Dargis' "fuck them" - the first of several - refers specifically to a fact she highlighted in her piece this weekend on the lack of progress in Hollywood films for and about women: Two major studios, Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers Pictures, didn't release a single movie directed by a female, even in a year of renewed prominence for women in film. One bright spot: The Hurt Locker by Kathryn Bigelow (pictured above) is sweeping the early critics' awards: in the past two days alone she and her film have gotten top accolades from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the American Film Institute, The New York Film Critics Online, and the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.

In a wide-ranging conversation this morning on women in Hollywood, Dargis, who has been a chief New York Times film critic (a title she shares with A.O. Scott) since 2004, had similarly strong words for Hollywood conventional wisdom and the studio system overall. "My tendency is not to talk in sweeping terms, but one thing I can say in sweeping terms is that there's a lot of sexism in the industry," she says. Here are some of the other highlights from the conversation.

On why women in Hollywood aren't faring any better: This business is really about clubby relationships. If you buy Variety or go online and look at the deals, you see one guy after another smiling in a baseball cap. It's all guys making deals with other guys. I had a female studio chief a couple of years ago tell me point blank that she wasn't hiring a woman to do an action movie because women are good at certain things and not others. If you have women buying that bullshit how can we expect men to be better?

On working within the system: For me the most sobering thing of the last ten years is that there really was a point where four of the studios were run by women… and you would have thought that would lead to an uptick of women directors. I'm not saying I've done a systematic analysis, but it doesn't look like it changed very much… Working within the system has not worked. It has not helped women filmmakers or, even more important, you and me, women audiences, to have women in the studio system. … I think the studio system as it exists now is a no-win situation for women filmmakers.

On director Kathryn Bigelow's success (achieved in part by getting funding outside of Hollywood, detailed in Dargis's June profile of her): Something like a woman winning best director for directing an action movie and not a romantic comedy is symbolically important. Whether it then leads to a lot of women doing things outside of the pathetic comfort zone of romantic comedy – and I say that as someone who loves romantic comedy – we'll see. We know that because women are allowed to make romantic comedies that they can make romantic comedies. That's in everyone's comfort zone. The idea that a woman can be a great action director is not is everyone's comfort zone. That's [Bigelow's] exceptionalism.

On Bigelow's chances for Oscar or future commercial success: The only thing Hollywood is interested in money, and after that prestige. That's why they'll be interested in something like The Hurt Locker. She's done so well critically that she can't be ignored.

Let's acknowledge that the Oscars are bullshit and we hate them. But they are important commercially... I've learned to never underestimate the academy's bad taste. Crash as best picture? What the fuck.

On male and female directors being held to different standards, as Dargis suggested in comparing Bigelow and Michael Mann in her piece: Do you think that a woman would have been able to get forty million dollars to make a puppet movie the way that Wes Anderson has been able to make, bringing to bear all the publicity and advertising budget of Fox? After two movies that didn't make a lot of money? I think this is true for a lot of black filmmakers too – they're held to a higher standard. And an unfair standard. You can be a male filmmaker and if you're perceived as a genius – a boy genius or a fully-formed adult genius – that you are allowed to fail in a way that a woman is not allowed to fail.

On whether there's an essential difference between male-made and female-made movies: Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary. That's all we need to say about that. But I do think as 51 percent of the population we should be given a chance… It's very boring to watch the same people coming from a certain kind of background make the same kinds of movies.

On Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephron: I personally don't think either of them is a good filmmaker — they make movies for me that are more emotionally satisfying but with barely any aesthetic value at all. I really like Something's Gotta Give, but I don't think it's a good movie…. I'm of two minds. Sometimes I think what women should do what various black and gay audiences have done, which is support women making movies for women. So does that mean I have to go support Nora Ephron? Fuck no. That's just like, blech.

On Sandra Bullock, whom she recently wrote should use her production company to "start giving female filmmakers a chance to do something other than dopey romances": Use your power for good, Sandy!

On why so many romantic comedies are so terrible: One, the people making them have no fucking taste, two, they're morons, three they're insulting panderers who think they're making movies for the great unwashed and that's what they want. I love romantic movies. I absolutely do. But I literally don't know what's happening. I think it's depressing that Judd Apatow makes the best romantic comedies and they're about men. All power to Apatow, but he's taken and repurposed one of the few genres historically made for women. ….We had so few [genres] that were made specifically for the female audience and now the best of them are being made by Judd Apatow. But what are his movies supposed to be about? Nominally about the relationship between a man and a woman, but they're really buddy flicks. Funny People was supposed to have an important role for a woman, but she was uninteresting and an afterthought.

On representations of women onscreen: There's a reason that women go to movies like Mamma Mia. It's a terrible movie… but women are starved for representation of themselves. I go back to Spike Lee and She's Gotta Have It. I remember going to see it at the Quad in New York, surrounded by a black audience. People are starved for representations of themselves.

On women being taken seriously as moviegoers: It's a vicious cycle. We're not going to movies because there aren't movies for us. Therefore we're not seen as a loyal moviegoing audience. My point is that if there are stories about women, women will come out for that…

That's why [women] go to a movie like The Devil Wears Prada and make huge hits. They want to see women in movies. People in the trade press constantly frame that as a surprise. This, gee whiz, Sex and the City's a hit, Twilight, hmm, wonder what's going on here. Maybe they should not be so surprised. In the trade press, women audiences are considered a niche. How is that even possible? We're 51 percent of the audience.

On this quote from a box office analyst for Hollywood.com, in The Washington Post: Fuck him. What an asshole. Yes, that's what I want! That's exactly what I want. If Angelina Jolie had been cast in a movie as a good as The Bourne Identity with a filmmaker like Paul Greengrass, I would have gone out to see it, and I'm sure I wouldn't be alone. That is absurd. That's blaming female audiences – you get what you deserve? Is that what he's saying?

On being a female critic reviewing and featuring women's films: I wanted to get [Bigelow] on the cover of 'Arts and Leisure'. I wanted this fantastic woman director to get her face on the front of the New York Times…[But] I am an equal opportunity critic. I will pan women as hard as men. I've had testy people imply that I should go easier on women's movies. I find that incredibly insulting. Are you kidding me? I don't want to be graded on a curve. None of us want to be a good woman writer.

I don't want to be the woman critic. I don't want to be the feminist critic. I don't want to be the shrew. What I want to do is talk about the art that I love and point out, every so often, inequities….It's a weird balancing act and I'm not saying there aren't contradictions.

On whether the prominence of women-directed films in 2009 will change anything, even if they're not statistically significant compared to other years: It's pretty shitty right now. Anything positive can only help a little bit. How's that for optimism?

Women In The Seats But Not Behind The Camera [New York Times]
Kathryn Bigelow Makes Movies That Go For The Gut [New York Times]
Now Starring At The Movies: Famous Dead Women [New York Times]
With Strong Female Characters, Hollywood Suffers From a Fear Of Failure [The Washington Post]

Related: Double X Films [The Atlantic]

Earlier: Things Are Not Getting Better For Women In Hollywood

The piece, "A More Perfect Union," is writer Elizabeth Weil's attempt to improve her marriage. Her marriage, mind you, is good; she and her husband are both writers living in San Francisco's Bernal Heights, with "two kids, two jobs, a house, a tenant, a huge extended family." But.

The idea of trying to improve our union came to me one night in bed. I've never really believed that you just marry one day at the altar or before a justice of the peace. I believe that you become married - truly married - slowly, over time, through all the road-rage incidents and precolonoscopy enemas, all the small and large moments that you never expected to happen and certainly didn't plan to endure. But then you do: you endure. And as I lay there, I started wondering why I wasn't applying myself to the project of being a spouse. My marriage was good, utterly central to my existence, yet in no other important aspect of my life was I so laissez-faire. Like most of my peers, I applied myself to school, friendship, work, health and, ad nauseam, raising my children. But in this critical area, marriage, we had all turned away. I wanted to understand why. I wanted not to accept this. Dan, too, had worked tirelessly - some might say obsessively - at skill acquisition. Over the nine years of our marriage, he taught himself to be a master carpenter and a master chef. He was now reading Soviet-era weight-training manuals in order to transform his 41-year-old body into that of a Marine. Yet he shared the seemingly widespread aversion to the very idea of marriage improvement. Why such passivity? What did we all fear?

So, they start the marriage-improvement project, "But how to start? What would a better marriage look like? More happiness? Intimacy? Stability? Laughter? Fewer fights? A smoother partnership? More intriguing conversation? More excellent sex?" To find out, she starts a round of self-help and classes (which, in the Bay Area, would appear to be thick on the ground) and therapy, both sexual and emotional. And through this, they realize there are Underlying Problems.

We spent far more money on food than we did on our mortgage. Sure, we ate well. Very well. Our refrigerator held, depending on the season: homemade gravlax, Strauss organic milk, salt-packed anchovies, little gem lettuces, preserved Meyer lemons, imported Parmesan, mozzarella and goat cheese, baby leeks, green garlic, Blue Bottle coffee ($18 a pound), supergroovy pastured eggs. On a ho-hum weeknight Dan might make me pan-roasted salmon with truffled polenta in a Madeira shallot reduction. But this was only a partial joy. Dan's cooking enabled him to hide out in plain sight; he was home but busy - What? I'm cooking dinner! - for hours every evening. During this time I was left to attend to our increasingly hungry, tired and frantic children and to worry about money. That was our division of labor: Dan cooked, I tended finances. Because of the cooking, in part, we saved little for retirement and nothing for our children's college educations.

When she admits that "I garnered no sympathy from our friends," we feel them (despite the passive-aggression of acts like "slipping crispy fried pigs' ears" into her salads). She and her husband start to fight, although whether from the stress of the "project" or the result of self-discovery is unclear. "What if my good marriage was not floating atop a sea of goodness, adrift but fairly stable when pushed? What if my good marriage was teetering on a precipice and any change would mean a toppling, a crashing down?"

Ultimately, she finds that the project was either effective or ineffective. It's hard to say - because marriage is complicated. In a review of Jane Gardam's new novel The Man in the Wooden Hat, Louisa Thomas writes that

In Gardam's hands, marriage can be the stuff of comedy, especially farce. One minute Betty is despairing, still feeling trapped in her marriage, and the next she's pressing her face against her husband's shirt, thinking how much she loves him. Over the course of their 50 years together, the complexity of their relationship only intensifies. They keep some secrets and confess others; they act generously but also with passive aggression, sometimes in the span of a single moment.

Gardam is a writer who evokes marital intimacy with special vividness, probably because of a willingness to acknowledge these obvious ebbs and flows and the inherent drama of longevity. I couldn't help but think of that, and of the classic Monogamy (which Weil should, perhaps, have read and saved herself a lot of money), in which Adam Phillips writes, "Growing old together, or growing young together? There is always something to resist, or defy." He's right; the difference is, most people don't need to manufacture it.

A More Perfect Union [NY Times]

• Michelle Trachtenberg is designing a line of jewelry for Coach's Poppy brand. Expect "colorful crystals." [WWD]
• Zac Posen is doing a lower-priced line, Z Spoke, which will be available exclusively through Saks Fifth Avenue come spring. It starts at $78:

• And it's a marked departure from his evening wear-heavy main line. "It's not Zac-for-less, it's not the little sister collection at all," says the designer. "The dresses — that's something I can do with my eyes closed. This is about a new identity." Hopefully that new identity includes solvency, given Posen, subject to continued rumors about his company's financial status, was forced to lay off staff recently. [WWD]
• Why is Cintra Wilson reviewing the Fifth Avenue Armani store now? That opened months ago. And it was extensively covered and reviewed in the Times back then. [NYTimes]
• Sophie Theallet's friend and longtime supporter Rupert Everett is happy she won the Vogue/CFDA Fashion Fund Award. Theallet is going to collaborate again with Manolo Blahnik on her runway show footwear for next February, and this time, some styles will be available in stores. [WWD]
• Some "legendary" male models we've never heard of (OK, male models we have heard of comprise exactly Tyson Beckford and that guy who was in Calvin Klein ads before he played Samantha's boyfriend on Sex And The City) are in this month's VMAN. [Independent]
• Claudia Schiffer has been thinking more about that clothing line she mooted a week or so back. "I have no definite first product in mind, but I would love to do cashmere. It's something I wear all the time myself, but I'd love to do something a bit more price-friendly. Plus a lot of cashmere lines are very classic and timeless, while I'd want to do it a bit more fashion. Or I could imagine doing handbags." You know. Cashmere. Or handbags. [WWD]
• If you need a fresh reason to hate the fashion industry this morning, how about an over-privileged under-informed 17-year-old heaping scorn on Luella's closure, and bragging about how she has, like, a ton of Lacroix — in the garage? Jane Aldridge probably kisses her Vogue portrait before going to bed each night. Right after inclining her head to say her prayers to Anna. [Fashionista]
• Vivienne Westwood says of the same closure, "It's very sad, but English fashion will survive, and be stronger." [Style.com]
• A four-day auction of the last contents of Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent's home has begun in Paris. Everything from the chandeliers to the pots and pans is for sale, some 1,185 objects in all. [Breitbart]
• Lanvin has attracted a minority investor. An unnamed entity, believed to be a European family, has bought a 12.5% stake in the business, for an estimated tens of millions of Euros. Last year, sales at Lanvin rose 29%. [WWD]
• Apparently it takes £230 worth of creams to look like Jane Birkin, along with Clarins and Dr. Hauschka makeup. And we always thought her so low maintenance and carefree. [Daily Mail]
• Birkin's daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg may be the face of the new Balenciaga perfume, but that won't stop Olivier Zahm from photographing the bottle between the breasts of a topless mannequin. Stay classy, Olivier! [FWD]
• John Bartlett, the recently fired men's wear designer for Liz Claiborne, has announced a collaboration with Alex Carleton of Rogues Gallery. RG/JB will launch in December at John Bartlett's Greenwich Village store, and will include a handcrafted leather log carrier and bankers' envelopes. Sounds practical. [WWD]
• Porsche is bringing back Yoko Ono's favorite sunglasses. [Luxist]
• A Gap store in Vancouver turned itself upside down to sell shoppers on a new kind of reward program called, for some reason, Sprize. They hung all the mannequins from the ceiling and turned the signage upside-down, but what you really need to know is this: Sprize reimburses you the cost difference automatically if merchandise you buy full-price later goes on sale. It's like everything you ever buy will be on sale. And it's not in the U.S. yet why??? [BrandFreak]
• Rosita and Tai Missoni seem like an adorable old couple. [Scotsman]
• Expect Burberry handbags, shoes and belts, as well as children's wear, in the near future. [Reuters]
• In coordination with something called cryptically "more trees," Louis Vuitton is paying 10 million yen (about $112,000) to reforest a 104-hectare area of land in Japan, to be known as the Louis Vuitton Forest. (Insert your own where-handbags-grow-on-trees joke.) [Japan Tourism]

She spoke to me from a hotel room in Philadelphia, where she was in the midst of her book tour. We discussed everything from ironing to why only 17 percent of U.S. Senators and Representatives are female.

Hi, Gail. Is this still a good time?
It's a great time. Let me just go turn off the oven.

[A minute later]

Did I say oven? I meant iron.

I was confused as to why you had an oven in your hotel room. But that actually reminds me of something I wanted to ask you—in a recent interview with Forbes, you said you didn't know any men who ironed.
I'm sure this has something to do with being in New York and class—men send their shirts out, unless their wives iron them for them.

My boyfriend usually sends his shirts out, but I did recently show him how to iron.
That is something my husband would never let me teach him, under the theory that someone is imprisoned by doing ironing—the revolution will be achieved when no one has to do ironing. Yet here I am ironing a shirt.

Maybe the revolution will be achieved when we can wear wrinkled shirts.
Maybe!

Anyway. In your book, in the section on the '60s, you write about two books, The Feminine Mystique and Sex and the Single Girl, that both had a major impact on women's consciousness. I wonder if it would be possible for a single book to make such an impact today.
Both of those books were partly the huge things that they were because they just caught a moment. Especially Sex and the Single Girl—she caught that exact moment and expressed it in a really dramatic way. It's harder to do that now because once a thought gets out there gets devoured so much faster, by so many.

Is that why there hasn't been a clear successor to Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and these other big names of the feminist movement?
No, it's the same reason there's not a clear successor to Martin Luther King. There are these crystal moments in history when something that's so obviously wrong gets tackled in the context of a society that's ready to hear it, and it happens very fast and it's very dramatic. Everyone who's part of it remembers it for the rest of their lives.

What was your mother like?
She wanted to be a journalist. She left college after her first year to work for the war effort.

Was she supportive of your career choices?
Yes. My parents were the kind of parents who would say, "Look at that, what a good sentence!" They were just wildly supportive, and not in a terrifying or bad way. It was very easy to feel wildly empowered.

Did you encounter discrimination?
The truth is I didn't. I came in at just the exact second when the windows were all thrown open by women who were like three seconds older than I was. They did all the suffering, the filing of the suits, the protests, the challenging of employers. I got all the benefits. I stand completely on their shoulders.

Did they ever feel any resentment toward you and the women of your generation—since like you said, you were born at that exact moment three seconds after them when things got a lot easier?
They never felt any resentment at the women who got to do the things. They felt resentment at the people who didn't let them do the things they wanted to do. They were a very generous group of women who celebrated all the good things that happened to all the women in their fields.

Do you think women are willing to mentor young women in journalism?
To the degree that people have time to mentor anybody. It's way way better than when I was starting out. Mentoring was not heard of. Early on, I remember we had a meeting of women. This was at one of the tabloids. A woman said that she would go in and say to her editor, "I want to know what I'm doing wrong." And he would never say anything. Finally, he said, "You're about where we thought you'd be at this point." I think guys were more comfortable with each other back then. My particular profession was not known for its mentoring. Now I think people are dying to mentor, but they're overworked. There's not enough time.

Did you read Joanne Lipman's op-ed in the Times on Sunday? She claims that in her entire career, a woman never asked her for a raise or a promotion.
I was only an editor for five years but that was not my experience. I just had lunch the other day with a young woman who used to be one of my researchers. She now has a really good job in the outside world, and she appears to ask for a raise on a weekly basis. It did used to certainly be true that women were not as good as men at asking for stuff. You did run into women who wanted their bosses to offer them promotions because it would be a validation. It was not a validation if they just demanded it. I really think that period is behind us. Then again, because of the economy, nobody is asking for raises now. They're just hoping they won't be noticed.

You don't get to the '80s until almost 300 pages into the book, and then you only spend 100 pages talking about the '80s to the present. Why did you decide to pay more attention to the '60s and '70s?
The '60s I thought were really important. I really wanted to go back and try to drench the reader in what it was like. Even people who were there don't actually remember what it was like. They just tend to gloss over it. It's not that everyone was suffering—women thought they were doing very well. But they weren't comparing themselves to the guys. They were compared to other women or their mothers. The change part happened so wicked fast, it's sort of amazing. That period from '64 to '72, '73. It was less than a decade, but all this stuff was legally changed. It was one law after another. Suddenly women's applications to law school and medical school shot up. The actual change in the mindset of the country happened really really fast. After that it's a story about how you digest all that and what you do with it, like what to do with kids. I just love the fact that the very second the women started to postpone marriage until later you start getting all these stories in the media that they've waited too long! The famous Valentine's Day story [the original is no longer online].

You were the first female editorial page editor at The New York Times. I was looking at the paper's masthead and there are still only seven women on the masthead, out of 25 people total. And in your book you mention the writer Laura Sessions Stepp, who decided not to become an editor and stay a writer at The Washington Post. Why is it still so difficult for women to advance to the top in journalism?
I think there's a bunch of things. Ideally you want to move forward into an industry where there's lots of room to grow, and this is a shrinking industry. There are not as many opportunities as you might have in another industry. But every single question goes back to the question of family-work tensions. There are a lot of issues, of course, but that is the big huge marker. I think that laps over into everything. There are still less than 20 percent women in the House and the Senate. There are corporate glass ceilings. Why aren't there more women partners in law firms? I'm sure part of it is discrimination lingering. But tons of it to me is the question of work-family tensions.

How can that be remedied?
When I was in college, we all thought there was going to be a revolution. Afterwards, I don't think I was surprised that we didn't have one, but in college—and I wasn't a big huge feminist at the time—if you had told me that jobs wouldn't be automatically structured to take in family issues, that guys wouldn't as often as women take two years off to take care of their families, that there would be no national access to quality childcare at every age—it never occurred to me that those things weren't going to be taken care of. And they're not.

Are things better in other countries that have better family leave policies and childcare?
I'm not a person who gets all bent out of shape about Sweden. Sweden's a lovely country but we're never going to be Sweden. Russell Shorto did a piece on Italy and Greece and Spain and their incredibly low birth rates. These are countries in which women are expected to work, but men maintain their old patriarchal values. That's the recipe for a zero birthrate. Then there are other countries in which guys are incredibly helpful and even then if there are no social supports then women have more children. Then there are places where there are social supports and the guys are helpful, like France. We're a mixture of all those things. Russell thought our companies were more flexible than companies in other countries. Clearly guys here, for whatever their failure to live up to 50-50 thing, especially when it comes to childcare, they're still shouldering quite a bit of the load. Still, it's always the women who seem to be the final person in charge. When somebody's sick, and people have big meetings, who stays home with the kid? Who keeps track of the birthday parties? Who keeps minimum quality cleanliness standards? All that stuff tends to be women.

You mention a Times article from last year by Lisa Belkin, where she wrote about households that split the chores 50-50, and how difficult that was.
It's really hard. Half of the world believes it's because guys genuinely do not have as high a standard about making sure you get invited to dinner every once in awhile, or having matching socks. It's possible that guys, if they don't care, then it's very hard to impose those standards. Others argue that this is all a plot and the guys are just waiting out the women. I would go for 50-50. Clearly guys enjoy the higher standards—they just don't want to be in charge of them.

Right now, 76 out of 435 House members, or 17 percent, are women, and it's the same percentage in the Senate. You also mention a statistic about female law firm partners—in 2005 it was also at 17 percent. Why are we still stuck at around 20 percent?
It's a mixture of things. Certainly the work-child tensions is an issue. It's also reapportionment. Once they figured out how to reapportion districts by computer to protect all the incumbent, it became really hard for women to get elected. That big year of women getting elected happened after reapportionment. In a lot of places, in any kind of hidebound, old traditional culture of doing something, it's really hard to get any place anyway because everybody stays so long. And it's so depressing at the lower levels. Kids ask me, "I'd like to run for office. What should I do?" Well, it takes 27 years to qualify. And then you're in the State Senate and if you're in New York then you just want to shoot yourself.

You didn't have much discussion of women choosing, or not, to take their husband's name. Among my friends this has been rather controversial—women finding out that their fiances actually feel strongly about it, for example.
Keeping your own name has dropped down again. There's much more inclination to do it the other way. It's never knocked me out. If you're planning on having children, it does get kind of complicated. I changed my name when I got married because the mailman said he wouldn't deliver the mail if I had a different name. But once you've created a career with a name, you're very unlikely to want to change it. I can see how it's important to people. I was surprised at how much it's become unpopular again to not change, after it became such a thing that you wouldn't do it. I do feel sorry for little kids who have these really long names.

Why are there no late-night female hosts?
I presume there will be eventually. All those kinds of things are matters of what people are used to and what seems normal to people. There was a long time when we were sure we wouldn't put up with women being anchors or radio announcers. Now no one thinks about it. That's what Hillary Clinton did for women running for president. It's never going to seem weird again. So you just need one to be there, and then it'll be a normal thing. I can see it happening with someone like Ellen DeGeneres.

The Times ran a story this weekend about how the White House is kind of like a frat house. Should Obama be making more of an effort to have women in positions of power?
I don't know if the basketball game is a prominent role, but clearly the basketball game is really important to him. Part of me thinks the poor man's tired, let him just have five minutes to himself. But it's a little weird to think that the time he wants to spend by himself is with guys only. I think it's fair game to discuss it.

Anything else?
You know what comes up a lot? It always comes from an older woman. They ask me, "Why don't younger women want to hear these stories? Aren't you concerned about that?" It's often phrased in a way that I have such sympathy for the younger woman. Like, we walked 50 miles and we couldn't wear slacks. And you just don't care! And partly, given the transformation that the world has made, the idea that right now a generation of young women has come into the world without thinking that they can be constrained by their gender—it's such a neat idea I'm perfectly happy to celebrate it. I know they have problems of their own, more complicated in some ways than ones my generation faced. I'm not inclined to beat my breast about whether young women know these stories. But they are really neat stories. When I did the book before this one, it was all sort of part of me and I had new thoughts about the way I did things. Because I had that larger sense, the more stuff like that you know, the more reasonable behavior seems—things that your sex does that seem strange or outlandish make much more sense if you can just put yourself in their shoes and live through their past. It's one of the very few stories that has a happy ending. It just knocks me out that throughout recorded history people believed that women couldn't do stuff and women were inferior. And this ended in my lifetime!

When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present [Amazon]

Related: Gail Collins Columnist Page [NY Times]
Gail Collins on "When Everything Changed" [Forbes]
The Mismeasure of Women [NYT]
Newsweek: OK, Singles, Now You Can Worry About Terrorism [Salon]
When Mom and Dad Share It All [NYT]
No Babies? [NYT]

I want to be clear about some things up front. While I am familiar with the plot and premise of the book, I have not read Sapphire's Push, the book the film is based on, and I have not yet seen Precious. By next week, I will have done both.

However, I have been following the coverage of the film since Sundance, ever since Postbourgie contributor SLB wrote a post called "Reveling in Bleakness" detailing her personal feelings about the novel. Following the conversation on Postbourgie, and our conversation on Racialicious, I realized that a lot of what has been written isn't so much about the issues discussed in the film, but our perceptions of race, class, pathology, and stereotypes.

Claudia, a commenter at PostBourgie, neatly summarized quite a few of the reactions:

Has anyone else here read Percival Everett's Erasure?

If not, I highly recommend it. My understanding is that some of the satire and criticism in Everett's book were inspired by Push. I am as undecided as many of the previous comments on the wisdom of bringing this work to the big screen. Generally, though, I tend to side with Everett's view in questioning who exactly benefits from such deeply painful cautionary tales of black life. We most definitely shouldn't shy away from black hardship and the real-life stories of suffering. But I wonder if novels like Push, that offer an almost hyper-real simulation of reality – what do they ultimately achieve?

Ironically, I remember back when folks had some of the same issues with the film version of The Color Purple, and I am a huge admirer of the book and the movie. So I probably need to think this through a little more (smile).

Lola, commenting at Racialicious, simply wrote:

I can't read things like this. They hurt to much, it is too personal.

The conversation, however, quickly took a familiar turn. How do we articulate our personal truth if our words and lives are filtered, pushed through a majority lens, and regurgitated as stereotypes?

cocomala:

yes, but why it then that our media is so obsessed with the negative portrayals of black women and men? why should this story get the greenlight?

where are the counterbalancing roles in movies starring black women who achieve success and satisfaction due to community/ parental guidance, love and care? where are any movies starring black women in positive roles this year? Okay, Cadillac Records, um Good Hair is coming out… oh, The Secret Life of Bees…anything else? …maybe The Family that Preys…

atlasien:

In a lot of movies, I think black women's suffering is pushed off to the sidelines or used just to underline the experience of a white heroine. So I can see how a movie where that suffering is made absolutely central and really extreme could possibly represent a welcome break from a stereotype… even if it's also incredibly depressing.

yesand...:

I don't know if I'm as worried about it being sanitized as I am about it black suffering being fetishized by a white audience, due to this "white guilt" that is (apparently) providing all the "hope" (money) to get these stories to the mainstream. [...]

For the black community, these kinds of narratives are for feeling a sense of collective struggle, a sense of identification in a world that seems hopeless. For (privileged) whites, it's about living the fantasy of a "just world" that is independent of their behavior, which alleviates their guilt and justifies passivity and the status quo. This is why I am not so happy about all of this paternalistic coziness with the "black" struggle all of a sudden. It reeks of fetish, it reeks of self-serving smugness. It doesn't really look like understanding to me.

Rchoudh:

While it's good to show both negative and positive descriptions of life within all communities, American films have a tendency to show both positive and negative descriptions of white American life. For every depressing story about white America you have in films like Revolutionary Road, you get many more fun-filled humorous stories in rom-coms like He's just not that into you and so forth. There's no such balance like this when it comes to stories depicting POC characters. While you have an overwhelming number of negative descriptions you have a dearth of positive descriptions where POC's play the main characters and where their positive stories become crossover successes with all audiences, whites included. I think that's why I'm reluctant to see yet another depressing movie starring POC's.

Browne:

Of course this is going to get funded. It's poverty, racially charged porn.

People watch these movies and it makes it seem that everyone who is poor has these insanely horrible lives and the poverty is owing only to these horrible parents and a horrible unsupportive community.

It's too damn easy.

I would like to see the character who plays Precious being cast as a normal teenager. That would be ground breaking, this is not groundbreaking from what I've seen. I know what's it is going to be and I don't look forward to it.

It's not about me wanting something to be positive, but I don't want my race to be used to make a point. While this is a movie about class, no one is going to see it that way it's going to be seen as a slice of black life and that's why I don' t like it.

Ultimately, there were some 130 comments debating the film.

I'll be curious to see what people say in the comments on the NY Times' website. Reading through the paper's new Sunday Magazine cover story, "The Audacity of Precious," my feeling of discomfort grew and grew. By the end of the six page feature, I started to feel that the writer, Lynn Hirschberg, was less interested in talking about a movie and more interested in observing the interesting "other." How did I know that this sentence...

He was dressed unremarkably in a loose, untucked shirt and slouchy khaki pants, but his hair, an electric corona of six-inch fusilli-like spirals, demanded notice.

...would lead to this one?

"I decided I should cut my hair," Daniels said, running his hand over his closely cropped head. The dreadlocks were gone. Daniels no longer looks like a wild child, but older, more sober.

Or phrases like:

Yet the movie is not neutral on the subject of race and the prejudices that swirl around it, even in the supposedly postracial age of Obama.

And:

Like the Jewish immigrants who created the movie business in Hollywood, Daniels has the will and the perspective of an outsider.

This one was particularly interesting, as Lee Daniel's isn't quite an outsider. He's been working in the business since 1983, and his former partner and father of his children is Billy Hopkins, an A-list casting director. Perhaps Daniels still feels like an outsider, but from reading the full piece, I feel like the writer was trying to play up as many differences as she could, providing a voyeuristic view of Daniels and the film's other main players.

Both Daniels and actress/comedian Mo'Nique say that part of them gravitated to the film because of their own histories with abuse by family members. (Also, despite prominently displaying the other lead actress, Gabourey Sidibe, on the cover, the article barely mentions her.) When the NYT's Hirshberg asks Mo'Nique to discuss the part, she responds:

In part, Mo'Nique was intrigued by the role of Mary Jones because, she says, she was abused by a brother when she was a young girl. The abuse supposedly began when Mo'Nique was 7 and continued for four years. "We wanted people to see the illness," Mo'Nique explained. "Lee said, be a monster. And my brother was that monster to me. When Lee said, ‘Action,' that's who I became."

However, there isn't much discussion about the issues of literacy, obesity, incest, HIV/AIDS or Down's Syndrome in the article. Abuse only merits three small paragraphs. While Precious puts forth an array of issues, these are not engaged with by the reviewers. Is it because of the heaviness of the subject matter? Perhaps. But I find it interesting that I have seen more discussion of Mariah Carey appearing without make-up than any discussion of the underlying issues in the film. However, in the NYT piece, the director, Lee Daniels, makes a lot of interesting admissions:

"As African-Americans, we are in an interesting place," Daniels said. "Obama's the president, and we want to aspire to that. But part of aspiring is disassociating from the face of Precious. To be honest, I was embarrassed to show this movie at Cannes. I didn't want to exploit black people. And I wasn't sure I wanted white French people to see our world." He paused. "But because of Obama, it's now O.K. to be black. I can share that voice. I don't have to lie. I'm proud of where I come from. And I wear it like a shield. ‘Precious' is part of that."

"I am so used to having two faces," he said, as if to explain his theatrical shifts in mood. "A face that I had for black America and a face for white America. When Obama became president, I lost both faces. Now I only have one face. But old habits die hard, and sometimes I can't remember who I'm supposed to be."

"I knew killers. My uncle, who took care of me, murdered people, and yet he took care of me too. People who have gone to jail for murder are also human. Black people are not all saints."

"My sister was an obese crack addict," Daniels said. "She had a chicken wing in one hand and a crack pipe in the other, and yet she had a line of white men waiting for her.

"Even the most evil person was somebody's baby at one time. And that's where life is lived. I've never been that comfortable with black and white."

To be honest, I'm not quite sure what to make of Lee Daniels, with the multiple references to Obama and the chicken/crack pipe comment. I started to get the impression from the article that he believes he is representing blackness - and from the readers comments at Racialicious and Postbourgie, this is the epitome of what many do not want the audience to walk away with. Also, Daniels comments seem to reveal a lot of personal shame and struggle wrapped up in race, so much so that discussions of class or cycles of poverty and abuse were completely overshadowed.

Is the goal here to tell a story? To illuminate systemic issues? Or to put forth a new view on blackness?

I am not sure, and I don't think I will ever be. Movies are subjective things, and are highly subject to the viewers interpretation. So even if Daniels' intended the movie to be a portrait of black like that isn't part of the "Huxtable/Cosby world," is that how the audience will interpret it?

Still, I look forward to seeing the film, and this statement, also from Daniels, explains why:

People read so much into ‘Precious.' But at the end, it's just this girl, and she's trying to live. I know this chick. You know her. But we just choose not to know her."

Precious [Official Site]
The Audacity Of Precious [NY Times]
Reveling In Bleakness. [Postbourgie]
Reveling In Bleakness [Racialicious]

Illustration by Christopher Silas Neal, via NY Times.

In an interview with the New York Times, Greider claims that more women gravitate toward her field not because there's anything particularly feminine about it, but because in a field where men tend to help other men, women must try to support other women:

The derogatory term is the "old boys network." It's not that they are biased against women or want to hurt them. They just don't think of them. And they often feel more comfortable promoting their male colleagues.

She goes on to mention the former president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, who most definitely is biased against women. Despite the gains women have made in science, there is still a clear tendency to think of science - and, it should be noted, economics - as something for boys only. Many have celebrated the recent Nobel record - 5 women won this year, out of 13 - but the so-called "record" isn't actually very impressive. And what's worse is the previous record: In 2004, only 3 women were awarded the prize. Greider is quick to point out that one year does not a trend make:

I certainly hope it's a sign that things are going to be different in the future. But I'm a scientist, right? This is one event. I'm not going to see one event and say it's a trend. I hope it is. One of the things I did with the press conference that Johns Hopkins gave was to have my two kids there. In the newspapers, there's a picture of me and my kids right there. How many men have won the Nobel in the last few years, and they have kids the same age as mine, and their kids aren't in the picture? That's a big difference, right? And that makes a statement.

But another important statement is being made on Twitter, where Elinor Ostrom is a top trend. We're pretty sure this honor is nothing compared to winning the Nobel prize, but when Twitter trending topics usually include stuff like "#liesgirlstell" and "#3wordsaftersex," the inclusion of a female researcher is most definitely a step up.

On Winning A Nobel Prize In Science [New York Times]
Nobel Prizes 2009: A Record Year For Women [AP]
Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize Winner, Top Trend On Twitter [Examiner]

"Every article of clothing is so loaded with signifiers, I don't know how you can help but make up stories about people and their desires based on what they wear," Hardy tells Guy Trebay for the New York Times. Hardy sees fashion as one of the many mediums through which she, as an artist, can twist and pervert our notions of power, gender, and class. For example: the photograph "Fashionfashion Money Look," shows a girl, sitting spread-eagle in her underwear, with menstrual blood soaking through, obscuring the dollar-sign pattern. (Unsurprisingly, this is not the piece the NYT chooses to focus on, but it is an interesting example of Hardy's blurring of fashion photography and art.)

Hardy's zine, FashionFashion, features hundreds of images like this one. Fashion is present, but not in the glossy, overpriced, shellacked-into-sameness way that we are accustomed to. Hardy's fashion stylings are much closer related to street style blogs, but with a particularly punk DIY spin that distinguishes it from any of the chicly perfect women featured on The Sartorialist or Garance Doré. In FashionFashion, Hardy dresses herself, and her sister, in thrifted and unlikely clothing:

An ice-blue satin dress with padded shoulders is turned inside out and worn as a skirt, the disturbingly sexual nude-colored pads inverted above the hip. A mesh tank striped in the colors of the Jamaican flag, paired with leopard tights and a raucously tropical man's blazer, is worn by the artist Ramdasha Bikceem, her gang-style chest tattoo proudly exposed. A matronly power suit is matched with an Homburg reminiscent of Williamsburg Hasidim and a sad wig that resembles silver tinsel.

Although the Times focuses on her fashion shots, Hardy is also famous for her video art. In 2005, she collaborated with Wynne Greenwood on ''New Report," which showed the two dressed as television newscasters, reporting for the fictional station WKRH. Hardy played "Henry Iragary" (last name taken from psychoanalytic theorist Luce Iragary). They interviewed a friend about her depression, reported on bra burnings and other feminist happenings, and lip-synced along with daytime television. Hardy's work is often funny and witty, but decidedly feminist in tone. This make sense, considering her education. Hardy has a BA in Women's Studies from Smith College, and she recently received her MFA from Bard College. She is a self-described "lesbian feminist with punk sensibilities," and thus at home with the "rampant multiplicities of identity."

Recently, Hardy began working as a stylist with fashion photographer Steven Klein. "I was on the set playing fake-it-till-you-make-it," she said. "I had no idea who Steven Klein was. I didn't even know Armani." Hardy admits that "you wouldn't really say I have any kind of background in fashion," yet she has worked with bands like Le Tigre and Fisherspooner, and even completed a collaboration with the designers JF & Son on a collection titled "My Favorite Things." Her addiction to thrift shopping has paid off in a big way. Pages from her zine are currently on display at Reena Spaulings Fine Art gallery in Chinatown, and last year an exhibition of her work was on view at the Tate Modern. With the recent spate of criticisms that have been leveled at the fashion industry, Hardy's recent success makes a lot of sense. Although there is a good deal of feminist theory hidden in her layers of vintage oddities, there is also a sense of pure excitement. Fashion is fun, funny, and witty. Her photographs are a lot more interesting than the endless stream of models jumping in front of a neutral background, wearing a look straight off the runway. She picks clothing not for their labels, but for their strangeness - "I'm interested in the weirdest things," she says. And it shows.

Playing Dress Up For Keeps [New York Times]
Reena Spaulings Fine Art [Official Site]
Exhibition Detail: K8 Hardy [ArtSlant]

On Saturday, Neil A. Lewis of the Times wrote that Edwards was considering announcing paternity, that Elizabeth Edwards had yet to come around to the idea, and that — as the National Enquirer reported last month — Hunter was planning to move to North Carolina so that her baby could be near the father. Showbiz411's Roger Friedman, though, says the story is vaporware. He says Hunter is in New Jersey with no plans to move, and that a source told him, "All that story is is regurgitation of old misinformation combined with false light and repackaged with bits of Andrew Young's book, probably leaked by his agent to heighten interest."

That book, by the former Edwards aide who once said he was the father of Hunter's baby, is the subject of a lengthy post by Glynnis MacNicol of Mediaite. MacNicol writes that the book proposal — which has yet to be picked up by publisher — seems like the main source for Lewis's Times story. But as we know from James Frey, just because something's in a book proposal doesn't make it true. Young's words haven't been fact checked by publishers yet, and he may be especially untrustworthy given that he once lied about being the father of the child. MacNicol characterizes the Times story as a quick-and-dirty attempt to get out in front of usually quicker-and-dirtier media outlets: "The New York Times is not going to be scooped by the National Enquirer anymore!"

But is there really even a scoop here? The Dave Matthews stuff is salacious, as is the assertion that Hunter gave her child the middle name Quinn to allude to the fact that she was the fifth of Edwards's children (and not, apparently, because she really liked the sister on Daria). But since Edwards is already totally discredited, the story doesn't really have anywhere to go from here. Lewis wrote in the Times,

Any acknowledgment of paternity would have ramifications for Mr. Edwards, who could suffer a further blow to his credibility but could also be praised for belatedly accepting responsibility. It could also shift Ms. Hunter's image from that of a predatory celebrity stalker (Mrs. Edwards told Oprah Winfrey that Ms. Hunter met her husband after waiting for him to come out of a New York hotel and telling him, "You're so hot.") to that of a mother concerned about her child's rights.

But any praise for Edwards's "belated" acknowledgment of his daughter is going to ring pretty false and hollow, given the lengths he went to in order to avoid acknowledging her. And Rielle Hunter will probably be forgotten in a few years' time, returning only to plague the nightmares of Caitlin Flanagan. At some point, John Edwards may make a public statement about Rielle Hunter and her baby (although she might be a teenager by then), and at least there will be some information to discuss. Until that happens, any face-off between the Times and the Enquirer just seems like a test of who can beat a dead horse the hardest.

For Edwards, Drama Builds Toward A Denouement [NYT]
The New York Times Edwards Story: Scandalous! Newsworthy! Vetted? [Mediaite]
John Edwards' Confession: Not So Fast [Showbiz411]

Uganda is attempting to stem the growing epidemic by offering more options for women to protect themselves. Research showed that women were highly at risk for new infections (and can pass these infections on to their offspring through childbirth, so new initiatives were explored. Heading up the renewed push is a female condom program, but it has already encountered some significant stumbling blocks.

With funding so limited, many donors argue, why invest in an expensive product that faces deep skepticism from the people who would use it? Female condoms, originally introduced in the early 1990s, have struggled to gain widespread acceptance because they are more expensive and less familiar than male condoms - they're big and baggy, make rustling noises during sex, and you need instruction and practice to learn how to insert them properly.

But Uganda sees the female condom as one way to regain the success the nation had in the fight against HIV/AIDS in the 1990s. After slashing its AIDS rate from more than 20% in the late '80s to about 6% in 2000, Uganda saw a leveling off of AIDS cases and then a slight rise. No one has been able to explain the reversal. Some say it's related to failed distribution programs for the male condom in the past. Other experts suspect that it's a result of foreign NGOs and governments pushing Uganda away from effective domestic programs that were aimed at keeping people from having more than one sexual partner, a relatively common practice in the country.

Other news from Uganda points to circumcision as an effective deterrent to HIV. The NY Times reports:

[C]ircumcision can make a significant dent in the H.I.V./AIDS crisis in this country is still being debated, because the epidemic in the United States is so different from the one in Africa. The African trials found heterosexual men were less likely to acquire the H.I.V. virus after circumcision, but largely ignored the question of whether women were safer - or possibly put at even greater risk of infection, as one small study suggested - if the man was circumcised; they also focused exclusively on heterosexual transmission, though in the United States, men who have sex with men are at higher risk.

Even Dr. Gray, who led the trials, is not sure the United States should promote circumcision. "If you were to ask me, should the U.S. be promoting circumcision, my answer would be, ‘no,' " he said. "What I do think ought to be the policy is that parents should be informed about the potential protective effects."

Each article hinted at religious and cultural traditions that enabled the spread of HIV/AIDS and the distrust of misuse of condoms, but focused on a lot of the issues between existing solutions. AIDS is still spreading in all corners of the globe and for some reason, despite educational campaigns and the occasional project funding, we seem to be succumbing to the virus.

The Battle In Uganda Over Female Condoms [Time]
The Latest Fight Over the Foreskin [NY Times]
Statistics: Worldwide [AMFAR]

In the Public Editor column, Clark Hoyt notes that Wilson's piece, though intended to be humorous, came across to many readers as insulting and mean-spirited. It was, Hoyt argues, a matter of the readers feeling like they were the joke, as opposed to being able to laugh along: "Wilson's editors should have saved her, themselves and the paper from the reaction they got from readers, who concluded that the humor was at their expense, not for their benefit."

At the very least, Hoyt notes, the entire brouhaha brings up "an issue that The Times and other news organizations sometimes struggle with: What is the difference between edgy and objectionable?" Times Editor Bill Keller attempts to answer this question by noting that "The key, I guess, is to imagine that you are writing for an audience with a broad range of views and experiences, and to write with respect for them." Keller also tells Hoyt that "he wished it had not been published."

Wilson admits that she pictures her audience to be "1,300 women in Connecticut and urban gay guys in Manhattan," and I believe her; it is a trap, I suppose, that anyone who publishes anything online falls into at times: you think you know your audience, only to find that your audience may extend farther than you'd imagined. For the Times, this seems to be an ongoing theme: the completely tone deaf articles the paper continues to spin out about the plight of millionaires during the recession ("How to I host a dinner party on only $2000?! What will I do with only 8 homes?!") aren't doing them any favors.

In any case, the saga, we think, has now come to an end. Cintra Wilson has apologized and moved on, the Times has apologized and moved on, we are moving on, and JCPenney is still my mother's favorite place to buy curtains, "no matter what that paper says." In the future, perhaps the Critical Shopper column will return to being critical about the stores themselves, and not the shoppers who choose to browse the racks.

The Insult Was Extra Large [NYTimes]

The piece explains:

It is rarely good to be female anywhere in the developing world today, but in India and China the situation is dire: in those countries, more than 1.5 million fewer girls are born each year than demographics would predict, and more girls die before they turn 5 than would be expected. (In China in 2007, there were 1.73 million births - and a million missing girls.) Millions more grow up stunted, physically and intellectually, because they are denied the health care and the education that their brothers receive.

The missing girls phenomenon sounds a bit misleading - it holds the connotation of girls who were born and have disappeared. But this crisis speaks to women who were not given a fair chance at life, either through neglect, infanticide, or gender-specific foeticide. The sad reality researchers uncovered can be summarized thusly:

Nor does a rise in a woman's autonomy or power in the family necessarily counteract prejudice against girls. Researchers at the International Food Policy Research Institute have found that while increasing women's decision-making power would reduce discrimination against girls in some parts of South Asia, it would make things worse in the north and west of India. "When women's power is increased," wrote Lisa C. Smith and Elizabeth M. Byron, "they use it to favor boys."

Since many of the cultural traditions favoring boys were rooted in economic necessity or ideas about the afterlife and blessings, many researchers assumed that the problem would be solved alongside the modernization of these nations. However, this has not been the case - apparently, the problem is the worst in some of the wealthiest and most educated districts in China and India, and has even carried over to impact the population of girls in communities who have migrated to the West.

Researchers note:

What Das Gupta discovered is that wealthier and more educated women face this same imperative to have boys as uneducated poor women - but they have smaller families, thus increasing the felt urgency of each birth. In a family that expects to have seven children, the birth of a girl is a disappointment; in a family that anticipates only two or three children, it is a tragedy.

Thus development can worsen, not improve, traditional discrimination.

There is no easy answer to this predicament. While targeted outreach may work, attitudes are slow to change. Even as we see immediate consequences of these decisions (like the issue of bride trafficking, which is a significant problem in multiple nations,) traditions can be slow to overcome. However, the tide may be changing in many areas. In India, officials are celebrating that for the first time in decades, more girls were born than boys in 2008, a direct outgrowth of government campaigns to curb infanticide.

But a more permanent solution would be for people to take an active role in promoting women's equality and stressing that young girls are just as wise of an investment as young boys.

The Daughter Deficit [NY Times]
The bride was 7 [Chicago Tribune]
In India, girls begin to outnumber the boys [The Independent]

We've already talked a bit about HRC's global master plan and the resistance to her efforts, but Times Correspondent Mark Landler really asks some powerhouse questions here really digging into the heart of the obstacles facing women. Most prominent in the discussions are the economic power of women and the links between gender oppression and terrorism.

Landler poses a query that is really asked in the realm of women's rights. When so much discussion focuses around awareness and not solutions, it was really refreshing to see this question appear:

Q: Do you have a point of view about what should come first: Do you empower women economically and then hope that they seize a political role for themselves? Or do you seek to give them more legal and political standing and hope that they can win a place in the economic sphere?

Clinton: That's a great question, because I think the historical record would show both routes have worked. Women were not particularly economically empowered when we finally included the right of women to vote in our Constitution. So women's rights were expanded in 1920, and that opened up a lot of doors to women to see themselves in different roles, including economic roles, outside the home.

India's been a democracy for 60 years, and remarkably extended the vote to everyone, every caste, to both men and women equally. So women have been given the right to vote, but without economic empowerment, they didn't have the influence that their votes should have brought, which is why the government of India has made such a big point of extending economic and political opportunity equally to women.

And when we visited SEWA, the Self-Employed Women's Association [in India], those women had the vote before they were born, but being economically empowered, being able to stand up for themselves inside their families, on the streets of their villages, is giving them a sense of autonomy and authority that just their vote couldn't have.

A discussion of economics (alongside discussions of literacy, education, and access) is crucial in fighting gender discrimination. As we discussed before, lacking access to capital can have dire consequences for women. It leads to them seeking out men for financial stability and being at the whim and mercy of that man. It also a way for women to be controlled, even in more developed nations. The power to earn and retain one's own money, to purchase and own property, and to work should be fundamental rights for every citizen. Landler presses even further with one solution that has gained a lot of popularity: microlending.

Q: In your travels as secretary of state, you've focused heavily on the role of microlending. Is there a reason in these early days that you've tended to emphasize the economic over the political?

Clinton: [...] I am also struck by every international public-opinion poll I've ever seen, that the No. 1 thing most men and women want is a good job with a good income. It is at the core of the human aspiration to be able to support oneself, to give one's children a better future. Microenterprise is uniquely designed to empower women because - through the trial and error of its development, going back to Muhammad Yunus's invention of it in Bangladesh - women are much greater at investing in future goods than the men who have participated in microcredit have turned out to be. And they are also very reliable in paying back, because they are so eager to have that extra help and recognition that microcredit provides.

So, I don't make a distinction between economic empowerment and political, social empowerment; I think it's fair to say both need to go hand in hand.

Landler also brings up an interesting link between terrorism and gender-based oppression:

Q: There are counterterrorism experts who have made the observation that countries that nurture terrorist groups tend to be the same societies that marginalize women. Do you see a link between your campaign on women's issues and our national security?

Clinton: I think it's an absolute link. Part of the reason I have pursued it as secretary of state is because I see it in our national security interest. If you look at where we are fighting terrorism, there is a connection to groups that are making a stand against modernity, and that is most evident in their treatment of women.

What does preventing little girls from going to school in Afghanistan by throwing acid on them have to do with waging a struggle against oppression externally? It's a projection of the insecurity and the disorientation that a lot of these terrorists and their sympathizers feel about a fast-changing world, where they turn on television sets and see programs with women behaving in ways they can't even imagine. The idea that young women in their own societies would pursue an independent future is deeply threatening to their cultural values.

But, there's an interesting part in Landler's line of questioning where HRC falters a bit. It is a question often asked by women's rights activists and others who are wary of the cause of gender equality being co-opted (and then later discarded) to score political points. If we are aggressively pursing and denouncing the way some nations treat women, why do we give a pass to others? Landler asks:

Q: Many of the countries where the abuses against women are most prevalent are also countries that have a vital strategic importance to the United States: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, India. How can you aggressively advocate for women without jeopardizing those strategic relationships?

Clinton: Well, in a number of these strategic relationships, there's a commitment to advancing the roles and rights of women. In India, the changes that have been made are remarkable. There are still tens of millions of very poor women, but women have assumed more and more responsibility; they are seen in public positions and increasingly economic ones, where their stature is accepted by society.

When I meet with the Chinese leadership, as I just did in the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, they have women who are part of their leadership team, and women who are assuming greater and greater economic and political roles.
[...]

In other societies where we have strategic security interests, it's a challenge to move the agenda forward in a way that includes women's issues. When we did our strategic review on Afghanistan, we said very clearly, We can't be all things to all people in Afghanistan. We have to focus on a few critical concerns. But one of them was the role of women, and women's participation in society.

She doesn't even touch Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. Now, I can understand that global politics is a volatile game, and it may be easier and more efficient to focus on criticizing enemies than to alienate allies. But, if women's rights around the globe are that much of a cornerstone to our global strategy, wouldn't it be problematic to keep working with countries that participate in gender based oppression?

Either way, the interview (conducted in just 35 minutes) makes for insightful reading and adds a great deal of insight into trends to watch for while Hillary Clinton continues in her role as Secretary of State.

(Aside: The interview actually brings up far more issues than I can discuss in one blog post. Bookmark this page for future reference - I've asked some of my friends who work in counterterrorism, homeland security, and international politics to weigh in with their thoughts and opinions later in the week. Stay tuned.)

A New Gender Agenda [NY Times Magazine]

Earlier: Hillary Clinton, Women's Rights, & Colluding With Global Misogyny

• Gwyneth Paltrow's clothing line with Zoetees is hitting stores this month. The collection includes tee shirts, studded tank tops, and a grey oversized blazer — fine basics, but there's no indication why the line should start at £100. [Elle UK]

• Earlier this year, Katy Perry, desirous of a fashion line, pre-emptively sued the Australian fashion designer Katie Perry for trademark infringement. Although the suit was later dropped, now that the pop star is in Australia, all mention of Katie Perry and the trademark issue is verboten during media interviews. Which is why when a television presenter asked the singer if there were any Australian artists she admired, Perry's manager actually killed the studio lights. [News.com.au]
• The tender melancholy of Being Donatella: "I would definitely prefer not to be obliged to attend certain events and parties, but I must." [ToL]
• Being longtime fans of documentarian Loïc Prigent — the man who made both the excellent Signé Chanel and Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton — we cannot wait to watch his new series, which follows four designers during the last 36 hours before their respective shows. Sonia Rykiel, Proenza Schouler, Jean Paul Gaultier Couture, and Fendi are featured; Prigent says "They only have 36 hours left; they don't have time to be polite." [W]
• Gaultier was among the guests evacuated from a hotel in Nice recently following a bomb threat. Nobody was injured and no explosives were found. [Yahoo!]
• Rachel Zoe's line for QVC will be shown in the biggest tent at New York Fashion Week. [The Cut]
• Between The Rachel Zoe Project, America's Next Top Model, Project Runway, Models Of The Runway, Project Runway All-Stars, The Fashion Show, and the upcoming Launch My Line, there's more fashion-themed reality television than any human being could ever watch. Is the genre reaching saturation? No, because women think about fashion the way men think about sports, and it would be silly to ask if there is too many sports shows! No, really: "The same way that sports is a passionate category for men, women look at style in the same way," said Style Network president Salaam Coleman Smith. "Women are passionate about transformation, and about ideas for living a fun, fabulous life, to improve themselves, find a new lipstick and figure out a new haircut." [WWD]
• Zoe, for her part, admits she has "a hard time" watching her show. That makes two of us. [WWD]
• Victoria Beckham found a lookbook model for her dress line who looks very much like Victoria Beckham. [Daily Mail]
• Hussein Chalayan's line for Puma looks exciting, intimidating, and totally technophiliac. [WWD]
• Pint-sized and cooler than we'll ever be, child style blogger Tavi WIlliams may have made the first cover of Pop magazine to be produced under new editor Dasha Zhukova. Interestingly, Tavi was just in the second issue of Love, which was founded by ex-Pop editor-in-chief Katie Grand. These are Tavi's first major magazine appearances. [Fashionologie]
• Meanwhile, Tavi was asked by Laura and Kate Mulleavy of Rodarte to film the presentation of the label's upcoming Target collaboration. None of the items in that collection will be priced above $80. [Lucky]
  
• Add Antonio Berardi and Stella McCartney for Adidas to the long list of English designers beating a return to London Fashion Week this season. [Telegraph]
• Cintra Wilson — the ordinarily funny writer who penned that amazingly tone-deaf, sizist JC Penney's store review for the New York Times — would like you to know that the controversy over her comments is officially over. At least to her. So don't write her about it! Don't read the comments under her post if you don't want to hear Wilson and an acolyte braying about the "whalesong" of complaint. [CintraWilson]
• House of Dereon now has a day dress collection. Weirdly, it includes an awful looking silk drawstring-waist jumpsuit. [WWD]
• You can watch an online short with Chloé Sevigny all about hip boutique Opening Ceremony's new store in Shibuya, Tokyo. [Dazed&Confused]
• Levi's Ryan McGinley-shot "Go Forth" ad campaign for its 501 jeans also has an online mockumentary component. You can watch these "Stories Of A New America" about good-looking young people doing cool things, you know, totally spontaneously, at Break.com. [MW]
• Kenny Chesney's apparel line will launch at MAGIC, the Las Vegas apparel industry event. [WWD]

Each woman's story is unique, but their journeys to jihad do have commonalities. Many have lost close male relatives. Baida and Ranya lost both fathers and brothers. Many of the women live in isolated communities dominated by extremists, where radical understandings of Islam are the norm. In such places, women are often powerless to control much about their lives; they cannot choose whom they marry, how many children to have or whether they can go to school beyond the primary years. Becoming a suicide bomber is a choice of sorts that gives some women a sense of being special, with a distinguished destiny. But Major Hosham urged me not to generalize: "All the cases are different. Some are old; some are young; some are just criminals; some are believers. They have different reasons."

One thing stood out: The appearance in Diyala of suicide bombers who were women was entwined with the appearance of the Islamic State of Iraq - the local face of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the umbrella name used in Iraq for homegrown Sunni extremist groups that have some foreign leadership. While many insurgent groups operate in Iraq, those with links to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia are associated with suicide bombings. In Diyala, the Islamic State of Iraq was particularly strong. It was also brutal and organized. It orchestrated mass kidnappings, mass executions, beheadings and ambushes. No one was spared: women or children; Sunnis, Shiites or Kurds. Whole villages were forced to flee; others fell under extremist control. Many of the women who became bombers were from families immersed in jihadist culture.

Rubin's piece paints a bleak scene for women in Iraq, in an area that has seen a sharp rise in female suicide bombers from 2007-2008. More and more women, disillusioned with their lives and under the influence of twisted religious rhetoric, have come to believe that the best way out of their miserable existence is to sacrifice themselves - and to take others with them. Women, Rubin explains, were actually a good choice for bombers - the coverage of the abaya allows for greater concealment, and until recently, women were spared searches, even at heavily guarded check points.

Last September, the Iraqi government completed training for 27 policewomen in Diyala. The effort came too late to save at least 130 people and probably more who have died in the province in suicide bombings carried out by women.

When Rubin arrives at the prison where Baida is detained, she sits with rapt attention, taking notes on her story, looking for the answer to the persistent question: why? Why would someone do this?

She began in a soft voice: "My name is Baida Abdul Karim al-Shammari, and I am from New Baquba near the general hospital. I am one of eight children; five were killed. The police raided our home. It was a half-hour before dawn during Ramadan. The Americans were with them."

She added with a touch of pride: "My brothers were mujahideen. They made I.E.D.'s." The word "mujahideen" means holy fighters and, in the context of Iraq, they are fighters against the infidels, the Americans. I.E.D.'s are improvised explosive devices.

She told me she helped make such devices, going to the market to buy wire and other bomb parts and working at putting bombs together. Men are routinely paid for such work; women are generally paid too, but less. Baida was proud to be a volunteer. "I knew we were fighting against the Americans and they are the occupation," she told me. "We are doing it for God's sake. We are doing it as jihad."

While Baida credits her leanings to her family, she also admits she is motivated by revenge:

Later it would be revenge for the deaths of her father and four brothers in what she said was a joint American-Iraqi raid on their home, but at first it was more general. She told me she watched the Americans shoot a neighbor in 2005, and she replayed the image over and over in her mind: "I saw him running toward them, and then they shot him in the neck. I still see him. I still remember how he fell when the Americans shot him and I saw him clawing on the ground in the dust before his soul left his body. After that I began to help with making the improvised explosive devices."

However, Rubin cagily illustrates other reasons why Baida may have been so ready to check out of this existence with hope of a better one in the next:

Baida grew up shuttling between Baquba, which is the provincial capital of Diyala, and Husayba, a town on the Syrian border. She went to school through eighth grade, she told me, and had ideas of becoming an architect, but her mother wanted her to stay home. When Baida was 17, her mother died, and a few months later, at her father's behest, Baida married. Almost immediately she knew she had made a mistake. A week after her wedding, according to Baida, her husband threw a cup of cream at her head; soon, beatings became regular. She smiled sweetly and shrugged: "His hand got used to beating me."

However, Baida seems completely disconnected from these events, as well as her husband:

She appeared to have let go of most earthly ties. A mother of two boys and a girl, all under 8, she had not seen them since her arrest last year. When I asked if they missed her, she said, almost airily, "Allah will take care of them." She spoke as if much of her life was already in the past. When she mentioned her husband, whom she actively hated, she used the past tense. She was living for that moment that some might see as an ending but for her would be a moment of transformation.

"As soon as I get out I will explode myself against the invaders," she told me.

As the interview continues, Rubin starts noticing an interesting deployment of logic Baida uses to fell okay about the murders she is about to commit. In a complicated discussion of what is haram and what is not, Baida explains how she reconcile the deaths of some, but not others:

It was certainly important to Baida, who felt she controlled little in her life, to feel in control of her death. Her goal was to take revenge on her brothers' killers - American soldiers. When I brought up the reality that the vast majority of suicide bombings in Iraq kill ordinary Iraqis, she would only say that she thought killing Iraqis was haram, or forbidden.

Baida explains:

You could choose whether you wanted to do it. They wanted me to wear the explosive belt against the police, but I refused. I said, ‘I will not do it against Iraqis.' I said: ‘If I do it against the police I will go to hell because the police are Muslims. But if I do it against the Americans then I will go to heaven.' "

A few weeks later, when I [Rubin] met Baida again, she tried to explain to me the line dividing when it is halal (permitted) to kill a person and when it is forbidden. She said she followed the rules of her group, but her cousins had different rules: they would kill anybody. Was there a difference, I wondered, between killing American soldiers and killing American civilians, like reconstruction workers? No, she said: "I am willing to explode them, even civilians, because they are invaders and blasphemers and Jewish. I will explode them first because they are Jewish and because they feel free to take our lands."

My interpreter asked where she stood: Was it halal to kill her?

"We consider you a spy, working with them," Baida said.

Baida did not believe it was halal, however, to kill members of the Iraqi security forces if they were working on their own, only if they were in a convoy with the Americans.

As the Rubin's narrative gets darker and darker, she also illuminates how the idea of a "choice" is one that is difficult to apply in these situations:

Her choice of suicide was not entirely hers to make. The suicide vests the cell gave to participants were outfitted with remote detonators so that someone else could explode the would-be bomber if she somehow failed to do it herself. This was a relatively new aspect of suicide bombing in Iraq. A second person, with a second detonator, would go on the mission to ensure against changes of heart. "One day this woman, Shaima, said, ‘I am ready.' I saw Shaima when they put the vest on her. It was very heavy. With Shaima, they exploded her, she did not explode herself. There were five or six killed."

At some point in the story, Baida is transferred to a mental hospital for evaluation. In the meantime, Rubin travels to other areas with high levels of women bombers. Extreme adherence to even the smallest points of religious dogma creates an environment where it is almost as if the people live in a time warp:

Until 2007, it was too dangerous for the Iraqi Army and the Iraqi police to enter the area. When they finally did, they found a strange community. "When we entered Makhisa we didn't find a TV because it's forbidden," Col. Khalid Mohammed al-Ameri, who was in the army under Saddam Hussein and has served all over the country, told me. "And no ice, no cigarettes and no tomatoes and cucumbers mixed together at the same shop."

The strictest Sunni extremists believe that people should not have anything that did not exist in the early days of Islam. Since there was no electricity in the seventh century, there could be neither refrigeration nor ice and no television. The aversion to mixing tomatoes and cucumbers is because cucumbers are viewed as a male vegetable and tomatoes are female, and mixing them in a box is seen as lascivious, Colonel Khalid said, shaking his head.

When Rubin returns, she finds that Baida has been calling, looking for her. Under advisement from military and local police that Baida may possibly be plotting to murder her as well, Rubin elects to keep future meetings short. The author's nervousness is palpable here - we have previously been informed that Baida had access to a cell phone while in prison and the mental hospital, and she stays in close contact with the members of her group. In addition, military operatives had warned that other journalists had died in similar ways, around the time when Baida began pressing for exact time and locations of Rubin's visits.

When we did finally go, we met with Baida alone, sitting together on a bed in the nurse's office because there were no chairs. I asked her gently, and as nonjudgmentally as I could, whether she wanted to kill me because I was a foreigner.

"Frankly, yes." Then she added, to soften it, "Not specifically you, because I know you."

Would she tell her extremist cousins or her friends about me? Would she give them my description and tell them enough that they could find me?

"I won't sacrifice my friendship," she said. A moment later she reversed herself. "But, if they insisted, yes, I would, yes. As a foreigner it is halal to kill you."

She continued: "If they kill Americans they will do a big huge banquet for dinner."

She smiled beatifically. As Major Hosham had said, "She is honest."

Rubin offers no conclusions or further analysis at the end of her piece, instead looking to capture the environment. Perhaps this is because there ultimately is no rhyme or reason for undertaking these horrific acts, that violate most religious principles and moral obligations. Baida's last words confirm this point:

I looked at my watch; I worried we had stayed too long. I got up hurriedly, knocking my notebooks to the floor. I adjusted my veil, thanked her for her time, for teaching me about jihad and for making me understand how dangerous her world was.

Baida was smiling again. "If I had not seen you before and talked to you, I would kill you with my own hands," she said pleasantly. "Do not be deceived by my peaceful face. I have a heart of stone."

How Baida Wanted to Die [New York Times Magazine]

Today, WWD ran a piece on the response to the Penney's review titled "DON'T DISS PENNEY'S" - (perpetuating the bizarre fiction that it was only rabid fans of the store who objected to the piece) - and New York Magazine declared that "yesterday was a good time for her to stop talking, but today is even better." Hopefully this marks the end of it. The initial piece was one thing, and I think our response here echoed that felt by a lot of Times readers — that it reflected larger themes in society that are troubling and ubiquitous. But the thing only lasted beyond that first ill-advised "Critical Shopper" because of the author's response, which came off to many as insincere, defiant, reluctant, and haughty — "sorry you were offended" — an attitude echoed by the Times' official response that Wilson's column "has always had an edge and a point of view — it is supposed to review, after all" and that, while she regrets offending some, she "stands by" it.

After-school special style, I hope we can all learn something from it. That people mock weight? We knew that. That the NYT can be arrogant and tone-deaf? Check. That certain women's reactions will always be dismissed with the "humorless feminist" card? Yeah, we've heard that a time for two. That having to state that you have a sense of humor makes you sound really humorless? (Okay, that was an interesting new More You Know.) No, all this is sad and old and ad nauseam. I think the more interesting point is that Wilson learned, not merely that "this hot button is so freakin' hot, it is thermonuclear," but that the Internet's a tough mistress: responses are swift, visceral, personal, and unignorable. Ironically, you're held to account in a unique way. It's also dangerous: you don't have the luxury of an emotional response, like a defiant tweet or an off-the-cuff posting, without backlash. (I was going to say, "as a Times writer," but I realized this was probably equally true for middle-schoolers.) You've got neither the ephemeral quality of spoken speech nor the distance and insulation of the printed word. That's good: In a sense, it's a bullshit detector. But it's also very ugly: A lot of the things written on Wilson's web site — personal attacks, comments about her appearance — made us increasingly uncomfortable and undermined the very valid points that a lot of people were trying to elucidate. (She told WWD that it was the explanations from "very nice people" that prompted her to issue her final, most earnest, apology, but that much of what she heard was "hair-raising." ) I didn't take Wilson's apologies as the high-handed dismissal a lot of people did, but bravado in the face of panic: the first time you really come up against the force of humanity that is the net — not the easily-dismissed XXX Wild West but the real people with real feelings and real opinions, it's terrifying. That's not who I am! You want to shout. But, of course, in a sense, it is. I'm not saying Wilson didn't get herself into the jam, and dig herself a hell of a lot deeper — she did, and fundamentally, I don't know that she or her bosses really get what it is most of us objected to — but that I think part of what we're seeing, weirdly enough, is the fallout of a tiny culture clash.

Look, she may hate us, but a lot of us have been fans of Wilson's since her advice column days in San Francisco - and many of us have passionate memories of the brilliant Winter Steele. Wilson is an unusually gifted writer, and can be wickedly funny. Those of us who objected to the piece did so not because we're humorless fatties who don't get edge, or bizarrely passionate J.C. Penney devotees, (or, as Mediaite would have it, "the thundering herd of Penney's-lovers and defensive chunkers" - edge, you know) but because cheap shots aren't funny, because it's incredibly depressing to see certain forms of discrimination continue to go unchallenged — and because we expect more from smart writers. Frankly, at this point I'm more depressed by the Times' disingenuous, defiant treatment of the issue than anything the author did in the heat of the moment. But for anyone who worries you're shouting into the wilderness, you're not; every single voice has tremendous power. Use it wisely.

Middle America Wants To Force-feed Cintra Wilson A Cream Puff [New York]
NYT "Critical Shopper" Criticized over J.C. Penney Column; Issues Zen Apology [Wall Street Journal]
‘Out of My City, Fatties!' NYT's Cintra Wilson Goes Schizo On Fat People [Mediaite]
DON'T DISS PENNEY'S [WWD]
Winter Steele 1: Eat Crow [YouTube]

Related:
Times Writer Finds J.C. Penney's Focus On Fat People Clever, Amusing
Mea Culpas?

Let me say, first of all, that I often like Cintra Wilson's "Critical Shopper" column: she writes with bite and personality and can be funny. In a paper often characterized by a tone as carefully bland as NPR's, she can be a breath of fresh air. But today's column, on Manhattan's first J.C. Penney, is a marvel of snobbery, cruelty, and ugliness.

Her overall point is that Penney's is middle-brow: a progenitor of the Target-championed "masstige" phenomenon, which gets name-brand designers to do cheapo lines, it is, she notes, a polyester-heavy rarity in the fashion mecca of Manhattan. Criticism of fast fashion, suspect manufacture and earth-unfriendly materials are one thing. Finding the clothes uninspired, poor copies of fashion is, I guess, a fashion writer's prerogative. But Wilson's aesthetic objections go way beyond that.

It took me a long time to find a size 2 among the racks. There are, however, abundant size 10's, 12's and 16's. The dressing rooms are big, clean and well tended. I tried two fairly cute items: a modified domino-print swing dress with padded shoulders by American Living (a Ralph Lauren line created for Penney's) and a long psychedelic muumuu of a style generally worn by Rachel Zoe. Each was around $80; each fit nicely and looked good. I didn't buy either because I can do better for $80, but if I were a size 18, I'd have rejoiced.

But wait, there's more! "The petites section features a bounty of items for women nearly as wide as they are tall; the men's Big & Tall section has shirts that could house two or three Shaquilles. And this is really, remarkably smart."

Because, you see, there are apparently people who wear these laughable sizes and are reduced to these knock-off fashions. It's understood that her readership will never set foot in this bit of middle-America; hence, I guess, the need for her report. This is, she concludes,

the genius of J. C. Penney: It has made a point of providing clothing for people of all sizes (a strategy, company officials have said, to snatch business from nearby Macy's). To this end, it has the most obese mannequins I have ever seen. They probably need special insulin-based epoxy injections just to make their limbs stay on. It's like a headless wax museum devoted entirely to the cast of "Roseanne."

This isn't, may I remind you, The Daily Mail. It's the New York Times, the alleged Paper of Record. Is this an attempt to be relevant? To draw on the snark of the blogosphere that the kids are supposedly so crazy about? Well, let me give you a little internet home-brew: FAIL. EPIC FAIL, even. I could add "compassion fail" and "humanity fail," if I so chose. I'd say "journalism fail," but if you keep this up, I won't need to.

Playing To The Middle [NY Times]