For the sake of brevity, let's simply focus on the "WTF Moments."

Outlet: New York Magazine
Article: "When Push Comes to Shove"
Speaker: David Edelstein, author of the piece
Quote:

I'm not judging girls who look like Sidibe in life, but her image onscreen is jarring to the point of being transgressive, its only equivalent to be seen in John Waters's pointedly outrageous carnivals. Her head is a balloon on the body of a zeppelin, her cheeks so inflated they squash her eyes into slits. Her expression is either surly or unreadable. Even with her voice-over narration, you're meant to stare at her ebony face and see nothing.

Sidibe does look like this in real life - what, has he never seen a big girl before? I suppose not - watching the movie, many different emotions flicker across Precious' face, but these are easily missed if one is gawking rather than watching.

But the woman who drops a TV onto Precious as she hurries down the stairs with her infant is a sociopath, too singularly garish to be universal.

Spoken like someone who has never watched one of their parents lose their mind over something you did and prepare to commit homicide. There's a reason Precious was running so fucking fast. Did he just miss that part in the opening where her mother Mary promises to whoop her ass for being uppity? That wasn't hyperbole.

Edelstein must have also missed some of Lee Daniels' memories from growing up. As he explains to the Daily Beast:

"It brought back a feeling I had when I was 11 years old and living in the projects in Philly. I answered the door one day, and a neighbor of ours, a light-skinned black girl who was about five years old, was standing there naked and bleeding. She'd been beaten with an electrical cord. I looked in my mom's eyes, and it was the first time I ever saw fear in her eyes. When I read Sapphire's book, those memories came back, and I felt I have to deal with this."

I get the impression from Edelstein's review that the book and the movie were simply too much dysfunction for him to stomach. And that's fine, I can understand that instinct - but why does he feel the need to dismiss brutal shows of force as "too singularly garish to be universal?" Please keep in mind that just because an experience is out of your ken, it may be heartbreakingly common to someone else.

Outlet: New York Post
Article: "Harlem Scuffle"
Speaker: Lee Daniels, director of Precious
Quote:

What separated Gabby from the others," Daniels says, "was she starts talking like this, ‘Oh, my God! I love your films so much. Oh, my God!' She talks like a white girl from the Valley."

Daniels, and his ideas of blackness, grate on me a bit . Ever since I read the NYT piece where he made a lot of references bowing to a monolithic view of what it means to be black, I've been slightly salty. Especially when one considers that many African-Americans feel rejected because they don't "fit" a certain paradigm of what is authentically black. I will forever call bullshit on this idea because it flattens the actual black experience.

Outlet: The Daily Beast
Article: "The Powerful Force at the Center of Precious"
Speaker: Gabourey "Gaby" Sidibe, lead actress and title character in Precious
Quote:

"For most of my life, my friends would ask me, ‘Were you adopted by white people?' And I'd say, ‘No, my parents went to college.'

What? Hold the phone. Having a certain type of speech pattern does not indicate your parents' education levels. It may indicate the region where you grew up, or your parents' vigilance to ensure you didn't have a lazy tongue, but "talking like a white girl" isn't some special collegiate exclusive. However, Sibide adds:

"My voice is different because my dad's Senegalese and my mom is from the South, so they both have accents. The mix of their accents created mine; I have little sisters who sound like me, too. And we are certainly black!"

When Push Comes to Shove [NY Mag]
Lee Daniels Reveals His Gritty Vision [Daily Beast]
Harlem Scuffle [New York Post]
The Powerful Force At The Center Of Precious [The Daily Beast]

Earlier:
What We Talk About When We Talk About Precious

Women's speech has long been judged differently from men's — women are typically expected to be warmer, friendlier, and more polite. As an undergraduate and grad student, I was keenly aware of these expectations, and how they played out in the classroom. I felt that my female classmates spoke less directly than their male peers, were more likely to begin their comments with "this is just my opinion," or "I could be wrong, but..." This always bothered me, as I felt that women were shortchanging themselves, essentially asking that their words be taken a little less seriously. I prided myself on not hedging my statements — as a political choice but also the classroom is one of the few social arenas where I feel comfortable being really assertive — and I did take a certain amount of mild hazing from my male peers for what I interpreted as my directness. But maybe I was wrong.

In a recent study, Nicholas Palomares, assistant professor of communication at UC Davis, ask students to write e-mails about a variety of topics, some gender-neutral and some stereotypically male or female. Palomares measured the "tentativeness" of the e-mails by counting phrases like "sort of," "I may be wrong," and "don't you think?" He found no difference in tentativeness when students were writing about gender-neutral topics, like restaurant. But women became more tentative when writing about stereotypically masculine things (like changing a tire), and men did so when they discussed "feminine" things. The effect was especially pronounced when students e-mailed members of the opposite sex. The study's press release gives this rather cute example, from a man: "… maybe girls prefer the quality of products at Sephora over other major department stores? I don't know."

So was I imagining the tentativeness in my female peers? It's possible. Perhaps I was so used to what Palomares calls the "stereotype that men are direct while women are tentative" that I heard hesitation where there was none, or that I ignored hedging statements coming from men. And when I thought of myself as being admirably forthright, I may have just been arrogant — something I've seen plenty of male students get criticized for as well.

Then again, it would be interesting to learn how classroom settings compare to the e-mail situation Palomares set up. Are academic topics gender-neutral, or are they gendered, like cars or makeup? Are women more likely to be tentative about math or science, which are still seen as stereotypically masculine? While girls who go to all-female schools are reportedly more confident in their public speaking abilities, and many say that single-gender education improves girls' assertiveness, I'd like to see a rigorous study of how boys, girls, men, and women speak in mixed-gender classrooms. In-person, group interactions are far different from e-mail, and these types of interactions may impose stricter gender norms on both sexes.

Interestingly, I've found myself being incredibly tentative while writing this post. Should I even write it at all? Should I mention my own experiences? Is being tentative even a bad thing? Maybe this is the priming effect psych researchers talk about, or maybe I'm a lot less direct than I've always thought. Or maybe I need to stop using the word maybe before this whole thing dissolves into a meta-analytical soup. Look: women should get to state their knowledge and opinions directly without getting judged for it. One way to advocate for this freedom is to speak up, without apologies or hedges — and to support women who do the same. We shouldn't assume that women are more tentative than men, but we should make sure that schools and boardrooms and the halls of Congress are places where everyone can say what they mean. Also, yeah, Sephora is better.

Women Are Sort Of More Tentative Than Men, Aren't They? [EurekAlert]

Krug was born in Pittsburgh and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in political science. She in received her masters degree in library science from the University of Chicago and worked at the John Crerar Library in Hyde Park and at Northwestern University before starting with the American Library Association. In 1967, she became the first director of the American Library Association's newly-formed Office for Intellectual Freedom, and in 1982 she founded Banned Books Week to promote the right to read without censorship. "For more than four decades Judith Krug inspired librarians and educated government officials and others about everyone's inviolable right to read. Her leadership in defense of the First Amendment was always principled and unwavering. Judith's courage, intelligence, humor and passion will be much missed - but her spirit will inspire us always," said Jim Rettig, ALA president, and Keith Michael Fiels, ALA executive director, in a press release from the ALA's website.

Throughout her career, Krug fought for the freedom to read, even though many of the books she worked to keep on the shelves were not to her taste. A true supporter of free speech, Krug refused to allow conservative groups dictate what can and cannot be read. Trevor Jensen for the Chicago Tribute reports that in 1992, Madonna's erotic coffee table book Sex led to an outcry from those who found it too racy for libraries. Krug felt that libraries should be able to carry any printed material that was legal, and she told the Chicago Times, "the book is sleazy trash, but it should be in every medium-sized library in the United States."

Krug recently claimed that the significance of her work was made clear to her when she read the children's book, And Tango Makes Three, to her granddaughter's class. And Tango Makes Three is a picture book based on the true story of two male penguins from New York's Central Park Zoo,who successfully raised a healthy young chick together. According to the ALA, Tango was the most challenged book of 2006-2007. After she was finished reading to the class, one girl stood up and began clapping. Krug later learned that the enthusiastic student was being raised by two women.

Each year, the ALA puts out a list of America's most frequently challenged library books. Krug took comfort in the perennial appearance of classic works like Catcher in the Rye and Of Mice and Men. "That means that censors, real and would-be, are not making the headway they think they are," she said. "Books that matter are still in libraries."

Krug believed that the role of the librarian was to bring people and information together, as she explained in a talk in 2002. In her editorial on Krug's life, Dorothy Samuels from the New York Times quotes Krug:

"We do this by making sure libraries have information and ideas across the spectrum of social and political thought, so people can choose what they want to read or view or listen to. Some users find materials in their local library collection to be untrue, offensive, harmful or even dangerous. But libraries serve the information needs of all of the people in the community - not just the loudest, not just the most powerful, not even just the majority. Libraries serve everyone."

Krug worked bravely throughout her life for the realization of this democratic ideal. In December 1980, she observed that complaints about the content of books in public libraries had increased fivefold in the month since Ronald Reagan was elected president. In 1982, Krug started Banned Book Week to promote those books that the "Moral Majority" wanted to see go up in flames. More recently, Krug was a leader in the fight against internet censorship. Krug also was an outspoken opponent of the USA Patriot Act, which included a provision that allows federal investigators access to library records.

Krug's passion for free speech began at a rather young age, as the New York Time's Douglas Martin reports. Krug credited her parents as the inspiration for her life's work. She remembers reading a sex-education book under the covers when she was 12, only to be caught by her mother. "She said, ‘For God's sake, turn on your bedroom light so you don't hurt your eyes.' And that was that," Krug said.

Judith Krug, Who Fought Ban On Books, Dies at 69 [NY Times]
Judith Krug [NY Times]
Judith F. Krug, 1940-2009: Librarian Started Banned Books Week [Chicago Tribune]
Judith Krug, Librarian, Tireless Advocate For First Amendment Rights, Dies [ALA]

[Image via Jim Rittig's Flickr]

Probably the former. Yes, families where both parents are present in the children's lives are more stable and ultimately create a better environment for children, but Grove is implying that parents need to not only be married for children to thrive, but the man needs to be working and providing ("responsibility") for his young while the woman stays home and cares for them. Why not promote a society where single mothers can provide for their children on their own? Grove says that the Conservative government will provide a maternity nurse service for families who need help during the first days after childbirth, but there is no mention of this service being available to single mothers (or fathers) who have a newborn. An emphasis is placed on the relationship between the father and mother, implying that they are together.

And what does Grove think of women's magazines? While he condemns lad mags' presentation of a "narrow conception of beauty and a shallow approach towards women," he praises women's magazines (and their publishers) for addressing their readers "in a mature and responsible fashion." So, being obsessed with materialism, being fearful of any beauty "imperfection," and constantly being reminded that the attention of men is necessary to live a happy lifestyle is "mature"? Has this dude ever looked at a women's magazine?

Lad Mags Linked To 'Social Ills' [BBC]
'Lads Mags' Condemned Over Images Of Women [Telegraph]
Poll" Do Lad Mags Make Men Feckless? [Guardian]