Desperate White House Wives

I can’t say I’ve ever been a big fan of Hillary Clinton. I think her husband is basically a douchebag, and like many women I couldn’t understand why she stuck by him during his douchiest moments. I was horrified by her support of the Iraq war. I was more horrified by the idea that she only supported it for her own political career. She may not be any more cold and calculating than any other politician, but she does a worse job of hiding it. There is something about her that I just don’t trust.

However, when her presidential candidacy was announced, I tried to keep an open mind. After all, she is a staunch supporter of reproductive rights, has worked to fund access to birth control and sex education, and helped bring us Plan B (praise lady Jesus). She changed her position on the war in Iraq, she believes in global warming, and she doesn’t want to build a fence to keep out the undocumented immigrants whose labor our economy relies on. And, hello, it’s about time we had some gender diversity up in the White House.

There is no doubt that Hillary was a marked improvement from the last couple Democratic nominees (after all, what’s the point of electing a man if he doesn’t have the balls to fight for a presidency he should have won?).

But then a junior senator from Illinois named Barack Obama had the audacity to declare his own candidacy, and his idealism was so infectious that it captured the media, the youth, and a significant chunk of Hillary’s base.

I feel bad for Hillary, I really do. She has worked incredibly hard to get where she is today, harder indeed than most male candidates would have had to. She has been subjected to vicious sexist attacks in the media and elsewhere. She has been the subject of ongoing criticism based on her appearance and demeanor. For anyone who thought that sexism was a thing of the past, this campaign has certainly proved that blatant misogyny is still socially acceptable.

Regardless of who is running against her, Hillary faces a mountain of obstacles. It must be devastating to come this close only to be eclipsed by Obama’s grace and charisma. Hillary is like the straight-A student running for class president against the captain of the football team.

The thing is, Hillary needs to wake up and smell the reality. After all, both candidates want to put new vending machines in the cafeteria, and at this point it’s a question of what’s best for the student body.

Hillary’s performance in this election, however, has shown that she in fact has little regard for what’s best for our country, and is more than willing to exploit racial fears to further her own candidacy.

From Betsy Reed’s excellent analysis in The Nation:

Yet what is most troubling--and what has the most serious implications for the feminist movement--is that the Clinton campaign has used her rival's race against him. In the name of demonstrating her superior "electability," she and her surrogates have invoked the racist and sexist playbook of the right--in which swaggering macho cowboys are entrusted to defend the country--seeking to define Obama as too black, too foreign, too different to be President at a moment of high anxiety about national security.

As her chances of winning narrow, Hillary continues to sink to new lows in her desperate bid for power. She is now eschewing subtlety and just going straight for racist rhetoric.





Just in case you missed the point, that would be WHITE Americans who are hard-working. Presumably the black voters supporting Obama are either shiftless welfare recipients or over-educated bourgeois dilettantes without real jobs.

So Hillary’s claim to fame is that poor, uneducated white people prefer her to Obama. Not to jump to any conclusions, but might I conclude that a majority of that demographic would prefer ANY WHITE PERSON to Obama? Especially since over 80% of the West Virginian voters who said that race was a key factor supported Hillary.Yet Hillary is not at all embarrassed of her racist constituency. In fact, she is embracing them and their racism, because the last card in her deck is the white privilege card.

Is it just me or does this feel like a flashback to another historical electoral moment, when white women suffragists were like, totally cool with black men getting the vote... until it became clear that it wouldn't be possible for both black men and white women to get it, at which point they sold out their black allies, started using white supremacist logic to argue for women's suffrage, and joined forces with white male racists to oppose the 13th and 14th Amendments?

You would think we'd learn from our mistakes. But rather than help create a coalition to strengthen the Democratic party and unite its core constituency of BOTH working class whites AND people of color, Hillary's win-at-all-costs strategy is functioning to exploit racial divisions and entrench white supremacy. On second thought, sounds like she's a perfect candidate for President of the United States!

There's Something About Miley

The last thing I want to do is add to the ridiculous obsession over the Miley Cyrus photo shoot in Vanity Fair. It has already been pointed out (more excellent analysis here) that the hypersexualization of adolescent girls is nothing new, and in the grand scheme of things, showing a little back is not the worst thing a fifteen year old has ever done. In fact, compared to the topless photos of Vanessa Hugdens or Jamie Lynn Spears’ scandalous pregnancy, Miley’s photo shoot is positively tame.

The thing is, Miley is not supposed to fall into the same category as all the other catastrophes of the childhood entertainment industry. She’s the good girl, the role model. She's doing it for Jesus.

Let’s not forget, once upon a time before she became a hot mess, a young, innocent Lindsay Lohan starred in The Parent Trap and Freaky Friday. Miley isn’t the first Disney darling to shock the public. She’s just a few years ahead of her time.

It’s not that we can’t handle the sexualization of young actresses. In fact, we rather pruriently obsess over the sexualization of young actresses. After all, there would be no good girls without bad girls. And the more scandalous the behavior of her counterparts, the more Miley was praised for resisting the temptations of celebrity. While Jamie Lynn was getting knocked up, Miley's career was skyrocketing to make her the most successful teen celebrity, with a year-end earning potential of $1 billion.

But Miley is learning the hard way that the good girl image is a difficult one to maintain. According to Gary Marsh, the president of entertainment for Disney Channel Worldwide, “For Miley Cyrus to be a ‘good girl’ is now a business decision for her. Parents have invested in her a godliness. If she violates that trust, she won’t get it back.” (source)

And this is the crux of the issue. Parents don't care about Miley, any more than they care about any other teen celebrity trainwreck in the making. What they care about is their own daughters, and Miley's photo shoot has made them confront the possibility that their own darling tweens might be exposing their backs, or bras, or worse... on myspace, right now.

In an industry known for its "corrupting influences," Hannah Montana was the exception to the rule. Now, it seems that the secret weapon in the parental battle to control teen sexuality has defected to the other side. Parents, a word of advice: stop trying to control your daughters and deny their sexual agency. If you actually respect your daughters' sexual autonomy they are much more likely to grow into strong, self-confident women.

Reality check

On Tuesday Grand Theft Auto IV hit the market, which means that right now, approximately six million gamers worldwide are sprawled in front of their HD-TVs, enacting violent fantasies of thug life on the virtual streets of a pseudo-New York City. Or maybe I’m wrong, and actual thugs are taking time out of their busy schedule stealing cars and shooting cops* to play video games about it instead. Like how all the drug dealers in Baltimore hang out together watching The Wire. Ah, the fantasy is so much better when you can pretend it’s real.

Like all video games, Grand Theft Auto inhabits the realm of fantasy. Unlike other video games, however, which feature superhuman fighting machines or magical forest creatures, GTA offers something different: the fantasy of realism. Set in what NYT reviewer Seth Schiesel calls “the exhilarating, lusciously dystopian rendition of New York City,” (see review here) GTA IV disavows its own phantasmagoric qualities by concentrating its energies on a world of gritty urban crime whose ‘realness,’ at least to its gaming audience, is the main draw.

From Schiesel:

“It looks like New York. It sounds like New York. It feels like New York. Liberty City has been so meticulously created it almost even smells like New York. From Brooklyn (called Broker), through Queens (Dukes), the Bronx (Bohan), Manhattan (Algonquin) and an urban slice of New Jersey (Alderney), the game’s streets and alleys ooze a stylized yet unmistakable authenticity.”

Stylized is one word for it. Schiesel does note that the characters are “each a caricature less politically correct than the last,” but somehow fails to find anything problematic about the depiction of “black crack slingers, argyle-sporting Jamaican potheads,” and “Puerto Rican hoodlums.” Does anyone else find it disturbing that a journalist living in New York finds these blatantly racist stereotypes to be “authentic”? What about the authenticity of the portrayal of women in the game? Does Schiesel believe that all women are prostitutes? That our purpose in life is to be fucked, and perhaps killed afterwards?

Don’t get me wrong, unlike some people, I don’t have a problem with prostitution or its representation in video games. If there were a game where the avatars were hookers and the goal was to sleep with as many johns as possible, then kill them and take their money, I’d probably buy a copy. But there is a big difference between violence as subversion and violence as subjugation. As I’ve discussed before, violence against sex workers is a technique of patriarchal dominance. In a world where women are systematically oppressed on the basis of gender, there is nothing subversive about glorifying sexualized violence against women. (More on this here.)

This is not to say that the game itself is not subversive in other ways. After all, the premise of the game is a sharp critique of the American dream:

"What does the American Dream mean today? For Niko Bellic, fresh off the boat from Europe, it is the hope he can escape his past. For his cousin, Roman, it is the vision that together they can find fortune in Liberty City, gateway to the land of opportunity. As they slip into debt and are dragged into a criminal underworld by a series of shysters, thieves and sociopaths, they discover that the reality is very different from the dream in a city that worships money and status, and is heaven for those who have them and a living nightmare for those who don’t." (source)

Turning conventional values upside down, the game rewards players for behaviors that society has deemed criminal. And judging by the legislation the game has inspired, not to mention the lawsuits, more than a few people are convinced that GTA is indeed threatening the moral fabric of American society. Whether or not you believe that Grand Theft Auto is a “thoroughly compelling work of cultural satire disguised as fun,” as Schiesel would have it, there is no denying its immense popularity. This is no doubt due in part to its virtual “open world environment” in which players are free to roam and complete tasks at will. Combined with its embrace of recklessness, cars, guns and sex, is it any wonder this game is so appealing to its primarily male 18-35 year old demographic? After a long day of mindless work in your office cubicle, a trip to Liberty City is indeed liberating.

Of course, it’s not liberating for everyone, unless you consider watching racist/sexist stereotypes of yourself getting killed to be liberating. Grand Theft Auto may offer a critique of the American dream, but it does nothing to challenge dominant structures of racism, sexism and heteronormativity. It's a shame, because the beauty of nihilism is that it doesn't discriminate. Regrettably, the makers of GTA missed the point.

*Wait, I thought this game was supposed to be realistic. Last I checked it’s the cops doing the shooting, not the other way around.