Wait, Now They’re Letting “Fatties” Make Out on TV? Surely You Jest …

Boy, mag/website Marie Claire really stepped in a big pile of cow patties with this blog post by Maura Kelly titled “Should Fatties Get a Room (Even on TV)? the other day. The piece was about television show Mike & Molly, which depicts an obese couple who meet at Overeaters Anonymous, and was apparently prompted by Kelly’s editor asking her, “Do you really think people feel uncomfortable when they see overweight people making out on television?”
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The Color Purple

So today is “wear purple in support of LGBT teens” day, courtesy of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). All across the mighty land of Facebook, people have changed their profile pics to purple in support of the day. I’m not seeing a lot of purple around the homeschool center today, except on little kids whose parents probably dressed them not knowing that today is “purple day” anyhow. I don’t own anything purple, oddly enough, or I suppose I would have worn purple just because.
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Meet Me at the Protest

Maybe I’m mellowing out a bit as I age, but it’s actually a pretty rare thing these days for anyone’s opinion about a movie to raise my ire to the point that I feel compelled to write an entire article refuting it. Maybe a Facebook post. Perhaps just a 140 character Tweet. But for me to devote an entire blog post or column to a subject, it has to really strike a chord in me. So I’d like to offer my congratulations to David Cox, whose article in The Guardian last week on Nigel Cole’s Made in Dagenham succeeded where so many other inane pieces have failed, inspiring an entire post to refute it.

Made in Dagenham is a fictionalization (though one that, by all accounts, stays fairly close to truth) of a strike by female factory workers at a Ford plant in Dagenham in 1968. A strike that, by the bye, was crucial to the eventual passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1970 (that would be Great Britain’s Equal Pay Act, not the one passed in the US and signed into law by John F. Kennedy in 1963, after which it was put into a vault and completely ignored by the mostly male managers who run things).

Mr. Cox kicks off his piece with this bit: “Dagenham in the 1960s is presented as in thrall to blinkered routine, bumbling incompetence and heedless injustice. It’s a place controlled by men, and its deficiencies spring from theirs.”

Actually, the film presents Dagenham as representative of the Western world generally in 1968. Historical context: England at that time was barely recovered from the economic devastation of World War 2. Post-war, Great Britain went through a period of not only physically rebuilding, but of vast social change; the fledgling post-war Labour Party had nationalized many industries. Since Mr. Cox writes for a Brit paper and might even, for all I know, be British himself, he should know this already. I grew up in America, where the accuracy of our school textbooks depends largely upon the whim of fundamentalist Christian ministers advising mostly white male politicians, and even I know that much.

Further, the context of this film isn’t about women versus men, it’s about women convincing men — in both their union and the larger entity of the Labour Party — to recognize that what’s fair, what’s right, is for unions in general and the Labour Party in particular, to work to support the rights of all workers, not just men. And at that point in history, they did not. You could make an argument that this is not the case today, but even that would be a dicey one to support.

The film doesn’t create some non-existent fantasy world controlled by men; it was a world controlled by men. The women working in that factory were devalued by their male co-workers, referred to by the diminutive term “girls” even when they were older than their male co-workers and managers. The work they did — women’s work, because it involved using sewing machines, and men can’t use sewing machines! They have penises, remember? — was devalued by reclassifying their jobs as “unskilled” so the men in charge could pay them even less than they were already. It wasn’t female managers making those decisions. There were no women at the top of the union heap representing the interests of its female membership.

And the injustice depicted wasn’t heedless, it was explicitly and deliberately designed to both keep women in their place and to control the bottom line — profit — which would be impacted hugely if the demand for equal pay was met. Not just because that one little demand being met for 187 women would have been huge. It was the collective bargaining power of working women around the world being inspired and compelled to demand equality — a movement that was starting to seriously impact larger society — that these men — were afraid of.

It took courage, spirit, and, yes, balls for the women who marched for equality to stand up to their fathers, brothers and husbands, to take off their high heels and aprons, to cast aside the expectations of the men in their lives and in their workplace that the woman’s place was to be subservient to them. The women at the Dagenham factory, fueled, in part, by the burgeoning feminist movement, collectively put their cute little womanly heads together and said, we’re sorry, chaps, but fuck that.

And Made in Dagenham, which depicts their story, is great if for no other reasons than that tells a nearly lost tale about the fight for women’s equality and it’s about women doing more than talking about men and sex and fashion. Also, it stars Sally Hawkins, who is indisputably a British goddess.

But wait! Mr. Cox takes issue also with the casting of the divine Ms. Hawkins in the role of Rita O’Grady, a fictionalized character who’s an amalgam of two or three real women. Apparently Ms. Hawkins isn’t as burly and manly as he would like her to be. Perhaps the makeup department should have given Ms. Hawkins a hairy mole and a brawny mustache, because heaven forbid a working class, protesting, budding feminist woman who’s an abstract representation of real women should be depicted as attractive. Because everyone knows feminists are all burly lesbians with short haircuts and comfortable shoes, right?

Mr. Cox also takes issue with the film’s depiction of the well-established scientific fact that women and men tend to do things in different ways. He says of the film, “Women do things differently. In their domain, sisterly co-operation replaces blustering self-promotion. Compassion trumps protocol. Good humour banishes pomposity. Above all, homely common sense mocks heartless custom-and-practice. The triumph of these values makes the world a better place.”

Well, yes. So what? Women do do things differently than men. And Made in Dagenham is a story about these particular women and how, united by their common cause and yes, god forbid, “sisterly” co-operation, they found the courage to stand up for their rights, at a time in history when women were largely pinned under the boot heels of men.

Next, Mr. Cox attacks the film for daring to imply that men and their testosterone cause problems: “War, it’s implied, in Iraq as much as the Peloponnese, is rooted in machismo. Political factionalism is displaced brawling. Disastrously reckless financial speculation is fueled by testosterone.”

Yes. Yes. And yes, absolutely. Actually, the “testosterone” effect of successful financial traders has been studied for a while now, Mr. Cox. Here’s an article from TIME on that very subject for you to peruse. (It’s also discussed in Charles Ferguson‘s Inside Job, which breaks down the global financial collapse that sent the entire world into a tailspin when the bubble burst in 2008. By the way, the vast majority of the people responsible for that shit? Were men. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

The war for equality didn’t end in Dagenham. In fact, it’s barely begun — as evidenced by this recent article on the disparity in pay between women and men on Wall Street, which discusses little things that might piss feminists off, like women working in the financial sector losing their jobs at five times the rate of men since July 2007. And female managers in the finance field earning 63.9 cents for every dollar earned by men.

Oops, scratch that — in 2007, the most recent year for which data from the Government Accountability Office was available for that Bloomberg article, that dropped to 58.8 cents. Wait, what happened to equal pay? Well, fuck.

The women who protested at Dagenham, at the time they went on strike, were being paid 87 percent of the rate paid to “unskilled” male workers and 80 percent of the rate paid to “semi-skilled” male workers. Women working in finance in 2010 may be bringing home more bacon, but the percentage of what they’re paid compared to their male colleagues has gotten worse, not better. Sucks to be a woman, I guess.

Made in Dagenham does push buttons, yes. But those buttons are well-worn because they’ve been pushed before and need to be pushed again, and again, and again, until the men who are still largely in control of things get the message and fix things. Because the things that were broken in 1968 when the real women of Dagenham went on strike are, to a large extent, still broken. This is exactly why a film like Made in Dagenham is relevant, important, and necessary today.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to pop off to paint some protest signs.

I’m OK, You’re OK, “Gay” Jokes in Movies are Not OK

And now for a few words on the “gay” issue surrounding Universal’s film The Dilemma, whose trailer, with Vince Vaughn uttering the line, “Electric cars are gay. I mean, not homosexual gay, but my-parents-are-chaperoning-the-dance gay,” has stirred considerable controversy (note: the trailer has been edited to take out that line).

Were gay rights activists right to challenge Universal for having this line in their film to begin with, and for highlighting it in the opening scene of the trailer? Hell yes, they were.

For me, this issue is a very simple one. As Unitarian Universalists, we are raising our children to respect diversity. Our congregation is a welcoming congregation for the GLBT community. As a bisexual woman with many friends who are gay and lesbian, and a daughter who recently came out herself, this is an issue that’s near and dear to my heart.

I grew up in Oklahoma, a place where openly acknowledging your difference from the norm in any respect — gay, liberal, not fundamentalist Christian — can be a dicey proposition. But while it would be easy to say it’s only in the flyover states that tolerance of gay kids, much less acceptance of them for who they are, is more the exception than the rule, the reality is that even in more liberal places like Seattle, New York City and Los Angeles, there’s a subtle kind of casual bullying that often takes the form of saying things like “that’s so gay” that gives gay people — maybe gay teens in particular — the message that who they are is NOT okay, that if their friends found out they are gay, they will become the target of teasing, social isolation, maybe even physical violence.

I can’t begin to count, for instance, how many times in the past two years I’ve asked the teens at our home school center in liberal Seattle to not use the word “gay” in a derogatory way, as in “You’re so GAY, dude!” and “That’s so GAY.” I would talk to the school’s administrator, to other parents, to make them aware of it being an issue, and for the most part everyone agreed that of course it’s no more okay for the students to use the word “gay” in that way than it would be for them to be saying “nigger” or “kike” or “spic” or any other derogatory term. They agreed that we had GLBT parents and teachers and students who would find it offensive, and even if we didn’t, it STILL wouldn’t be okay.

But it still happened, on pretty much a weekly basis, and was tolerated by default in a way that a student using a racial slur, or making fun of a student’s weight or bra size, would never be tolerated. It was a never-ending battle against the popular culture of television and movies and videos and music these kids are exposed to that tells them “that’s so GAY” is okay.

The thing about oppression is that it’s an insidious thing. The Nazis didn’t just wake up one morning and start rounding up Jews in concentration camps and implementing the “final solution.” They started out with propaganda and smaller bits of oppressive (one might say bullying) behaviors to establish themselves as superior and the Jews as inferior to the Aryan race, and then responsible for all its problems, and then not even human in the same way that Aryans are human. They established with the common people that it was okay to discriminate against Jews by a systematic devaluation of Jews as people, people with the same rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as everyone else. They did it through fliers, through cartoons depicting Jews as rats (thereby setting the stage for the acceptance of “exterminating” Jews as one would exterminate a nest of rodents infesting ones home), through hyperbole, and, yes, through movies. Popular culture is as much a part of what sets the social barometer of acceptable mores as the indoctrination kids get at their parents’ knees.

It doesn’t matter if the joke “clarifies” that “of course we don’t mean THAT kind of gay, sheesh.” It doesn’t matter if it’s a funny joke, if it’s a joke at the expense of another person. It’s not about being the PC police. It’s about the need to respect other people, period, and to recognize that when you make jokes about gayness an acceptable part of popular culture, you by extension make jokes about particular gay people acceptable, and you further are helping to create a culture where intolerance of gay people is the norm. And when intolerance is the norm, bullying will — and does — follow.

You think not? Go do a random internet search on “gay bullying suicide” and see how many articles you pull up. Now go to those articles and read the comments section, and see for yourself how much hate seethes through those anonymous keyboards out there. It’s shocking, it’s sad, it’s the truth.

And while it’s also the truth that you can’t change what’s in peoples’ hearts, you do not have to make hate and bullying and intimidation acceptable. We as members and friends of the GLBT community have to stand up and say enough. We have to say “this is not okay, period.” Most of all, we who are the adults need to be actively concerned about creating an environment where it is both okay and safe for gay and lesbian teens to be open about who they are. Where a gay teen won’t be bullied to the extent that he feels life will never get better, and suicide is the only option.

As a bisexual woman, I wish I hadn’t had to grow up hiding that about myself, or feeling there was something wrong with me. As a mom, I don’t want to feel afraid that my daughter might get hurt, emotionally or otherwise, for being brave enough as a young teen to be open about who she is. And much as I admire Dan Savage and the It Gets Better project, I wish that the world we live in wasn’t a place where we need an “It Gets Better” project to reach out to young people to convince them their life is worth living, even if they’re gay.

This is why, even if you might think they’re being overly sensitive PC police, it’s a good thing for GLAAD to be watchdogs of the media around the term “gay” being bandied about in negative ways. If you’re not gay, or don’t have someone in your life who is gay and has ever experienced being bullied or threatened because of their gayness, maybe you find it hard to get why anyone would get so worked up about this issue, or you think it’s not an issue at all.

But just in the time it took me to write this post, I got a notification in my email inbox about a comment someone made about a YouTube video I put up several months ago of my daughter, her BFF, and her friend’s (gay) father dancing as part of a Glee Flash Mob at the Seattle Gay Pride parade.

The comment, by a user named wowtcg, was this: “Stupid faggots need to get aids and die. But in the end they all get aids :)…..Thank God.”

Wowtcg, who not only took the time to search on YouTube to even find this video in the first place and then to leave a hateful comment on it, inadvertently made my point about why it’s so important that we fight — loudly — against the use of “gay” in a derogatory way in popular culture, including stupid jokes in movies. This, folks, is exactly why.