It’s a habit I got into in college. For whatever reason, watching this incredibly tense and data-heavy drama about politics helps me unwind at the end of a long day. However, I usually have enough sense to turn off The West Wing before I actually am asleep. Once I feel myself nodding off, I switch off my laptop and head off to dreamland.
But last night, “I’ll just rest my eyes for a second while CJ does her press conference” turned into me actually falling asleep while my laptop played through the last two episodes of season one and the first two episodes of season two (which I have on iTunes). I woke up at two-thirty in the morning to images of Josh Lyman in the hospital and an unsettled feeling that I’d been dreaming about polling statistics. I switched my laptop off and fell asleep for real, only to wake up four hours later feeling like I’d barely slept the night before.
On a related note: NPR, WTF? When my clock radio went off this morning, the first thing I heard was “we have some very sad news to report.” Thinking that yet another beloved news figure had died or that a major national monument had burned to the ground, I sat bolt upright in bed.
“Gidget, the chihuahua in the Taco Bell commercials, has died.”
Double X has a piece up on the recent vampire pop culture trend and what it means for women – specifically, how both HBO’s True Blood and the Twilight book and film series are anti-feminist. Twilight is a given in that category, but I could not disagree more with that interpretation of True Blood. (For the record, I am a huge fan of True Blood and Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire book series on which it is based. My love for this campy, absurd show and its feminist attributes also appeared in a post on Damsel.)
Double X’s Latoya Peterson makes the case that Sookie Stackhouse, the series’ protagonist, falls into the “man’s protection and a woman’s desire are intimately connected to violence” paradigm, since “Sookie frequently finds herself the subject of Bill’s wrath while he is trying to protect her.” As she unfavorably compares Sookie to Buffy Summers (the undeniably feminist protagonist of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which ended its seven-season run in 2003), she notes,
“Sookie…is tender, chaste, and completely inexperienced in the ways of love. In her case, being a virgin marks her as different in the Southern town of Bontemps, where sleeping around is one of the few recreational activities available. Particularly in the first season, when women who lay with vampires are marked as loose (and quite a few end up dead at the hand of the town’s deranged serial killer), a theme emerges dividing the ‘good girls’ from the ‘bad girls’ or ‘fangbangers.’ Sookie, who sleeps with her undead suitor Bill, ends up marked as bad, although she ultimately gets the upper hand on the killer.”
I’ll readily concede that Buffy is up a few notches on the feminist scale – she’s a 9 or a 10 while Sookie is more of a 7. But just because True Blood is not as feminist as Buffy the Vampire Slayer is no reason to dismiss the show. Sookie’s story is one of her own agency, and putting her in the same category as Twilight’s Bella Swan – whose passivity is downright disturbing – is wrong. Sookie is an outcast in Bon Temps not because of her sexual inexperience, as Peterson implies, but because she can read minds. The undercurrent in much of her story arc is how she learns to harness and leverage such a formidable power; in fact, the apprehension of the townsfolk, who dismiss her as “crazy” or “retarded,” can be read as traditional patriarchal discomfort with powerful women.
Peterson also neglects to mention that while her vampire boyfriend Bill is fiercely protective of Sookie, the conflict between the two characters stems from the fact that Sookie frequently rejects his control and insists on exercising her right to take care of herself. Equally important is the fact that Sookie exhibits a great deal of sexual agency. Far from being a sweet, chaste girl overtaken by a powerful vampire – as Bella Swan ultimately is – Sookie is the one who initiates her sexual relationship with Bill and defends it when she is then shunned by Bon Temps as a result. If anything, the way she stands up to the townspeople who dismiss her as a “fangbanger” is a textbook example of how to smack down slut-shaming.
There is virtually no reference to the book series in the Double X piece, so some of the key projections made about True Blood seem off-base. Though True Blood has not followed the books to a T, Sookie’s storyline has been very consistent thus far. It is highly unlikely, for instance, that Sookie’ ass-kicking efforts begin and end with her decapitation of the town’s serial killer with a shovel. Harris’s Sookie stakes vampires, takes out a few wereanimals, and becomes a major power broker in the supernatural world. It’s also worth noting that in the book series, Sookie ultimately has three different lovers (Bill, the vampire boss Eric, and a weretiger named Quinn), in addition to several dalliances that stop short of being full-blown sexual relationships (with her boss, Sam Merlotte, and the werewolf Alcide Herveaux). I’d hesitate to assume, as Peterson seems to do, that Sookie and Bill remain exclusive throughout the television series, particularly given that Eric’s attraction to Sookie has already been foreshadowed.
In addition to Sookie, the character of Jessica Hamby – a young woman whom Bill turns into a vampire at the end of the show’s first season – is emerging as another example of female sexual agency. Sheltered and abused in her human life, Jessica uses her newfound powers to assert herself. In the second season, she initiates a relationship with Sookie’s friend Hoyt, a sweet and patient human man.
What’s striking about this scene is that female sexual awakening is not treated as something to be feared or disgusted by, even if the female in question is a vampire. Instead, Hoyt reassures Jessica that her vampire quirks are wonderfully sexy; in the next episode, when Bill throws Hoyt out to “protect” him from Jessica (not hard to read between the lines there), Hoyt responds that he “doesn’t believe that for a minute” and Jessica stands up to Bill: “It’s not my fault my fangs come out when I get turned on!” The scene’s construction posits Bill as old-fashioned and wholly unfair, while Jessica is acting on completely natural, normal and comfortable impulses with a man she really cares for. In fact, Sookie accuses Bill of projecting all over his vampire progeny rather than allowing her agency.
All of this is not to say that True Blood is entirely unproblematic. Unlike in the books, which are told from Sookie’s point of view and thus give better insight into her thoughts behind her actions, TV Sookie occasionally comes across as immature. Jessica’s agency is important, but because she is a young, untrained vampire, there is an omnipresent fear of what might happen if she were to “lose control.” And though True Blood has enormous potential to be “the next Buffy” if the plot does not deviate too greatly from the book series, right now I have no problem admitting that Buffy still reigns, and Peterson does a fantastic job of outlining the reasons why Buffy remains a gold standard. But the Double X article was far too dismissive of True Blood’s feminist streak. It might not be “there” yet, but we still have to acknowledge the seeds that have been planted. This is one of the few shows currently on the air where we can see women asserting themselves when faced with socially-imposed limitations and kicking some supernatural ass.
When I saw Bacardi’s new ad campaign targeting women, I noticed that Jezebel asked “why advertisers thought showing pictures of women they deem hideous along with degrading comments would make ladies line up for Bacardi.” Isn’t it obvious, girls? An advertiser has finally understood that we all live in utter fear of running into women who are hotter than ourselves! Therefore, we must only feel comfortable going out in public with friends that are obviously less hot! Don’t forget that personality never plays a role for us ladies, whether its our own, our friends, or a prospective man. What matters most when we head out with a friend is whether a guy we run into can give me the once-over and decide he’d totally love to bang me as opposed to my friend. (That’s why we ladies bother going out in public at all, mind you – so that more men can see us, thereby increasing the likelihood that at least one of them will start drooling.)
But the only way to ensure that any man even looks at me is to make sure that nobody near me looks better than I do. You see, when I’m not thinking about whether a man might find me attractive, I am thinking about how to make myself hot by any means necessary. And as we all know, the only physical attributes that are ever attractive are being a size 4 or less, a golden tan, and skin that resembles a baby’s freshly-cleaned bottom. And really, all women are simply imperfect incarnations of this goal. (Thankfully, society has finally made it attainable by inventing Botox and concealer. How did women even survive beforehand, I wonder?)
This is why I only leave my house with female friends that I have carefully scrutinized and found to be less likely to make a guy all hot and bothered than myself. I don’t ever go anywhere with my friends who share common interests with me, or make me laugh, or let me cry into whatever they happen to be wearing that day, or have the party platter scene from Clone High memorized word for word, or have admirable commitments to their passions. No, I prowl through the local Starbucks on Saturdays, hunting for women who have more physical imperfections than myself (because everything that deviates from the aforementioned description is obviously a flaw). Then, I fake my way through conversation to get them to believe I value them as people (HAHAHA!), and then take them out with me on a rotating basis so that I can get men to think about me naked (need I remind you once again that this is all I want?).
It’s so funny how Bacardi was the first company to realize that this is how female friendship really works. Normally liquor companies only feature women in ads when they’re the targets of drunk guys in one way or another. It’s so refreshing for a brand of alcohol to encourage the deep insecurity and breathtaking shallowness that defines all womankind (because we’re innately this way, you see, and none of our insecurities come from the barrage of advertising we get showing how women are supposed to look) from our own perspective and not just that of men.
After a radio silence for a bit, I’m back with big news: I’ve got my first guestblog post (!!!) over at Damsel on True Blood’s Sookie Stackhouse as a feminist TV character. Check it out and please comment – I’d love to hear your thoughts on why Sookie is (or is not) a kickass female protagonist.
Onward to all the stories I wanted to write about sooner…
- This article from Time on Iran’s marriage crisis (which was published before the escalating election protests that began this weekend) gives a fascinating angle on some of the undercurrent of unrest.
- Also, for the first several hours of those protests, Twitter was my primary info source. Suddenly the Time cover on Twitter makes more sense…
- I am really at a loss for words when it comes to the sicko who killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum. It’s truly chilling to realize that there are other people out there just as filled with hate. I’ve been trying to collect my thoughts on the idea of extremism; there's a decent debate going on right now at Politico’s The Arena about whether some of the incendiary language used on cable news shows is fueling this spike in domestic terrorism.
- I very rarely say this, but I agree with Sarah Palin on something: I think David Letterman’s joke about her daughter – whichever daughter he meant – was in incredibly poor taste. Though I’m actually more offended by the “slutty flight attendant” joke he made about her earlier. I disagree with Palin on just about everything, but it’s cheap and demeaning to resort to attacking her looks.
The vigil for Dr. Tiller outside the White House last night ended up being an overwhelmingly positive experience. I spent forty-five minutes listening to women tell their stories and was struck by two common themes: one, the inner struggle that women go through when they consider a late-term abortion, something that virtually always happens because of horribly tragic health circumstances. (To get a sense of what I’m talking about, read this amazing op/ed featured on AC360 from a woman who sought a late-term abortion. She makes the dead-on connection to the decision to take a family member off of life support.)
But the second common theme I heard dealt largely with the protection for clinic workers and women trying to access them. It’s appalling that protection is necessary and also that not enough is provided for under the law to fend off a steady stream of harassment. Abortion is a perfectly legal option in the US, so why does it sometimes feel like a right abandoned on the proverbial doorstep? (The links I posted earlier, particularly Ann Friedman’s piece, highlight the specific problems with the state of clinic protection.)
The bottom line is that women should not have to be led by a trained escort into a doctor’s office. They should not have to have such a personal procedure done in a building built like a dungeon in case it gets bombed. Doctors who are simply doing their job should not have to fear for their lives. And as relieved as I am that he’s doing it, the Attorney General should not be in the position of having to dispatch federal marshals to clinics. At the end of the day, why is this where the battle is being fought?
Just as anti-war activists are much more likely to attend a march or donate to a group than vandalize a recruitment center, the other side of the abortion debate needs to collectively get away from the dangerous harassment precedent that is being set – and some basic rules of civility need to be far better enforced. Peaceful protest outside a clinic, legal challenges regarding abortion laws, donations to like-minded organizations and elected officials, vocalized opposition to the practice in the media – all of these are effective methods of protest protected by the First Amendment. But our constitution says that women have the right to choose, and our protection of clinic workers and female patients should not be an apologetic afterthought but a bedrock belief that, whether you agree with their decision or not, the people making it have a right to do so without being in fear of their lives.
Listening to the women and men who spoke at this vigil reminded me of why I am pro-choice to begin with: such a personal, ultimately medical decision needs to be made in private by the woman facing the pregnancy, with the support of a well-trained doctor, all of whom should be able to wrestle with the moral questions involved without fear of harassment or government intrusion in the decision itself.
It’s time for the pro-choice movement to reclaim the debate and rhetoric on this important issue; although Dr. Tiller’s death is horrible and senseless, a great deal of good can come out of it if his passing can inspire the next generation to take the lead in redefining the way we think about women’s health.
Posted by Meg 
Posted by Meg 
Posted by Meg 