Textbook Anti-Feminism

As today was my last day of classes for this semester, I have begin flipping through my no-longer-needed textbooks to decide which ones I should keep and which ones I should sell.  While this question is highly pressing, it is not what this post will be dedicated to considering.

In looking through my Political Ideologies textbook, it happened to open to a passage that we did not cover in class, but was written by the infamous Phyllis Schlafly, talking about her concept of the "Positive Woman."  In part, it contained one of the most interesting criticisms of feminism I've heard: "The women's liberationist . . . is imprisoned by her own negative view of herself and of her place in the world around her."

While Ms. Schlafly and I ideologically agree on . . . well, nothing . . . her criticism of the negative-worldview-perpetuation of feminism is interesting.  I think that Shlafly's über-conservative woman-as-happiest-fulfilling-her-maternal/male-serving role is repulsive, but I also ascribe to the notion of self-fulfilling prophecies (for which I'm sure I could use a more psychological and scientific term than that, but I can't think of what it might be at the moment).  

The comment that feminists are stuck in the mud just because they think they are is fascinating.  I can say that I have seen plenty of people that are in fact doing fine, but their perspective on the world is so negative that it APPEARS to them otherwise, causing completely unnecessary problems and distress.  I 100% agree that if things are okay, one shouldn't get so caught up in the mind that things seem that they aren't.  As my boyfriend likes to say, perspective is everything.

However, I think that the glaring issue with Ms. Schlafly's criticism is that women's issues aren't just illusions, they are factually provable.  Women don't just think they are making less money than men, studies have shown they receive lower compensation for the same work.  It's obviously evident that institutions are not in place that would allow women to create a manageable work-life balance, and are forced to pick one or the other if they want to have families. (Now that I think about it, even that last sentence, which is pro-woman in intent, is built off of the current cultural sexist assumption that women are the ones who create and have families, and that men just participate in them as visitors.)

The other beef that I have with Phyllis Schlafly's statement is that it assumes that recognizing the disastrousness of a situation only leads to depression and doom and gloom.  Sure, realizing that women still have to deal with institutional sexism doesn't make you want to throw a party in celebration, but recognition of a situation that should be changed leads to revolution and change and adjustment.  If you substitute historically oppressed groups into Ms. Schlafly's statement, it becomes evident how ludicrous it is, and how much a justification it is for existing power structures by blaming those who are oppressed.  Take, for example, slaves.  "The slaves . . . are imprisoned by their own negative view of themselves and of their place in the world around them." Bam!  Suddenly slavery was the fault of the slaves having such a bad attitude about their situation.  Recognizing a problem is the first step in solving it.

Reading the passage in my textbook reminded me of all the other 1970's anti-women's rights campaigners, and how they uniquely made feminism look like it was bad for women.  Anita Bryant and Marabel Morgan come to mind.  I can somewhat sympathize with a more conservative outlook, wanting to restore the family and maintain old-fashioned values (though if one takes that statement literally, it means we should go back to segregation and feudalism, so who knows how good of a position that is to take).  However, it is astonishing when one considers that the very women who declared their desire for a return to the home weren't walking the talk . . . somewhat reminiscent of Sarah Palin's push for abstinence-only sex education while her daughter was unwantedly pregnant by a boy who later proved himself to be an unabashed attention whore, taking advantage of suddenly being famous just because he didn't use a condom.  But I digress.

Anti-feminism is a sticky subject, and trying to stay somewhat on-topic and in-decade (the decade in question, that is), the logic used by Schlafly and Co. is so obviously motivated by a fear of challenging existing power structures that it defies serious examination.  Fearing the breakdown of the traditional family: valid.  Fearing that women will become lesbians so that they can't get pregnant: crazy.  Homophobia: not valid, but understandably social conditioned.  Assuming that homosexuals need to "recruit" because they can't reproduce: crazy.

When all is boiled down, the arguments of the anti-Feminists of the 1970s are based in what seems to be nothing more than terror of the unexpected and presuming a breakdown into chaos if women gained any kind of power outside the home.  Using logic that employs victim blaming to make women the ones responsible for their own problems is terrifying, and I'm not sure I'll ever wrap my mind around the fact that it was women who were some of the most outspoken proponents of 1970's anti-Feminism. There's no denying that the Feminist movement has made some missteps, but when you think about it, it has given a women a voice they never could have had before.

In fact, without Feminism, the anti-Feminists would never even have been able to have enough prominence and power to speak out about their feelings against Feminism.  How's that for a mind bender?

Blast from the Not-So-Past

Long time no post.  Such is life.

I'm really trying to get away from Facebooking and more into blogging again - I like the "archival" nature of blogs, more than the you-know-it's-there-but-can't-quite-find-this-thing-you-linked-to nature of items posted on Facebook.  Also, considering apparently your future employers can find out any and everything you post on Facebook, and I haven't heard too much about the career-busting disasterousness of blogs, they seem "safer".  Maybe that's just because they're not as popular as Facebook, or harder to find, who knows.

Anyway, the video I posted up at the beginning of this post is the full-length version of the song used in the Intro for Mad Men.  Though I personally couldn't care less about Man Men the show (I watched the first episode on an airplane, it didn't hook me enough to ever consider watching more), this song is pretty funky.  I like the simplicity yet grooviness of it, though I do find it funny that it is used for the introduction a "retro" show, considering this sounds somewhat modern-lounge-techno-y.  But it does fit will with the opening title art (which, if you haven't seen it already, is very clever and endlessly spoofable, definitely do a YouTube search for it), so what do I know.

Long Time No Post

As evidenced by my complete lack of posts for the past, oh, 4 months, I have once again let my blog fall into disrepair.  After the blogging-mania that occurred during my summer stint in South Korea, I guess I kind of burned out, not to mention that this past semester has been the absolute most insane one I have ever experienced.  Not like that is really any excuse for just abandoning a blog, but, well, I WAS busy.

Anyway.  Recently I have been noticing more and more rock, dance and pop songs featuring saxophones, a development I am quite enjoying.  Saxes have been relegated to jazz-only for too long (not that there is anything wrong with jazz).  And so, for your listening pleasure (or perhaps not, if you don't like club music), some of the songs that I think are bringing about the revival of the saxophone:

In the Dark by Dev

I, like many people, presumably, had never heard of Dev until she collaborated with Far East Movement, that most unusual of entities, a hip-hop quartet of Asians, and the Cataracts on the song "Like a G6" that became popular last fall.   In this new song "In the Dark," Dev is working once again with the Cataracts, on a song that features a catchy sax hook, though I have to admit that the film portion of the music video is kind of horrifying.

Mr Saxobeat by Alexandra Stan

As a nice segue into this song, many have compared it to Dev's "In the Dark," though considering "Mr Saxobeat" came out 3 months earlier, "In the Dark" looks kind of like a copycat.  The music video, like Dev's, makes no sense, but I guess that's a common theme for music videos, and I might be asking too much of them for them to actually have, oh, even a tenuous relation to the song.  In case you are wondering, this is a Eurodance song, as Stan is a Romanian recording artist.  I love the fact that songs from Europe and the UK are starting to get more play on US stations . . . gives some relief from the Miley-Selena-Bieber headache the current American music industry is creating.

Calabria by Enur featuring Natasja

Now this is one song that is pretty much guaranteed to get stuck in your head and/or drive you crazy.  And the music video is, no surprise, weird.  Coming from Denmark, this song was a big hit a few years ago, but still regularly appears on my Pandora stations, likely because of its infinitely catchiness and trippy beat.  Definitely has a strong sax line going on, but so many other beats that you might forget what on earth you're listening to by the time you realize it.

Three songs is hardly a comprehensive list to prove that the saxophone is the revived instrument of the decade, but I'm glad to see it at least appearing, something I can't remember really happening for at least the past few years.  And actually, now that I think about it, the entrance of the sax very much seems to correspond with the rise of Europop here in the US, it will be interesting to see how or if that trend continues.

That is all for now.

Safe/Unsafe

I've seen my fair share of flight safety videos and demonstrations, most of them unmemorable (is that a word?), but on my recent flights to and from South Korea, I flew on Delta airlines, a carrier that I don't often use.

And their in-flight safety video scared the hell out of me.  Both times I had to see it.

A few seconds in, after the innocuous "Delta/Sky Team - Safety First" graphic and the goofy obligatory "Pilot's Welcome" segment, I was met with one of the most terrifying examples of plastic surgery abuse I think I have ever seen.  The main "character" in the video is a woman flight attendant of an unknown age, given the fact that her face is stretched tighter than an artist's canvas, and it's impossible to tell which portions of her face are original or not.  She probably told me how to buckle my seat belt and where the oxygen masks were, but I couldn't focus, given how disarming I found her appearance to be.  I suppose I should give her the benefit of the doubt that maybe she just naturally looks like that, but I would bet up to . . . oh, the price of a round-trip domestic airline ticket, that she has had some kind of cosmetic procedure done.  See the video below, and tell me, does that look normal?  And furthermore, why on EARTH did Delta choose to have her in their safety video?  I felt more scared than safe after being forced to watch this little piece on the plane, because then plastic surgery in general freaks me out.

Also, in a completely unrelated housekeeping note, I have now added "Reactions" buttons to my posts.  Feel free to click away to let me know what you think, and also drop me a line if you think there's a reaction button label that would be useful to add.

K-Pop Music Mashup

So, if any of you follow me on Facebook, you most likely have already seen the various postings I have about K-pop songs that I really like.  This post will be a repeat of some of those songs, but with plenty of new ones I haven't mentioned before, so that those of you not on Facebook can share in the fun, and/or so that I can have an easily accesible archive of these songs and bands.

First up is the Wonder Girls song "Nobody."  I didn't realize it until after I got home, but there is both a Korean and English version of this song, and the Korean one is INFINITELY better.  I don't know if this is really possibly, but I feel like the girls' singing ability is far better in Korean, plus is just flows better and doesn't seem so "dubbed."  On my Facebook profile I accidentally posted the English version, but I will attempt to post the Korean one here, because a) it's better, and b) it's the one my room and I danced to for the talent show that was a part of my study abroad program, so it has more memories for me (even if those memories involve a possible act of sacrilege, of trying to practice a goofy choreographed dance in a meditation room with a giant cross).

After this we have the song "Marshmallow" by IU.  I don't actually know anything about this song, but we saw the music video for it in one of the breaks between lectures (in between each half of the lectures, a different artist would be featured and we would watch two of their music videos, it got to the point where you had to make a conscious decision between going to the bathroom and staying to watch the videos because they were so interesting), and it intrigued me with its weirdness.  I don't know what's going on or what she's singing about, the best I can make out is that her live-in boyfriend is actually a marshmallow, or she wishes he was a marshmallow, and she enjoys knitting.  Or something like that.  I suppose I could look up the lyrics for the song or the Wikipedia explanation for the video, but that would take all the fun out of it, as I think it's more exciting when it makes no sense.

Getting into the more clubby side of things, there's the song "Hands Up" by 2PM.  I can't remember where I heard this first, but it definitely sounds like it could be a hit on the USA Top-40 Charts.  It actually took a few listenings before I could easily differentiate between this song and . . . another which at the moment I can't remember.  Perhaps this means that I can't actually differentiate between them like I thought I could.  I guess I'll have to get back to you on that one.

Next up is the song "Mirotic" by TVXQ, a band with a name that is an acronym for something, but I don't know what the full term is.  These guys are apparently the "gods" of K-Pop, and this song got them into a lawsuit with the Korean government (TVXQ won), for featuring the line "under my skin" which was deemed to be a bit too risqué.  Frankly, this confuses me, because I'm pretty sure I've heard other K-Pop songs with lines that were racier than that, so it's not like the whole Korean music market is prudish, unless "under my skin" is slang for something far worse that what I can imagine.

While we're going with the boybands, let's see something from Super Junior.  I kept hearing this song "Sorry Sorry" while I was in Korea, so it must be pretty popular, and the video isn't bad, if you're into black and white filming with funky lighting effects.

While I and some of the other girls from Cedar Crest were out for a walk around Olympic Park, we heard a terrific amount of noise coming from one of the old Olympic buildings, and it turns out that the band Girls' Generation was playing there that day as part of their tour, and, in addition to having enough members to supply about 2.5 American girl bands, Girls' Generation is crazy popular in Korea.  Their song "Gee Gee" apparently broke a ton of radio records, like being number 1 for the longest amount of time ever.  The first time you hear the song, you're like "What on earth is this?" but then you'll find that the chorus is stuck in your head and keeps going on repeat, which may explain why it was so popular, people kept trying to listen to it all the way through in order to get it out of their heads.

Finally, I must mention 2NE1, the band with the super-confusing name!  You can pronounce it "To Anyone" or "Twenty One," though those pronunciations have nothing to do with what the letters and numbers actually stand for, which is "New Evolution of the 21st Century."  Oh, and if you're a fan of the group, you're called a "Blackjack" because of the reference to the number 21.  Got that?  I'm not a huge fan of the music put out by this group, though I do think that parts of this song "Fire" sound kind of like the Black Eyed Peas' "Boom Boom Pow."  But maybe that's just me.