Monumental Women

Or, Today in Fascinating Coincidences -- Coincidences that, I am sure, are in no way political and certainly not related in any way to persisting gender inequities, which exist, after all, only in the minds of fat, ugly, man-hating feminazis:

WaPo has a story this weekend on efforts to call attention to how few public statues or memorials in our happy little post-feminist country commemorate vagina-equipped persons. According to the story,

Of the 5,193 public outdoor sculptures of individuals in the United States, only 394, or less than 8 percent, are of women, compared with 4,799 of men, according to the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Art Inventories Catalog, considered the most up-to-date catalogue of such works. And none of the 44 national memorials managed by the National Park Service (such as the Lincoln Memorial) specifically focuses on women and their accomplishments, writes art historian Erika Doss in her book “Memorial Mania.”

EVE (Equal Visibility Everywhere) is a new non-profit group that has been established to call attention to the disparity and its harmful possible consequences. Lynette Long, a psychologist and founder of EVE, tells the Post that the nonverbal message conveyed "by the dominance of male statuary trumps any verbal communication girls receive about being equal to boys. 'Humans tend to trust the nonverbal, and the statues send a very clear nonverbal message. Girls can’t be what they can’t see,' she says."

Meantime, over in the business section, the Post reports that sales of Barbie helped Mattel Inc.'s revenue rise by 8 percent during the first quarter, stronger than analysts expected in what is usually a slow quarter for the toy manufacturer after the busy holiday season. Global sales for Barbie were up 14 percent, the first time the Barbie brand has had double-digit sales growth in the first quarter since 1997, according to Reuters.

Which proves once again that girls made of vinyl are ever so much prettier and more appealing than women made of stone. I mean, really, darlings, we can't be cluttering up the nation's hallways and public squares with dour old broads like these, can we? If only those grim-faced gals who spent decades fighting for the right to vote had decked themselves out in some pretty pink ball gowns!

(Photo Credit: Bill O'Leary, Washington Post. Statue of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony in the Capitol Rotunda.)

We do hereby call upon the vagina-equipped historians (yes, you, and you, you, too, girlfriend) who read Roxie's World to weigh in on this vital question of public herstory. Should we jump on the bandwagon and demand that statues of long forgotten heroes be dragged out of public spaces in order to create room for women whose accomplishments deserve long overdue recognition? Or should we stay at home, playing quietly with our Barbies -- or, you know, fighting to improve conditions for living women rather than wasting valuable energy worrying about how to honor dead ones? In other words, does it matter that the hordes of young girls traipsing through Washington, DC right now on their springtime trips to the nation's capital will see so few images that resemble them in the hundreds of statues they will wander by in the course of their adventures? Or doesn't it? We have a healthy respect for the politics of visibility, but the truth is this issue isn't one that makes our blood pressure rise, tickled as we are that there's a cute little dog in the FDR Memorial downtown. How about you?

We eagerly await your replies. In the meantime, my typist heads to the stationary bike in the basement to continue the project of re-sculpting her own monumental body. Peace out, darlings, and have a happy weekend.

On Broads

Are you or are you not a broad? The question is addressed to the women and the non-women among you, because, of course, here in Roxie's World biological sex has no necessary or determining relationship to gender presentation. And, no, we do not need to pause to debate why broad is being defined here as a matter of gender presentation, while women was rather too casually lumped in with biology. It's Wednesday, darlings. My typist has things to do (like, you know, purging before her weekly weigh-in) and places to go (the horrible messy prison-house of doom office), and Judith Butler doesn't read this blog, so we needn't trouble ourselves with the subtleties of the sex/gender divide. Grant me a certain leeway, and go back to my original question: Are you or are you not a broad?

Moose and Goose have different positions on this question (as was noted in this post the other day), which is the only reason we bother asking it. To Moose, broad is a term of respect and affection for a take-no-$hit woman who strides boldly through life with purpose and without apology. Broads are strong, resourceful, willing to take the heat. To Goose, broad is a term of derision, a sexist pig-dog of a term designed to discourage women by labeling any evidence of ambition or power unseemly, unwomanly. Well, sure, Moose retorts, when a caveman says it, but when I say it it's a compliment!

Moose felt supported in her Reclaim the Epithet position by a headline in the Sunday Times on a story about one of her very favorite big-shouldered actresses, Kathleen Turner. "Need a Broad? Call Turner," chortled the headline. The story focused on Turner's performance as "a brassy, foul-mouthed, ex-alcoholic nun who works as an addiction counselor, bullying her patients into sobriety" in Matthew Lombardo's play, High. Lombardo wrote the play with Turner in mind and wanted her for the part because, “In a word, I needed a broad, and when you think of a broad, you think of Kathleen Turner.” In the story, the qualities associated with the figure of the broad are all positive. The broad has "vitality" and "resilience," a "commandeering" presence, a compelling voice: "[Turner] talks the way Bankhead and Joan Crawford and so many of the great movie stars used to talk." Turner seems drawn to the character she plays in High precisely because of her broad-like qualities. She tells the Times she likes “women of strength and character — women who don’t wait around for men to do things for them.” For that reason, she has mixed feelings about some of the women characters in the plays of Tennessee Williams, though she played Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to acclaim in 1990. “But some of those other Williams characters,” she said, “they don’t take enough care of their own lives. They’re too passive.”

Broad is good, willing to take charge of her life and the world. Not a broad is weak, waiting, passive, deferential. Broad is Thea Kronborg in Cather's The Song of the Lark, triumphant on the stage at the Met after years of training and shrewd professional pursuit. Not a broad is Lily Bart in Wharton's The House of Mirth, dead because she is too good for this mean, dingy world but too weak to change it.

Or that's what Moose thinks anyway. What do you think? Are you a broad? Why or why not?

(Photo Credit: Mark Veltman, New York Times, 3/31/11)

Dr. Stimpson Declined to Comment

So we will comment for her, in the manner of our most excellent blog buddy, Historiann, as a project for the brand new blog, The Pseudonym Exchange (for those times when your own pseudonym just won't do).

Why? Because, darlings, some jobs call for a lasso, not a leash. Read on.

* * *

Veteran (by which I mean antediluvian and, apparently, anti-a whole bunch of other things) CBS newsman Morley Safer is "sorry" that a nasty little dispute over gender inside an exclusive Manhattan club called the Century Association (whose website, when we checked, was, conVENiently, "temporarily down for maintenance") has "become public." Translation: I am a big dumb wanker, and now everybody knows it! Poor me! No fair!

The New York Times declares that Safer has "ruffle[d] feathers" inside the club (whose members include -- get this! -- Henry Kissinger, Chuck Close, and Meryl Streep) in a series of e-mails over whether the Century should sever its ties to an all-male club in London, the Garrick, which permits women to enter only in the company of a man -- presumably, you know, a male member. No word on what Hank, Chuck, or la Meryl thought about the matter, but Safer, who strongly supported maintaining the club's relationship with the Garrick, went ballistic on Centurion Catharine R. Stimpson (English prof at NYU, founding editor of Signs, and a former president of the MLA) after Stimpson joked in an e-mail about taking the risk of seeming "whining and self-pitying" and then going on to list "10 unpleasant ways that she had been described by fellow Centurions because she advocated cutting ties with the Garrick." (Oh, what Historiann would not give to see that list!) Safer, according to the Times, "pounced" on Stimpson's joking self-description in his reply, which the Times somehow obtained, despite "club rules [that] strictly prohibit members from discussing internal matters with the news media." See if you agree that "pounce" is the right word:

“You’ve taken the risk and indeed you are as you describe: ‘whining and self pitying,’ ” he wrote to Dr. Stimpson and others. “You may also add to that, humorless and vindictive. And how about. Lacking in the common decency of that ancient saw: ‘Live and let live.’ So you can add nosy to those qualities that you catalog with such pride.”

Wow, Morley, you can haz misogyny much? Whining, self pitying, humorless, vindictive, lacking in common decency, nosy. How could you have left deep-voiced, castrating, and snake-haired out of your toxic stew of woman-hating imagery? Don't hold back, Morley! Let the old girl have it, why don't ya?

Now, in fairness to Mr. Safer, Historiann is compelled to acknowledge that Stimpson and women generally were not the only targets of his venomous rage. Earlier, in defending the right of clubs to maintain discriminatory policies, Safer engaged in a classic bit of slippery-slope rhetoric that is a hallmark of violated privilege. Again, as the Times reports it:

“What will be next?” he asked. “Disassociation with clubs that do not cater to vegans on their menus? Kosher dining rooms? Special facilities for nudists and transsexuals? Abolition of ‘Centurion’ to describe our members, given that the term is, according to the OED, derived from the all-male Roman army?”

Apologies to all of my Jewish, vegan, nudist, transsexual readers -- I should have put a trigger warning for rank stupidity ahead of that quote, I suppose.

What will be next? Gosh, Mr. Safer, I don't know. Perhaps you'll be run out of town like veteran UPI journalist Helen Thomas was after she made inflammatory remarks about Israel last year. Or perhaps you won't be, since male privilege was, last time we checked, still alive and well and doing a fine job of protecting members of the club whose "private" musings become uncomfortably public.

Here's what I do know, big fella: Next time Historiann comes down from the high desert and heads to the Big Apple, she just might drop by the Century, lasso in hand, to knock back a couple of pisco sours with Meryl and Kate. But don't you worry your (not so) pretty little head -- We and our lady parts will keep our distance from you and Kissinger. You two can drink port and look up words in the OED until H-E-Double Toothpicks freezes over. Me and the feminazi cowgirls got some serious work to do.

So, tell me, readers: What buttons does the sorry saga of Safer, Stimpson, and the Century push for you? Share your stories of Dinosaurs Still Roaming the Earth in comments, will you? I've got to feed the horses, clean the barn, and run six miles up a mountain and back before class this afternoon. Talk amongst yourselves and I'll check back in later to see how the revolution is progressing.

(Image and Inspiration Credits: Historiann)

Roxie's Watching: The Kids Are All Right

(Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in The Kids Are All Right.  Photo Credit:  Suzanne Tenner via)

First things first:  Annette Bening plays good gay.  Or plays gay good.  Er, well. Wevs, kids.  Suffice it to say we were convinced enough that we'd pick her for our softball team in a heartbeat.  Julianne Moore does a fine job, too, by the way, despite her character's unfortunate foray into sex with a dude halfway through Lisa Cholodenko's vexing The Kids Are All Right, which finally opened yesterday in the DC area.

Before this goes any further, we want you to understand that we are not in principle opposed to lesbians having sex with dudes.  Or to Sapphists using gay male porn to spice up the boudoir.  Or double-headed vibrators.  Or bickering and micromanagement within the context of intimate relationships.  We are not wild about infidelity if the partners in a relationship have committed to being monogamous, but, hey, nobody's perfect.  Also, we have never really gotten into composting, but we make no judgments about those who do.  Finally, we disagree with our pal Jack Halberstam, who claims in an otherwise spot-on critique of The Kids Are All Right that Julianne Moore looks dowdy in the film.  We think her look is a hippie-groovy southern California thing that's kinda gay, kinda motherly, and kinda the granola crumbs left over from a particular moment of mid-70s womyn's culture.  In any case, all due respect, Jack, we do not believe the words "Julianne Moore" and "dowdy" belong in the same sentence.  Oh, and unlike Halberstam, we've got no problem with Bening's and Moore's characters being referred to collectively by the film's titular "kids" as "the moms," because, well, that's the way we talk here in Roxie's World, too.  It's a way of (affectionately, ironically) marking the otherness of parents and children or humans and animals as they negotiate intimacies-across-difference.

So, those aren't the things that bug us about this big, widely acclaimed flick about two lesbian moms and their two sperm-donor kids, played marvelously by Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson, coming of age and establishing contact with the sperm donor, Paul, played by Mark Ruffalo.  No, what finally -- and deeply -- disappointed us about the film, despite the splendid performances and some pitch-perfect moments of dialogue, were what felt like multiple failures of imagination in its depictions of lesbian sexuality, long-term partnership, and queer family-building.  In the end, to use a metaphor in keeping with the film's upscale SoCal look and value system, The Kids Are All Right opts to put new wine in an old narrative bottle, and the result is a vintage that looks good but leaves a nasty, corked aftertaste.

The complaint here isn't that queer family stories should offer up sanitized, positive images of homodomesticity -- you know, multi-orgasmic wonder dykes who perfectly understand and communicate with their children; cheerful, gender-queer kids who never suffer a moment of existential doubt; bio-dads who play a meaningful role in the children's lives without feeling a need to take over the family.  Such stories would be limited both in their appeal and in their social or political value.  Who needs a queer Cosby Show, after all?

Nonetheless, it is disheartening that "the most widely distributed lesbian-themed mainstream movie in history" depicts sexual intimacy between long-term female partners as mutually unsatisfying drudgery, shows lesbian moms to be neurotic, smothering, and insecure about their ability to parent (especially male children), and represents families as rigid, stifling entities that negotiate threat by expelling outsiders rather than re-imagining family in more flexible, capacious, and generous terms.  Within the narrow terms of the film, Paul can only enter the story as a kind of Prince (or should that be Prick?) Charming But Dangerous.  Without appearing to mean to (but that is part of Paul's sleepy-eyed shtick), he seduces the kids, Joni and Laser, with organic vegetables and a few easy words of wisdom about how to get out from under the maternal thumbs.  He then seduces Moore's character, the insecure Jules, with -- well, what exactly?  We think it had something to do with his understanding the word fecund, but that can't possibly be right, can it?

Bening's character, the uptight Nic, immediately recognizes Paul as a threat and ultimately banishes him from the family as an interloper, but not before she has been subjected to the humiliation of Jules' infidelity with him -- and not before the audience has been subjected to scenes that encourage the belief that real sex requires a penis and, hey, maybe femmes aren't really lesbians after all.  In the film's last scene, Nic and Jules seem tentatively reconciled, fingers intertwined in the front seat of a car in an affirming gesture that recalls the closing shots of Thelma and Louise.  "I don't think you guys should break up," Laser says from the backseat.  "Why not?" one of the moms asks.  "Because you're too old."  These latter-day heroines avoid the cliff's edge, but they seem stuck in a landscape of phallic power not all that dissimilar from the one that drove Thelma and Louise to take the only escape route available to them.  It's hard to say which female pair got the least happy ending.

It could well be that the quest to be "the most widely distributed lesbian-themed mainstream movie in history" was the undoing of the story The Kids Are All Right might otherwise have told.  As the charming queer friend with whom Moose and Goose saw the film remarked, "I had the feeling this movie wasn't really targeted at me."   Lisa Cholodenko, who also wrote and directed 1998's High Art, is certainly capable of more nuanced and queerer storytelling than we get here.  Our feeling was that the story started out strong and funny, poking fun of the vicissitudes of partnership and parenthood and taking up tricky but worthwhile questions about what it means to be biologically related to a complete stranger.  For us, though, the story ran off the rails when Jules slept with Paul and never really got back on track.  In taking that turn, the film gratifies the straight male fantasy that what every lesbian needs is a good straight roll in the hay and presents lesbian relationships as cheap imitations of the worst heterosexual marriages:  like them in being riven by conflict, frustration, and inequality, unlike them in lacking the almighty penis.  There were obviously other narrative possibilities available, but Cholodenko seems to have been too firmly committed to proving that this "unconventional family," as Paul describes them in a toast, is depressingly like every other grim, dysfunctional, but inescapable family we have ever encountered in life or art.  Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em, the film seems to say -- Well, you could live without that particular model of family life actually, but it takes a bold leap of the imagination and will to make and sell stories about other ways of building families and intimacies that can be sustaining and satisfying rather than just grimly, painfully, corrosively endured.

Marriage is, as Jules says late in the game, "hard":  "Two people, year after year.  Sometimes you just stop seeing the other person."  That's true, of course, in any long-term partnership, with or without children, in or out of sunny southern California.  Still, long-term intimacies do have their pleasures -- even sexual ones, insist the ornery but discreet geezers of our acquaintance! -- and families can be strong without being insular and inflexible.  It's unfortunate that Cholodenko's film, for all its strengths and all its box-office charm, doesn't have the guts to show some of those pleasures and possibilities.  No, we have no right to burden artists with the demand for positive role models and happy endings, but surely we can see that the kids might do better than "all right" if we were prepared to help them first to imagine and then to build a better world.

Seriously, folks, let's skip the cliches about lesbian bed death and needy, overly protective (s)mothers.  We've got a fine new wine here in the phenomenon of non-heterosexual family-making.  Betcha anything it would taste better if we poured it into a beautiful new bottle.  I'll drink to that, darlings, and I bet you would, too.  Peace out.

Dykes Against Softball

(Photo Credit: Associated Press, via)

A previously unknown organization, Dykes Against Softball, headquartered somewhere in the suburbs of Washington, DC, issued a communiqué this morning expressing surprise and gratitude to Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus for saying something sensible on the subject of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, pictured at left playing softball at the University of Chicago in 1993. The Wall Street Journal ran the photo on its front page earlier this week, a move that has been widely interpreted as suggesting that the unmarried Kagan is a lesbian. Marcus said she found the picture "charming" and thought it made Kagan look "like more of a real person and less of a brainiac." (The Association of Real Lesbian Brainiacs immediately denounced that statement as insensitive, but that is another story.)

She went on to say, "Memo to conspiracy theorists: Straight women can play softball, too. Sometimes a softball bat is only a softball bat."

In its communiqué, Dykes Against Softball praised Marcus for her perceptiveness and courage in publicly declaring that, contrary to popular understanding, softball isn't just for lesbians: "Coming in the wake of WaPo media critic Howard Kurtz's brave announcement earlier this week that he -- a straight male -- had his own long history of playing with the big ball, Marcus's column is another encouraging step forward in the painful struggle to undo the deeply rooted and -- to many of us -- deeply hurtful stereotype that lesbians love and excel at softball."

The DAS communiqué continues:

Lesbians come in all shapes and sizes and with varying degrees of eye-hand coordination and athletic interest. While it is true that softball has served as an important means of community-building for non-heterosexual women in a range of times and places, it is also true that many of us feel no connection at all to what some have termed "the lesbian national pastime." Some of us hate team sports. Some of us are terrified of gigantic balls being hurled through space by burly women with extraordinary upper-body strength. Some of us prefer the peace and quiet of the library or the relative safety of the pool hall to the loud, dusty world of the diamond. Some of us don't like to run in our high heels. Some of us think blue jeans accentuate our wide hips. Some of us would just as soon skip the game and go straight to the beer-drinking and the back-slapping.

DYKES AGAINST SOFTBALL is grateful to our heterosexual comrades Ruth Marcus and Howard Kurtz for their courageous contributions to the cause of de-linking lesbianism and softball. It is our sincere desire that this whole episode (which has commanded so. much. attention. that one might actually begin to think it fricking mattered!) might teach a valuable lesson about the dangers of stereotyping. We think every individual, regardless of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, size, or ability, should be free to play -- or not play -- any game, anywhere, any time. Just don't make any assumptions about what team you think we're on, because, you know, some of us girls are really not into the big stick.

Thank you for your attention. Now, can somebody tell us how concerned we ought to be about Elena Kagan's philosophy on executive power? Because, well, call us crazy, but we think maybe that's where some of these big stick issues might actually fricking matter!

The (Gender) Politics of Snow

This Vehicle Liberated by Vagina Power!

This Path Cleared by
Sistas Shovelin' for Themselves!

(Photo Credits: Moose, 2/11/10)

What's up, Rox? you are probably wondering. Somebody wake up on the wrong side of the gender binary? Or maybe cabin fever has settled into the neighborhood, nearly a week after Snowpocalypse II blew into town and not quite 24 hours after Snowpocalypse II, Part B finally shot its wad? Nah, the moms are good, despite having discovered evidence of an ice dam problem on another wall in the house. Moose just felt compelled to offer a broad-shouldered, gynocritical response to an especially dopey column in yesterday's WaPo by Kathleen Parker.

The Post has, of course, been all over the snow story, which is appropriate, given the historic scale of the storm and its significant local and national impact (because the federal government has been shut down for four straight days). WaPo being WaPo, there's even been a look at how the region's leaders, including Maryland Gov. Martin "You, Sir, Are No Jack Kennedy" O'Malley, have negotiated "the politics of snowstorms." Much of the coverage has been great. We've especially enjoyed the photo galleries, but business columnist Steve Pearlstein had a really smart piece on what the response to the storm by cash-strapped state and local authorities says about our broken politics. Here's the money (ha-ha) quote:

It is a measure of the dysfunction of our political system that we can no longer rationally debate whether it is penny-wise and pound-foolish not to spend a little more to try to keep the Capital of the Free World from grinding to a halt every time a snowflake descends from the heavens.

I realize there are lots of problems that cannot be solved just by throwing money at them, but snow removal is not one of them. We have the know-how, we have the technology and we have the money and economic self-interest to do it right. What we don't seem to have is the leadership or political will.

Amen! And then there is Parker's not especially illuminating meditation on what the storm allegedly revealed (or conveniently affirmed) (to Parker) about gender difference. Parker notices how quickly her neighbor, USA Today columnist Craig Wilson, gets out into the storm to do battle with the snow "with his Great Big Snow Shovel." Craig's alacrity is evidence to Parker of a primordial male urge to act in response to a "taunt from Nature." She acknowledges that when she poked her head outside during the epochal storm she saw "many women," presumably also equipped with shovels, clearing sidewalks and unearthing cars. Hmmm. One guy, "many women," all doing exactly the same thing. Sounds like a paradise of gender non-difference, doesn't it? Nope! Not to Parker, who blithely asserts, on the basis of evidence as substantial as a melting snowflake, that "most women do these things because they must, while men apparently can't wait to do them."

We'll pause here so that you can go get your pink or blue barf bag and relieve yourself of that icky burning sensation in the back of your throat.

Better? Thought so.

By the way, Parker also lets us know in the course of her "analysis" that Craig Wilson, who is so hot to go after the snow with his "Great Big Snow Shovel," is gay (he is -- Yay, Craig!), which, I guess, is Parker's way of letting us know that even light-in-the-loafer guys are not immune to the Great Big Manly Urge to subdue Nature, while women -- Ah, well, if I must, I must, I guess, but, really, it would be so much nicer if a big strapping fella would come along and do it for me -- and then if his boyfriend would feed me stroganoff, too, well, that would be just peachy!

We are not making this up, peeps. Feel free to grab that bag again if you need it.

Here's the thing, Ms. Parker. By 10 o'clock this morning, we had had approximately 47 guys come knock on the door and offer to dig out the cars and shovel the walks in Roxie's World. We declined, not because they weren't offering to do it for free and give us stroganoff into the bargain, but because, contrary to what you assert, we actively enjoy doing this kind of work. No, we didn't race out at the height of the storm to catch flakes before they even hit the pavement, and we certainly didn't wield the biggest shovels on the block. Nonetheless, we derive a deep satisfaction in everything associated with shoveling snow: being outdoors, doing work that is physically taxing yet pleasurable, and being a part of the social, communal experience of something like a snowstorm. The work is less about subduing nature than respecting it, figuring out how best to exist in it so that people and property will be safe. A storm is a moment of chaos and uncertainty. The cleanup is a period of checking on things and setting them to rights. And shoveling snow is one of those activities that always has a feeling of play about it, because the cold air makes us giddy and wet clothes make us feel like kids again. As the moms shoveled, a stream of neighbors passed by, and everyone laughed as they exchanged loud greetings and stories about the storm. Such rituals confirm not only our shared participation in a significant event but our membership in a community, our neighborliness.

It wasn't a guy thing, Ms. Parker, it was simply a good thing, and we were delighted to be a part of it. We're sorry to hear that in your neighborhood, which, since we don't know its name, we might as well call Gender Gap, shoveling is for manly men, while the girly girls are stuck indoors. You should come outside sometime and pick up a shovel. You really don't know what you're missing.

Notes on a Stereotype

Spoiler Alert: If you haven't yet seen Notes on a Scandal, you might want to skip this post for now. Maybe you could re-visit some of my holiday posts and try to decide whether you like me better in my reindeer tiara or my oh-so-naughty "Happy F-ing New Year!" tiara. Or, maybe you should shut down the computer and head out to your local cineplex to see Notes so that you can join in on the debate my moms are about to launch. Don't say I didn't warn you: Spoilers and rants ahead.

My moms go on lots of dates in January. It's a time of year when one of them will say, "I've got to go downtown and get a haircut this afternoon. Want to me meet me after for a movie and an early dinner?" and the other, instead of hemming and hawing about how much work she has to do, will say, "Sure. What's playing?" Thus it was that on Friday they caught a late afternoon showing of Richard Eyre's creepy, riveting Notes on a Scandal, starring Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett. (Pause for a scene-setting bit of local gossip: Just as the trailers were about to start, PBS reporter Gwen Ifill and a female companion came and sat down right next to Moose and Goose. The moms were thrilled. They just love rubbing shoulders with the kinda famous people one tends to see at the movies in Washington.)

My moms are suckers for a good story, and they like nothing better than spending a couple of hours in the dark with women who are as smart, talented, and gorgeous as Dench and Blanchett are (even though Dench bends over backwards to be the opposite of gorgeous in this role. She succeeds admirably. Wait for the bathtub scene. Look at her upper arms. You'll probably race from the theater to the gym to start a weight-lifting program. Props to Dame Judi for letting them film her aging female body in all its un-nipped or -tucked glory.).

The tale is gripping, as Dench's Barbara Covett and Blanchett's Sheba Hart (love the subtly allegorical names, eh?) are drawn not into friendship but into a twisted nest of co-dependency, power struggle, sexual intrigue, and multiple betrayals. The two women meet on the first day of a new term in a dysfunctional high school in inner-city London. Dench plays a battle-ax history teacher who holds her students and her colleagues in utter contempt, while Blanchett is a novice art teacher who is bored with her bourgeois married-with-children life but clueless about how to run a classroom. Searching for a gem among her unruly students (Barbara calls them "feral"), Sheba gets entangled with a horny fifteen-year old boy. Barbara soon discovers the affair and realizes she can use the knowledge to gain control of Sheba and command a semblance of devotion from her. Not surprisingly, complications ensue. Horny boys show up at inconvenient times. Families get suspicious. Cats die. Secrets come out, with a little help from the bitter, grief-stricken cat owners who are supposed to keep them. Jobs are lost. Someone goes to jail. Someone else goes to the park. No one looks noble, though the child with Down syndrome at least seems fully innocent.

Luminous peformances, a great script, a haunting score by Philip Glass--What's not to love about Notes on a Scandal? Why did my moms walk out saying they felt deeply conflicted about this film? My moms are the opposite of image-nazis. They don't go to the movies expecting (or even wanting) to see positive role models and happy endings, but they were bothered by how fully invested Notes on a Scandal turned out to be in the trope of the predatory repressed lesbian. One could argue that as the adult in a sexual relationship with a "child," Sheba, too, is a predator, though the film is clear that her lover Steven instigates their affair and that Sheba's chief moral failing is her inability to stop it. Sheba seems less a predator than a selfish fool who misses the "fuck fests" (as she describes her early relationship with her husband to Barbara) of her youth. In the film's last glimpse of her, Sheba is shown in a tabloid photograph being sent off to jail with her forgiving husband at her side. She has been convicted of a crime, but she has been fully restored to "normal," marital heterosexuality.

Barbara, on the other hand, is the unredeemed and irredeemable sex criminal of Notes on a Scandal. The word "lesbian" is never spoken in the film, a sign of how deeply phobic its structuring of female same-sex eroticism is. In the moral panic whipped up by the revelation of Sheba's affair, Barbara is forced to resign from her job. The headmaster threatens to reveal a previous incident in which another woman teacher, Jennifer, sought a restraining order against Barbara, who had obsessively stalked her much as she has been stalking Sheba throughout the film. The film ends with Barbara moving in on her next target, a young woman who vaguely resembles Sheba and gets drawn into conversation when Barbara notes that she knew the woman who is the subject of the lurid tabloid headlines she is reading. Called a vampire earlier (and we all know that female vampires are lesbians, right?), Barbara has her fangs out in the end, getting ready to strike again. Sheba has been rehabilitated. Barbara is the damned recidivist. She is damned by the tormenting power of a sexuality neither she nor the film is willing to name.

Or that's what my moms say anyway, and their reaction is similar to commentary by Malinda Lo that my Aunt Katie was kind enough to pass along. Our pal Damion over at Queering the Apparatus had a different take on the film when he saw a preview of it in November (and you know we put great stock in what Damion has to say about film). We share Damion's awe for the performances, but the film's artistry is itself problematic because, as Lo points out, the performances have such a strong ring of truth that they forestall critical examination of the toxic stereotype that serves as the story's central narrative trope. And even if we don't go to the movies in search of positive queer images, it's disheartening that last year mainstream audiences thrilled to Brokeback Mountain, which presented same-sex love as sweet but doomed to a violent end, while this year they'll flock to a morality play that depicts same-sex desire not as victimized but as pathetically, inevitably victimizing.

I think I'm going to go to Hollywood and pitch a movie about my moms. Maybe I'll call it Notes on Twenty-Three Years of Queer Delight (Thirteen of Which Included a Really Cute Dog). Whaddyathink, kids? Could I sell that script and quit my day job as a world-class squirrel chaser?

Roxie's Pleading: Halt Hillary-Hating

We expect it from George Will, who today urges Barack Obama to go ahead and run for president in part because "he has, in Hillary Clinton, the optimal opponent. The contrast is stark: He is soothing; she is not." What he means, of course, is: He is soothing; she is shrill. He is smooth; she is calculating. He's a sweetheart; she's a bitch. George is too much of a gentleman to come right out and say all of that, but he doesn't need to. It's all palpably clear from the sexist rhetorical atmosphere he sets up in the contrast between "soothing" and its unnamed opposite. I didn't even need help from my moms the English profs to pick up on that one.

We've even gotten accustomed to it from Arianna Huffington, whose swipes at the junior senator from New York are a staple of her pontifications on Huffington Post. The swipes are so frequent and often so gratuitous that we've sometimes wondered whether the author of On Becoming Fearless isn't just a teensy bit afraid of Clinton.

Nonetheless, two years ahead of the presidential election of 2008, we here at Roxie's World are officially ticked off at all the Hillary-bashers. We are particularly put out with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, whose catty potshots at Clinton are as predictable as the tides. Her most recent column (which you can only access through Times Select) is as saturated in misogynistic stereotypes as George Will's is, and it's merely the latest example of her relentless attacks on the woman named in the headline over her column "Hillzilla." Cute, Mo. We love it when women engage in ad feminem attacks, depicting powerful women as scary, threatening, monstrous, unfeminine ("and we know that she's not a good dancer," Mo meows), and undeserving of her success. The low point of Dowd's assault is the assertion that Clinton's only message to voters is "simply the Divine Right of Clintons." Huh? Methinks Dowd has confused the Clintons with the Bushes and thought she was writing another column about the idiot boy king.

Here's the thing, kids. We here at Roxie's World are not ardent Hillary partisans. Indeed, longtime fans will recall that I endorsed Al Gore for president back in May, while my moms continue to dither and worry and ambivalate, which may not be a word but ought to be. Poor Democrats. The point is this: We're disgusted that the Democratic race has already been framed as a smackdown between race and gender and that over and over again, from right, left, and center, Hillary Clinton is being pilloried as bitch, shrew, and harridan. As "unelectable." As "calculating." As "cold." We have a world of admiration for Senator Obama. How could we not love a man who stood up at the Democratic convention in 2004 and declared that, "We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states?" Our beef is with the pundits who are scared senseless by the prospect of a serious female contender for the presidency and who reduce everything to the crudest of contests between pretty and ugly, smart and personable, "calculated" and "genuine," black and white, male and female.

My friends, it will be a glorious day for America if the Democratic party offers voters Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Tom Vilsack, Bill Richardson, and Al Gore. I'll take that over an aging John McCain and a resurgent Newt Gingrich any day. Let's put 'em all out there in the public square and have a good old-fashioned debate. Spare us the smackdowns, the stereotypes, and the antediluvian resistance to powerful women. And, please, spare us Maureen Dowd working out her unfinished psychosexual business on the back of a woman who had the guts to believe that being "First Lady" was just the beginning of her extraordinary political journey.