Check out this by Laura Rosbrow about how we need more women leaders.
Why did it take so long for a woman to win best director?
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Author Archives: margotmagowan
Are childless women happy?
Best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert says childless women are just fine
The husband, the kids, the picket fence, you know this scene. Women’s biological clocks are desperately ticking. We’re on a quest to secure a man so we can reproduce, because becoming mothers will make us truly happy and fulfilled.
While childless men manage to find a respectable place in society, often with a few publicly recognized achievements under their belts, admired, or even envied, as the self-sufficient bachelors they are; childless women remain suspect, if not total freaks. They’re often pitied; people wonder at what point in their lives they veered off onto their unnatural, unfeminine paths, becoming lonely “spinsters” or crazy cat ladies.
Best-selling, childless author of Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert introduces a radically different theory in her new book Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. She writes that childless women have historically served a crucial role in society, not yet publicly recognized. These women should not be scorned but celebrated for their contributions to bettering the human race.
Gilbert writes:
“If you look across human populations of all varieties, in every culture and on every continent (even among the most enthusiastic breeders in history, like the nineteenth-century Irish, or the contemporary Amish), you will find that there is a constant 10 percent of women within any population who never have children at all. The percentage never gets any lower than that, in any population whatsoever. In fact, the percentage of women who never reproduce in most societies is usually much higher than 10 percent- and that’s not just today, in the developed Western world, where childless rates among women tend to hover around 50 percent.”
Gilbert speculates that female childlessness is an evolutionary adaption:
“Maybe it’s not only legitimate for certain women to never reproduce, it’s necessary. It’s as though, as as a species, we need an abundance of responsible, compassionate, childless women to support the wider community in various ways. Childbearing and child rearing consume so much energy that the women who do become mothers quickly become swallowed up by that daunting task- if not outright killed by it.”
Elizabeth GilbertGilbert points out that childless women have always taken on the tasks of nurturing children who are not their biological responsibilty as no other group in history has ever done, in such vocations as running schools, hospitals, and becoming midwives.
That’s all fine and good, but won’t these childless women be desperately unhappy in their old age?
Gilbert says no. Recent studies of happiness levels in America’s nursing homes show the indicators of contentment in later life are poverty and health. “Save your money, floss your teeth…you’ll be a perfectly happy old bird someday.”
Gilbert concedes that without descendants, childless women are often forgotten more quickly, but that the role they played when alive was vital. Gilbert calls these vibrant women the “Auntie Brigade.” Here are some examples she lists of their influences:
Jane Austen was a childless aunt.
Raised by childless aunts:
Leo Tolstoy
Truman Capote
the Bronte sisters
Edward Gibbon (famous historian raised by his Aunt Kitty)
John Lennon (Auntie Mimi– convinced him he would be an important artist)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Aunt Annabel offered to pay for his college education)
Frank Lloyd Wright (first building commissioned by Aunts Jane and Nell who also ran a boarding school in Wisconsin)
Coco Chanel (Aunt Gabrielle taught her how to sew)
Virginia Woolf (muse was Aunt Coraline)
Marcel Proust (memory set off by Aunt Leonie’s madeleine)
Gilbert writes that when J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, was “asked what his creation looked like, replied his image, essence, and spirit of felicity can be found all over the world and hazily refelected ‘in the faces of many women who have no children.’ That is the Auntie brigade.”
Marcel ProustI’ve always wondered why people get in such a tizzy about gay people, justifying their bigotry because: “It’s just not natural.” How do we know what’s natural? Is everyone supposed to pop out babies like the Duggar family and their 20 kids? Is that “natural”? And is every “natural” thing good anyway? Death is natural. Cancer can be natural.
Women without children are perfectly capable of being happy; what they’re often missing isn’t kids, but a society and a culture that values and respects them.
To all the moms out there, thank you for working hard to continue the human race. And to the “Auntie Brigade,” thank you for working hard to continue the human race.
Read my post on New York Magazine’s biased coverage of childless women here.
Will boys see movies about girls?
I wanted to respond to the following insightful comment by Pepper-Tumeric on my Puff, the Magic Dragon post on sfgate :
…almost all fictional heroes are boys. And I can only speak for myself in saying that, when I was a girl, I noticed this and was saddened. Even Pooh, which I love, has only one female character, and that’s (uh huh) the mom Kanga. Why couldn’t Piglet be a girl? Nobody was going to have sex with each other, so why did he have to be a he? It didn’t make sense to me, and it made me mad that the only female characters I encountered were princesses in peril or mothers. The message that this sent to me, even as a young girl, was that writers and publishers believe that a girl’s only role was to be rescued or to whelp more boys. In most children’s media, girls really are not expected to do anything useful, so a little “girl power,” even when interpreted as you do, feels like progress. My husband used to work at Leapfrog, so I have an insider’s perspective. Publishers slant the fictional universe toward boys because there is a perception, true or not, that while girls will play along with movies/books/etc that feature male characters, boys will not do likewise with female-cast characters. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a financial calculus. But I for one am going to do what I can to skew the calculus the other way for my girl.
I totally agree about Pooh. I loved Pooh as a kid. I had a giant one, one of those super cheap toys stuffed with tiny styrofoam balls, the kind of toy that you win at an amusement park. I loved that Pooh until he was an empty yellow bear skin, his red belly shirt completely tattered. But the no girls thing really bummed me out then and now. I read all the Pooh stories and Pooh poems and when I was grown up, I read the Tao of Pooh. As a parent, I read the stories to my kids and still miss the girls. There’s a cartoon now on TV and they have added one girl human to the troop, thank God, so that’s a little progress.
But what I really wanted to respond to was Pepper-Tumeric’s reference to the popular theory: girls will see movies and read books about boys, but boys will not see movies or read books about girls. This is really important because these kids grow up into adults who were trained as toddlers to think its perfectly okay to divide books into great literature or “chick lit” and movies into award winning films or “chick flicks.”
So why not, instead of helping these kids become tiny experts in gender stereotyping, challenge the toddlers (like we do in every other area to help them learn) and transform Hollywood and “great” literature for future generations? It’s just not true that little boys are only interested in movies and books that are about boys and that girls are just totally fine seeing movies all about the opposite gender with no issues at all.
It is true that all kids are self-centered; they want to see themselves reflected out there. But girls get a great deal of practice, early on, just by the sheer amount of books and movies starring boys, to suck it up. They learn to be open to seeing and hearing about the other gender. We ought to teach boys the same thing.
Ponyo
But instead, a lot of parents feel comfortable when they see their kids neatly fall into established gender stereotypes. It would be great if more parents took their boys to movies starring girls or read them books with multiple girl characters. Teachers too, could select these kinds of books for reading time and assign them to their students. The issue, of course, is complicated by the fact that so many “girlie” books and movies are really bad, often perpetuating the stereotypes we are trying to escape from. There are some exceptions. Ponyo is a great movie that just came out on DVD, a fantastic girlpower version of the horrible movie, The Little Mermaid (where Ariel gives away her voice to land a man.) Ponyo co-stars a very sweet boy who loves and admires Ponyo’s strength and power, so a movie like that could be a good choice to begin the challenge. (It’s also a movie by my all time favorite animator– Hayao Miyazaki.) Part of the reason I started blogging was to create a resource for parents. Please add your suggestions.
On this blog, many parents have commented that their boys do actually like books I wrongly assumed they wouldn’t because they appeared too girlie, even if they weren’t actually stereotypical stories. For example, One commenter wrote that her son loves the Rainbow Fairy Series. I had written that though this is is an action-adventure series where two girls have magical powers, are able to fly, rescue fairies from wicked goblins etc, its so girlie looking on the cover, showing the fairies motion-stopped, like pinned butterflies, long hair flowing, mini-skirted, all sparkly, colorful, glittery. This commentator was offended, and wrote her son loves the series which is great. Maybe there are more moms and sons like that out there?
Here’s the thing: even if your boy or girl refuses to see movie about the other gender– at what other time in your parenting do you allow your three year old to dictate your choices? As parents, we always strive to challenge kids out of their comfort zones to help them grow. When it comes to gender, why do we do a 180, letting them advise the executives at Leapfrog what toys to create? These toddlers ought to be awarded multi-million salaries or at least a consultant fee.
Another view on Dr. Seuss
responds to on the good doctor:
The lack of women is something that bothers me in Sergio Leone’s films. I think the female characters in The Godfather are pretty weak. Dr. Seuss troubles me far less. For one thing, they’re there: in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, as the author points out, as well as The Cat in the Hat, and Daisy-Head Mayzie, and busily leaping on Pop. (The main guy in Green Eggs and Ham wears some kind of dress, or tunic, so it’s hard to determine his sex.) But when I think of Dr. Seuss, it’s not of penetrating characterizations of masculinity: it’s of vaguely asexual – even allegorical – creatures – Sneeches, Loraxes, empty pants, disgruntled misanthropic monsters, beaky anthropomorphic figures who care intensely about buttered bread. And of course, the lessons stick with you: Red Scares and Butter Battles and nuclear war are dangerous; a person’s a person no matter how small; it’s a good idea to try stuff.
A good point, but my daughters notice the lack of girl characters nonetheless.
Women in the Olympics
I wrote today for my blog on SF Gate about the positive side of seeing women compete in the Olympics: national coverage for women athletes, seeing women win. You can also read about a negative side in my post below– women winners posing in their underwear.
Blogging for SF Gate
I have a in the City Brights section of SF Gate. New blogs coming here soon. Thanks for reading!
Champ or Vamp?
Are women athletes celebrated more for what they can do or for how they look? Here’s a photo of Winter Olympics 2010 silver medal winner in Ladies Super Combined, Julia Mancuso. Have women athletes made any progress winning endorsements, acclaim, recognition, and money for their skill rather than their appearance? Here’s something I wrote about Summer Olympics 2000 and the state of female athletes that was reprinted in a bunch of papers. Tell me what you think about how we’re doing now.
SAN FRANCISCO — In the photo she’s wearing a tight two-piece suit. Legs parted, head thrown back, eyes closed, she smiles.
The woman is not a Playmate of the Month but Olympic high jumper Amy Acuff in Esquire magazine’s cover story/pictorial entitled “America’s Ten Sexiest Athletes.” But on closer examination, Amy is not lying down; she is jumping.
A perusal of recent issues of men’s magazines reveals the latest sex symbol is the female athlete.
Sports Illustrated features Olympic swimmer Jenny Thompson topless with her hands covering her breasts. And Gear has a photo of the Australian women’s soccer team, all players completely naked with their arms and legs placed strategically.
It’s no coincidence that this fascination with women athletes as soft-core porn stars comes right as women are making enormous strides in achieving parity with men in the Olympics. One step forward, two long jumps back.
At the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, more women will compete in more sports with more media coverage than ever before. With 4,400 participants, women will represent a record 42 percent of the competitors. Most exciting, women will be competing in what were once exclusively male domains. New categories for women include weightlifting, pole vaulting, water polo, tae kwon do and the triathlon.
But the slew of wet T-shirt pictorials reveals a powerful cultural bias. The American public is still uncomfortable seeing women as successful athletes and celebrating them for embodying the qualities that athletes possess. Magazines like Maxim are undermining hard-won progress by reducing all female competition to just another beauty contest.
Athletes are valued for what their bodies can do, not how they look.
Athletes are competitive, ambitious and they know how to win, but those attributes just aren’t ladylike. Photographing sports superstars in lace panties and sheer camisoles keeps them safely inside the parameters of womanhood.
While girls learn early on they will be judged for their looks, boys learn that athleticism equals attractiveness. Ever since high school, the jocks were the big men on campus, a guy’s skill made him hot and the best player sealed his status by getting the prettiest girl.
The grown-up world isn’t much better. Male athletes are worshipped for their achievements. Joe DiMaggio won Marilyn Monroe, and that wasn’t because he looked good in his uniform.
For women, athletic skill doesn’t equal desirability. In a capitalist world, the girl with the most money wins. Blond and buxom tennis star Anna Kournikova makes $11 million to $15 million in endorsements, though she has never won a professional tournament. Her earnings equal those of Martina Hingis, who has earned her money by winning 26 career titles, and are much more than 43-time winner Monica Seles’ $7.5 million or defending U.S. Open champ Serena Williams’ $6 million.
Even a pretty female player isn’t valued like a male player. Tiger Woods gets $47 million; Michael Jordan, $40 million, and 70-year-old Arnold Palmer makes $19 million.
The excuse is that men make big money because their sports make more money from television contracts, but it’s all a vicious circle. When women aren’t valued for their skills, aren’t trained properly and aren’t celebrated the way male athletes are, they’re at a severe disadvantage.
While many call this just bad luck, the law calls it illegal. More than 20 years ago, Title IX, which demanded gender equity in sports funding, began to be enforced. A generation of women growing up under it is a major reason why female athletes have been able to make the advances they have.
Even with this law, females make up only one third of interscholastic and intercollegiate athletes.
Summer 2000’s gold medal favorite, Stacy Dragila, was once told women don’t have the upper body strength to pole vault. Today, pole vaulting is the most popular new women’s event, with Dragila holding the world record.
For reaching that record last summer, Dragila got only half the $60,000 prize money that men get for the same competition. But, she was able to generate more income and media coverage for her sport by posing with other track and field women for a sexy calendar.
Athletics should be the one place where there truly is a meritocracy, where women are rewarded for how high they can jump, how fast they can run or how much they can lift. But once again, the rules are different for women.
This summer, along with their shotputs and discuses, female Olympic competitors will need lipstick, good lighting and lingerie if they want to get the gold.
Supergirl PJs from Target ***GGG***
I got my kids Superman pajamas at Target a couple years ago; they still fit. We call them Supergirl PJs (though I guess they should be referred to as Superwomen– is there a Superboy?) The PJs have the Superman crest on the front, which lights up, and mesh red capes which attach with velcro. The girls transform when they put these PJs on; they start leaping and high kicking. Last night, three year Alice said to her dad, “Now I will defeat you and then you will work for me!” Then she leaped off the couch onto his back and said, “See, I can fly when I have the cape!”
Watching how my kids act wearing these outfits reminds me again how important it is to get girls out of their “pretty” dresses. Alice is a great hiker, but when she wears her flowing princess stuff to the park, she can’t climb or run, she trips and falls, losing her confidence, then whining. Wardrobe choices are subtle– and not so subtle– early training for what kinds of actions the kids get comfortable with, and if they mainly experience their bodies as something pretty to look or something that can do cool stuff. That’s why all the toys where girls get trained to dress dolls– paper dolls, plastic dolls, sticker dolls, magnetic dolls– drive me crazy.
Beacuse these are PJs, only worn around the family at night, the girls wear them happily without their usual self-consiousness about other kids possibly seeing them and making fun of them for being in “boy stuff.”
Tiger Forgets to Apologize to Women
Update: If sex really is an addiction, Tiger should have apologized to all the women he used as drugs.
At this morning’s press conference, Tiger said he was sorry to his family, his wife, his kids, his fans, his sponsors, but he left out the more than a dozen women he had sex with. Tiger further objectified these women when he only referred to them in his speech as the “temptations” of power and fame.
Tiger, do you get that women are human? Or does that insight come later in your recovery– around day 56 or so?
When porn star Jocelyn James calls a press conference, flanked by Gloria Allred, it’s challenging to have sympathy for anybody in this story. But Tiger had sex with Jocelyn for three years– along with many other women. What enabled him to do that if she’s so sub-human? At the press conference, Tiger apologized to his wife, as he should, of course; he supposedly loves her. But the skill many men acquire to divide women into wives or whores really creeps me out. If there really is such a thing as sex addiction, this dichotomy must fuel it. I imagine any 12 step recovery program would require that Tiger make amends to those he used as part of his “addiction.”
I’m not saying Rachel Uchitel and the porn stars and models and single moms who slept with Tiger are all victims; they could very well be sex addicts themselves who used Tiger just to get off, get fame, or money. But, as far as I know, they aren’t the ones in intensive recovery programs making public apologies. Tiger is. Maybe he’s not there yet in his program, or maybe his other amends will be as private as he famously is. But it would be nice if Tiger– or Kobe Bryant or Bill Clinton or whomever the latest sex scandal powerguy is– added to his standard mea culpa that he’s sorry for treating women like tissue paper. Because these so called private matters become so public, and I’m sick of seeing women split up into homemaker or homewrecker all over the media. I’d like an apology for subjecting women to that all over again.
Here’s what I wrote yesterday:
Are the rumors true? God, I wish she’d just take 300 million or whatever it is and get out of there.
See what I mean about “wife school?” Stand by your man, cheer him on, no matter what.
Gross. Women are biologically capable of putting up with anything! “Family” is so important to us, nothing else really matters. What a horrible example to all of us married people. A talk show host I used to work with would disagree, he’d say it’s a good move, it shows family values, you stick around no matter what. And then I would say: but reverse their genders– the story becomes unimaginable.
Young woman golf star falls in love with her friend’s hot “manny.” They marry and have two kids; she keeps winning tournaments and doing endorsements. After a few years of appearing as the perfect family, wife and husband get in a huge, violent fight. He goes after her with one of her golf clubs. Soon after, the public starts to learn she’s been sleeping around, about 15 men come out and claim they were with her, including porn stars and hosts. (Does “hostess” in this context even have a male equivalent meaning?) He takes off his wedding ring and retreats with the kids to his home country. Everyone says he is not the kind of guy to take this behavior, he will get the money he can and divorce her; he’ll never take her back. Photographs show up of her in sex rehab in the South. Then they are
pictured at the rehab together. An announcement is coming tomorrow…
You can see the sexism, too, in how the public reacted to the alleged violent fight; because it was a woman who supposedly attacked a man, even sending him to the hospital, there were jokes about the reports of abuse on Letterman and SNL. Lots of people were saying, empathically, that whatever happened, it was a private matter; police should just stay out of it and the media should back off and leave the couple alone. But domestic violence isn’t a private matter; it needs to be investigated, not ignored. Victims typically recant their stories. It’s not anyone’s right to let himself get beat up or murdered by his mate. It’s against the law.
So I guess today, Tiger will ask for forgivenss for his sexual indiscretion, just like Bill Clinton, Ted Haggard, Jim Baker and Kobe Bryant before him. (I think I’ll start a list.) I actually believe in forgiveness, I think it’s a skill you can learn just like any other skill. I learned that at a class I took at Stanford taught by Fred Luskin; the class was amazing. Also, anyone who has ever been through a 12 step program knows forgiveness is a crucial step towards recovery, for totally selfish reasons, you must forgive to get well. Forgiveness, by the way, doesn’t mean Elin has to stay with Tiger, or that anyone has to stay with anyone. It means you get to move on with your life and devote your considerable energy to something else instead of nurturing the grudges you were clinging on to for years.
My issue with Tiger and Elin is really that I am so sick of this same, old story, just watching it again again, the version I get of it, as a person in the world, the repetitive scenario: the cheating, powerful guy and his loyal wife. It bores me. I’m so tired of it. I want a new narrative. And I don’t mean the occasional exception (I’m trying to think of a powerful woman that’s cheated and her husband and he’s taken her back after public humiliation to insert here.) I want new archetypes, repeated upon centuries and ingrained into our subconscious, then translated back into our stories, movies, lives, and tabloids. I’m craving something original.
Robert Pattinson “hates vaginas.”
In this month’s Details, cover boy, Robert Pattinson, takes part in one of the most that I’ve seen in mainstream media. I’m bummed, because before coming across this expose, I wasn’t a fan, but I kind of liked Pattinson and his Twilight series.
In Details, Pattinson is pictured several times, always fully dressed, next to totally naked or almost naked women. In one photo, he lies next to a woman who is in a bathtub, her hands gripping the faucets behind her, as if restrained. In another photo, he wears a button down shirt, a blazer, and sunglasses while the woman with him wears nothing but transparent stockings; a third photo shows two naked women, one lying on the ground in a glass coffin type encasing, reminscent of Snow White; there’s just a head shot of Pattinson in the background.
All this you could almost chalk up to typical Details magazine. Not Pattinson’s fault, but the photographer and photo editors telling everyone what to do.
But then Pattinson’s has a quote that clarifies his position on women: “I really hate vaginas. I’m allergic to vagina. But I can’t say I had no idea, because it was a 12-hour shoot, so you kind of get the picture that these women are going to stay naked after, like, five or six hours. But I wasn’t exactly prepared. I had no idea what to say to these girls. Thank God I was hungover.”
What’s weird is that the interviewer, Jenny Lumet, who as in most celebrity profiles, has already chummily inserted herself into the story, chattily telling readers how she and Pattinson drink beer together and trade jokes as they walk by a sex shop. But now, she doesn’t follow up on his statement at all. She just asks him what his mother will think of the soft porn photo shoot.
If it were me there interviewing him, I would have asked Pattinson to clarify: “What do you mean you hate vaginas? You don’t like the way the feel? The way they look? They scare you?”
Or I might say, “I know just what you mean! And penises can be really weird too– veiny and hairy. Frankly, I don’t think genitals should be seen in daylight at all. Twelve hours under bright lights is way too long to be around so many vaginas!”
On the cover of the magazine, Pattinson’s face is shown inbetween a woman’s legs, facing out, half smiling at the camera. His eyes tell his audience, “This is exactly where I belong, and as soon as you stop looking at me, I’m going to turn around and preform the best cunnilingus this woman has ever had.” Maybe the young star felt vulnerable, and he was trying to backtrack, get some control. Or maybe he really does hate vaginas. Does that mean he’s gay? I would’ve asked.