On Wednesday, November 23, 2011 Pia Guerrero, Hugo Schwyzer and I discussed our upcoming Men and Feminism Panel at Santa Monica College with hosts Christene Kings, Susan Kraker and Denise Zepeda.

Tune in at 32:30– we barely scratched the surface. For more, join us on December 1 at 6:30pm and the rest of our panelists: Yashar Ali, Kalil Cohen, Jacqueline Sun and Shira Tarrant.

Listen here, beginning at 32:30: Melanie Klein, Pia Guerrero and Hugo Schwyzer on KPFK’s Feminist Magazine.

On Wednesday, March 16, 2011 I joined Feminist Frequency‘s Anita Sarkeesian on KPFK’s Feminist Magazine in Los Angeles with host Lynn Harris Ballen. Anita discussed critical media literacy and vlogging as a viable way to bring feminist and gender critiques to audiences outside academia in a way that makes them, not only more accessible, but more relatable. I join the end of her segment to discuss WAM! LA 2011, the second annual WAM-It-Yourself event in Los Angeles, hosted at Santa Monica College. Tune in for Anita’s engaging discussion and details on next week’s line-up of presenters from visual artist Daena Title, the editors of Ms. Magazine discussing the first year of the Ms. Magazine blog to body image activist, Claire Mysko, author of Does This Pregnancy Make Me Look Fat?, to Anita herself plus many more. Don’t forget to RSVP to the event here.

Anita Sarkeesian and Melanie Klein on KPFK’s Feminist Magazine

Originally posted at The Daily Femme on July 26, 2010.

Interviewed by Cherie

The minute I saw Melanie Klein’s photographs of students standing against a massive collage of models found in magazines, I wanted to know more about her work. As a Women Studies and Sociology lecturer in a Southern California College, Melanie Klein has been studying how the objectification of women in the media has a negative psychological, social, physical, and mental impact on the average woman. Covering the likes of Kim Kardashian and Britney Spears in her courses but also on her blog, Feminist Fatale, Melanie deconstructs media representations of women from a feminist perspective. In this interview she focuses on the dominant beauty paradigm in our celebrity-driven culture and explains what she means by the term “empower-tainment.”  She also tells us how reducing her own media consumption changed the way she looked at other women and gave her self-esteem a much-needed boost.

Can you share how you decided to create the project “What does a real woman look like?” with your students? What were their reactions to your idea?

I teach Women Studies and Sociology at Santa Monica College and this project came from a course I taught called “Women in Pop Culture” where we addressed representations of women in the media and discussed how a certain image of beauty affects women across class, weight, size etc.  We also discussed what George Gerbner of the Annenberg School of Communications called “cultivation” to explain how a media saturated environment impacts our perceptions, morals and values. Cultivation refers to the endless stream of repetitive images manufactured by the media. Millions of images that we view over our lifetime carry the exact same body idea and so we decided to cut out hundreds of them, paste them up on a wall and then take photos of the women against the collage to underscore the juxtaposition. The students were really moved by it and standing against this collage elicited a visceral and emotional response that illustrated how daunting and depressing these images can be.

(more…)

…on the power and influence of the mass media, pornography and pop culture, misogyny, racism, and the cultivation of normative images of heterosexual sexuality.

I’ve read his book, Getting Off, I’m using it as part of my curriculum this semester in WS 30: Women and Pop Culture but hearing him critically examine these issues articulately and intelligently in this 2007 interview took the issue to a whole new level. Thanks to Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency for sending the link my way.

You MUST listen here.

Originally posted at tweetingfeminists.posterous.com. Check out all the interviews of tweeting feminists with interviewer, Ronak Ghorbani.

Podcast: Tweeting Feminists Episode 2 featuring Melanie Klein the Feminist Fatale

By Ronak Ghorbani

Tweeting Feminists Episode Two by ronak_gee

Excellent commentary by Rebecca Trasiter at Salon.com today after Palin fumbles repeatedly in interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric.

Highlights include:

Where I come from, a woman — and especially a woman governor with executive experience — doesn’t have to rely on any elder or any man to protect her and pull her ass out of the fire. She can make a decision all on her own. (Palin was more than happy to tell Charlie Gibson that she made her decision to join the McCain ticket without blinking.) I agree with Coates that the McCain camp was craven, sexist and disrespectful in its choice of Palin, but I don’t agree that the Alaska governor was a passive victim of their Machiavellian plotting. A very successful woman, Palin has the wherewithal to move forward consciously. What she did was move forward thoughtlessly and overconfidently, without considering that her abilities or qualifications would ever be questioned…

So here it is, finally. And as unpleasant as it may be to watch the humiliation of a woman who waltzed into a spotlight too strong to withstand, I flat out refuse to be manipulated into another stage of gendered regress — back to the pre-Pelosi, pre-Hillary days when girls couldn’t stand the heat and so were shooed back to the kitchen.

Sarah Palin is no wilting flower. She is a politician who took the national stage and sneered at the work of community activists. She boldly tries to pass off incuriosity and lassitude as regular-people qualities, thereby doing a disservice to all those Americans who also work two jobs and do not come from families that hand out passports and backpacking trips, yet still manage to pick up a paper and read about their government and seek out experience and knowledge.

When you stage a train wreck of this magnitude — trying to pass one underqualified chick off as another highly qualified chick with the lame hope that no one will notice — well, then, I don’t feel bad for you.

When you treat women as your toys, as gullible and insensate pawns in your Big Fat Presidential Bid — or in Palin’s case, in your Big Fat Chance to Be the First Woman Vice President Thanks to All the Cracks Hillary Put in the Ceiling — I don’t feel bad for you.

When you don’t take your own career and reputation seriously enough to pause before striding onto a national stage and lying about your record of opposing a Bridge to Nowhere or using your special-needs child to garner the support of Americans in need of healthcare reform you don’t support, I don’t feel bad for you.

When you don’t have enough regard for your country or its politics to cram effectively for the test — a test that helps determine whether or not you get to run that country and participate in its politics — I don’t feel bad for you.

When your project is reliant on gaining the support of women whose reproductive rights you would limit, whose access to birth control and sex education you would curtail, whose healthcare options you would decrease, whose civil liberties you would take away and whose children and husbands and brothers (and sisters and daughters and friends) you would send to war in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Russia and wherever else you saw fit without actually understanding international relations, I don’t feel bad for you.

Do you think she’s ready to lead?  Yikes.