To continue our theme from Friday’s ‘Women, Know Your Limits’ video, we turn to the Women’s Interest Lifestyle section of CNN.com, where we find this gem:
Plus, Michelle Obama knows just what to pack!! I think I’m getting the vapors.
I don’t generally write much about “the sex” in this space, aside from the occasional Chuck Grassley/boobies joke, because, among other reasons, several of my colleagues—and, god knows, by this point, probably my mother—read this blog, so, really.
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But my post last week about divorced comedian Steve Harvey’s book of so-called advice for single women, “Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man,” has raised a lot of issues about women, sex and dating that I’d really like to explore a bit further. If this is the sort of thing that makes you blush, well, I really don’t know what you’re doing on this blog in the first place, but you might want to wander on over to something a little more PG.
Anyhow. Several of the folks who commented on and emailed me about the post articulated my problem with Harvey and his philosophy better and more succinctly than I could.
Blogger/author Robin Monique kicks Harvey’s ass around the block and offers some of the soundest dating advice I’ve heard, well, ever:
When should I sleep with him? Answer: When you want to and not a moment before.
What if I sleep with him and then he stops calling? Your value is not determined by your vagina. He can’t see that? His loss. Keep it moving.
Don’t I lose my power when I sleep with a man? As long as you’ve got two feet and the good sense to leave a situation that’s not working for you, you always have power.
When should I let him go? When you find that you’re more often unhappy than happy in the relationship.
How do I avoid heartbreak? You can’t. It is a part of life. Trust that you’re strong enough to get through it.
See the pattern? Your greatest relationship is the one that you have with yourself (or your God if you’re religious/spiritual). Setting your relationship behaviors around arbitrary rules rather than your own natural tendencies will all but guarantee a lifetime of confusion, anger and heartbreak.
Meanwhile, commenter TheProblemWithCaring picks up on a largely unspoken racial dimension of Harvey’s argument that I completely missed (edited for length; read the original comment here):
It seems to me that Steve Harvey wrote this book to all the “good” single women of color out there, who seem to be lapping it up. From the church to beauty salon to the late night tearful debriefing sessions with sisters, mothers, aunts and friends on “What went wrong with Mr. Right;” the answer always is YOU GAVE UP THE COOCHIE TOO EARLY.
It’s never that the man is just emotionally unavailable, a misogynist with intimacy issues, a commitment-phobe, fucking your cousin, or just not that into you. It always comes down to When Did you Sleep with Him.
It would fly in the face of the paradigm for women of color to say “BUT HEY DIVORCED STEVE HARVEY. I AM A WOMAN, BUT I LIKE SEX TOO.” It’s easier for Oprah and others to accept it and try to claim power from their sub-status as women (i.e. Our pussies are magic! Men cannot resist!) instead of trying to assert real power. Personally, I think Black women could do a lot for themselves, their communities and the world if they stopped listening to little dicks like Steve Harvey and started telling Black men, Eat my pussy, fuck me right AND call me tomorrow, or fuck off and let me date your brother.
There were also a few critical comments (though not many, leading me to believe I have a very naughty readership) that made the reasonable point that in a situation where a woman is looking for a long-term relationship and a man is just looking for sex then, yeah, by having sex the woman does give up a lot of leverage.
But, if you’re looking for a ring or just a long-term serious relationship, then dating a man who is very openly NOT looking for those things is a losing proposition from the start. Far too many women—the Carrie Bradshaws of the world, let’s say—drive themselves to distraction trying to get men who aren’t interested in commitment to commit. It defies reason. If you’re looking for a Volvo, don’t go to the Ferrari dealership, okay?
But—and I think this might come as a surprise to Mr. Harvey—it works the other way too. Not every woman in the dating pool has back issues of Modern Bride stashed away in her closet. You might need to sit down for this, Steve, but here’s the truth: Not every woman you date wants to marry you. We are not even close to that into you. Seriously.
If you have a mother like mine, you’re familiar with the maxim that no man is going to buy the cow when he’s getting the milk for free. But here’s a thought: The cow is not for sale.
Ponder that.
According to our friends over at FishbowlLA, there’s a bit of an internet fracas brewing between Mattel and a coalition of worked-up mommybloggers over the company’s decision to “magically transform” girl-hero Dora the Explorer into, well, something of a slut.
The mommymob fears that the new, skankified Dora will influence their daughters to develop body image issues, eschew books in favor of makeup and spread their legs for every two-bit SpongeBob on the block, which is probably true since I grew up playing with stuffed animals only to become an unrepentant furry.
Anyhow, the Concerned Women for Chaste Cartoon Characters (CWCCC) is sending around a petition demanding that Mattel suspend Dora in her pre-pubescent glory, forever. Sign up here.
The tired theme that women aren’t funny gets some new life in today’s Guardian, with Germaine Greer trying her hand at the famously explosive topic. Greer’s strategy seems to be to mitigate the objections of ladybloggers and assorted other wimminfolk by following each absurd assertion (“Women are about as funny as a botched colostomy”) with some half-hearted apologia (“But that’s only because they don’t want to be!”).
“Women famously cannot learn jokes,” Greer writes. “If they try, they invariably bugger up the punchline. The male teller of jokes is driving towards his reward, the laughter of his mates. The woman who messes up the same joke does so because her concentration is not sharpened by that need. She is not less intelligent, simply less concerned.”
Oh Germiane, you caught me. Try as I might to tell a good chuckler, my lady brain invariably gets distracted by more pressing issues, like hairstyles and sewing notions.
Wait, though. Greer then backpedals a bit and asserts that women actually can deliver jokes, we just can’t think them up:
“Given an opportunity to perform a finished comedy routine, a female comedian will make you laugh as hard as any man. Put her in an improvisation situation along with male comedians, and she is likely to be left speechless.”
Where the logic of Greer’s argument falls apart is when she moves from moderately fact-based Assertion One, “There are more funny men in entertainment than there are funny women” to unsupported, overreaching Assertion Two, “Men are naturally funnier than women.”
I think that if it is true, at least on average, that a woman is less likely than a man to get a laugh, it’s because boys are raised to attract attention, while girls are brought up to deflect it. All jokes, gags and innuendos basically say the same thing: Look at me. And on the whole, men are more comfortable in the spotlight, possibly because they don’t have an entire entertainment industry firing mortars at their self-worth from the time they pick up a crayon.
I wish there were more funny women. There certainly are a few. It isn’t easy being a woman who’s more piss and vinegar than sugar and spice in a society that still values doe-eyed deference far more than we’d like to admit, and given the choice, I’d much rather laugh than drink, cry and cut myself.
I just hope I won’t be laughing alone.
This morning Barack Obama signed into law the first legislation of his presidency, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, extending the statute of limitations on paycheck discrimination for men and women like Ms. Ledbetter, who earned less than her male colleagues while doing the same work.
The bill is a victory for women and other marginalized groups and is long overdue. That said, though, I seriously doubt it will make much of a dent in America’s 78-cents-for-every-dollar gender pay disparity because overt bias is much less of a problem than the inability or unwillingness to negotiate. Simply, the problem isn’t that American women aren’t getting raises; it’s that they aren’t asking for them.
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It’s been well documented that in America, and probably around the world, boys are taught to argue while girls are raised to acquiesce, and from the sandbox to the boardroom, pushy women are seen in a very different light than pushy men. So it isn’t any wonder that more often than not, when Dick and Jane are each offered their proverbial 78 cents, Dick will negotiate his way up to a dollar, while Jane will politely accept what she’s offered, reasoning that the company, knowing the market and her qualifications, probably is offering a fair rate.
So now the company is paying Jane 22 percent less than Dick for doing the same job—but they probably would be willing to pay Jane what they’re paying Dick. Only Jane never asked.
The same is true when it comes to raises and bonuses—you usually aren’t going to get one unless you ask for it. The fact is that in business, unlike in college, no one is assigned to track your successes but you. Your failures, yes, but successes, not so much. Social scientists have long puzzled over why women succeed in huge numbers in academia then fall behind their male peers almost immediately after graduation, and the answer is simple. The problem isn’t women’s all-consuming (and highly overstated) desire to make babies; it’s that while her male colleague is in the boss’s office asking for a raise, she’s sitting patiently at her desk, waiting for somebody to notice all the great work she’s doing.
None of this is to say that women like Lilly Ledbetter who earn less than men for doing the same job aren’t victims of discrimination or that they don’t deserve the right to sue for damages. But regardless of the law, few women will ever have the opportunity to see these wrongs righted in court. Every woman, though, has both the ability and the responsibility to ask to be paid what she’s worth.
Come back next week for How to Negotiate Better Pay without Sounding Like a Bitch.
Last week, I noted some of the unsettling racial/sexual overtones of the new Axe Dark Temptation campaign. But it’s not surprising I don’t like the ad; I’m nowhere near Axe’s 18-24 year old male target demographic.
Which is what makes CP+B’s recent Volkswagen “Routan Boom” campaign so bizarre. As an educated, solidly middle-class, 26-year-old female who would like to have children in the not terribly distant future and who is, as a matter of fact, actually in the market for a new car, I’m sitting square in the middle of VW’s ideal consumer real estate.
And yet the ads, which should be tailored to appeal to me, instead achieve the unfortunate trifecta of offending, confusing, and utterly creeping me out.
The 30-second spot “Meet Christine” opens with spokesgal Brooke Shields sounding the alarm about a growing “epidemic”:
“There’s an epidemic sweeping our nation. Women everywhere are having babies just to get the new Volkswagen Routan. Take this couple. Christine here is so seduced by German engineering, she’s having a baby just to get it.”
Probably the weirdest note these faux-public service spots, presumably aimed at the educated young women who make up a full 61 percent of the minivan-buying market, hit is the mocking tone they apply to one of the most monumental decisions in a woman’s (or man’s) life: When, or if, she wants to become a parent.
As traditional gender roles begin to thaw, more and more women are agonizing over the choices that come with potential motherhood—Can I keep my career and have a baby? What am I going to do about child care? Can my spouse or I afford to stay home? What if I’m still single, but my biological clock is ticking?
The Routan spots minimize these life-altering moments with a gusto not seen since Coors’ ’07 spot “Pregnancy,” in which the woman’s positive pregnancy test is equated with the changing color of the temperature indicator on the man’s beer.
Interestingly, as I was transcribing the line from the “Christine” spot above, I typed “Couples everywhere are having babies…” before listening again and realizing that it’s not couples, but women. That’s another unsettling aspect: Even though all of the women in the ads are coupled up (Dan Quayle would be proud), it’s always the woman who has initiated the pregnancy, apparently covertly, painting the men as dupes and the women as manipulators.
Also bizarre is the choice of Shields as the face of the “Routan Boom” campaign. In recent years she has spoken publicly about her struggle first with infertility, and then with post-partum depression. Now here she is making a joke about women who approach having babies with the same gravity as changing their hair. What?
Sales figures for the Routan aren’t yet available, but it will be interesting to see if they hit their mark. In portraying women as wonton, overgrown children impulsively having babies to get a new toy, the campaign dismisses the legitimate and pressing concerns of exactly the consumers it’s trying to reach. They’re not just doing a disservice to women, they’re doing a disservice to themselves.