Well, Therese Schechter, of whom I’ve been a fan since “I Was A Teenage Feminist,” is hard at work doing just that in filmic form. Her new doc, “How To Lose Your Virginity,” examines our culture’s obsession with being virginal. The journey kicks off when Therese herself starts planning her wedding and realizes that, “like many modern brides, I have no business wearing white.”

Check out the trailer:

From the website:

[The film's] true target is idealized, fetishized virginity: its historical role in U.S. culture, its power to mold and damage a girl’s self-image and self-worth; its commodification as something manufactured, sold, given away, taken…

…What is behind this strange American cultural moment where Disney starlets flaunt purity rings while writhing on stripper poles, brothels hold million-dollar virginity auctions, and artificial hymens can be had for $30 on Chinese websites?

Therese plays the audience’s navigator, decoding a landscape of conflicting and hypocritical messages about what it means to be a ‘good girl’ or a ‘bad girl’ – and why it matters. In the end, she follows the white organza road, not only to her own non-white wedding, but also to a place where young women can have open, non-judgmental conversations about their own sexuality.

I’ve been waiting for this movie to come out for a while–I talked about it on Girldrive back in 2008. The doc is THISCLOSE from having all the funding it needs, and Therese is busting her ass to raise all of it before July! Go here to help out. Even $10 will make a difference–they’re missing less than $2500.

We direly need more people questioning our blinding worship of the intact hymen (or whatever virginity is). So let’s make sure this film gets finished!

ALSO: Check out the companion blog, The American Virgin.

Fast-forward to 2010: Channelling Robyn Okrant, an 18-year-old from Pennsylvania named Jamie is spending a month following all the advice that Seventeen doles out to young women. Purpose: to “shed some light on the modern teenage experience.” (Jamie admits she’s probably too self-aware for it to actually affect her. Just think of this as a SuperSize Me for teen girls.)

From the blog:

I got to thinking about the role of beauty/fashion magazines in society, and the industry’s intentions. Obviously, teen magazines are not intended to serve as manuals for better living. An informal poll of my friends indicated that roughly 0% of the girls I associate with actually apply the advice they get from magazines to their daily life. Save for the occasional “My-Ear-Got-Deformed-From-A-Cartilage-Piercing” horror story, however, these magazines offer little more than exhaustive lists of how to become cuter/hotter/thinner/fitter/healthier/more popular/etc. So if nobody is applying these supposedly life-changing tips, why are people still buying these magazines? (Cue inevitable: “They’re not… print media is dead!”) Are we really entertained by lists of makeup tips and pictures of girls in intensely-layered ensembles that we aren’t likely to wear? (Guilty pleasure answer: Yes?)

Julie’s note: A while back, I wrote a post (my first, in fact) concerning the multiple teen pregnancy-related storylines on TV. Around that same time a show first aired on The CW: Life Unexpected. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a show — a modern day fairy tale, really — about a teenage foster child who tracks down her birth parents in order to become emancipated, and via an institutional deus es machina, winds up in their care. As of yesterday, it has been picked up for a second season.

The show took me by pleasant surprise. Not only does it hearken back to the WB’s earlier, rose-colored days when young adults built non-traditional families, but it has a risk[ier than most] depiction of real, flawed women and tough situations. A welcome television oasis, one would gather, from the One Tree Hills and 90210s that sandwich it on the young network.

Liz Tigelaar, Life Unexpected’s showrunner, agreed to sit down with me a few weeks ago and talk about the show, its gender (politics?), and her experience as a female showrunner.

Julie Block: What was your inspiration for Life Unexpected?

Liz Tigelaar: It was a lot of things. On one hand I would think about my life: I’m kind of scared of babies and I would love if a teenager was just dropped on my doorstep. And I also had a long relationship with someone from high school and always thought, “What if we had a baby in high school?” So I was thinking about my own life. And I love coming of age stories and the idea that the parents are the people who need to grow up because of the kid. On a deeper level, I’m adopted and always had this fantasy of finding my birth parents … It was only in doing the show that I realized how I grappled with it. So I guess you could say it’s pretty personal, but I didn’t think of it that way [originally]. In retrospect a friend who read [the script] said, “Hey, this is kind of about you!” And I was like, “What?”

JB: So how then, for a story so personal, do you separate yourself?

LT: It isn’t my story. The themes and ideas [are], but I wasn’t a foster kid, I wasn’t a kid who didn’t get adopted, I have great parents who wanted me, who are amazing people. So it’s not my story, but I may see myself in my characters, like Cate, obviously. I never wanted to write a story about myself, it’s more that I can see myself in this fictional story.

JB: How do you feel about how you handled the foster care stuff?

LT: There’s always more research that can be done, and there are things you do for television, so I’m not claiming that we’re any more accurate than Grey’s Anatomy or any other medical story [chuckles]. But I read a lot of memoirs, so even if we haven’t been able to get the facts and logistics right … we’ve tried to be really true to a character’s emotional state, and obviously there’s only so far we can go on the CW.  People will say like, Lux is a brat, Lux is unlikeable; there’s this idea that you’re going to have this perfect kid with no damage who’s just grateful and allows you to love them when they’ve been through awful stuff. We’ve really tried with all the characters to not think of them as good or bad but just as people, who are flawed, who are trying.

JB: I’ve read a lot of hateful responses to Cate’s character … I’m wondering if you think that’s symptomatic of how we view the mother/father dynamic.

LT: Of course! I never sat around fantasizing who my birth father was. It’s completely different, a birth mother vs. a birth father: You were in your birth mother’s body and she gave you up. With Lux, in a way, her anger is still directed at Cate. And Baze is less important because in her mind growing up, he wasn’t even a thought. I think she always fantasized Cate was her mom, that person on the radio, and I don’t think she sat around fantasizing who her dad was. I always thought that was true, as was that theme of being a parent vs. being a friend.

Whether in business or parenting, women and men can behave the exact same way but be conceived completely differently. A guy is powerful, strong and won’t back down, whereas a woman is a bitch. And it’s the same on TV. You could never have the character House be female. It would be like, “That character is totally unlikeable!” We like the female characters who have babies and get married! We like the ones who don’t take their anger out on other people. That’s true for parenting, too. When I was little, my dad would do my hair before school when my mom was out of town. It would be the worst job ever —

JB: With braids and poofs going everywhere —

LT: Right! But if your dad did it, that was so cute! But if your mom sent you to school like that? “She needs to be taken away from her.” It’s an entirely, completely different standard, which I wanted to also explore. And I think we’ll keep exploring.

JB: So, I read that originally you wanted Cate to be a bike messenger …

LT: Originally she was going to be having an affair with a married man … more screwed up, basically. The way it panned out, it [now] made sense to have her on a pedestal, and it probably relates more closely to the way I put mother figures on a pedestal. But when I originally conceived it, I wanted it to be more inconvenient [for Cate] to have a kid. But I realized (well, obviously, the CW helped me realize) that … she and Baze would be in the same boat [financially], so it’s nice they have different challenges. But at the time I thought: If she’s living in an apartment with two roommates and she thinks her married boyfriend is going to leave his wife, and she has a whatever job …

JB: Have you gotten any responses from people involved in the foster care system?

LT: The responses have actually been pretty good. I mean, when you’re tackling an issue like this, you always get nervous that you’re not going to do it justice. And there are things that we could always do better. We always call and ask [our consultants] specific questions and really try to honor the truth of the situation. But there’s a website called “Birth Mother, First Mother,” and I always get linked there about the show and I think that it resonated that way. A foster care documentary about easing out of the system contacted me and I did a little endorsement of it. It’s definitely made me want to get involved [with foster care] in some way, and I think it’s also only led to more ideas for stories. Not only with Life Unexpected–I have another pilot that I really want to do that’s kind of in a different direction. But I don’t, I try not to read TelevisionWithoutPity. I always want to go on so bad because I think the people who write on there are really smart and know a lot about TV, but I’m afraid to go on there because …

JB: You’re not sure what they’re writing about the show?

LT: Well, honestly, I’m just afraid that I will get so paralyzed. It’s hard. There’s so many debates that go into everything that people don’t know [about] … To do this job and this show you have to have confidence in yourself and your decisions or you will not be able to do it, so I tried not to be obsessed with what undermines it too much, but I do get really curious. I know what I think of as a fan of something, and I tell the writers all the time: If I was on my own staff, I would be revolting all the time … It’s been shocking to me, once the weight of the show and the responsibility is on your shoulders, how your storytelling changes. I haven’t seen the wide response, but from the articles, I’ve been pretty happy.

JB: One of the great things about the show is that the characters are complex, but the characters get a lot of flack. And I was wondering if female characters get more of it.

LT: Definitely. Look at how much people love Baze, who’s no worse, no better, than Lux or Cate. One thing I loved in the evolution of Cate’s character: I feel like at the beginning, people did find her a certain way, but people have really come to understand her and relate to her … I’m a lot like Cate, and I don’t think I’m that [I’m so different]. I think a lot of people are like me. I remember with the first draft I handed in, they said, she’s unlikeable, a woman who doesn’t want to get married and have babies is unlikeable, a woman who takes her anger out on others rather than turning it inwards is unlikeable, all these things that make a woman unlikeable. A man would never get these notes.

And so I would always push Cate further, and I’m happy that she gets to be as broad and real as she is. When we were watching the finale together, my dad laughs and goes: “She’s just always herself. No matter what.” And I love that he said that, because I always thought Cate is who she is despite herself. Even if she sometimes wants to be different, she can’t help but be herself for better or worse.

JB: You definitely touched on that in the early episodes when Cate questions the perception where the female radio jockey is crazy and abrasive, and the guy jockey is funny and cool. I think a lot of women really connect with that …

LT: It’s the reason that Liz Lemon is so loved. All of us see ourselves in her.  With the women from Sex and the City, maybe we saw ourselves in that we have those conversations with our girlfriends, but I don’t think that most people [really] saw themselves. But Tina Fey’s character is so popular because people feel like floundering basket cases. Especially now …  You prioritized your career over personal life and it creates a whole set of issues. Cate’s done that. She’s a character I really love, she’s really easy to write, I love making fun of her, I love Shiri [Appleby]’s quirks, and she just embodies her. She gets it. And it’s really fun to see.

JB: You’ve said that Life Unexpected is the unsexy show on The CW.  So what might young women take from Life Unexpected that they wouldn’t take from … Gossip Girl?

LT: It’s a love story, it’s not a sexy love story because it’s a love story between a family. It’s about family and trying and wanting to be better than you are, and how it’s easier to tell somebody to do something but harder to follow yourself. We have this image of how women should be, if we opened magazines and we just saw ourselves, if we turned on the TV and just saw ourselves … not to say that we sit around comparing ourselves to every woman, but I think it’s a truer representation of what’s going on … [The characters] don’t strive to be perfect because they know they’re not. There’s no standard of perfection. But, I think it’s just more real.

The stories we tell are going to be more emblematic of real situations. We’re not going to have two girls kiss because it’s hot. It’s going to be because one person is really struggling with something, something real, [for] the kids watching who might also be struggling with it. We’re not doing anything for shock value or sex appeal. Not that there’s anything wrong with those, it’s fine, but it’s not us. If we tried to be that, it would be inauthentic. We have to stick to what we do.

JB: What are the things that Lux is struggling with? Clearly not all her issues are tied in a bow…

LT: Well I haven’t pitched second season yet [Note: this interview took place in mid April] so I don’t know what they’ll like or what they won’t like … Once she’s been adopted, all the push-pulling goes away, and what it becomes is, I want to live up to whoever you expected me to be. I don’t want them to know they got a lemon.  I don’t want them to think they got a dud, but inside I kind of feel like a dud. I think that’s the story, and what’s really amazing and heartbreaking.

JB: How does sex come up in the writers’ room, or with the network?

LT: We haven’t had a lot of it, probably because the show’s so not sexy. We did have this question in the beginning, was Lux a virgin or not? And I see that it’s a good story, Lux losing her virginity, but personally I feel like I’ve written that story. I haven’t, but I feel like I have. And I’ve seen it a million and one times, and I just don’t believe that she’s a virgin. I don’t believe that Bug was the first person she had sex with. I believe that a kid that’s looking for love, looks for love, and … takes sex for love … In the episode where she’s just lying in bed with Bug in her underwear, we [didn’t] have to make [a thing of it]. We obviously did a story with Baze hoping she’s a virgin, but “My boyfriend’s name is Bug. I was going to live with him. Are you kidding me?!” I think that’s more fun. I like taking stories that you’ve seen and then turning them because we have a more adult character.

JB: I think you handled well the part where she’s like “I know how this [sex] happens.” There was an article in Time about the anniversary of the pill, which argued that abstinence education is partly behind the foster care epidemic.

LT: Someone was just telling me that the number of abortions are way down, and I don’t know if that means less people are getting pregnant or fewer people are getting abortions … That’s why we always said Cate and Baze used a condom, it just broke. I didn’t want to represent them as careless people. I also never meant to represent Cate as anti-choice …

JB: Is that what people think?

LT: With Gilmore Girls and with this show. If you look at things through that lens, it’s easy to say. With Gilmore Girls, the message could be, “Hey! You should get pregnant and have a baby! Because you guys will be best friends!” With Cate, maybe it’s a little different, but close. People put their belief systems onto [the characters], but I always had my own theory about Cate. And actually, kind of like with my mom, she didn’t know she was pregnant until she was about six months pregnant. She was, but they told her she wasn’t …  Cate was in denial for a long time and then it was past the first trimester and [an abortion] wasn’t going to happen. But our intention wasn’t to send anti-choice messages.

JB: What’s your experience being a female showrunner?

LT: I read an article that looked at the ratio of men to women, and said it wasn’t that great for women. That’s not my experience. Julie Plec, who does The Vampire Diaries, is one of my best friends; my producing partner’s a woman and she does everything; I’m surrounded by so many empowered women. But it’s much harder. We’re just built differently, for instance: I was having this horrible day [a few years back] and I did this pitch and I don’t [remember] what happened. But as they were talking I could feel myself welling up in this room full of men, one woman, thank God, and I was … really frustrated. And I just started crying! And I was so mad at myself, I was being such a girl. But I wanted to say, I cried, I’m not ashamed of that. That’s what I do, I don’t punch people, I don’t take it out on someone. I just get a little weepy.

It can be hard because that’s not acceptable, and while it’s not everyone’s nature to cry, it’s mine, and obviously if you’re crying at work you’re seen as weak. So then I have to fight my personal nature. It’s not the best example. But I feel like my whole show is that too, in a weird way. There are really strong women on the show and I like it that way. We think differently but we’re not desperate to be right, we really want to collaborate. It’s not about our egos–we just want to make it good.

Conferences in general are good ways to feel rejuvenated if you’re a weary activist, galvanized if you’re a newbie, refreshing if you’re a blogger. And it’s really essential that they’re equal opportunity–it can’t just be a bunch of rich people in the room. So go apply–or check out the student discounts–if you can’t afford to hop on a plane and pay $355 in tuition. (Let’s get real–who really can these days?)

During my undergraduate career, I had been actively interested in American visual culture and its affects on American women’s identities. The issue of visual culture’s influence on identity was always a contentious one for me, as I think it is for many young women. How can it not be when you’re constantly bombarded with images of unattainable beauty standards? As my research on visual culture accumulated, I began to wonder about visual culture in other locations. Because of my Italian heritage, and the opportunity to study abroad in Rome in 2006 for five months, I knew immediately that I wanted to talk to Italian women about visual culture and how it may or may not have influenced the shaping of their identities. I interviewed women from various backgrounds and ages.

“[Italian women] feel how American women felt in the 50s,” said Angela, a 34-year-old architect and Ph.D. candidate in 2006 living in Rome. This response was startling to me. Angela continued, “When my friends and I go see American movies, we see how brave and independent the American women are. Even though it is better for Italian women today, we still haven’t reached where American women are.” Antonella, a 35-year-old manager in Milan echoed this sentiment, when I interviewed her recently. She said, “To represent the current woman, who lives in 2010, I suggest discussing the working woman, who has a lot of dreams, ambitions, and hobbies. When I say dreams, I don’t mean wedding dreams, but dreams for themselves, like career, travel, and why not a new sports car?” Both Angela and Antonella felt pressure from their society’s expectations, usually expressed through visual culture.

When I questioned how Angela felt about Italian advertisements, she commented, “Of course I’m affected by it to some extent. I think everyone is, but you can’t follow it—you’ll go crazy.” Likewise, Antonella said that she didn’t feel like Italian visual culture represented her. She stated, “Unfortunately, women don’t speak or say anything special in most of Italian advertising. They often appear bare-ass, from food advertising to car advertising.” This is, of course, similar to representations of women in American advertisements, however, in Italy many ads involve nudity. The billboards I saw in Italy typically presented half-dressed women, occasionally nude, in poses that seemed all too explicit for the general public. This had the effect of overshadowing the commodities being sold, to the point that many of these billboards seemed to be simply selling women. The production of this visual culture is entirely for men by men. Nudity is generally more accepted in Italy than the U.S., which is, in some ways progressive, but can border on exploitative.Italian media was new to me, though I was used to seeing the unattainable aesthetics that went into most commercial media. The television shows I watched in Italy exuded a fetishized, commodified female sexuality constructed for the male gaze; stronger than what I had seen in the States. Women in scantily clad garments passed on the screen with gyrating hips. The women were generally there to act as decorations, or ornaments. One young woman I interviewed found this to be problematic. Elisa, a 22-year-old student in Milan said, “Of course, I’d like that this purely ornamental function had an end; women are not only objects or bodies that can be shown, but they are also people endowed with intelligence, with their own thoughts and opinions. This effort should be taken upon media, but also upon women themselves, and public opinion.”

The women represented in visual culture, at the time of my visit, were often blonde, blue-eyed, and waif-like. Even Miss Italy (in 2006) exhibited these traits. For the Italian women that I spoke with, this felt confusing since these models were not representative of them. In Italy, most blondes are seen as non-Italian. They are considered “exotic.” There is a definite hair-color hierarchy in Italy. Blondes are seen as sexy, easy, and exotic, while brunettes are common and prudish. When I would walk around with my blonde-haired, blue-eyed friend, she would receive more attention than I would. We would be at a café or in a clothing store and my friend would be helped first, whereas I wouldn’t even be spoken to on most occasions. However, sometimes this hair-color hierarchy had its downside. For instance, since many blondes are stereotyped as “dumb” some Italians wouldn’t talk to my friend, because they assumed she wouldn’t understand them, whereas because I’m Italian American and look as such, they would often ask me for directions and/or help. This inconsistent behavior was confusing and annoying. I would often wonder, “How will I be treated today?” I began to feel ugly and unimportant in Italy, as I was constantly reminded that I was “average” and looked like everyone else.

One woman, who definitely stood out to me during my stay was Marilena. At the time, she was a 64-year-old single woman who had never been married and never had children. She dressed like she was in her twenties, had a tanning bed in her apartment, dyed her hair blonde, and kept numerous framed photos of her younger self throughout her apartment. When asked if she was affected by visual culture, she stated, “No, I am not fixed on it.” For me, it was difficult to let Marilena get away with this comment when it was all too clear that she was extremely affected by the imagery imposed on her. This was evident by the things in her apartment. As I spoke with Marilena further, she began to state her insecurities: “I don’t think I was beautiful. I’m not sure of my beauty.” She continued, “My mother, father, or grandmother never told me I was pretty.”

The last four interviews I did were with young women in their twenties. I spoke with Erica, a 23-year-old student in Milan, and when asked what she thought of American women, she replied, “I think they are like Italian girls, but maybe more opened mentally. Although, I see that the problems they have in America are similar to the problems we have.” I questioned Erica on what she meant by this and she said that she believes American women to be more susceptible to letting visual culture bleed into their psyche. When asked how she felt about representations of women in popular culture, Martina, who was 21-years-old, said, “The women are introduced like empty containers.” Women in visual culture are completely devoid of voice, strength, and retaining any sense of authenticity.

Alice, a 24-year-old, discussed the dominance that American culture seemed to have in Italy. She said, “[In Italy] it says that in America the girls are all wonderful, like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Hillary Duff, and Paris Hilton…One thing that seems taken very seriously is their physical appearance.” The women I spoke with all discussed their dislike of the current visual culture that was being presented to them. When asked how she would change this, Paola, a 24-year-old office clerk, said she “would change the image of the [woman as] object that is presented exclusively on television programs and commercials. To begin, the woman would no longer be insufficiently dressed and she would speak.” Women are repeatedly silenced through visual culture. When will it be our time to speak?

None of the women I spoke with were able to identify with the commercialized representations of them. I’ve spoken with other women from various backgrounds informally about this as well. The response is generally the same. We don’t feel that our physical and/or intellectual selves are represented accurately in today’s media. Each woman I spoke with was aware that visual culture shaped her identity to some extent, and still does. The women I interviewed all stated that these types of advertisements were detrimental to their physical and emotional health.

I often question, “Will things ever change?” And if yes, when? Visual culture has only increased its ability to alienate and silence women. Those who continue to produce these advertisements seemingly don’t care.

Women must be heard. They must be allowed to speak their own culture and identity.

Then there’s this long, annoying, pointless, drawn-out part of the interview focusing on how “angry” Sophia is, if she’s an “angry person” or if she’s angry about other things. Uh, yeah, she says, “commuting.” Glad that Sophia realized the ridiculousness of the question, but will millions of viewers? Check out the clip for yourself. Katy at Jezebel has more.

I farted in the library yesterday.

I farted. In the library. I was sitting, minding my own damn business, and then I had to fart, so I tried to ease it out silently, you know, the way you do, but it made a sound.

And then I was mortified.

The Roommates, who I informed online and who enjoy mocking me for my bodily functions, the assholes, did not help: while R tried to calm me down (“it’s fine, nobody noticed, calm down”) R took a break from stalking puppies on Puppycam 2.0 to send me a Facebook Chat:

R: LEAVE NOW EVERYONE KNOWS.

Me: I hate you

R: whats that smell

This is one of those absurd things, sexist and otherwise, that you’d think as human beings we’d have progressed past, socially, and yet we haven’t. It’s why Elliot (on scrubs) is called a bankfarter and hates her job. It’s why games in elementary school like “Whoever smelt it, dealt it, and whoever denied it, supplied it” were less funny and more a matter of a life or death. Don’t even pretend to me that, even as you were laughing, you weren’t petrified that somehow you’d be named supplier.

My embarrassment was tempered by the fact that there was no one I found attractive nearby. My reasoning, of course, being a girl, that if there were a guy I found attractive nearby, and he was taken in by my frizzy hair, sweats, or Quasimodo posture, he would have instantly been repelled by my body’s unseemly ability to let loose smelly gas. You know, find me less attractive.

Less feminine.

Because while farting – or pooping, or other bodily functions – are bad for boys, they are ten times worse for girls. And this is partially because girls are not supposed to be able to do those gross things, nor are they allowed to. And mainly because they never do them in movies.

And personally I find that dehumanizing. And a catch 22.

It starts when you’re young. Or it did for me anyway: Girls don’t sweat, they “watered,” according to my older brother. Perspired, according to my grandma. And glistened, according to movies I’d see about older southern women instructing younger southern gals in the early 20^th century. When girls poo, they poo out flowers and rainbows. And farts smell like roses.

It starts when you’re young.

As you get older, weird shit starts happening to your body. One of which is that blood starts leaking downstairs. But you hide it, and every time you see a commercial, they advertise the apparati meant to hide said gross red stuff with some benign blue liquid. (Quick but important addendum: Kotex, who actually gets it, made the aforementioned commercial. Even if nobody else does. Thanks, network TV!) Half of the commercials – in fact, half of the products – are targeted towards hiding said apparati better: smaller compact tampons passed around by giggling girls while confused boys look on.

At the same time, there are movies. Lots and lots of movies. Movies, funny ones, that often are about poop jokes, or fart jokes, or puke jokes, or all-other-sorts-of-gross-bodily-fluid jokes. Who doesn’t love a good poop joke? I love them, my roommates, again, love to mock me for them. But it’s funnier (and perhaps more embarrassing) to us because we’re breaking some sort of cultural taboo that claims I shouldn’t do such things because I’m a girl.

I could list so many movies where boys do gross things. Animal House. Van Wilder. There’s Something About Mary. On, and on, and on.  I could dump a load of them on you [pun intended].

But how many movies or TV shows can you think of, where girls do gross things? I can list them on my hand:

Scary Movie 1: During the sex scene, the girl lets out a surprising burst of cum. I think.

Harold and Kumar: the two hot british chicks at Princeton have a game of “sunk my battleship.” It’s pretty awesome.  And by awesome I mean disgusting.

That … may be it. So few girls act gross, and even fewer making gross period jokes! The one time in recent history I can think of is Superbad, and that is, essentially, a movie from a male perspective about girls. How else does Jonah Hill pull Jules, huh?

Where are the jokes about girls getting her “period”? Where are the jokes about girls getting her blood everywhere, or what’s more, girls making fun of their friends and each other about said blood, or reveling in the humor? Gross things are funny, but why is – let’s be honest – something that is considered disgusting, perhaps more disgusting and taboo than poop or even semen, never, ever used as a joke?

It is completely nonsensical to me. Either periods are grosser than pooping, in which case it should be fair game by really extreme comedic filmmakers, or it is less gross than pooping (which it is: wouldn’t you rather get “period” on you than somebody’s shit?), in which case it’s also fair game. But no one ever makes jokes about it, and if or when they do, it becomes a joke made by guys about women.

Let’s step away from periods for a second, and return to women doing gross things for a laugh. The only recent one, the only one that really comes to mind, is 2 Girls 1 Cup. And that is not meant to be empowering. It’s just disgusting. When it exploded on the internet (that time the pun was unintended) the reason why it was so out of the ordinary, was so commented upon, and was so disgusting, was because it was two girls. If it had been 2 Guys 1 Cup, it would have gone nowhere.

The movie Bride Wars was awful. And it wasn’t just because it made women look like crazy conniving bridezillahs with no depth or humanity to them, or that the premise was so shaky. It was because it promised to be an all out farcical “catfight” of one uppsmanship of pranks. If it had been a guy movie about two dudes, I guarantee you that they would have been putting laxatives in each other’s drinks or feeding each other semen sandwiches or at least making fun of each other for farting. But instead we got Kate Hudson’s hair green and girls shrieking and ripping each other’s wedding dresses, which is not how ladies behave blah blah blah. Had Kate Hudson popped a laxative in Ann Hathaway’s cosmopolitan, or Hathaway stolen all the tampons, pads and toilet paper out of Hudson’s apartment, the movie would have been much funnier. I mean, that is some good material, right there. [NOTE: DO NOT STEAL IT.] But nobody would greenlight such a movie, and I am pretty sure Hudson, at least, has a no “poop jokes” clause in her contract.

It sucks, and it’s dehumanizing in a sense. Because the other aspect of it is that, no matter how gross some of these guys can be, they still get the girl in the end. (See: Pretty much every Seth Rogen/ vehicle.) But if girls are gross, then suddenly they are less attractive. Suddenly, they are less girly.  We always talk about the catch-22 of the Madonna/Whore complex, but what about the catch 22 of being a human  — a messy, dirty, gross, human — or being a pretty girl?

So yeah, I farted. But you know what? Roses smell like poo. So you tell me if I’m any less girly.

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It didn’t bother me that most of the points made in these two pieces were just scratching the surface–I am thoroughly ensconced in feminist culture but understand that most Newsweek readers aren’t. And you gotta start somewhere! I get this.

It also didn’t bother me (well, maybe a little) that the three journalists who wrote this story were white. After all, I know many white feminist writers who understand that race and gender and class and geography intersect, and they show that in their writing. If I thought white people could only write about the views of white people, I wouldn’t have written an entire book with another white person displaying just how multilayered young feminism really is. There is certainly a diversity problem in mainstream media–92 percent of television news directors are white, most major newspapers’ staffs are 80 percent white–but white people can be accurate and informed reporters as long as they seek out a range of voices.

Which leads to what did bother me–a lot: In the 3500 words total that Newsweek devoted to the future of feminism this week, amid the 10 people who are quoted in these pieces, not one woman of color shows up. Seriously.

This happens constantly when the mainstream pubs try to cover feminism. It happened in a CNN news segment last June, where the network’s definition of feminism was Angelina Jolie, Hillary Clinton, and Gloria Steinem. It happened at a highly publicized Planned Parenthood event a few months ago called “Voices on Feminism,” which consisted of, yep, three white women.

Some might argue that this is more a reflection of the kinds of women calling themselves feminists rather than the fault of the mainstream media. And it’s true, to a point–although there are millions of bad-ass feminists of color, many women of color do feel marginalized by feminism–these women in Girldrive, for a start. But guess why? Because articles, TV clips, and events like these continue to marginalize them even as they attempt to widen the conversation about feminism. They ignore the young women of color doing feminist work nowadays like Stacyann Chin, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Rinku Sen, to name a few. Not to mention the ones who paved the way for women writers and journalists (Ethel Payne? Alice Walker? Marcia Gillespie? HEL-lo.) These three women at Newsweek didn’t even bring up the issue of race, much less seek out the voices of non-white feminists. This is a huge. Fucking. Problem.

What really gets me is that the majority of young feminist activists do think of feminism in an intersectional way. Just look at the blogger rosters at blogs like Feministing, Feministe, or Racialicious. Just look at the staff at organizations like WIMN or INCITE! or the ladies in Girldrive. Young feminists are trying not to make the same mistake that some Second Wave white feminists made of being blind to race issues. But places like Newsweek, CNN and other mainstream outlets make that a frustrating uphill struggle by painting a whitewashed, monolithic picture of feminism.

–Nona

UPDATE: Jezebel’s Irin wrote a post riffing off Anna’s post on how the picture is all white women (which, in my opinion, isn’t as important as getting the words and names of feminists of color into the piece, since the photo is of the writers and the women who filed the original Newsweek suit.). But yes, regardless of “how much sense” the photo makes, perhaps the editors should have thought twice about visually representing feminism with these women rather than a cross-section.

UPDATE #2: The authors’ blog, Equality Myth, wrote this in response. I wish I could just call them up and talk to them on the phone. It’s not racism–it’s colorblindness. It’s failing to realize the bigger picture of what feminism means today. It’s choosing to interview Ariel Levy, Rachel Simmons, and Gail Collins–who are all amazing but not representative by any means. There’s also such a thing as constructive criticism, which I think Irin gives.