The number of hate crimes involving race and religion declined in the United States last year, leading to a slight drop in the overall total, but incidents related to sexual orientation and ethnicity showed increases, according to federal statistics released yesterday…
Crimes against Hispanics also increased for the fourth year in a row, the ADL said, with 595 incidents reported in 2007, compared with475 in 2004.
“While we welcome the fact that reported hate crimes declined slightly in 2007, violent bigotry is still disturbingly prevalent in America, with nearly one hate crime occurring every hour of every day of the year,” ADL director Abraham H. Foxman said in a statement.
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez explores the role of porn in these racially specific hate crimes:
There are 4.2 million porn sites on the Web, totaling more than 400 million Internet pages. An astounding 25 percent of all search engine requests are for pornography. Pornography profits each year exceed the profits of NBC, ABC and CBS combined.
And yet no one in the rising-Latino-hate debate has thought to look at this sector of the media for indications of violence and hatred toward Hispanics, and Hispanic women in particular. Except me. Because I’m practical like that, and I’m not afraid to go there. Or anywhere, really.
Rape of Latinas Popular on the Net
I’ve been keeping tabs on the popular free porn site Redtube.com, which is essentially the X-rated version of YouTube, and have found a very disturbing trend.
Day after day, week after week, month after month, videos claiming to depict the rape of Latina maids or Mexican women seeking green cards, etc., have appeared in the top five videos of the day, often in the No. 1 spot, with high ratings from the site’s users.
Often, these videos depict women crying, begging for mercy and enduring unwanted anal sex. (The popularity of Latinas in these videos is all the more alarming when one considers that Latina actresses comprise less than half of 1 percent of all TV and movie roles in the United States.)
It is no coincidence that as hate toward Latinos and immigrants rises, Hispanic women are being presented in a very popular, profitable (and, we pretend, invisible) media outlet as the ideal rape victims.
Miss California’s Carrie Prejean is generating more commentary. Following her statement that she was tempted by the devil when asked about gay marriage, the question asked by Sheldon Filger is: how does God feel about breast implants. Never mind the fact that these were implants funded by the pageant to boost self-esteem. I guess God’s version weren’t good enough. Hmmmm.
Maybe I’m just Miss California dreaming, but it seems to me that Carrie Prejean is afflicted with a terminal case of breast envy. Just as some men may feel inadequate if they perceive a certain part of their anatomy doesn’t “measure up,” it could be that the actions, thoughts and words of the 21 year old beauty queen and runner up at the Miss USA pageant are merely a disguise for her own sense of not “measuring up” to her beauty queen peers in the natural state God endowed her with.
There is a reason why I inserted God into this narrative. The whole premise of Ms. Prejean’s political antics has been predicated on the claim that she is a devout, Bible-believing Christian woman and her outspoken posture on the issue of same sex-marriage is an act of pious conscience. Whether or not I agree with Carrie Prejean’s decision to place her celebrity persona in the service of the anti-Gay marriage organization known as the National Organization for Marriage, I could respect her decision if it was based on consistency. However, it strikes me that this devout Bible-believing Christian woman missed one verse in the Bible, no doubt unintentionally. Allow me to quote from Chapter 4, Verse 5 of the Song of Solomon: “Thy two breasts are like young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.”
If you are a conservative Christian who believes that the entire Bible, chapter and verse, is the inalterable word of God almighty, then it appears clear that God thought female breasts were quite important, or otherwise the Lord of the universe would not have bothered to reveal what is essentially an erotic ode to the bosoms of women. My interpretation of this biblical verse is that God thought breasts as they exist on each woman are beautiful, “like young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.” And for the record, young roes are somewhat on the small size.
So, it is obvious that God adores female breasts (kind of like me, or maybe it is vice versa). But more importantly, God created female breasts, along with everything else in the universe. So the essence of that verse from the Song of Solomon is that God thought his creation of the bosoms of women was perfection. Furthermore, it is a principal of conservative Christians such as Carrie Prejean that everything God created in its natural state is perfect and should never be altered, such as the institution of marriage being solely a union for a man and a woman. So Ms. Prejean, what about hiring a cosmetic surgeon to alter your breasts, and undo God’s perfect creation?
Her latest book, Bodies, maps the progress of our alienation, from a time when we took our bodies for granted to one where they are an endlessly perfectible work in progress. “When I was growing up,” she explains, “one or two girls were beautiful, but it was not an aspiration, right? We didn’t expect to be that sportsman or that beauty queen. That was OK, that was what movie stars were for. That wasn’t something that was essential for all of us.” Yet today, movie-star looks are not just an aspiration but an imperative, and ordinary people think nothing of starving or surgically enhancing their bodies in a tireless campaign to make them look as though they belong to somebody else altogether.
Just as Donald Winnicott identified the “false self”, whereby a neglected baby will blame itself for its carer’s lack of interest, and create an artificial version of itself in the hope of winning love, so Orbach argues that we are creating false bodies. Assailed by media imagery that celebrates only one type of body and one type of beauty, we assume any discrepancy between our own appearance and this digitally airbrushed “ideal” must be our fault, and that it’s not merely necessary but morally virtuous to do whatever it takes to correct our deficiency. The simultaneous rise of anorexia and obesity is not a paradox, but rather two sides of the same psychological coin – both manifestations of our panic about hunger, in which normal appetite becomes pathologised as the enemy. Crucially, whereas once we might have experienced the pressure to look different as an onerous tyranny, today we tell ourselves that it’s empowering.
“We transform the sense of being criticised,” Orbach writes, “by becoming the moving and enthusiastic actor in our own self-improvement programme. We will eagerly repair what is wrong … We see ourselves as agents, not victims. It is the individual woman who feels herself to be at fault for not matching up to the current imagery … She applies herself to the job of perfecting that image for herself and so makes it her own, not assaultive or alien.”
Orbach’s writing is closer in tone to cultural studies than to the jaunty self-help register of most contemporary books about eating, but in person there is nothing abstractly academic about her. Framed by a mass of curls, she is small, even birdlike, but her sprightly energy conveys a vivid sense of aliveness. Her accent has a faint American inflection, which can sound almost antipodean at times, particularly when her sentences end in a question mark – “right?” – and she is surprisingly relaxed, even imprecise, with her words, often letting sentences tail away unfinished. But she is very clear about where we are going wrong.
I’ve been half looking forward to the meeting, and half dreading it because, although it must be 20 years since I first read what Orbach calls “Fifi”, her work feels uncomfortably relevant to my own current state. She is the sort of woman you find yourself confiding in, and I admit to her that halfway through my first pregnancy, my overriding preoccupation is with weight gain. To my dismay, what I’m really thinking about most of the time is how I’m ever going to lose it. And right there, according to Orbach, is the source of our troubled relationship with food. Mothers transmit their own anxieties to their babies; it all begins in the family.
“The only way to solve the problem is to provide very different help to new mums,” she says briskly. “Because every mother wants to do right by their kid. It would mean training health visitors and midwives; you’d raise a mother’s awareness of her own body. This is an opportunity for both of you to find the rhythm in terms of relation to appetite. I don’t think it would be difficult to design. And it would be very cheap. And new mums would really benefit from it. But instead, they are being told to do sit-ups straightaway, and why not even consider having a C-section, so you don’t have to get that last month’s weight gain? All of that nonsense. It’s completely counter to what a baby’s mental health requires – and what the mother needs as well, actually.”
What can parents say, I ask, to a 16-year-old girl who is convinced that a regime of dieting and beautification is not self-punishing but empowering? “Well, it’s awfully late at 16. But I’d be saying to the mums: ‘Watch your own behaviour – how often do you criticise your own body in front of your daughter?’ Stop making the body the cause of the problem, or the solution to the problem. The problem isn’t how she looks.”
But surely a teenage girl would say that how she looks is precisely the problem? “But what she’d be picking out aren’t imperfections, they’re just what makes her her, right?” What if she says she’s overweight? “Well, they all feel overweight. Even when they’re tiny, tiny, tiny. But where are they getting that idea? That’s why I think the mums are doing something.”
If Orbach were just another voice in the cacophony of finger-pointing that surrounds most discussion about weight, I would be feeling unpleasantly guilty by now. But her analysis of what she calls “disordered eating” extends beyond mothers and the family, to encompass everything from the diet industry – “which relies upon a 95% recidivism rate” – to the media, which produces glossy magazines in which “not a single image is not digitally retouched, up to hundreds of times” – and globalisation, in which a culture of “aspirational bodies is the mark of entry”.
One of the things that strikes me is the statement that “movie-star” looks were not always an aspiration or expectation. Each semester my students conduct an oral history and time and time again, women over 60 respond to questions about beauty standards and beauty norms that existed when they were girls and teenagers with the same sentiment. There was a time, before the all out media assault, when standards of beauty existed that weren’t as relentless or unrealistic as they are today. Girls and women recognized a celebrity figure as exactly that. A celebrity. A star. Someone unlike themselves.
Girls and women today are inundated with relentless messages that proclaim that they CAN look like the celebrity du-jour and that they SHOULD and if they don’t attain that image they have failed, they are without value and should try harder.
It is little wonder that girls and women see these “failures” as personal rather than recognizing the failure on the part of the mass media machine to portray “ordinary” girls and women.
Sitcoms and films from my childhood portrayed more “average-looking” individuals. Not everyone was primped and polished with the intention of looking “natural.” “Natural” beauty these days is nowhere near natural or easy and breezy. It is an all out organized campaign with a low success rate.
I’m so excited to introduce Lani to the blogosphere and have her join the ranks at Feminist Fatale.
Welcome!
Lani hails from a conservative, Christian, working-class family in Texas . These experiences have greatly shape her feminist paradigm, and motivated her to break away from the conservative dogma that was so prevalent in that community.
Lani is a writer, eternal student of sociology, philosophy, anthropology, and feminism (and, whatever else captures her attention in that moment), human and animal rights activist, and a worker bee in various forms and fashions.
She attended California State University , Northridge, and received her Bachelor’s degree in Sociology with an emphasis on gender studies. She will return to school in 2010 to work towards her Master’s Degree in International Studies with a concurrent degree in Women’s Studies.
She plans to do humanitarian aid work in a non-governmental organization with a major focus on these issues.
I love Stephanie Coontz and I’m glad she blogged on the lack of childcare today. Lets not even begin talking about maternity leave in this country.
Family values? Valuing the family means supporting families across the country.
Here’s a thought for a Mother’s Day gift that would go beyond the complimentary flowers passed out by restaurants and the complementary speeches churned out by politicians every May: Affordable childcare that is operated in accord with high-quality national standards.
It’s a gift long overdue. In 1971 the House and Senate overwhelmingly passed a Comprehensive Child Development Act to provide quality child care for working parents. The bill mandated extensive training for child care workers and strict standards, written and enforced with extensive input from parents. But on December 9, 1971, President Nixon vetoed the bill, declaring that publicly-provided child care would be “a long leap into the dark” that might weaken American families.
Since then, American families have indeed taken a “long leap” into an unanticipated world. Forty-five years ago, just 14 percent of working women who bore a child returned to work by the baby’s first birthday. Today, 83 percent of working moms do, 70 percent of them at the same hours they worked before the child’s birth.
Rebecca Romijn was photographed and applauded for being back in shape mere weeks after her pregnancy and giving birth to twins. In a recent interview, she told Extra! that she lost 35 pounds in about 3 weeks by breastfeeding.
Romijn’s close to losing the 60 pounds she gained during her pregnancy and get this…She’s done it without a workout plan. “I think within the first three weeks, I took off like 35 pounds without doing anything!” Okay, almost anything. “I haven’t been able to work out that much because I have twins. It’s impossible to get back into a regular schedule.” So, what is her secret to dropping the pounds? “Breastfeeding is the very best diet I’ve been on. It’s amazing. It’s like you have to eat 5,000 extra calories a day or you can’t produce enough food for them.
Breastfeeding burns approximately 500 calories/day and women lose approximately 1-2 pounds/week. Salma Hayek is the only celebrity that I’ve heard speak honestly about pregnancy, baby, weight gain, weight loss and breastfeeding.
I wrote a similar piece in October when the tabloids were printing pictures of Angelina Jolie 11 weeks after twins.
This advertisement campaign isn’t new but it still makes me laugh each time I see it.
Nutrisystem says that “real” men can diet, too….as long as they can eat “mmmmm…man food” consisting of meaty burgers and pizza. Man food is hearty cuz real mean are hearty and beefy, too.
Food as an expression of gender has been around for centuries.
Victorian women were urged not to be seen eating by their mothers because eating led to defecation and women didn’t have and still shouldn’t have bodily functions. Furthermore, food and the act of eating is sensual, physical and pleasurable. The Victorian women was not supposed to be sexual, sensual or carnal. If she did eat, she should steer clear of “heat-inducing” foods such as spices, caffeine and…meat.
Nutrisystem and Carl’s Junior are simply playing out gender rules that are more than 150 years old. And, Nutrisystem has found a way to target men as a new demographic to increase their profits. It does so by allowing men fret over their appearance without losing their manhood. Dieting has long been considered a feminine trait. In order to sell diet food to men you must make commercial that promise these men that they will not be emasculated.
What’s the ultimate message? Diet by eating “man food” (and we can make money off your new weight obsession without appearing to be a like silly girl).
