A friend recently asked me to watch the ridiculously long “Telephone” video by Lady Gaga and Beyoncé as she wanted my feminist opinion on it. She described it thusly: lady gaga is thrown in prison, has explicit lesbian relations, gets telephone call for the sole purpose of showing a virgin mobile shot, gets out of prison, goes to a restaurant and poisons Beyoncé’s boyfriend and everyone else, dresses in an American flag and dances around in the dead bodies before driving off Thelma & Louise style in a vehicle labeled “pussy wagon.”

It’s a pretty accurate description:

And here’s Fox News’ conservative reaction to the clip:

But the objections of feminists, while similarly concerned for the representation of women and the sexualization of violence in this clip, are inherently different than those expressed at Fox News. Sean Macaulay at the Daily Beast sums it up when he says the video is all about “lezploitation”:

The women-in-prison genus has been in steady use since the 1920s, and its rules and clichés are among the most strictly observed of exploitation fare. “Telephone” is no exception, and reverently starts with a New Fish (Lady Gaga) arriving at a jail to Run the Gauntlet of Leering Inmates before being Sexually Assaulted by pair of strapping Lesbian Guards.

Sadly, the video epic doesn’t have time to include other staples of the category, such as the Sadistic Warden; the Queen Bee; the Inmate on the Edge, usually carrying a pet mouse; the Wise Old Lifer, who generally works in the library; and the aforementioned Shower Scene. This last one is a glaring omission, rather like reviving Oklahoma! without “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top.”

But “Telephone”—directed by Jonas Åkerlund—makes up for these omissions with a vicious catfight, a mass murder, and a deadpan Beyoncé doing a Kill Bill homage as the “butch top” in this criminal partnership. “You’ve been a very bad girl,” she tells her wayward lover. “A very, very, bad, bad, girl, Gaga.”

I found this last quote interesting as it’s followed up with both women putting a very phallic object in their mouths. You see, unfortunately Sean Macaulay isn’t critical of lezploitation as a genre that sexualizes violence and constructs a fantasy ideal of women as secretly loving abuse and as always ravenous for sex (from men, btw).

But besides the obvious gender issues of the clip, what I find much more subversive and dangerous is the advertising in a way that I can only really compare to the 2001 film Josie and the Pussycats:

Upon a little further investigation, I realized that Virgin Mobile was getting so many shots because they’re sponsoring Gaga’s world tour and she has multiple deals with them in the works. But then, I came across this really interesting list in The Moderate Voice, from which I learned that a lot of the labels were unpaid spots:

* Wonder Bread: Unpaid. Used in a sequence showing Gaga poisoning diner customers, because Gaga wanted to contrast the poisoning with an all-American brand.

* Miracle Whip: Paid. Used in the same scene-and for the same reason-as Wonder Bread; seems to be part of the spread’s new, edgier campaign.

* Diet Coke: Unpaid. It was Gaga’s idea to curl her hair with Diet Coke cans in the video as an homage to her mother.

* Virgin Mobile: The cell phone in the video is a nod to the company, a mobile sponsor of Gaga’s Monster Ball tour.

* Polaroid: Camera and photo booth featured acknowledge Gaga’s role as Polaroid’s creative director.

* Heartbeats headphones and Beats laptop : Unpaid. An extension of her partnerships with Interscope Music and Hewlett Packard.

* PlentyofFish.com: Unclear. Possibly the weirdest deal of the bunch; result of the dating site’s partnership with Interscope.

And of course, the sponsors of the video knew what they were getting into – this video wasn’t meant for regular airplay. It’s allegedly been banned from MTV. This video was made to be viral, so people like me and my friends would discuss it and then look for it online, post it on our blogs, and discuss more. All to benefit Virgin-fucking-mobile and Miracle Whip (though I really love the latter…). As Feministe points out:

It was not designed to be shown on television, ever! It is ten minutes long, and it has more dialogue than music, and it has the “fuck” word and naked breasts and vaginas and girl-on-girl action and basically everybody gets murdered. At no point did anyone making this video think, “I’m still pretty sure we could get this on television, though.” No. It was made to be on the Internet. And you can tell because this affects the form itself, like the actual decisions of how to shoot and edit the damn thing. You can tell this video was meant to be turned into nine million animated GIFs, for example, because there are several parts of it that are shot to look like animated GIFs: you know that thing where there’s like two seconds of movement that loops back around on itself in a weird, jerky, headache-inducing way? That’s what this video looks like, a lot of the time. Gaga has now apparently incorporated not just an analysis of gender and sexuality into her work, she has apparently decided to take on the issue of new media.

Advertisers are getting smarter. We’re all becoming more susceptible. Damn them.

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What a buffoon! According to a Sydney-based researcher, the Australian Prime Minister, at an event in January, told her that her PhD was an excuse commonly used by young women “to avoid starting a family”.

Deputy PM Julia Gillard better get on the clean up trail after that one. Apparently Mr. Rudd doesn’t recall making such a comment. I’m sure he did – he’s such a useless goon. I’m also sure he’s not a total misogynist like his rival, Tony Abbott. He’s just an indoctrinated, socialized, mostly-misogynist like most other men. He may not really believe she’s avoiding having babies, but his comment does imply a belief that education is somehow lost on women.

And I don’t fully believe that Rudd wants to see women get a fair go. Otherwise his government would not have just denied any possibility of a quota system for women’s employment. According to a newly released KPMG report, only 54 per cent of employed women are full-time, compared to 84 per cent of men. The findings didn’t seem to phase Minister for the Status of Women, Tanya Plibersek, who sluffed off the suggestion that the government should address this disparity with an appeal to the fact that the report included no formal recommendations to government.

Riiiight, so governments are incapable of analysing data and finding their own solutions, but must rely on recommendations from the private or NFP sector for action?

Bullshit, Ruddy, you just think women have stolen enough rights and should be happy with where they’ve gotten to, right?

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Gosh, on the heels of that disturbing study on the attitudes of children yesterday comes another figure out of the UK, this time from an online poll of over 1000 respondents, that more than 50% of women believe rape victims bear some responsibility for their attack.

The poll was administered by Haven, a safe refuge for female survivors of abuse, and called ‘Wake Up to Rape.’ The responses were startling:

A fifth of the women said the victim was partly responsible if they went back to the assailant’s house and a 10th said taking a drink from a stranger had unforeseen consequences.

Twenty per cent of women surveyed said they would not report a rape to police, with half of those citing shame or embarrassment as a reason.

Furthermore:

One in eight thought a victim who danced in a provocative manner on a night out was also to blame for any consequences.

In a more striking finding, 14 per cent of the women told the surveyors that 14 per cent of women believe most rape accusations were cooked up.

More than a third of women thought that rape victims who’d gone back to a man’s place for a drink were partly to blame for the attack, compared to less than a fifth of the male respondents.

Interestingly, it was mostly women aged 18-24 who espoused these opinions. This is a really frightening social regression after the lengths feminists have gone to to get courts to recognize any form of non-consensual sexual activity to be rape. It’s a bizarre form of self-denial that women put themeselves through to think that it won’t happen to them if they behave in a certain way. The issue is not that women look or act a certain way and put themselves in vulnerable situations. It’s that men choose to rape. It’s that rape, in the words of Susan Brownmiller, is a tool of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear for the purposes of maintaining male dominance.

This wasn’t something I truly grasped until I read the title of Andrea Dworkin’s speech to the Midwest Regional Conference of the National Organization for Changing Men: “I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape.” Read it! It’s incredibly moving. Here’s an excerpt:

We women. We don’t have forever. Some of us don’t have another week or another day to take time for you to discuss whatever it is that will enable you to go out into those streets and do something. We are very close to death. All women are. And we are very close to rape and we are very close to beating. And we are inside a system of humiliation from which there is no escape for us. We use statistics not to try to quantify the injuries, but to convince the world that those injuries even exist. Those statistics are not abstractions. It is easy to say, “Ah, the statistics, somebody writes them up one way and somebody writes them up another way.” That’s true. But I hear about the rapes one by one by one by one by one, which is also how they happen. Those statistics are not abstract to me. Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.

And it is happening for a simple reason. There is nothing complex and difficult about the reason. Men are doing it, because of the kind of power that men have over women. That power is real, concrete, exercised from one body to another body, exercised by someone who feels he has a right to exercise it, exercised in public and exercised in private. It is the sum and substance of women’s oppression.

It is not done 5000 miles away or 3000 miles away. It is done here and it is done now and it is done by the people in this room as well as by other contemporaries: our friends, our neighbors, people that we know. Women don’t have to go to school to learn about power. We just have to be women, walking down the street or trying to get the housework done after having given one’s body in marriage and then having no rights over it.

The power exercised by men day to day in life is power that is institutionalized. It is protected by law. It is protected by religion and religious practice. It is protected by universities, which are strongholds of male supremacy. It is protected by a police force. It is protected by those whom Shelley called “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”: the poets, the artists. Against that power, we have silence.

I would argue it’s also institutionalised by the socialisation of women to believe in the system. To believe that we play a role in our own abuse. To believe that men have this right – this male sex right – over our bodies, over our actions, over us. Systems naturally want to reproduce themselves and the shit we are fed in the media is for this purpose – the maintenance of patriarchy and women’s subordination. Somehow, somewhere we’re being told we’re to blame for men’s violence and that voice is so pervasive it’s reaching children, who are parroting this belief.

Again… dangerous. Dangerous stuff.

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In one of the most disturbing news stories of the year, the BBC had an article today on research of schoolchildren that has found most students think violence towards women is okay if there is a reason behind it. The examples of times when it’s okay? If the woman has an affair or is late making dinner.

The research was conducted in Glasgow with 94 primary children aged 11 and 12 years. The children were questioned in depth about their attitudes and aspirations towards gender roles and behaviour. The children were asked to consider if it was okay for a man to punch his wife/girlfriend if he found out she had had an affair. Nearly all the children thought this was justifiable. In a second scenario, roughly 80% of the children said a man was justified in slapping his partner because she did not have the dinner ready on time.

Edinburgh Napier University researcher Nancy Lombard says of her findings:

“The children didn’t agree with violence, but gave reasons to try to justify it if the woman had done something ‘wrong’. The old saying of ‘If he pulls your pigtails it means he likes you’, translates into violence in adulthood which girls accept as normal.”

Another disturbing finding of Lombard’s study was that girls expected to modify their behaviour and narrow expectations once they were married and had children.

One of the girls said: “I want to be a dancer or a doctor.”

But she added: “When I grow up I’m going to have two babies and work part-time in the shop down the road.”

Lombard argues that gender role stereotypes are limited girls’ perceptions of life options and their behaviours in order to ‘accommodate’ men and boys. Honestly, while part of me is surprised by these findings, another part of me isn’t. The socialisation of girls to fulfill gender roles of nurturers and carers starts very early, and I think has gotten stronger with the advent of marketing to children. Toys that used to be gender-neutral are now much more gendered, to the point that even Lego blocks are marketed separately towards girls and boys. This has been found to be deeply embedded at all levels of marketing.

What’s the implication? These are stereotypes that reflect male dominance exacerbate social inequalities for women in all areas of their lives, from the workplace to the home. And clearly this is resulting in some sort of perverse regression to fifties-era gender ideal-types and norms of social behaviour. The next generation is clearly growing with expectations that women exist for the sole purpose of serving men.

Dangerous!

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Valentine’s Day is illegal in Saudi Arabia, and the police are out in full force to crackdown on shops selling anything red to ensure nobody in any way celebrates romance or love. Members of the religious police have been scouring shops for red roses, heart-shaped products or gifts wrapped in red.

Interestingly, these items are legal for purchase at other times during the year, but they are not allowed in the vicinity of Valentine’s Day. Apparently the Western notion of romantic love has been corrupting Muslim youth. A statement by the religious police posted in major media outlets read:

“Those who don’t comply will be punished,” the statement said, without spelling out what measures would befall the offenders.

I’m sure there are more than a few Western men that wouldn’t mind seeing such a draconian ban in their own cities. And while the commercialism surrounding any calendar date that can now be commercialised is enough to make anyone react in disgust, it’s clearly an arbitrary violation of basic rights. I could only imagine the reaction should, as happens in so many other Western countries at this time of year, a production of The Vagina Monologues was to open in Riyadh.

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Durex has come out with a series of new print ads featuring sexual acts with the bodies of the heterosexual couple comprised of words that presumably their different body parts are thinking/feeling. Take a look:

Right… apparently while giving head, I’m not only feeling dainty and really into the taste, but am all kinds of satisfied (pleased, contented, happy, smug). And apparently my boobs can’t stop thinking about themselves. And I’m really hungry for… fruit? What? Meanwhile, men’s penises turn into their brains and their entire bodies go into some sort of system failure?

But wait, there’s more:

Here, I am quaking and numb and shuddering and vibrating throughout my whole body (save for boobs, which are still thinking of themselves, apparently) with apparent pleasure, but wait… my head… I’m confused and paralysed and embarrassed. Apparently I’m privately traumatised from my pleasure?

I quite appreciate Katy’s analysis at Jezebel:

The most annoying thing about these ads is that they have the potential to be really good – if they made a little more sense. The female body is shown as a complex textbook of emotions, while men are reduced to one single thought (or less). Naturally, Krahne wants to play up the sexy part of sex, but wouldn’t it be funnier if the oral sex-woman was thinking about “suction,” “teeth,” “knee pain” or if we wanted to be really honest, “this condom tastes like a Fruit Roll-Up that has been sprayed with Lysol.” Also, we appreciate that it takes a certain about of strain to maintain that position for men, but it’s not exactly a cakewalk for us either. Finally, maybe instead of “confusion,” a woman on the brink of an orgasm could be shown thinking “hells yes!” or at the very least “don’t stop.”

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Somewhat good news story of the week: small and stable Central American country, Costa Rica, has elected its first female president and apparently she won by an overwhelming majority, more than 20-points ahead of her nearest contender. The new president, Laura Chinchilla, apparently won on a campaign of continuing economic liberalisation that analysts believe is responsible for the stability of the country that has relatively high standard of living and the longest life expectancy of any country in Latin America.

The 50-year-old protege of the current president, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oscar Arias, promised to pursue the same economic policies that recently brought the country into a trade pact with the U.S. and opened commerce with China.

“Today we are making history,” said Chinchilla, who will be the fifth Latin American woman to be elected president when she takes office in May. “The Costa Rican people have given me their confidence, and I will not betray it.”

The not so good news? Chincilla is a social conservative who opposes abortion and gay marriage. She’s not a woman who represents women or women’s rights. She’s a continuation of the same-old same-old power structures entrenched in Costa Rican society. The Christian Science Monitor mistakenly calls this election evidence of women’s rise in Latin America. But is it really the case if women are only electorally viable if they espouse more conservative values than their male counterparts?

Though there is a growing trend across Latin America of increased representation of women, largely due to affirmative action quotas implemented in more than a dozen countries in the region, I can’t help but feel that if it were up to these women, there would be no quotas or affirmative action. These women sound to me like the Sarah Palins of the Latin region. Is it really progress if, although she’s a woman, she supports and implements more socially conservative laws than we might get from a progressive like Morales or Chavez?

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When I read the headline today, I was immediately reminded of early-century eugenics programs that were so popular across the Western world that they largely informed the Nazi holocaust. Apparently a US organisation is giving monetary incentives to encourage drug addicts to get sterilized.

The organisation calls itself Project Prevention and is headed by Barbara Harris, who intends to pay $300 to drug addicts on the provision they get long-term contraception or seek sterilization. The organisation was founded in 1997 and is funded through private donations and is not-for-profit. So far, it claims to have given funds to over 3200 drug-addicted “clients,” of whom more than 1200 are women who have been permanently sterilized.

Apparently Harris is driven by her own experience, having adopted the four children of a crack-addicted woman in Los Angeles. She says of the second of the four, Taylor:

“He couldn’t keep food down and his eyes looked like they were going to bulge out of his head,” she says. “Noise bothered him, light bothered him, he just couldn’t sleep.

“My husband and I had to take shifts with him. He would sleep 10 minutes, wake up screaming. I was just angry at his mom, I thought how could somebody do this to a baby?”

I admire that this woman has concern for disadvantaged children born into pretty terrible circumstances. However, sterilization is clearly not the solution. It’s not the solution for the simple reason that drug addiction is not a permanent state. And offering money as an incentive to get sterilised is preying upon the vulnerabilities of addicts, whom I hear will take rather drastic measures to get funding for their next hit. Harris understands this of drug addicts and uses their disease against them. Surely this is based on a prejudicial idea about the social capacity of people with addictions – that they can never recover and become productive members of society or good parents. It’s a campaign of social engineering – a way of preventing people with a problem from ever reproducing. Surely these funds could be better used in drug education, awareness, prevention campaigns, or safe-needle houses, or prenatal care facilities for vulnerable and/or disadvantaged people.

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Trust superbowl Sunday to construct a celebration of all that is mainstream misogynist, hyper-masculine with the ads that the world has been abuzz about. In case anyone still harboured romantic ideals that our culture had become more equal and respectful, here’s a mash-up via Feministing:

The ads that don’t make the cut? The ads too unpalatable for CBS? Man with head up own ass, and ‘the gay kiss’ ad:

For great analysis of the above and other ads, check out this piece in the Washington City Paper by Amanda Hess.

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Four years into its mandate, the International Criminal Court has yet to secure a conviction for those accused of committing horrific war crimes since 2002. Yet again, the court has decided to drop charges against an accused war criminal due to lack of evidence. The latest war criminal to escape justice is Abu Garda of Darfur, who was accused of killing 12 African Union peacekeepers in 2007, and voluntarily turned himself in to authorities last year. However, ICC judges have ruled that there is not enough evidence against Abu Garda to support a trial.

According to the press release, the pre-trial Chamber:

“was not satisfied that there was sufficient evidence to establish substantial grounds to believe that Bahar Idriss Abu Garda could be held criminally responsible either as a direct or as an indirect co-perpetrator for the commission of the crimes”

This is on the heels of the dropped charges against the Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, the first case to go to trial at the ICC, for the same reason – lack of evidence. I had such high hopes for this institution, created as a permanent international court with the power to punish the most serious violations of human rights. The purpose of the court was to take away the ‘ad hoc’ nature of prosecutions of war crimes, which until the establishment of the ICC relied upon the political will of the international community to agree to the establishment of an international criminal tribunal, like the ones for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda.

The situation of Darfur was unique for the ICC as it was the first situation to be referred by the Security Council of the United Nations. Other cases have been referred to the Special Prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, by the countries themselves affected. So given the lack of cooperation by the government in Sudan, I can understand the limitations with gathering evidence. However, this is a problem that appears to be plaguing the court.

Understandably, witnesses and evidence is a difficult thing to collect in a guerilla conflict. But is it the case that Mr. Ocampo is just not trying hard enough to gather the necessary evidence to secure a conviction? Or is it that Western legal standards are just unsuitable to trialling international war crimes? We clearly will never get a Law and Order: War Crimes and Atrocities Unit, in which teams of highly specialized forensic technologists scour desert and jungle floors for evidence that this particular armed rebel commited this particular atrocity. I would like to be able to say it should be enough that there is overwhelming evidence proving that you are a person of a particular rank within a particular armed group and that that armed group has been witnessed committing war crimes to convict that person of war crimes. Perhaps there is too much individual agency attributed to violators of international law. But clearly this would be problematic.

I don’t know what solution to offer the ICC and I’m sure their much more qualified legal experts are working hard to address their lack of success. I do hope for a win for the ICC sometime soon, as the institution is quickly losing credibility in the eyes of the international community.

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