damn proud of it.
So maybe Joan Rivers is a less-than-likely representative of female empowerment, but the woman has certainly made her mark. The new documentary, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work examines a year in the life of the legendary comic, and I certainly got more than I bargained for from the indie flick. Like a new role model, for instance.
Sure, many people know Joan more for the ever-progressing plasticity of her face, but the 77-year-old has been cracking jokes and offending the masses for half a century. Whether or not you care for her current repertoire (she’s lately been known to pick on celebs like Lindsay Lohan and Miley Cyrus via Twitter), A Piece of Work underscores the impact Rivers had on a previously prudish American audience.
Regarding one of her earlier risque routines featured in the film, Rivers said,
I was the first one to discuss abortion, and it was very rough…And I couldn’t even say the word “abortion”…And by making jokes about it, you brought it into a position where you could look at it and deal with it. It was no longer something that you couldn’t discuss and had to whisper about. When you whisper about something, it’s too big and you can’t get it under control and take control of it.
Say what you will about the woman, but bringing an issue like abortion to the forefront of America’s consciousness in the ‘60s was pretty courageous. Continue reading
The Twilight series: A New Moon with old trends
New Moon movie poster
I wouldn’t describe my feelings for the Twilight saga as “love” or even “like,” but more along the lines of “obsessed.” When I read the four books in the Twilight series, along with millions of teenage girls, I was engrossed in a world where one could go to school with vampires and be best friends with a werewolf.
However, another feeling rivaled my fanatic obsession while reading the Twilight saga; extreme aggravation. Continue reading
Fourth graders feeling fat: The plummeting self-image of young girls
Girls like Sarah Totonchi (shown here in 1986) were convinced they were fat at age nine
In his recent article for the Wall Street Journal, Jeffrey Zaslow reports recently contacting women from a 1986 study of fourth graders, in which 75% of the girls revealed that they felt like they weighed too much, and more than half claimed to be on diets.
The girls weren’t alone in their concerns about weight: a fourth-grade boy, when interviewed, said “Fat girls aren’t like regular girls. They aren’t attractive.”
But the societal pressure on girls has increased exponentially during the two decades since the first interview. Continue reading