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How the entertainment industry has stooped to new lows March 16, 2001 | Page 10 WHEN ACTIVISTS from women's rights and gay rights organizations protested the sexist and homophobic lyrics of rapper Eminem at the Grammy Awards last month, they were dismissed as uptight malcontents who couldn't see the irony in his music. But Eminem is hardly alone in making money off sexism. As ELIZABETH SCHULTE explains, many recent movies, magazines and television shows are trying to make sexism acceptable. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - It's a place where men can come together THAT'S THE theme song of Comedy Central's The Man Show, one of several new "man-oriented" shows--otherwise known as "testosterone TV." Each week, women in skimpy outfits jump on a trampoline for an audience of stomping and hooting 20- to 30-year-old guys, downing free beer. On the FX network is the X Show, which is pretty much the same stuff, but also features advice on "getting it" from your date. Then there's the new XFL pro football league. To boost the league's sagging TV ratings, one cheerleader promised to let viewers take a peek into her locker room. Maxim, one of several "lad" magazines launched a few years ago in England, is now on the shelves in the U.S. The January issue offers--in addition to the usual swimsuit model pics--tips on "How to get out of a chick show." In the bookstores--filed under "Gender Studies"--you can find the work of Warren Farrell, who claims to have been part of the 1970s feminist movement, but now pens books under the title of "masculinist." His books sit alongside such titles as Why Men Don't Iron--and The Natural History of Rape, a crackpot pseudoscientific "explanation" of why men rape and why the way women dress encourages them. And if you want to go to the movies, you can see Tomcats, whose trailer promises plenty of breasts, plus a guy running over his girlfriend with a golf cart. Then there's Eminem, who goes one better than other pop stars--he doesn't just rap about women as sex objects, but about murdering them. "X Show" producer Mark Cronin--a one-time writer for scumbag radio talk-show host Howard Stern--tried to explain the spread of blatantly and proudly sexist entertainment. "I guess everything went through a kind of PC phase when it was very difficult to do anything like that, and that's gone now," he said. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - THOSE INITIALS, "PC," stand for "politically correct"--the phrase that the Republican right used more than a decade ago to describe what they called liberal attacks on "free speech." In the universities, bigots like George Bush Sr.'s Education Secretary William Bennett and Dinesh D'Souza, author of Illiberal Education, claimed that liberals were taking away the rights of white men by giving "preferential" treatment to women and minorities. Another anti-PC crusader, Linda Chavez--Dubya's first pick for labor secretary--once said that laws against sexual harassment were turning us into a "nation of crybabies." Affirmative action and multicultural studies programs--products of the civil rights and women's liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s--were considered part of this "liberal assault" on white men's rights. Anti-PC crusaders hid behind "free speech" to justify their opposition to programs that benefit women and minorities. The attack on "PC" should be called what it is--bigotry. And to judge from The Man Show and Maxim magazine, these bigots have won some ground. They've popularized the idea that anyone who challenges sexism is "too sensitive." This goes hand in hand with the argument that the women's movement actually went "too far"--and ended up hurting men. All the "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" baloney has an appeal in a society where men and women are alienated from one another. In a world where there's virtually no useful sex education and women's bodies are treated like commodities, it's no surprise that men and women have warped views about sexuality and about one another. But the idea that the fight for women's liberation created this divide--or made it worse--is nonsense. During the 1960s and 1970s, when a growing women's liberation movement was fighting for free child care, free abortion on demand and equal pay for equal work, millions of men and women rejected sexist ideas. In the late 1980s, mass mobilizations in Washington--involving women and men organizing together--helped protect a woman's right to choose when Bush Sr. and the Supreme Court threatened to take that right away. But in the last decade, with a supposedly pro-choice president in the White House, the major women's organizations haven't been organizing and mobilizing. Instead, they've tailored their message to the rightward-moving liberals in the Democratic Party. Middle-class feminists like Naomi Wolf--most recently a campaign adviser to Al Gore--retreated from some of the most basic ideas of women's liberation. "What if we called abortion what many believe it to be: a failure?" wrote Wolf in 1997. Meanwhile, Camille Paglia--who claims to be an "anti-feminist feminist"--has urged women to stop whining about oppression and start making it in the boardrooms of Corporate America. If such so-called feminists were echoing some of the right wing's criticisms of the women's movement, it's no wonder that the publishers of Maxim think they can get away with more blatant sexism. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ON THE cultural front, "power feminism" has found champions among those who argue that portrayals of women as sex objects can be looked at as "empowering." One group of "third wave" feminists, for example, decided to title their online magazine Bitch--because, the editors said, "Bitch is most often hurled at women who speak their mind, who have opinions and don't shy away from expressing them...If we take it as a compliment, it loses its power to hurt us." While walling herself off in a world where she "takes ownership" of the words "bitch" and "slut" might be one woman's reaction to sexism, it doesn't do a thing for the rest of us. Nor is Hollywood's marketing of sexy women "kicking butt" a step forward. In a review of the movie Charlie's Angels in Salon magazine--titled "Tasty not Tasteless"--Amy Benfer argues that the Angels "play to an audience that gets it, that understands that...sluts deserve some respect, and there's nothing wrong with being a sex object if your objective is sex." Benfer even counterposed Angels to the pro-feminist Thelma and Louise, arguing "it was all too real...Thelma's pizza-eating, braying control-freak husband...both women's minimum-wage waitressing gigs...There's a place for that, but Angels points out that chick rebellion doesn't have to be limited to gritty, social realist stories about oppression." But let's not fool ourselves. Columbia Pictures is selling this brand of "feminism" with a movie teaser featuring Cameron Diaz wiggling in her BVDs. Sex sells movies, and that's what Charlie's Angels and the rest are about. Is this the best that women should expect--acting jobs as sexy crime fighters? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - WOMEN HAVE won improvements in the quality of our lives since the 1960s. But oppression still exists--especially for working-class women. Women still make approximately 72 cents to every dollar a man makes for the same work. And statistics from the Economic Policy Institute's State of Working America report show that the narrowing gap between men's and women's wages over the last 10 years is largely the result of a decline in men's wages. Meanwhile, the successes of a minority of women have masked the struggle to make ends meet that most working-class women face. While women in the top fifth of the workforce in terms of income have made significant gains, studies show that women in the bottom half remain only slightly above where they stood a quarter of a century ago. And the lack of affordable child care means that the unpaid work of caring for families still disproportionately falls on women. Abortion, while still legal, is unavailable in 85 percent of U.S. counties. And President Bush--who in his first days as president ordered the Food and Drug Administration to review the abortion-inducing drug RU-486--promises to make the situation worse. The New York Times recently interviewed women who work in television, including Diane English, creator of "Murphy Brown"--a pro-feminist show that became popular during Bush Sr.'s administration. "If women start to wonder if they will lose the right to have an abortion, perhaps the attitude may change during the next four years," English said. "We don't write from a political point of view...But since the election we've become a lot more passionate in the writers' room, and that passion will seep into our characters." With Bush in office, it's clear that women have some big fights ahead. Those fights can change what the entertainment industry--and society at large--consider acceptable and what is considered just plain sexist.
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