If you're in the New York area on December 9th, you should definitely check out F-WORD: FEMINISM, FUNNY & FEARLESS! It's a fundraiser for Paradigm Shift, one of our favorite organizers of thought provoking, fun, and (yes!) feminist events.
The event is hosted by the Abbie Crutchfield (MTV, NBC Stand-Up For Diversity Finalist) & Jen Dziur (Williamsburg Spelling Bee, McSweeney’s), who are the co-founders of New York’s all-female Ladybits Comedy. There's lots more info here.
The evening features performances by:
Jessica Delfino, Comedian
Publicly denounced by the US Catholic League, A comedy rock star”- Comedy Central
Leah King, Writer-Performer “Hey, you. Can I get a smile?”
Known in the Burlesque world as LadyLUXXX, her one-woman show about street harassment fuses music, dance, and spoken word.
Hadiyah Robinson, Comedian
Finalist NBC Stand-Up For Diversity, Performances on BET’s “Comic View” and “One Mic Stand”
You can RSVP and invite your friends on Facebook. If you can’t make it, please donate to Paradigm Shift anyway. They need your support to keep doing great events! Donations are secure using Pay Pal.
At first, I thought I sort of liked the new ‘The Situation’ - Bristol Palin abstinence PSA, and not even ironically. My expectations, cultivated by a longtime familiarity with abstinence-until-marriage campaigns that were authoritative and explicit about the fact that sex will ruin my whole entire life, were low. Understandably.
So, right. The Candie’s Foundation releases their new ad campaign, starring politico teen mom Bristol Palin, whom I loathe, and The Jersey Shore's Mike 'The Situation' Sorrentino. What happens in this video? The rundown is that our young heroes are mingling behind the set of what I assume is Dancing With The Stars. The Situation sees Palin from behind, and not knowing who she is, tries to pick her up with some bad lines, which I refuse to reproduce in this blog space. Palin does a quick spin, which maybe she learned from Dancing With The Stars, and affectionately mocks The Situation's lousy attempt at getting her to have sex with him.
What develops from this point on is a conversation about sex, except with different uses of the word 'situation' in lieu of the usual 'abstinence,' 'sex,' 'pregnancy,' or the classically vague, doom-ridden 'consequences.' Bristol Palin tells The Situation that she's definitely not going to have sex with him because she doesn't have sex with anybody (anymore), but that she hopes in general when he is sexually active he is safe. The Situation, in turn, ushers in latex evidence to prove that of course he practices safe sex. Palin seems satisfied by this, there are more exchanges revolving around situatedness and, all in all, things are remarkably cordial.
This cordiality was what first surprised me about the Candie's ad. I don't think I've ever seen an abstinence ad in which there was such a casual exchange between two people with different views on sex. It seemed to lend credibility to a position on teen sexuality that differed from its own, and sent the message that these differences were OK.
And then I got to thinking. It all, suddenly, was a little too casual. Eerily so.
This appearance of tolerance–and an appearance is all it is–is exactly what makes this ad even worse than those which overtly warn that sex is going to destroy me. The longer I thought about the way this abstinence ad appealed to me, through its image of open mindedness and the use of reality TV sensibility, the more insidious I found it to be.
Even though one of the two characters in this ad is sexually active, safe, and happy about it, because he is a Jersey Shore caricature, viewers are not asked to take his sexual choices seriously. Through the casting of someone as ridiculous as The Situation, the Candie's people achieve the unfathomable, which is making Bristol Palin –an abstinence-pledging teen mom–look like a legitimate sexual role model. Palin's abstinence advocacy on its own is clearly an absurdity; however, next to The Situation's buffoonery, I can see how it would almost make sense.
The abstinence-until-marriage movement is just as backwards as it has always been and its ideology is no less threatening to sexual health and fulfillment than before. But there are definitely people doing the deceptive work, in certain cases with new media intelligence, to frame it otherwise. Things to look out for, I think.
Aside from the other abstinence-only-until marriage keywords missing from the Candie's ad, 'waiting' is noticeably not there. This is because apparently we are no longer waiting; we are now pausing. Before we play, that is. Did you know that “Pause Before You Play” is the overarching message of all The Candie's Foundation’s current campaigns? As the Candie's people explain, when pausing, teens should:
“Pause to think about your future; pause to think about consequences; pause to evaluate your relationship; pause to delay sex; pause to get a condom; pause to ask “why now?”
One of the really unsettling things about this ad, I realized, is that this push to “pause” comes at the very end, as if it's not the message propelling the whole scenario forward to begin with. Which of course, it is. An ad like this creates an image of an abstinence-until-marriage movement that encourages open dialogue and an acceptance of teen sexuality, when in fact we know that abstinence-until-marriage sex education programs accomplish the opposite: they silence teenagers' voices on their sexualities.
Lena Chen is definitely on our radar these days: she writes the blog The Chicktionary and is now the Health, Sex and Relationships expert for gURL.com, a community for teenage girls. Lena and I had a great conversation over at gURL about virginity, chaste pop stars and whether you can tell if a guy's a virgin by checking his penis (don't worry, you can't). Here's a just a little snippet:
Therese: Let’s start with something simple like how do you define virginity. Which actually isn’t at all simple, so never mind.
Lena: I defined virginity in previous posts on gURL (“The gURL Guide To Virginity Through History“), and there’s so little consensus on the definition of sex that it’s surprising that anyone attributes any significance to their “purity.” There are a lot of people who still think (incorrectly) that you can “test” for a girl’s virginity. But guys just don’t have the same anatomy, so they don’t have to deal with the same crap.
Therese: Right. Checking the condition of someone’s hymen gives you as much information about someone’s sex life as checking the tip of someone’s penis. None. Why is it that guys and gURLs are judged differently for the same behavior?
Therese: It’s true. We talk about giving away your “precious gift,” like your virgin status is really all you have to offer someone. When Taylor Swift (left, with Demi Lovato) sings in her song friend ‘gave everything she had’ to a boy, it means she gave him her virginity, doesn’t it? And it ended badly because, well, if all you have is your virginity, then you’re left kinda worthless.That was EVERYTHING SHE HAD! Really, she has nothing else of value to offer this world? Like being a kind person or being good at math, or being able to run really fast? There are a lot of very excellent reasons to wait to have sex, but the fact that your virginity is the only thing of value you have to offer the world is NOT one of them.
We suspected Beth Schacter was a kindred spirit when she wrote about our work on her blog. But we were totally sure of it when we read about her film-in-progress 'A Virgin Mary' and saw her 2007 film 'Normal Adolescent Behavior' (NAB). This film, a teen drama like nothing you've seen, depicts the complex platonic and sexual relationships between a group of 6 high school friends. We recently spoke to Beth about how teenagers choose to have–or not have–sex.
Can you tell us about Virgin Mary, and how it's similar or different than NAB?
Virgin Mary is a romantic comedy so in that sense it's a world away from the drama of NAB. But they are both about sexual politics. Virgin Mary is about a girl, Mary, who at 12 makes a deal with her best friend Alexander that they'll lose their virginity to each other on her 18th birthday.
Then he moves way and he comes back senior year a be-dreadlocked, Burning Man worshipping freak who seems a little too eager to collect on the bet. Mary isn't ready to have sex and she spends most of the movie trying to get out of the deal instead of just being honest and saying, "I'm not ready."
Her best friend, Allison, has a lot of sex but has never fallen in love. So it's really the story of two cherries - the sex cherry and the love cherry - and how these best friends each lose them. I really love the idea of making a romantic comedy about teenagers for a teen audience; we used to have a lot more of them and they are my favorite movies.
In NAB, you've set some of the conflict between a polyamorous group of 6 friends, and the other high school kids who seem randomly promiscuous. You're making a very sophisticated distinction here. Can you talk about the differences between the two groups?
For me, the thing with the 6 friends all sleeping with each other is that it isn't that different from what most of us experience in high school. We have a clique of friends and everyone dates everyone else and eventually you're dating your best friend's ex-boyfriend and it has this very incestuous feeling to it. These six just codified it. Which is ultimately their undoing.
It was definitely a choice to put the six kids in a world where they were the most moral and the most normal. To me the six are the least corrupted of the kids in the movie - they get good grades, they don't drink, they love, they feel, they emote, they have a sense of history and are empathetic. [The eventual boyfriend of one of the six] Sean is trapped by this need to play traditional roles without understanding them and the rest of the school is trapped by this need to make sex a competition about who can be the most provocative and dangerous.
I wanted to push people to rethink their own judgments of what is "right" vs. "what is right for me." The real problem comes when we decide we need everyone else to do what we do in order to feel confident in our choices. Being an individual in the face of plurality is far more difficult than being an individual and surrounding yourself with like minded people. I think the kids did okay until Sean showed up. I know for a fact they will all go on to be healthy happy adults.
How do you think your characters differ from other onscreen representations of teenagers in mainstream films?
I'm after the same thing a bigger movie is after - people being entertained and moved. I like a lot of what is out there, and my taste is really way more mainstream than indie. Anyway, I was a huge fan of Jennifer's Body which is about as radically third-wave feminist as a movie can be. I loved the girls and their friendship which had that perfect level of obsession and real love at its core. The ideas in that movie feel familiar and yet the tone and the size of the movie couldn't be more different from what I do. And I was thoroughly entertained. It helps that the movie comes from two incredibly smart women (Diablo Cody and Karyn Kusama) and that they made it on their terms.
A lot of kids don't have any sex in high school, for a variety of reasons aside from virginity pledges, so I'm wondering how NAB might speak to them.
It may not, honestly. But then Virgin Mary started percolating because of a girl at a screening who told me she felt like nobody talked about why people don't have sex, only about why they do. I loved that. The idea that we're so focused on the why and not talking about the why-nots. At the core NAB is about self-determination which for me is the only thing that matters when you talk about sexual choices. But it definitely has a narrower spectrum of choices depicted in the story.
Was it difficult to make a film about such unconventional teenage sexual relationships? Was there pressure to make it more mainstream?
I was at a meeting when we were first out with the script, before I even finished grad school. And an executive from a studio that rhymes with MGM brought me in and told me that she would be "more comfortable" if the girls in the movie were witches. Those were her words. "More comfortable." Like the idea that these girls were having consensual sex and had made informed decisions about their sex lives was so uncomfortable that they needed to have supernatural powers so she felt better about it. I stopped trying to make a studio version of it after that.
I was struck by the line "You want me to become a virgin again?" that Wendy says to Sean when they start dating. He wanted to somehow wipe the slate clean in a way that made me think of how brides are transformed into temporary virgins on their wedding day. Why is that something people want?
I love that she calls him on his shit. He's saying "I love that you are who you are now but can we pretend you got there without having sex?" And she says absolutely not. For Sean it's so obviously coming from insecurity - he can't stand the idea that he has to compete with something so dangerous. Ultimately he can't take it–he has to destroy any evidence of her past even after they break up.
Is the idea of one boy and one girl in a committed relationship a fairy tale?
I hope not! I think the most committed relationship girls have in high school is with their best friend and when you take sex out of the equation and look at the best friend relationship you can see a lot more committed relationships that work. Really work. But you add in sex and love and lust and hormones and it gets harder. Not impossible. Just not as easy. Not that it is easy after high school it just is harder in different ways.
It's the line "I thought pretending to lose my virginity would be a little more special. Judy Blume should have prepared me for that" in the film's trailer that makes me want to see "Easy A," opening Sept 17th.
In a story takes some of its inspiration from the novel "The Scarlet Letter," Emma Stone plays a virginal high school loser who pretends to have sex with her closeted gay friend so he can look straight–which makes her look slutty. She then embarks on a lucrative scheme pretending to have sex with all kinds of guys so they can pretend they aren't virgins/gay/losers/whatever. Which makes her seem like a pretend sex worker, except that she embraces her pretend sluttiness by wearing a Red A. Even though she's still, you know, a virgin. Got that?
On the plus side, the film features Patricia Clarkson, Stanley Tucci, Malcolm McDowell and Lisa Kudrow. On the minus, the romantic lead appears to be played by that pukey poor/sensitive guy from Gossip Girl. So, this could be really awesome and sex positive and smart. Or, it could reinforce every stereotype re: sexual boys are celebrated, sexual girls are reviled. And that would be really, really awful. Double feature with 'The Virginity Hit'?
Seen this ad for this upcoming film? Bored as I am of the horndog-guy-trying-to-lose-virginity-before-college storyline? Tired of being told that only freaks are still virgins when they enter college, that every 'normal' guy needs to bang a hot chick before graduation, lest the shame of his sexual lameness destroy the rest of his life? Feeling strangled by Hollywood's unchanging definition of masculinity? Wish this storyline wasn't churned out a dozen times a year and that people like Will Farrell, who produced this film, could find something more creative to do with his gifts? Like make Elf II? Then don't call this number.
As a public service, here's a rundown of what happens when you call the 'Virgin Help Line' at 888-743-4335 (which is part of an ad campaign for the new movie The Virgnity Hit). A teenage-sounding guy named Zack comes on, welcomes you to the hotline and presents some options:
Press 1 if you're a virgin. Press 2 if you’re friends of a virgin and want to help Press 3 if you don’t know if you’re virgin or not. Press 4 if you want your virginity back Press 5 if you want to stay a virgin. Press 6 if you want to hear Matt say a pickup line that makes girls swoon Press 7 if you like to party.
Press 3 and you get clichés about guys who like wizards and play chess. Press 5 and you get some shit over your life choices. Press 6 to get a line about stealing a car and going to Mexico. And somewhere in there are assurances that any girl can lose their virginity so long as she's willing to lower her standards to the level of the guys' (nonexistent). So don't call them. Someone is for sure keeping track of the hits, and we don't want to give them any more encouragement.
