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The 44th Super Bowl was a fairy tale for the New Orleans Saints—and a bad dream for the women who made up one-third of the television audience. Over at The Sexist, Amanda Hess has graciously compiled all of the most egregious instances of sexism, racism, and homophobia broadcast during the commercial breaks last night. None of them are funny. Most of them are downright offensive. But all of them, Hess points out, were approved by CBS.
Here it’s important to out CBS as complicit in all of the advertorial programming shown during the Super Bowl—most of which was ineffectual at best, dangerous at worst. And as Dana Goldstein reported last week, CBS made particular overtures to Focus on the Family, offering the same “guidance” it administers to all wannabe Super Bowl advertisers on what would be “appropriate” for their anti-choice advertisement starring football star Tim Tebow. But by allowing the barrage of misogynistic (‘milkaholic’ babies fighting over a howling 'wolf'?) ads to blanket the year’s most-watched evening of television, CBS has done both short- and long-term damage to women’s well-being.
Based on some informal friend-polling, I’m not alone in thinking that these ads were some of the worst cases of lady-bashing in Super Bowl history. But if Mad Men has left any practical lesson, it's that the glamourous cadre of Madison Avenue hacks are also pop psychologists plugged into the elusive id of America, knowing what we want and how we want it before we do. What’s more, companies dropping upwards of $1 million on airtime surely focus-grouped each spot within an inch of its life.
So someone in the midlife-male group that's the target demographic for Bud Light, GoDaddy.com, or Doritos liked these ads—thrilled to them, even. What could possibly justify the attraction? Economist Brad DeLong flags a graph that may hold some explanatory power.
Men ages 25-54 are experiencing their lowest level of employment in the United States ever. Despite the recession, women are doing compratively well: Unemployment for men of all ages is at 10.8 percent, while only 8.4 percent for women. (Black men are at 17.6 percent.) And the precipitous drop since the beginning of the recession means that there are fewer men who can fulfill the hetero-normative cultural diktat to be “master and commander” of their domestic lives. Reihan Salam's essay on "the death of macho" laid out the emotional terrain:
[A]s men get hit harder in the he-cession, they’re even less well-equipped to deal with the profound and long-term psychic costs of job loss. According to the American Journal of Public Health, “the financial strain of unemployment” has significantly more consequences on the mental health of men than on that of women. In other words, be prepared for a lot of unhappy guys out there—with all the negative consequences that implies.
In other words: These men may not be carrying lip balm, but they are out of work and mad as hell.
The facts on the ground are not funny—families are doing more with less, less with less, and pride is being swallowed with every unanswered resume sent out. Sublimating these anxieties into that quietly violent Dodge Charger ad is therefore manipulative in the extreme (and pointless: If my theory holds, brand-new, $30,000 cars should be out of reach for this audience). Whether the commercials interpret the present or predict the future, this ad trend—like selling your wife for tires—should be roundly condemned.
Photograph of man by Photodisc/Getty Images.
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—Sarah Palin isn't ruling out a bid for the White House in 2012. Claiming she'll run if it's the right thing to do, she said it was "absurd" to rule it out—some are even joking she thinks it's her "divine mission." [Washington Post, The Daily Dish]
—Some claim the Focus on the Family ad featuring Tim Tebow in last night's Super Bowl was a whole lot of hype. The ad, which steered clear of explicitly stating the group's message, was meant to be pro-life but seemed more pro-Tebow than anything else. [Salon]
—Washington, D.C., is still digging itself out from last Friday's snowstorm, but reports are already estimating a new helping of snow this week. Some forcasts are predicting eight more inches for the area starting Tuesday afternoon. [Washington Post]
—Husband and wife Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally share adorable and honest moments with New York magazine. The couple has been married since 2003, but the spark is definitely still there. [New York]
—A woman claims she was raped by NFL star Michael Irvine. Irvine and a friend illegedly consumed large amounts of alcohol, lured the woman into their Florida hotel room and forced themselves on her. [Courthouse News Service]
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After all the sturm und drang over the Focus on the Family-sponsored Tim Tebow ad, it was inevitable that some people would find the ad itself underwhelming. If you had no idea what the underlying story of the ad is, you would think that the Tebows spent a ton of money to explain that the Florida Gators quarterback has a mother who finds him loveable, a message that is a tad obvious even in these dark times. Trying to put myself in the shoes of someone who hasn't seen the ad, the most I could come away with was, "Are they trying to taunt the motherless?" It was heartening to see Focus on the Family flush millions of dollars down the toilet for an eminently forgettable spot. Half the audience probably thought Tim and Pam Tebow met on eHarmony.
Of course, those of us who knew about the ad ahead of time took the time to watch it carefully, and I could tell what they were trying to do. The theme seemed to be, "Sure, we're openly campaiging for an abortion ban that would dramatically escalate the maternal mortality and injury rate through both illegal, unsafe abortions and by forcing women undergoing deadly pregnancies that doctors believe will kill them, but look, we grin really hard, so you know we can't be that bad!" Attempts to put a smiling face on a misogynist ideology has been the anti-choice trend for a couple of years now, but as usual, they don't control their message as well as they think they do.
The ad shows Pam Tebow telling a detail-free story about how she almost lost Tim during her pregnancy (they decided to eliminate the part of her usual story on this where she almost died), and while bragging that her family is "tough," she gets tackled by Tim in a CGI-constructed way that makes it look like a real football tackle. Then, snuggles. Two unwittingly nasty aspects of the ad jumped out at those of us at Casa del Marcotte: the blindside tackle and the bragging about toughness. In an ad designed to send the message that Focus on the Family doesn't hate women, it seems a little thoughtless to show a man run over his own mother while she's trying to talk. What would have been a bit of harmless-seeming tomfoolery in a more mundane ad took on ominous tones because it served as a visual representation of Pam's story of how she was nearly killed bringing Tim into this world.
If anything, the bragging was even more upsetting. When you argue that you survived a harrowing pregnancy because you're "tough," you imply that other women who die under similar circumstances were too weak to deserve to survive. It's already bad enough that the religious right shames women who choose abortion for choosing their education, careers, relationships, already existing children, or their own lives over the obligation to have another baby. But shaming women for being weak who die trying to fill the mandate (or who are deprived of the choice) to bear children at all costs? That's dark indeed, no matter how glowingly white the background of the ad is.
Photograph of Tim Tebow by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images.
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Jenny Sanford, the soon-to-be-ex-wife of Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina, is out with a memoir, which, according to the New York Times, she wrote "in part for their four boys, who remain confused about their parents' pending divorce." Jenny apparently thinks her book will set her sons (and the world) straight—as if this is the very thing her boys and the world most need. While I think Mark Sanford is likely a loon and clearly wasn't a good husband (or governor), and she (and the people of South Carolina) are right to divorce him, this is one case where I think Jenny is the bad parent.
I say this because one of the best books I've ever read on divorce is Anthony E. Wolf’s Why Did You Have to Get A Divorce? And When Can I Get a Hamster? In fact, I've read all Wolf's books—including his one on teenagers (even though I don't have one yet). Wolf is not of the school that all divorces have to be irreparably damaging to children. But he does powerfully and persuasively argue that one of the worst things divorcing parents can do to their kids is to share with them all of their adult, messy, and self-justifying, or even justified, reasons for getting a divorce. Why? Because it invariably puts kids in the middle and asks them (either explicitly or implicitly) to take sides in what really is and should remain their parents' private dispute. Is Mommy right that Daddy should have worked harder on the marriage? Or is Daddy right that the marriage was passionless and doomed? Or vice versa? No kid can answer such questions, because to do so would be to risk the affection of the other parent—the very thing that most terrifies kids about divorce. Kids don't want to take sides. And frankly, they don't care. It's the adults who care. Kids just want to love and be loved by both parents.
Thus, when such questions arise, Wolf wisely counsels that, even if one parent is truly a jerk, short of situations of actual abuse, the other parent must respond, challenging as this can sometimes be: "That's between your father [or mother] and me." And leave it at that. Anyway, as Wolf notes, if one parent is truly irresponsible or a monster or simply absentee, the kids will discover this on their own. They don't need the other parent pointing it out. In fact, they probably know it all too well—and it makes them sad. Obviously, Jenny Sanford has not followed this advice but instead has chosen to air her family's dirty laundry in public. When the Times reporter asks her why she's chosen to expose her kids' father "as a laughably cheap, self-absorbed, soulless, cheating first-class jerk," she replies snootily: "It's not the book that put him in a bad light." Maybe so. But this book sure puts her in a bad light. Does she really think this is what her kids need, to be thrust into the spotlight and embarrassed yet again in front of their friends (as if their dad's press conference admitting his extramarital affair wasn't mortifying enough), all supposedly for the kids' own edification, and even as their parents' divorce is still raw? I don't.
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The blogosphere is a-twitter about Vanity Fair’s latest “New Hollywood” cover. Specifically, its stark lily-whiteness. As Dlisted put it, this year’s annual Annie Leibovitz shot “makes a BYU class picture look like a Benetton ad.”
Bloggers have pointed out a few obvious, nonwhite actresses who could have been included, like Gaby Sidibe, who is featured in the portfolio inside the magazine, but not on the cover. There’s also Zoe Saldana, who starred in the two biggest sci-fi movies of the year, Star Trek and Avatar. Yes, Saldana was featured on the cover of the 2008 Hollywood issue—behind the gatefold, natch, along with Alice Braga and America Ferrera—but then, they put ScarJo on the cover of the Hollywood issue THREE YEARS in a row. (2004, ‘05, and ‘06.) And can I make a retroactive vote for Charlyne Yi? Admittedly, I don’t think she glams up all that often, but the prospect is so delicious.
Try to play this game too long, though, and you run out of steam. After all, as Dodai Stewart points out on Jezebel, it’s not as if Hollywood is exactly teeming with hotly tipped young actresses of color. Maybe it’s just a numbers thing, and those of us who feel angry at VF really are just shooting the messenger. Most American movie ingénues, after all, are white, pretty, and thin. But it’s a chicken-and-the-egg kind of scenario. Is Hollywood to blame for not putting more actresses of color in its movies? Or are magazines like VF to blame for perpetuating the idea that young, worthy actresses are naturally thin, pretty, and Ivory soap-white?
As momentarily satisfying as it feels, I also don’t feel entirely comfortable cherry-picking actresses of color and then waving them around, yelling, “Here’s one you could have put in there!” It makes it sound like we’re pushing for a kind of tokenism, some quota-based notion of “diversity,” when really it’s just sad that someone could look at an image like that and not see race written all over it.
I was chatting with a friend about the brouhaha today, and she was reminded of this line in Adam Gopnik’s recent New Yorker obit of J.D. Salinger:
In American writing, there are three perfect books, which seem to speak to every reader and condition: “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Great Gatsby,” and “The Catcher in the Rye.”
Now, I happened to hate The Catcher in the Rye, and The Great Gatsby left me cold when I finally read it, years and years after I should have. So maybe Gopnik and I have different literary tastes. That’s all fine and good; I’m not obligated to buy his assertion that these are “perfect” novels. But the notion that these books should “speak” to me and my “condition”—that I will naturally find something resonant and familiar in the experiences described therein—makes me feel strangely claustrophobic. (And I can only imagine what a black person who finds Huck Finn deeply problematic is supposed to feel.) It’s not that I think Gopnik should have added some books with minority characters to that short list. It’s just upsetting to be reminded that “white and male” is still seen as some kind of universal solvent—a category that everyone else can be dissolved into.
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The other day, the Guardian published a list of its favorite literary stepmothers, scouring children's classics for the few that aren't just pure, unredeemable evil. Here at DoubleX, we asked: Why are stepmothers always pure, unredeemable evil? And why do characters' biological parents so frequently have to die?
Meredith Simons: Just last week, my mom asked me, "Why doesn't Disney make a movie about a wicked stepchild?" I'm biased, but my impression of blended family situations is that often stepparents enter a marriage with genuinely good intentions and affection for their stepkids. The kids, meanwhile, feel an almost innate desire to sabotage, undermine, and generally make the stepparent miserable. Yet this doesn't seem to be reflected in our literary (or at least fairy tale) canon. There's only one put-upon stepmother on the Guardian's list.
Rachael Larimore: Can anyone think of ANY Disney movie with two parents? It's a common trope among the old fairy tales, like Snow White and Cinderella . But even the more modern movies almost all have single parents.
Hillary Busis: Mulan had both her parents, but other than that, the only two-parent families I can think of come from much older Disney movies: Peter Pan and 101 Dalmatians .
Jenny Rogers: Sleeping Beauty . But I suppose she's torn from her parents.
Hillary Busis: Mulan and the kids in Peter Pan also spend most of the movie away from their parents.
Noreen Malone: Isn't that just the classic kid fantasy? In nearly every single game I played as a kid, we pretended we were orphans. No authority figures that way.
Dana Stevens: It's an age-old trope in children's lit—all the big Grimm's Fairy Tales have dead or absent mothers, replaced by mean stepmothers or bad moms who die in the course of the story, like Hansel and Gretel's. Even more modern kids' fiction, like The Secret Garden , A Little Princess , and my old fave Ballet Shoes , dispense with parents, especially female ones, early and unsentimentally.
Hanna Rosin: In all great children's books, kids used to be orphaned (and in some cases still are, like in Harry Potter and the The Mysterious Benedict Society ). Now at least they get one parent.
Claire Gordon: I think it's a Freudian thing. In James and the Giant Peach , the wonderful parents die, then James runs away from his abusive aunts and then travels the sea in a giant womb. Rereading the scene where he climbs up the sticky peach hole: awkward.
Dahlia Lithwick: Michael Chabon has a nice riff on this in his fatherhood book. That kids can't grow unless they are ditched. He says his kids would have to be frogmarched into the wardrobe at knifepoint to meet the lion.
Jessica Lambertson: Do you think the stories cause kids to fantasize about being orphaned or in some way abandoned? Is it just natural to imagine being alone to have adventures? My sister and I always imagined ourselves as parents in the new frontier (Laura Ingalls Wilder style). We turned the couch into a horse-drawn buggy and used our American Girl dolls as our babies, but we always had husbands, imagined though they were.
Dana Stevens: I think it's the opposite—the fantasies give rise to the stories, or rather, the stories that best speak to children's fantasies are the ones that survive for generations.
Jenny Rogers: In my childhood games, I was always an orphan and usually a maid. I blame Cinderella for these strange fantasies.
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Reading Matt Labash's skewering of the enviro-guru Low Impact Man, I snorted with laughter and overlooked the glints of climate-change denialism peeking out among the jokes. For about a minute. Then I read the piece again and launched a big e-mail argument with Matt, who is a friend of mine. It is in this spirit that I recommend his new book, Fly Fishing With Darth Vader: And Other Adventures with Evangelical Wrestlers, Political Hitmen, and Jewish Cowboys.
It's a collection of Matt's work, which means it's a collection of inflated egos, delicately punctured. You can hear the hiss as the air goes out of Dick Cheney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Sharpton, Marion Barry, and Roger Stone. At the same time, you'll also come away with some sympathy for these men, or at least their foibles. At moments, Matt gives a tutorial in gonzo journalism—hey, what's he doing on stage with Arnold? At other times, he is all appreciative audience, "mainlining the very soul of New Orleans," as he writes of a jazz musician he profiled in the city after Katrina. You may not agree with his every underlying theory. But go along for the ride. And then afterward, argue with him.
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Emily B., Rachael, I'm not very comfortable with the idea of soft-focus ads either for or against choice. Although I still agree with Jess that the Tebow ad isn't the end of the world, I really think this is one of the few things that just can't be marketed—and to the extent that it can, the powerful positive imagery is nearly all on the side of "life." I am as uncomfortable as Will Saletan about an ad advising women to go against their doctor's advice and carry a pregnancy to term that might kill them. I can imagine, too, many situations in which a woman might be pressured to do just that. It's wonderful that the Tebow's situation worked out as it did, but I am sure that most of us know people who hoped for a similar miracle and didn't get it.
So yes, Rachael, your ad would be an improvement. Happy people, here because their mothers chose life—who could argue with that? You would, I imagine, skip the flip side—unhappy people, say, or the kid reduced to being a lookout for the corner dealer because his mom can't or didn't buy him anything to eat today, or anyone whose quality of life might be aesthetically less-than-appealing. And that's fine—because no one wants to actually sell abortion. But I'd argue that your ad is disingenuous—because you're selling babies, not a world where abortion is illegal. An honest ad for that would include babies, sure, but it would also feature graveyards and clothes hangers. The alternative to safe, legal abortion isn't safe, happy families. It's much more complicated than that.
I could envision an ad to counter the Tebow ad—one featuring a different family in a different world, one where that Tebow ad and others like it have been successful, and Roe v. Wade not just overturned but crushed in many parts of the country. A lineup of four kids, perhaps, with the oldest one speaking. "Our dad says our mom was a wonderful woman," she says. "She was pregnant, and there were problems, and some doctors told her that having the baby might kill her. But some doctors disagreed, and in our state, she didn't have any choice. She hoped she'd be one of the lucky ones, but she wasn't. We miss her." That's an ad I hope we never see.
Photograph of Tim Tebow by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images.
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Yesterday, Jessica Wakeman of the Frisky asked Lori Gottlieb about the article I wrote earlier this week about Gottlieb's book, Marry Him: the Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. To recap, Gottlieb's argument is that college-educated women in their late 30s and early 40s who are still single are without husbands because they were too picky when they were younger and more marketable. In my Slate piece, I quote statistics she uses directly from her book to show that her argument is not grounded in data: Marriage rates are still quite strong for college-educated women, and overall marriage rates have dropped in the United States because the least-educated women are not getting married.
"I don’t see how that speaks to anything that I say in the book," Gottlieb says of my article. "What I’m saying in the book is for those people who are not married and who want to be married and are wondering why they’re not, here’s what I learned and maybe you can apply that to your own life, too." This is disingenuous. She is not benignly trying to share her experiences, she's trying to scare women. As Liesl Schillinger notes in the Daily Beast, Gottlieb "intends this book, she writes, as a blood-chilling cautionary tale, 'like those graphic anti-drunk driving public service announcements that show people crashing into poles and getting killed.'" And Gottlieb very explicitly tries to make the case—using statistics—that there are a lot of women who need this graphic PSA. Check out this passage from her prologue, called "The Husband Store," about the traits she desires in a mate:
Basically, my Husband Store went from a six-story bulding to the world's tallest sky scraper. And I didn't think I was alone. Could the be one reason that in 1975, almost 90 percent of women in the United States were married by age 30 but in 2004, only a little more than half were? Or why the percentage of never-married women in every age group studied by the U.S. Census Burean (from 25-44) more than doubled between 1970 and 2006?"
As I said in my piece: No. Those statistics have nothing to do with upper-middle-class women having "unconscious husband-shopping lists" a million pages long. Of course, I do give her credit for making a provocative argument for the narrow slice of women to whom she is speaking. I don't deny that there are successful women out there who are too picky or overly entitled.
But then Gottlieb gets personal:
Some of these people are really addressing their own issues. I understand. What’s exciting about this is they’re really touching a nerve and it’s getting people to think and I hope people will be open-minded. I think what Jessica [Grose] was doing there was, she’s probably highly-educated and she’s probably one of those women who’s saying, "Well, we do fine! We eventually get married!"
Gottlieb's condescending implication seems to be that my piece was written out of defensiveness—and not because I found her argument lacking in solid data. If this is really what she is telegraphing—I'm just one of "those women" addressing my "own issues," it's insulting, not just to me, but to female journalists in general. Any woman who criticizes her book, Gottlieb is saying, must be doing so because she's has her "own issues" about marriage and is lashing out. We're all so emotional, we can't possibly have rational arguments against her!
In reality, my piece was not written because of personal problems with marriage (I'm engaged). I am not "one of those women" as she put it, but even if I were, that wouldn't make my original objections to the book any less sound. I'm going to finish this post with a little more from Liesl in the Daily Beast, because she puts it better than I could:
There’s such a thing as luck, and there’s such a thing as love. Sometimes the two forces combine, sometimes, they don’t. If luck and love had combined for Gottlieb, today she might be a housewife in Teaneck with an SUV of her own, two kids and a mortgage, and she would not have had the need or the time to have built her fabulous career, or to have written this whining, corrosive, capricious book.
Photograph of woman by Stockbyte/Getty Images.
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Edwards' family, take note: There's life after public scandal after all. According to the Daily Beast, insiders say one Eliot Spitzer, former New York governor and rough-sex-with-call-girls-enthusiast, is considering a return to politics. Says one family friend:
He wants to be relevant ... I think he keeps toying with it—running against Kirsten Gillibrand or running for comptroller. He doesn't have to raise the money. He already has the money, if he decides to do it. I told him he had to consider if this was something he wanted to drag his family back through again, especially if there is anything else [that is, a fresh scandal] out there.
The bizarre truth is that sexual scandals no longer hold anyone back, or at least not for long, it seems. Ashley Dupré, Spitzer's call girl and possessor of the much-touted "best vagina in New York" (I imagine that means it emits warm light and automatically syncs to iTunes playlists?) now has her own New York Post advice column. It took Bill Clinton more than a few years to bounce back into public favor after his sex scandal, but a mere nine months after resigning from governorship, Spitzer was writing financial columns and appearning on a host of cable talk shows on the regular. At this point in time, all the details of Spitzer's sordid sex life, the ones that were so fascinating and grotesquely tabloid just two years ago—he wouldn't take off his black socks during sessions, he insisted on rough, bareback choke-sex—seem like white noise. For as harsh as public opinion is during the height of a scandal, we are a very forgiving, and forgetful, bunch.
Photograph of Eliot Spitzer by Timothy A. Clary/Getty Images.
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