When I first watched the clip, I was disturbed by the audience’s initial eye-rolling and derisive laughter. This, I thought, is why I have so little tolerance for pop culture. The twits were laughing at Susan Boyle for no other reason than that she was not young and not gorgeous. Apparently it was heinously absurd for a not-young, not-gorgeous woman to even haul herself out there on a stage (boo! hiss! climb back in the Kitty Condo with your cats why don’t you!) much less have the sheer monstrous hubris of thinking she could sing.

But of course she can sing, beautifully, and everyone in the world is now thrilled by this reminder that even not-young, not-gorgeous women still have value. If they can sing.

Don’t get me wrong: I love Susan Boyle. I love her story, I love the phenomenon, I love the comments around the world from people tearfully rejoicing in the triumph of a “normal” person. I hope she sells a million CDs. I guess I’m just wondering what it all means. As Tamar Abrams observes in the HuffPost, “the problem is that recognition of her talent is directly proportionate to her lack of good looks and youth…what does it say about the civilized world that our expectations for greatness are diminished when people are unattractive and/or old?”

Well, I’m going to take a wild swing here and say that it means our civilization is shallow and superficial and crap. It’s also sexist. Abrams asks, “when did looks and age become the bar by which we are each judged?” which of course is a rhetorical question, unless Abrams has just arrived here as an exchange student from the Andromeda Galaxy. Looks and age have always been the bar by which women are judged, at least in male-dominated societies. The only thing that’s changed in my lifetime is that the bar has gotten higher. The pornification of our culture means that we are surrounded by a nonstop effluvient of plasticized fembot imagery, beside which any normal human being looks like Gollum. No wonder real live women are having their parts changed out for artificial bits; they’re just trying to look more like what’s on the Spice Channel.

The double standard is especially obvious in the performing arts. Of course beauty is a big plus for anybody, male or female, but the fact is that men with talent and ability have never been held back by ugliness, chubbiness, hairlessness, or any other -ess I can think of. Pop music, for example, is full of deeply ugly men — and I mean scary ugly — as well as average blokes with paunches and receding hairlines (hello, Elton John and Phil Collins). And can anyone imagine a woman of Meatloaf’s heft having the kind of career he had? My youth was haunted by videos of Meatloaf sweating and howling through 8-minute songs in heavy rotation on MTV, but when Ann Wilson put on a few pounds she was practically banned from the channel. America had to be protected from the horror.

I don’t see things changing anytime soon, but at least the wonderful Susan Boyle has given us a brief bit of breathing space. Enjoy it while it lasts.

It was two years ago today that Seung-Hui Cho went on his murder spree at Virginia Tech, killing 32 people, wounding 17 others, and finally turning the gun on himself. It was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

A few days after the massacre, Sarah Baxter put her finger on what was troubling Cho in an article that must surely rank as one of the most brutally inane things ever published by the Times: it was feminism made him do it! What the shooting revealed, said Sarah, was “the crisis of young males in a feminised society.” Sarah Baxter is something like the English version of Camille Paglia, though without the bustier: both are anti-feminists who claim to be feminists, yet somehow only manage to write about how a) feminism is crap, b) most women are crap, and c) everything would be fine if we’d just stop whining and appreciate all the wonderful things men have done for us. Anyhoo, Sarah consulted with her buddy Camille and came up with a tender portrait of Cho the Shooter, a manly young man who was frustrated by a modern world full of harlots and unfeeling feminists: “college girls who reported him to the police for stalking and got him carted off to mental hospital after he sent them shy love messages full of yearning,” in Baxter’s phrase. Damn those idiot college girls for reporting Cho as a stalker! If only they’d appreciated his shy love messages full of yearning, there would have been no massacre. See what feminism does?

Actually, there is a connection between feminism and the Virginia Tech massacre, though it’s precisely the opposite of what Baxter thinks it is. But first, let’s get one thing clear: what caused Cho’s behavior wasn’t feminism or anti-feminism or anything in this big blue world but the addled contents of that boy’s skull, emphasis on addled. The guy was insane. A raving psychotic. You might as well blame gallstones on feminism. Yes, I understand that mental illness is affected and sometimes prompted by life history — it’s not all just brain chemistry — but the level of psychosis displayed by Cho is pretty clearly in the realm of massive disease. But if Cho’s actions had been shaped by some kind of angry response to women’s liberation (as was the case with the Montreal killer), what that would show us is not a society that is too feminized, but one that isn’t feminized enough. A society where bigotry against women’s rights is still so deep that it evokes murderous rage. A society that needs more feminism, not less.

Think about it: feminism is surely the only social justice movement that is still treated as a problem rather than a solution. If a group of young toughs go on a gay bashing spree, for example, the gay rights movement isn’t named as the social problem that has prompted those poor confused young men to kill. Instead, everyone understands that the problem is the bigotry, the homophobia, and that what needs to happen is for the young toughs of our society to learn tolerance and respect for diversity. Yet when women are slaughtered, people say, “well, if they’d just stop trying to be equal they wouldn’t get killed. No wonder men are upset.” We see that right now with the Chris Brown-Rihanna trainwreck: people actually blame feminism for imperiling young men’s self-esteem. Surely the answer to that is more feminism — perhaps young men could be taught that manliness isn’t measured by the number of stitches in your girlfriend’s lip? — but no, instead we’re told that “of course” young men beat the crap out of women to assert themselves in these terrible feminist times. And that if feminists had any sense or compassion they’d recognize the crisis of masculinity that is causing those balled-up fists to collide with our jaws. Still waiting to see that argument applied to gay bashing.

But back to Cho and Virginia Tech. The other thing the massacre shows (as if we needed more evidence) is how much violence against women is accepted as normal. Just part of the landscape. Cho had already been reported by female students as a stalker, yet he wasn’t confined, wasn’t under supervision, wasn’t on a police watch list. He was even able to buy guns, for pete’s sake. And the morning of the massacre, the police initially assumed that the first two shootings were “just” domestic violence, which is why they didn’t issue an alert or shut down the campus. “Just” domestic violence. Yeah, yeah, just another dead woman, murdered by her stalker/former boyfriend/would-be boyfriend. Happens all the time.

The Violence Against Women Forum will feature four of the New York area’s preeminent experts on domestic violence. Each expert will speak about a specific topic that she feels is currently noteworthy.

One of the four panelists, Leslie Crocker Snyder, Retired Justice of the New York Supreme Court, will speak on “Reform in sex crimes and domestic violence and the need to continue these reforms.”

Details of the event and the other panelists can be found by clicking here.

The Violence Against Women Forum will feature four of the New York area’s preeminent experts on domestic violence. Each expert will speak about a specific topic that she feels is currently noteworthy.

One of the four panelists, Rosemonde Pierre-Louis, Manhattan Deputy Borough President, will speak on “Violence Against Women and the Media.”

Details of the event and the other panelists can be found by clicking here.

Tina Fey promoted sexist stereotypes with her parody of Sarah
Palin last year, depicting the Alaska Governor as a brainless bimbo.

As we all know, patriarchy bestows its smiles and kisses on the women who do its bidding, especially those women who take on the front-line enforcer jobs of shredding other women to bits. Last year a whole bunch of women signed up for duty on the Sarah Palin Evisceration Squad, none more prominently than Tina Fey. And the rewards for her efforts keep pouring in. She’s been on magazine covers, photographed by Annie Liebovitz for Vogue, and voted Entertainer of the Year by the Associated Press. Now “Saturday Night Live” has won a Peabody Award for political satire, largely on the strength of Fey’s ridicule of Sarah Palin. According to the Peabody Awards committee, “The late-night legend stole the election-year thunder from its satirical competition on cable and may have swayed the race itself.” Ya think? Having a Vice-Presidential candidate slandered and misrepresented week after week on national TV might have swayed the race? Gee, I never would have guessed.

The LA Times oozes that Fey’s impersonation of Palin was “spot-on” and “dead-on,” but it wasn’t. Physical resemblance, yes. Vocal resemblance, yes. But the rest of it was pure propaganda. Sarah Palin never said “I can see Russia from my house” — Tina Fey said that in a skit. But the jibe stuck, and millions of Americans believe the words were Palin’s. Sarah Palin’s real debate performance was impressive, but in the SNL debate skit, Fey-as-Palin refused to answer questions and instead announced that she would “demonstrate some pageant walking.” The audience roared.

The sad thing is that modern American feminism has become so anemic that Tina Fey probably thinks what she was doing was somehow compatible with women’s rights. And why wouldn’t she? The largest feminist organization in this country joined in the Palin-bashing too. Last fall NOW featured a suggested Sarah Palin Halloween costume, replete with pageant sash, “lots of hairspray,” and “a wardrobe that didn’t cost $150,000.” It’s incredible. If you had told me 30 years ago that NOW would be engaging in that kind of sexist mockery of a female politician, I wouldn’t have believed you. But that was then; NOW is different. If you follow the link on that costume page to learn “so much more” about the “horror” of Sarah Palin, it’ll take you to a Kim Gandy editorial that is full of bald-faced lies — lies that came straight from the Obama campaign. The rape kit smear, for example: a particularly ugly piece of disinformation spread by the Obama team expressly to discredit Palin among women voters. By helping to spread that lie — and others — NOW wasn’t doing anything remotely resembling feminism. It was functioning purely as an auxiliary of the Obama campaign, and using any means at hand to destroy the enemy. Patriarchy enablers.

As I wrote last year in “Stone Her”:

The other day I was talking to a young woman, a self-described feminist, who could not understand why defending Sarah Palin from sexist attacks was a feminist act. She really, truly could not understand that. Her argument was that because Sarah Palin is a Republican (a “bad” woman), the correct feminist response is to use any means necessary to destroy her. Why not stone the bitch? Why not call her a c**t? Why not make jokes about raping her? She’s one of those bad women! Bad!

I also wrote at the end of that post that I hoped it wasn’t too late to salvage the women’s movement. I wrote that I hoped we could “start feminism all over again.”

Well, we’re doing it. Look around.

The G20 Wives -- not husbands

Well, there are only two husbands anyway. Funny, that.

They let women in the room?

That’s Hillary at one of the G20 meetings — Hillary and a whole bunch of dudes. Wonder if she’s carrying her jar?*

Keira Knightley is appearing in a new ad campaign about domestic violence for the British charity Women’s Aid.

In the shocking two-minute film, Knightley is shown being brutally assaulted by her partner (warning! violent content):

At the end of the clip, you’ll notice that the tagline says “2 women die from domestic violence every week.” That’s the figure in the U.K. In the United States, it’s ten times that number: at least 20 women killed each week. (Reported figures vary, but the range is from 1000 to 1500 deaths per year.)

In the British press, reaction to the new campaign is mostly very positive, though some are wondering aloud if this kind of thing really works. What do you think? Is this the kind of ad that will raise awareness? Will battered women see themselves in this? Will it have any effect on abusive men?

Early coverage of the video in the U.S. media suggests to me that the internal barriers people have to recognizing domestic violence are quite sturdy. On the L.A. Times site, for example, one commenter protested that “guys just don’t beat their girl friends/spouses/significant others when they walk in the door.” On E! Online site, several commenters were reminded of the Rihanna and Chris Brown case, and took the opportunity to air their belief that Rihanna was “faking it.” Meanwhile, commenter “Andrew” (also on the E! Online site) helpfully explained that this sort of thing is the natural result of “women are being employed in positions where men should be, displacing men as bread winners and providers.” Men are frustrated by this challenge to their natural authority, sez Andrew, so of course they strike out.

We have a long way to go.

We’ve created a new section on the website for the forum, as you’ll see if you look up on the top menu bar. In that section we’ve made the entire brochure available for download as a pdf or jpeg, and we’ve also created separate pages for each panelist with individual jpegs and pdfs.

You can download the invitation above as a jpeg or a pdf.

The next job for the workshop elves (that would be me and a couple of imaginary friends) is a notice for the home page.

Results from the Boston Public Health Commission's survey of teens on the Rihanna/Chris Brown case

Recent events have made me wonder despairingly whether decades of modern feminism have made any significant dent at all in the quality of relationships between young women and men.

The Web chatter by teenage girls who have been casually forgiving of rapper Chris Brown’s alleged battering of his girlfriend, singer Rihanna, has stymied me. If you judge by some of the posts, many girls seem to think she must have done something to provoke it, or that she is equally to blame. A New York Times story last week, headlined “Teenage girls stand by their man,” quoted one Grade 9er: “She probably made him mad for him to react like that. You know, like, bring it on?”

Timson sees more of the same — or worse, really — in the MT murder case in Toronto, in which a 17-year-old girl talked her boyfriend into murdering a 14-year-old girl, apparently in exchange for sexual favors:

These vile text messages, flatly discussing “bj’s” and “bang bangs” and fuelled by the obsessive irrational hatred of one girl toward another, depicted an emotional landscape devoid of respect, conscience or heart. They also revealed a very retro scenario – a monster girl who thinks her power lies in bitchily, and then murderously, vanquishing another girl.

In these cases, girls see other girls as the enemy in the endless hand-to-hand combat to capture guys. Chris Brown is better off outta there, say those girls. Don’t you know?

I bolded the part that is crucial, the part that I keep talking about incessantly to my friends/family/dog/wall, the part about how this behavior is profoundly pre-feminist. This is how women are trained to behave under patriarchy: all value and status flow from men, so women must compete with each other for access to men and the resources they control.

Eavesdropping on the thoughts of these hate-full (I use the term with precision) young women is, for me, like traveling in a time machine. This is how women ruthlessly cut each other down in the days before feminism. Read nineteenth century novels, check out the diatribes of anti-feminist women at the fin de siècle, watch an old B-movie from the 50s. It’s the patriarchal snakepit.

That’s why the first job of Second Wave feminism in the late 1960s was consciousness-raising: bringing women together to deconstruct these patterns and understand how we had not just been brainwashed into accepting our subordinate status, but also how we’d been pitted against each other from girlhood.

But today, after decades of backlash, it’s as if feminism never happened:

Many boy-girl relationships today have become a retro minefield because of the confluence of several things.

First, there has been the sexualization of young women very early in their teens, so that being “hot” and attracting boys becomes an early measurement of their worth, and remains that way well into adulthood.

Second, there’s been a devaluing of feminism and its true principles in the media and popular culture. Feminism has been both trivialized – softened into what I call “you go girl-ism” – and demonized by exaggerating scary things such as man hatred.

The frustrating thing, Timson says, is that “teenage girls today have been given every single tool they need to gain their own equality: the words, the books, the laws; the examples everywhere of women, sometimes their own mothers, achieving at work and living in respectful and equal domestic relationships.”

Yes — but. Here I part company with Timson. Girls have not been given every tool. The anti-feminist backlash has been too strong. The deeply-rooted social patterns that Second Wave feminism starting chipping away at are still largely intact, like icebergs under the surface. A girl today grows up with a working mom and laws guaranteeing equality, but almost everything she watches on TV, hears on the radio, sees in the movies, reads in magazines, and buys at the store reinforces the age-old message: men run the world, and women are the sex class.

Add to that the particularly toxic flavor of modern culture — brutal and degrading pornography, hip-hop that glorifies violence and abuse of women, “torture porn” movies, even magazine ads designed to look like rape scenes — and it’s no wonder girls today are growing up with deeply internalized misogyny.

We need to re-start feminism. We need to re-start the consciousness-raising, the remedial lessons, the basic 101 stuff. We need to bring our message to every woman and girl — and every man and boy — in this country.

If I have one wish for The New Agenda, it’s that we can recapture the clarity and power of the Second Wave. Except this time, we won’t let ourselves get bogged down and fractured and backlashed into oblivion.

On the president and her wardrobe:

“He’s always asking: ‘Is that new? I haven’t seen that before.’ It’s like, Why don’t you mind your own business? Solve world hunger. Get out of my closet.”

Yeah! That’s how it’s supposed to be. The menfolk run the world while the ladies worry about shoes.

The name of this masterpiece of journalism is “Mrs. Obama Speaks Out About Her Household.” I think the reporter must have simply dredged up some old Mamie Eisenhower or Jackie Kennedy pieces from the Times archives and plugged in Michelle’s name. Topics covered include:

• How she keeps her figure
• French fries
• Hips, and the value of pleats
• Silver belts
• Shoes, and how she keeps buying them

Most important of all is the President’s dismissive attitude towards his wife’s fashion foibles. It’s a standard trope of patriarchy, going back to the ancient Greeks: serious man, frivolous wife, indulgent teasing.

This is Act II of last year’s media assault on Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. Just as those women were brutally attacked for daring to reach for power, Michelle Obama is now being primped and puffed as a good Stepford Wife who knows to stay in her place. She can worry about her silver belts and matchy-matchy shoes, while the men do the important stuff. And all is right with the world.