Blogging While Female

One of the first entries in this blog was about the release of the Butzel-Long report, the first report which condemned Eastern Michigan University's administration for mishandling the discovery of rape/murder victim Laura Dickinson.

Since then, a second report has been released, this one produced independently of the university by the Department of Education. The Dept. of Ed. report doesn't tell us anything different than the BL report, except that it lays out some specifics, namely that the University violated federal law a number of times, putting us at risk for fines and even the loss of federal financial aid funding (which would CRIPPLE the students of this university, as at least 60% of us receive/are eligible for federal aid. That would vanish if the ED chose to exert it's full power - which it never has before).

In the aftermath of these reports, three top administrators were fired/"let go" from the university: President Fallon, VP for Student Affairs Jim Vick, and the chief of public safety Cindy Hall. Fallon was outright fired, while Vick and Hall were "separated."

That all happened about two weeks ago, but EMU isn't out of the national news yet. On July 19, the father of Laura Dickinson appeared on Larry King. On July 27, Anderson Cooper mentioned the scandal on a rather sensationalistically-titled episode called "Crime and Punishment: Keeping Them Honest." And tonight, former president John Fallon and his wife appeared on Larry King for about twenty minutes.

Here are my notes from as it happened:
*Larry King mispronounced Ypsilanti, lol (notable because on Anderson Cooper, the reporter seemed to be trying very hard to pronounce the city correctly)
*Fallon says Vick told him Laura was half-naked, yet there was no sign of foul play? Claiming that Vick was purposefully keeping everything under wraps - sounds like he’s blaming it entirely on Vick.
*Fallon doesn’t seem to like the term “separated” for Vick’s departure.
*Claiming there’s an inverse relationship between the BL report and the personnel decisions made by the BoR. He’s the fall guy.
*Fallon’s wife, Sidney, is here as well. So far she’s just playing the supportive wife role, talking briefly about her husband’s integrity, etc.
*Ooh, his attorney is here as well. No legal action yet, but a suit based on fraud is being considered. She’s drawing a comparison between Vick’s behavior and the cabinets of large company CEO’s…I think I might have missed something here.
*Fallon came to the university when it was having “significant problems” and he was “determined to tackle them.”
*Sidney Fallon views this interview as part of the moving on process, bringing out the “other side” of the story.
*Neither Vick nor Hall returned calls inviting them to appear on the show tonight.
*Apparently the terms of Fallon’s severance isn’t final yet? He says “nothing is official” when King asks if he’s getting a year’s severance pay.
*Ooh, University House issues. Apparently living in that house was part of his contract.
*King asks the attorney if there’s any way parents can know the safety records of campuses. There’s a semi-complex list of steps to get the information from the FBI. I wonder if they’re going to mention that EMU has apparently been covering up crime stats? … Apparently not.
*”What do you want, John?” To clear his name, to regain his career. His “friends and colleagues from around the nation,” though they don’t know the details, don’t believe this can be true.
(originally published on EMUTalk.Org)

Really, it just seems strange that Fallon would appear on Larry King. For one, many of us thought that this story would pretty much be over, as it seemed likely that part of the separation agreements would include gag orders. Apparently that wasn't the case. Also, while Fallon thinks that "any reasonable person" would see the inverse relationship between the cover up and the personnel decisions made by the Regents, I would think that a reasonable person would hear what he's saying and say "Yeah, okay, but at the end of the day you were the president. You should have tried to get more information out of someone other than the VP." Who is going to have faith in a president that admits he's clueless when a brutal rape/murder occurs on campus?

Certainly not us.

Also, does it sound good for Fallon's career to admit that you've been president of three different schools in the last 5 or so years? We now know that some of the shady administrative decisions Fallon made at his last job were repeated here (appointing a provost without consulting the faculty. It's been discussed on EMUTalk, but the search function isn't turning anything up for me). It's not surprising that Fallon's career, by his own admission, is probably over. Heck, it's the one rational thing I've heard him say since the cover up was revealed.

Wow. This is fascinating.

Sexism, Strength and Dominance: Masculinity in Disney Films

It's not exactly groundbreaking subject matter - Disney's portrayals of masculinity warp boys just as much as their depictions of femininity warp girls - but the fact that it's the equivalent of an academic paper...on Youtube is fascinating. It allows the argument to really work on multiple levels: the ethos of facts and examples and the pathos of seeing these films that we grew up with. To me, the argument is greatly enhanced by showing Simba and Scar fight rather than just saying "The movie's climax is a brutal battle between Simba and his evil uncle."

That being said, I think there's some criticism that can rightfully be leveled at this piece, namely with the references to Beauty and the Beast. Does Gaston thinking the beast is weak and unmanly truly support the argument that Disney is teaching our boys to behave this way? Gaston is the bad guy, and clearly has been throughout; everyone that we are sympathetic to thinks he's an idiot. I always thought it was obvious that we shouldn't be like Gaston? And I'm sure that somewhere in Disney cartoons we get a good guy implying that one needs to be aggressive in order to be manly (Mulan, anyone? Or maybe there's something in Aladdin? Certainly Mufasa and Simba, in all their light color, muscular strength, are better than thin, dark Scar).

But shortcomings of the actual argument aside: I want to post academic work on Youtube! Appropriate mindless Web 2.0 (I don't even know what that phrase actually refers to, but I think Youtube is probably part of it) applications for something useful! VIVA LA REVOLUTION!

So people with too much time and money on their hands have once more decided to study the phenomenon that is MySpace. Yes, that dangerous haven for the dark and depraved monsters of the world that want nothing more than to get their hands on tender young flesh.

Except that it turns out that those who posses said flesh are a lot smarter than grown ups give them credit for.

Allow me to reiterate: no. Fucking. Shit.

Also, apparently there is room to argue with MySpace's claim of 100,000,000 users. Extra! Extra! Water is still wet!

Of course most teenagers know to keep their profiles, or at least select portions of it, private. Not everyone in the school needs to know what you were doing on Saturday night. I'm not surprised that more IM usernames were revealed than e-mail addresses: the spambots don't troll for AIM names (yet); my e-mail address is rarely displayed in a non-mangled format. And guess what? I've been doing that for years, even back in the days when I was a teenager.

And do you have any idea how many profiles on any social site are created as just a way to check on friends or as a duplicate site? I can't tell you how many people on LiveJournal (or, I'm sure, InsaneJournal) have multiple journals for different uses (if LJ hadn't turned into a bunch of idiots I'd be hosting this particular journal over there as well).

We really need to start giving teenagers some credit where it's due. I know back in those halcyon days I hated being lumped in with all of the dumb kids, internet users or not. Know why? Because I knew that I, and (most) of my friends, were smart enough to avoid the really dangerous situations. I can't think of a time when I received unwanted sexual advances from someone I didn't know. I certainly never gave out my phone number/address to someone that I didn't know extremely well (I actually can only think of one person that I ever gave out my home address to. I'm not sure if I ever gave out my phone number because I'm an awkward enough conversationalist in writing). It's silly to think that kids who've grown up with the Internet (I didn't get it until 7th grade, but "kids today" have had it for a much longer portion of their lives) make bigger and dumber mistakes than the rest of us did.

Yes, there are always going to be kids who put themselves at risk. Kids will run out in front of ice cream trucks or take candy from strangers. Setting the MySpace profiles of 14 and 15 year olds to default to "private" is a smart, unobtrusive way to protect as many kids as possible. Thinking that every single person on MySpace is out to kidnap those kids is just unfounded paranoia.

Anyone who knows me in real life (and currently, I think that's everybody who reads since all of my readers are through the LJ feed) has probably heard me rail against sexist terms like "actress" and "waitress" and "stewardess" (one that is, thankfully, firmly on its way out!). There is absolutely no point in differentiating people in their job titles by gender. A female server of food does the exact same job as a male, for example.

That's why I'm extremely happy about MSN's list of TV's Best Actors. This is not a list of the best male performers on television; it's a list of the best performers. Period. (Well, according to these editors; I'm sure everyone would quibble with an inclusion/exclusion on this list, like every other list ever created!) Two women (of color, even!) are featured on the list. Now, I'm not sure if the ratio of best female-to-male actors is 8-to-2, but at least these two women have been recognized as being among the best in their craft, not just the best women in their craft.

I have always hated commercials that show women happily cleaning their houses. Because who doesn't love using the latest in house cleaning products in her nasty bathroom? (And it's always women in these commercials. Have you ever seen a man cleaning house? And the guy on the OxyClean commercials doesn't count - he's cleaning up artificial messes that we just watched him make)

Well the commercial that I just saw takes the fucking cake. It's for the GoDuster which showed a woman actually pirouetting because this thing apparently makes dusting that much easier.

And there's also the requisite little girl claiming how "fun" it is to use the thing to dust her horribly chintzy porcelain collectibles.

And people wonder why I don't clean my apartment; I can't stand patronizing the companies that produce these products.

Free Love: Was there a price to pay?

Usually I really enjoy Brian Alexander's columns. His America Unzipped series paints a really interesting portrait of American sexuality and its changes.

His latest article, however, smacks of sexist, judgmental tripe. Exhibit A:
But there is no question that we are still living with the “free love” fallout. Everything from the rise of Viagra to “Girls Gone Wild” and feminist porn, to the sex education debate and the Christian fundamentalist backlash, bears the mark of that bohemian sexual revolution.
"Fallout" certainly has negative connotations, and just about everything in that list is abhorrent to somebody (except maybe Viagra - I don't think it's an inherently evil product. What's evil is its marketing. And how insurance providers wouldn't cover birth control until it came around and they wanted to cover that). Perhaps this instance is simply irresponsible editing, rather than out right idiocy. Let's read on.

The first page of the article is about all of the bad stuff we now have to live through all thanks to those dirty hippies. STD rates skyrocketed, abortion became legalized...but, oh wait, hippies weren't singlehandedly responsible for the new sexually liberated culture? Playboy had been around for 14 years? Masters and Johnson had published "Human Sexual Response" a year earlier? So...really we should just go back to blaming Hugh Heffner. Except that the concept of "Free Love" had been around since the 19th century (I'd argue earlier: look up John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, in the 18th).

So really, the hippies didn't do anything new. Let's just hate on them anyway; it's the 40th anniversary of the summer of love.

Half way through page two we get to some actually positive things that came from the Summer of Love. Feminism took to the streets, as women realized that "free love" meant men got to have sex with whomever they wanted without responsibility.

Oh, and here's where we get to the extremely debatable parts of this article:
The age’s radical feminist notion of eliminating marriage never materialized, but demand from 40 years ago to have “the freedom to love, to chose whom to love and how to love,” written by Goldfield and her essay collaborators Sue Munaker and Naomi Weisstein, is taken for granted by the young women — and men — of the MySpace generation.

I realize that I'm on the older end of the MySpace generation (OT: I realized last night that I am getting old when I was playing a game at a high school summer camp and no one knew who Captain Planet was), but our choices in who we love are still rather limited: interracial relationships are still relatively rare and god knows that you'd better love someone of the opposite sex! Making out with a girl in a picture to post to MySpace so you'll get knew friends is completely different from marching in a Pride parade. Or fighting for the right to marry your girlfriend.

“Some [people] are monogamous, but they are choosing to be, rather than following some script. Maybe they are not having sex with 10 people at a time, but now they are following their own script,” says [Eli] Coleman [Director of the Program of Human Sexuality at the University of Minnesota and editor of the International Journal of Sexual Health].

I'd argue that monogamy is pretty much the norm. Unless you stumble on some interesting websites, the only way you're going to be exposed to the modern tradition of polyamory is if you're in a large city. We still largely follow the sexual role scripts in our society. (Alexander claims that studies support Coleman's statement...by citing a survey from 1994 that says 64% of women born between 1963 and 1974 had co-habited before marriage. That has nothing to do with multiple sex partners and everything to do with pre-marital sex. NOT the same issue)

But I'm waiting for my boyfriend to get here. So what better way to occupy my time than getting suitably outraged over stupid stuff like Nintendo's latest attempt to cater to women.

Full disclosure: I'm not what one would normally consider a "gamer" (well, not with video games. I kick ass in D&D, however). I enjoy playing the occasional video game (Dead Rising was bad ass. And I really, really want to get a Wii so that I can play the Pirates of the Caribbean game. Sword fighting!) but for the most part my favorites are from back on the SNES. I don't care about graphics or even story lines all that much; I want something with high replay value that doesn't take 45 minutes just to learn which button makes you jump vs. super jump.

I also have a weakness for simulation and strategy games, but that's a whole other post.

But you want to know how you attract me, a border-line female gamer, to buy your system and games? Don't patronize me. Give me an engaging game that DOESN'T objectify my gender/sexual orientation/race (okay, not my race - Caucasian woman here). I can shoot aliens or zombies along with my guy friends - I just prefer to have a female avatar while I'm doing it. A female avatar that isn't Lara Croft.

And give me sim games. Nintendogs looks incredibly cute and fun (I had Catz on my computer in middle school). There's a cooking game that I wasted some time playing in Best Buy once. Puzzle games are always a hit.

Do not try to sell me a "video game" that doles out advice on "womanly manners."

Now creating a "game" that helps monitor actual health-related activities (hours of sleep, activity levels and water intake) could possibly be helpful to everyone. We all know about the obesity epidemic in this country (and how people are hoping that the increased activity required for the Wii, or games like Dance Dance Revolution will have an impact). I could definitely see a simple "game" being created and actually used by people to keep track of their daily activities. So many people keep their video game systems with them 24/7, this could be used to keep an electronic food journal, or calculate just how many calories were burned by taking the five flights of stairs up to class rather than hopping on the elevator.

Let's hope that this particular game doesn't make the jump from Japan to the US. We have enough body issues without a video game telling us to eat more ginger.

Seriously. That's apparently the name of a new show on NBC this fall.

From the article:
The series is about a 17-year-old call girl who worries that her flat chest will consign her to a life of poverty.

...

I have to admit, that when I first heard about Ugly Betty, I wasn't too excited. I haven't actually watched any of it, but it appears that my fears were unfounded and it is a surprisingly positive show.

From what I've read about the original Columbian version, there is no way to put a positive spin on this. 17 years old, a prostitute for drug traffickers, AND obsessed with getting breast implants. Oh, and according to the Wikipedia article, she actually gets the implants, becomes "disillusioned" and then kills herself.

What a message to young people everywhere.