It’s nice that The National Older Women’s League called bullshit on Alan Simpson in light of his “milk cow” comment debacle last week, but I wish OWL had been available to rescue Older Woman Betty White on Emmy night. Simpson’s consciousness will never be raised, but there’s still hope for t.v. audiences who think batty old biddy jokes are howlarious.
Because the short shelf life of actresses is directly linked to sex appeal, when they stop being sexy, they start being funny—for not being sexy. Thus White’s goofy dance routine and stilted “sexual chemistry” exchange with Madman John Hamm, followed by her shower scene with Hugh Jackman, former sexiest man alive.
Never mind that 88 year-old White was a pioneering woman in television in the ’50s (after hosting her own radio show in the ’40s). Or that she’s been winning Emmys for half a century. She’s old. And for women, that’s all it takes to get a laff. You can even win an Emmy for it–if you don’t mind that the joke’s on you. As Julia Cheiffetz asked on Huffpo yesterday: Is it really that funny to see an old lady express sexual desire and say ‘”fuck’ on prime time television?”
Call me a Lucy Stoner. I didn’t take my husband’s surname when we married, which seems perfectly unremarkable–except that it’s not: a century and a half after Stone became the first American woman to keep her name in marriage, only about 10% of brides do the same, according to the Lucy Stone League. And The Boston Globe says the practice is in decline. Stone is probably rolling over in her maiden name-marked grave.
The Lucy Stone League opposes conjugal name-changing on the grounds that it’s “a powerful instance of sex discrimination which has a major effect on women.” I doubt it’s that consequential. But Stone herself offered a more fundamental reason: “My name is my identity and must not be lost.” It is just a name–until you’ve lived with it for a few decades and it accrues history and symbolism on top of family (and ethnic) pride.
“A woman should no more take her husband’s name than he should hers,” Stone reasonably asserted. After she registered in a Dayton hotel under “Stone” instead of “Blackwell” in 1856, the Dayton Journal sneered, “We don’t offer ‘Mrs. Lucy’ our hat because she probably has one of her own, to match her breeches! Women’s rights forsooth! Where, we should like to know, are Mr. Blackwell’s rights?”
A permanent installation by the Prague-based artist Matej Kren stands as a challenge to Nicholas Negroponte’s prediction, last week, that books will be obsolete within five years. The piece, called “Passage,” recalls Walter Benjamin’s sublime essay, “Unpacking My Library,” about buying, borrowing and inheriting books. In the closing paragraph, Benjamin regards his several thousand-volume library, observing that “…for a collector… ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.”
Proust suffered from it. Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman took “rest cures” for it. And though it’s been retired from The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, we all surely have a touch of it: Americanitus (or “neurasthenia”), a nervous condition triggered by the stresses of modern life (which, said Freud, also caused flatulence).
San Francisco artist Alison Pebworth has launched a cross-country research project called “Beautiful Possibility” in which she explores contemporary manifestations of Americanitus by interviewing people about what ails them and why. Her historical research focuses on the intersection between European and Native American history and how it shapes American identity today. Pebworth’s wry, postmodern, and stunning circus-style tour banners combine folk, historical and political icons (including Olive Oatman, who, she says, elicits more questions than anyone in the series). One of my favorites, “Claim Your Demons,” shows Dick Cheney hunkered down in a basket next to the Sauk Indian chief Black Hawk (to her credit, Pebworth forces you to figure out why Black Hawk was once considered a demon of Cheneyesque proportions).
Pebworth’s multimedia road show is interactive on many levels: she’s out there taking the pulse of the nation now; you can browse around to see where the northern leg of her tour is taking her here, learn what happened at previous stops here, or take her Americanitus survey here. Better yet, track her down and tell her how you’re feeling. Next stop: Aberdeen, SD.
Makeup-free Mondays: interesting, provocative, and—when you think about it for three seconds—bonkers. Last I checked, women (Lady Gaga excepted) were already fully empowered to forgo makeup on Monday or any other day. Half the working women I know go without; the rest slather on CoverGirl Thick Lash like there’s no tomorrow, and nobody cares who does what.
This natural beauty initiative either has something to do with Debrahlee Lorenzana, a 21st century Joan Holloway who was (allegedly) fired by Citibank for being too sexy for her shirt, or it’s a fabulous prank: after all, the organizers are asking women to donate their unopened makeup to–no joke–women’s shelters (Let them eat L’Oreal!)
The people at The Beauty Bean, where MFM was launched, recommend a Charlotte York inspired Sex and the City hair style that requires a $58 “serum” followed by a $38 “Anti-Humidity” spray followed by a $49 “creme”—no servility to fashion or commerce here! But their MFM page exhorts, “Stop apologizing for not wearing makeup, no matter what day of the week it is.” It’s true that women apologize for a lot of random nonsense, but not, in my experience, their bare faces. Even Grace Coddington goes naked at Vogue.
What next–girdle-free Fridays? This is the latest (well-intentioned) initiative in a growing trend of low concept activism that ranges from the merely misguided (Remember Not One Damn Dime Day? No one else does either) to the downright embarrassing (Bras Without Borders). And like most misdirected advocacy, it’s having an unintended effect. I suddenly hear Dior’s Serum de Rouge Luminous Lip Color Treatment calling out to me. Sephora, all is forgiven–I’m coming for the Crimson 840.
Since she was ransomed back from Mohave Indians in 1856 wearing a tribal chin tattoo, Olive Oatman has inspired a sculpture by Erastus Dow Palmer, two biographies, two novels, a play starring John Wilkes Booth’s brother, a 1965 episode of “Death Valley Days” (featuring Ronald Reagan), four children’s books, a 1982 short story by Elmore Leonard, and an Oscar-nominated short film (2008), but never a song.
Until now. Last month the country grindcore band Phantom of the Black Hills released a fittingly Deadwoodesque tribute to America’s first tattooed white woman on “Ghosts,” tweaking some interesting themes, like whether or not Oatman, a Mormon, lost her religion as a white Mohave. If the facts in “Olive Oatman” are iffy (twisted as they’ve been for over a century), the mood is right: Here’s the Oatman clan heading west:
Her and her family prayin’ to the moon
Piled in a wagon, rolling to their doom
Bones of the past rattlin in the back
That’s when the mountain roared
Indeed, the Yavapai Indians who killed Oatman’s family in southern Arizona (then Mexico) were mountain dwellers. (Note to Governor Brewer: back then, the state was filled with nativists–none of whom were white). Phantom nails it in saying Oatman, who was taken captive, then traded to the Mohave, “had to bend but she never bowed.”
The song’s gritty vocals and driving rhythm–slow in the intro, then double time–evoke Oatman’s ride on a prairie schooner driven by a reckless and monomaniacal father of seven, bound for California (the place, wrote Didion, “where we run out of continent”). A banjo traces jittery lines of fingerpicked beauty across this well-worn gothic narrative. Though Phantom of the Black Hills’ website is damnably uninformative (perhaps a masked dude aiming his banjo at you like a loaded weapon is all you need to know), I’m glad an L.A. band with a pistols-at-dawn attitude was the first to claim this California dreamer.
What we have to work with: Seven women, dressed identically, pacing atop an eight-foot tall, ten-foot wide wooden cube in Bryant Park in two shifts for 10 hours a day all week. So, Kate Gilmore’s performance piece “Walk the Walk” is about working women. They’re trapped, or perpetually on display, or going quietly insane in their corporate cubicles, or something. The piece is intended to depict women collectively, and though Gilmore told the New York Times that diversity was a particular concern in “casting” them, age was evidently not a factor: They’re all under 35—reflecting about a third of working women.
When I saw them Tuesday, they wore canary yellow skirts, pink tops, and beige pumps–get-ups no New York working girl would likely be caught dead in. Their perplexing fashion semiotics are complicated by Gilmore’s observation that the yellow matches, er, taxicabs. More immediately, they looked like a bed of tulips come to life, an alluring sight that–to Gilmore’s credit–drew in viewers who might not otherwise approach a piece of performance art; they regarded the women thoughtfully, then walked in and out of the cube to hear footsteps thumping overhead and read about the piece. The horizontal flow of the onlookers moving through the structure made a nice duet with the circular motion of the women above.
But the problem with using people in art–especially art about labor–is that the temptation to fixate on their experience of the piece often overwhelms yours. (Case in point: I clearly recall the stony expression of a museum guard forced to wear Ryan Gander’s bloody tracksuit in the New Museum’s 2009 “Generational,” but not the tracksuit). What were these women–many SUNY Purchase grad students–thinking? I’m making art history? I’d rather be a Vanessa Beecroft girl? I left the iron on in the bedroom and there’s not a thing I can do about it? When I saw them at around 2:00 on Tuesday, at the beginning of the second shift, their movements were relaxed and fluid:
Later, coming up on 5:00, the women looked like cold, caged animals trying to avoid each other:
“Walk the Walk” follows a long tradition of performance artists or their emissaries doing repetitive and vaguely degrading things,for better or worse, from Linda Montano and Teching Hsieh to Chu Yun, who paid his sleeping beauties $10 an hour to drop a pill and play dead last year. As a working woman, I stared at the Gilmore Girls with a feeling of pity, not recognition. I wondered why they weren’t allowed to wear sweaters and worried that their pumps hurt. A few looked back at me, but not for long; they were on the move, going nowhere.
What’s more astonishing? A) Seventeen Alabama students werepaddled for violating their school dress code on prom night; B) Corporal punishment is still legal in 20 states; C) Over 200,000 public school students are paddle-whacked each year; or D) Mainstream media coverage of A doesn’t mention B or C. Thank you, Jezebel, for putting the story in perspective.
And kudos to fashion offender Erica DeRamus, below, who just said no to the paddle–and got suspended. “This is not the 1940s,” DeRamus told Fox News. “We don’t take corporal punishment now.”
It’s nice that The National Older Women’s League called bullshit on Alan Simpson in light of his “milk cow” comment debacle last week, but I wish OWL had been available to rescue Older Woman Betty White on Emmy night. Simpson’s consciousness will never be raised, but there’s still hope for t.v. audiences who think batty old biddy jokes are howlarious.
