We don't need feminism anymore!

I was listening to CBC radio the other day and they were doing a special show on the 40th anniversary of Ms magazine. They interviewed one of the founders of the magazine, Letty Cottin Pogrebin and her daughter, a journalist named Abigail Pogrebin.

At first, I was kind of excited to be listening to a feminist story on the radio while I drove, but I ended up getting more and more irritated with it. It gave the impression that everything is fine right now, thanks to people like the founders of Ms magazine. While I appreciate how much things have improved in a variety of ways, I really get annoyed when people try to make it seem as though we no longer need feminism because men and women are equal now.

Abigail said that she doesn't feel that her life or her daughter's life are constrained by being a woman because we now have choices that weren't available when her mother co-founded the magazine. Then she went on to say that she used to work for 60 minutes, but found a new, less prestigious, job closer to home when she had children because she wasn't able to travel all the time anymore... and that she couldn't travel for work regularly because her husband had a job that required him to travel for work. She also said that he would not consider compromising his job to stay home with the kids. Now, this sounds like one of the reasons we still need feminism... women's choices are constrained in ways that men's choices often are not.

So, she quits a good job to take something closer to home in order to stay home with her children while her husband travels for work, but we don't need feminism anymore. Hurray for choices!

I hate this "I choose my choice" feminism. We do not have choices, in a lot of cases. The decision to participate in the nuclear family, to work in the waged labour force, to make sacrifices in one's career for the sake of raising children, even the decision about what kinds of clothing to wear are constrained by material circumstances, they are not made in a vacuum.

Still trying to decide what I think about Lady Gaga...

I saw this great video with a male acapella group singing a Lady Gaga medley (mostly Bad Romance)



I thought I'd use it as an intro to some thoughts on Lady Gaga. I have to admit, I am not overly familiar with her as an artist; I have heard her songs that regularly play on the radio, I play Pokerface on the piano and Bad Romance on the guitar, and I find her music fun to dance to, but I do not have any of her albums, nor do I have her songs on my playlist. What I have been following more closely is some of the discussions around whether or not she is a feminist.

She claimed that she is not a feminist, saying "I'm not a feminist - I, I hail men, I love men. I celebrate American male culture, and beer, and bars and muscle cars..." Then, she apparently realized that loving men and being a feminist are not incompatible because she later said "I'm getting the sense that you're a little bit of a feminist, like I am, which is good" and goes on to discuss how the music business can be different for women than it is for men.

Another thing she did that I think is great is alternate representations of people with disabilities (found here), which, on the one hand, show interesting images of different types of bodies that do not entirely fit in to "normal" images within pop culture. On the other hand, some argue that she is sexualizing the disabled body (which may or may not be a problem).




I think my favorite thing about Lady Gaga is how she takes images typically found within pop culture, such as poses or fashion, and changes it just enough to make a different type of image. Yes, she does conform to dominant beauty standards in many ways, I'm not sure she would be all that successful if she didn't, but sometimes I find she changes what would otherwise be a very sexual image just enough to make it different. For example, even though her clothes can be revealing, the weirdness of them takes away what might otherwise be blatant sexuality to turn it into something interesting as opposed to simply fitting into the male gaze.





However, her new video Telephone (found here), seems to conform to a more dominant music narrative, including revealing clothing and tons of product placements... Maybe it could be read differently- it does feature one of the few "butch" lesbian images in modern pop culture, and there could be meaning behind the products and lack of clothing... maybe I just don't get it this time.

Anyway, I'm wondering other people's opinion of her, whether it be related to feminism or academia, or just personal likes/dislikes about her music...