peripheral vision

I have adored Jen Davis’s work ever since I first saw it a few years ago. I love it for so many reasons. She’s one of the few self-portraitists whose body is not slender. Her photographs are complicated. They engage with the experience of having a body that becomes almost public property in the way that our fat-hating culture loads so much bullshit on it. People see a fat body and easily leap to ideas, assumptions and judgments about the person, the whole life inside. Many people have written smarter words about this than I can at the moment, so I will quote liberally from them.

First, a note on my use of the word fat. “[T]he word ‘fat’ is usually a put down. Fat, when used as an adjective describing a person, has become synonymous with some really negative words like-lazy, ugly, smelly, stupid and disorganized. It is often assumed that fat people have no will power or have ‘let themselves go’, it even prejudices some people on the quality of a persons parenting or work ethic depending on their size. But the big one is health. If you are fat you are automatically unhealthy and any or all health issues are directly related to your weight, which is not always the case.”

(from Free Range in Suburbia)

I am using the word fat as a neutral adjective, without the value judgments that can often be associated with it. I want to reclaim the word fat so it doesn’t carry all that other bullshit with it.

“There is nothing I can do, as a person with a fat body, that is deemed acceptable by my society except not have a fat body. Actively trying to not have a fat body while loathing my fat body and policing other fat bodies and agreeing yes I am disgusting no of course I am not working hard enough yes I’m lazy no you don’t have to like me yes hate me hate me more I’m sorry I’m sorry I’ll diet more and more and more eat less and less and less — this is the one thing approved of. It’s the one thing I’m allowed to do. And it’s still not enough, never enough, because then I am pathologized for hating myself (because they demanded it) for focusing too much on food (because they demanded it) for still, despite all that STILL, existing as a fat body.”

“My not dieting is pathologized by a culture that says fat = unhealthy. My not having dieted is pathologized. My having accidentally lost weight is pathologized. If I admit to “less than perfect” eating, now or in the past, I am pathologized. If I talk about eating “well”, in a way that doesn’t endorse restricted eating, if I hold up having a healthy, loving relationship with food as my ideal instead of weight loss, I am pathologized. If I say I eat healthfully, I am called a liar. If I reject the paradigm of “healthy” food, I am called delusional and in denial.”

(from Feeding my Boychick)

“In our society as it is today, fat people are damned if they do, damned if they don’t.  If a person is caught eating in public (going to a restaurant, even a nice one and not the stereotypical fast food restaurant), many people think they have the right to comment on what the fat person is eating.  If the fatty is having something high in calories or carbs or whatever-the-latest-diet-baddy-is-today, the person feels justified in telling them how to eat better.  ”Are you really sure you should be eating that?”  I’ve heard that all too often.

“However, even if the fatty is being a Good Fatty (TM), and only eating a salad (with low cal/low fat/low taste dressing on the side!), they are still subject to revilement.  ”That’s not going to help you!” and “If you ate that way all the time you wouldn’t be as fat as you are!” are said to fatties who dare to eat in public.

“It is commonly assumed that all fat people are lazy and never, ever, EVER exercise.  After all, it’s evident because they are so fat!  When a fat person DOES try to exercise in public, they shamed by hearing cat calls.  They are told they are deluding themselves because if they really did exercise they wouldn’t be that fat.  They are told they should never attempt that exercise until they lose weight.

“It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t world, if you happen to be fat.

“[...] To get get rid of my fat body, you have got to get rid of me.

Almost everything that is being aimed at fat people is being aimed at getting rid of them, of us. ‘I don’t want to see you, you are gross, disgusting, a slob, stupid, lazy!  I don’t want to know you even exist!  Get out of my sight.  Preferably, go eat a gun!’”

(from A Day in the (Fat) Life) (The horrible sentences in her last paragraph have actually been said to the author.)

And in case you think that the concern with fatness is really about health, here’s just one study to contradict that idea.

* * *

Jen Davis’s photos subvert some of that bullshit, and they resist the typical weight-loss narrative we see everywhere. In her photos, you can’t NOT look at her. There is great ambivalence in the photos, for sure. She’s not always comfortable being looked at, I think, but I don’t see misery. When I see emotional discomfort in the photos, it’s often a result of the outside world pushing in on Davis, or its potential to (it’s the too-tight jeans that are the problem, the people looking at her and maybe thinking some of the thoughts I’ve quoted above, not Davis’s body. Or at least that’s how I see the photos.

The Oprah magazine just did a story on her that makes me very sad. And I don’t know how to write about it without disrespecting Davis’s right to live her life however she damn well chooses, without finding myself among all the shitty and supposedly well-intentioned commenters on fat bodies. But I still feel deeply sad that we live in a world that is so fucked up, it makes sense, after a lifetime of pain and isolation, to ask someone to cut into your contentious body and tie up a part of it — with no less than a 40 to 50 percent chance of failure — in an effort to make it less contentious. Davis made herself vulnerable in doing the story, and I don’t want to shit on that or her in any way.

What bothers me the most is that the Oprah story just reduces Jen Davis and her wonderful, complicated self-portraits to parts in yet another weight-loss narrative, where the person loses weight and lives happily ever. Now the photos are relegated to the role of evidence of that time she used to be fat and unhappy, a time on which the door is now closed because she has lost weight and become happy and confident. Of course, it’s just Oprah, and of course they would do a story like that, a story that just trots out all the usual narratives we have for women. This is why I avoid those dumb-ass magazines. But I still just feel so sad about this whole state of affairs. (I wonder if every blog post I write now will be about how fucked up this world is.)

The story begins with a description of Davis’s physical appearance, reinforcing the idea that the only way a woman can realize her true potential or selfhood or whatever is through physical beauty (She “has the kind of straight blonde hair the rest of us have to fake.” Imagine if women could find a way to just love ourselves as we are; what would the Oprah Empire do then?). The discussion of her accomplishments — exhibitions in France, Spain and Italy; the New York freakin’ Times featuring her work; awards, grants, residencies and invitations to give lectures about her work — merits only one small paragraph on the second page of the article. No, what really matters is her appearance and the age-old story of The Ugly Duckling. What really matters is romantic love, as the story is book-ended with quotes from Davis about how she wants a romantic partner and she’s 34 and has never had a boyfriend (you know, the Never Been Kissed story, except that in Davis’s case she’s not exactly virginal – there is tremendous sexuality in some of her self-portraits and especially her webcam series). (Don’t get me wrong, romantic love is great and important and I think she more than deserves to experience that. But the Oprah story makes it sound like the problem was always centred in Davis’s body, not our fat-hating world and the wounds it inflicts.)

I feel like this article has reduced a full, rich, complex human life to a trope. I don’t know Davis personally at all, and this is the first interview with her I’ve read. But I wish I could give her a big hug. I would tell her that she is beautiful and awesome now, but she has also been beautiful and awesome all along and she will remain beautiful and awesome for the rest of the her life, regardless of her body’s shape.

Do yourself a favour and look at all the her beautiful work on her website.

Back in 2008, when I still volunteered at the Drop-In Centre, a young woman was found naked and dead in a local park. I had never met her but people I served at the drop-in knew her and grieved. It took the police more than a year to decide it was homicide. I guess because it’s common for mentally-ill, crack-addicted, part-time sex workers to end up naked and dead in a park from natural causes. I haven’t followed the details of the case closely, but they did finally arrest a man in 2010 and now his case is being tried. I have read precisely two articles in my local paper about the trial, and I am disgusted. I don’t know whether to be disgusted with the lawyers and legal system about the way the questioning is going, or whether it’s simply a matter of misogynist reporters and editors. But from the articles I can’t figure out who’s on trial: if it’s the accused, there hasn’t be a whole lot of coverage on him. It seems like it’s the victim who’s on trial, judging by the articles.

The first one is all about how mentally ill she was and how much crack she smoked and how much prostitution she did. The only mentions of the accused are how he sits quietly in the court and [politely] rises when the jury enters and exits, and how when the victim was killed, he was homeless… “on the street; he was distraught.”

The second article continues in the same vein. There is some small mention of how the accused was caught in the act of beating and sexually assaulting a prostitute in Barrie before being arrested in this case, but the bulk of the article is about the victim. How she didn’t pay the full amount for her last hit because she often waited until she got paid for sex. Whether all the sex she and a former boyfriend had was always alone and how his answer was that they never had a threesome. I’m sure that’s relevant to the case, somehow, but the way it’s being reported it’s all out of context and just ends up feeling horrible. Would they report it this way if she were still alive after the sexual assault? I thought we had laws about the relevance of a victim’s sexual history in sexual assault cases, but perhaps it goes out the window when the victim is dead. Or when she’s a crack-addicted sex worker…

It’s so discouraging to see how backwards we still are in so many ways. It’s disgusting that a human life is so disregarded. She was a person, like all of us, with flaws and grace and love. She sold roses to amorous couples. People loved her, people who have to read this trashy, disrespectful coverage. People who have to watch the system dehumanize and devalue her life over and over again. It’s sickening.

A few months ago, we came upon an acquaintance giving out flyers outside the farmers’ market. She cooed over the baby and chatted very warmly with my oldest. We talked about her flyers (actually I wish I could find them now). After we left, I realized she’d never once asked whether the baby was a boy or a girl. She’d avoided gendered pronouns by talking about “the little one” or “the baby.” And it was SO refreshing. Whether the baby is a boy or girl really didn’t matter at all. What matters is that the baby is adorable and happy and smiling, and my oldest is clearly a great, nurturing older brother, and she covered all that most satisfactorily. coming away from that conversation made me want to see her again soon, but I haven’t.

A few weeks ago at the library, I came upon two fathers talking intimately. One of them had a child just a few months older than my oldest and the other had one a few months older than my youngest. I didn’t want to intrude on their conversation but we were the only people in the play area and somehow I just found myself included in the conversation. The baby happened to be wearing blue that day, so I noticed when the man asked me how old my child was. My child — not my son.

I’ve known for a long time how quickly and thoroughly we stuff gender onto our babies. But I hadn’t really thought about avoiding gendered pronouns, even when you have a good sense of the baby’s sex. Since the more recent conversation, I’ve become a lot more aware of how often I refer to a baby’s sex indirectly, and I don’t really like it. Not only that, but I’m finding I don’t even want talk about “my son” so much as I do “my child” or “my kid” or “my oldest or youngest.” It’s a small thing, but a nice thing.

My oldest’s teacher (who I adore in every other respect btw) often divides the class into girls and boys to facilitate certain activities (putting coats on, going outside, that kind of thing). And funnily enough, my kid now always tells me about how, at recess, he and his friends fight the girls’ team (which often also has boys on it). There is more to children than whether they’re a girl or a boy. And yet it seems to be our default setting, to notice and, however indirectly, comment on their gender. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Now here are some pictures of my oldest’s interventions in our home.

(later the same day)

decorations for Santa

mouse trap

Christmas tree

Or, if you needed any further evidence that I’ve become a humourless feminist…

This morning I noticed A Photo Editor’s Daily Edit featured a sexualized woman on all fours to illustrate an article entitled, “Crazy In Love” in Men’s Health magazine. At first I was taken aback because love is generally experienced between two people, not by looking at a sexualized woman. Then I read the intro paragraph and discovered it was actually about (male) jealousy and how “whether it leads to ruin or redemption, scientists say, depends on [the man experiencing jealousy] and the woman he loves.” (Um, HOW, pray tell, can jealousy lead to redemption???)

Quite apart from the quality of the article and the fact that it is just replaying the old Women Bring on Men’s Violence Trope (aka Rape Culture) but with so-called scientific backing, I decided to reply to the fact that a picture of a sexualized woman on all fours with a decidedly come hither look on her face was illustrating an article about (men’s) jealousy. Given that A Photo Editor is clearly capable of critical thinking, I thought it was just one of those oversights that needed some consciousness-raising.

I’ve had blind spots pointed out to me recently, and afterwards it was like I had new eyes. For example, just the other day someone pointed out to me how fat is often used in children’s books as code for lazy, stupid, and/or generally unpleasant. Even my beloved Harry Potter series does this. And how could I have missed it???

Similarly, Katherine Don’s series Bringing Up Baby on Bitch Magazine has shown me the light about how birth, parenting and mothers are represented on tv. Again or still, I’ve been wondering, How did I not notice this before??? Now I can’t stop noticing…

So it was with this sort of spirit that I commented. And pretty quickly, men leapt to defend the work.

First up, the old You’re Just Not Getting It Because You’re Not Part of Our Inner (magazine-publishing and reading) Circle Defence.

Next, Infantalizing The Complainer, a variation on the You’re Just Not Getting It Defence, by mentioning Teen Beat. Because clearly my objections are juvenile. If I were just a little more grown-up, I’d get it.

Oh look! It’s the You’re Just A Humourless Man-Hating Feminist Defence! I honestly think the last time I heard this I was in high school. Clearly I live in a magical bubble full of wonderful, thoughtful, intelligent men who are not threatened by having sexism pointed out to them. And I don’t even mean only my husband and close relations – I mean acquaintances, both real-life and online. Thank you A Photo Editor for showing me how awesome the men in my life are. (Don’t get me wrong – I’ve seen lots of it online, it’s just been a long time since I’ve experienced it personally.)

You know what? I don’t read print magazines, men’s or otherwise. Probably for this very reason.

Ooh – the If A Woman Was Involved In The Decision-Making It Can’t Be Sexist Defence, along with a slightly more poisonous variation of the Humourless Man-Hating Feminist Defence. If this kind of comment is a cliche, it’s for the same reason that feminist texts from 30 and 40 years ago are still shockingly contemporary. Because women and men are equally socialized by the patriarchal system and both internalize its bullshit. Because nothing is changing.

I know it’s juvenile for me to retreat to my own safe(ish) space to rehash this. But there’s no point in my commenting further over there. It won’t achieve anything or change anyone’s mind. I’m truly shocked that a smart man can have such a horrid view of women. Especially since A Photo Editor has a self-identified feminist man contributing to it.

About a year ago, my son got hooked on Disney Jr. At the time, I thought it was ok. It didn’t have commercials (oh, I was so naive) and the shows weren’t awful. We got into a really bad habit when I was pregnant and exhausted for 10 months straight, of him watching tv while I slept on the couch. We’re still trying to wean him off so much tv, with varying degrees of success.

But back to the Disney channel. Now I have a different opinion about it. For one thing, there may not be commercials, per se, but it most certainly has advertising. And it’s all for Disney. As far as I can tell they have built this whole channel just to create a rapt audience to sell their products to. My son has started to say, “Can we go to Disney World? It’s where dreams come alive.” When I stopped gagging and gasping, we talked about how sneaky advertising can be. He was already familiar with commercials, from our watching the Food Network, but the Disney ads aren’t identifiable as commercials. And with all the movie and toy tie-ins, it’s nearly impossible to distinguish between content and advertising. (Of course, with all the product placement, the Food Network is almost as bad, but it has other benefits, which I’ll get to later.)

And what about the content? I’m just beginning to notice the lack of girls. I haven’t done painstaking research, but that’s my general impression. There is Handy Manny where the female character owns the Hardware Store that supplies the star, Handy Manny (a step in the right direction at least?). There is Jake and the Neverland Pirates, which I confess I haven’t actually watched much of. I think one of Jake’s band of friends is a girl. There is Special Agent Oso, who’s a pretty dumb bear who wouldn’t be a quarter as successful at solving problems without his Palm Pilot, who I think is kind of female. I think my son even recently said something about girls not being heroes. It was good he said it, because it meant we could talk about it.

The channel has just started a new show called Tinkerbell, which I confess I haven’t watched, and they play the new Strawberry Shortcake, which is all about managing feelings and making people feel good while carrying on a gendered business like a hair salon, dance studio, clothing boutique, cafe or general store. The only non-gendered business, run by Blueberry Muffin, is a bookstore. There are no boys there, as far as I can tell, except maybe for a Berrykin? (Also, when did Strawberry Shortcake stop farming and move to Berry Bitty City to open a cafe??? Strawberry Shortcake when I was a kid, was awesome, with boys AND girls AND villains, all with brilliant colours and names. It may have been created to sell toys but at least it had good stories and characters. Now it’s all watered down and every episode has a MESSAGE. But that’s another issue. Ok, but before I move on… Seriously, check out the difference between the 80s Strawberry Shortcake and the current one:

Original

New (and improved???)

The original one looks like a chubby, fun-spirited girl with a cat. The new one is a teenager who lost the pantaloons and baby fat and got some salon-styled hair. And check out her dainty, manicured hands. You do the math. But now back to what this post was REALLY supposed to be about.)

My son is most fond of the Imagination Movers at the  moment. I thought this was great. They solve problems with imagination and music. They have a song about brainstorming. Surely this is good stuff. But last week it struck me: the Imagination Movers are all (white) men. There is only one regular woman on the show. Nina is their neighbour and she’s apparently a photographer for the local paper. Although I think she helps them brainstorm ideas and solve problems, she doesn’t get to wear coveralls like the men. No, she wears only pink or red skirts. I really want to like them, especially after reading this background, but why can’t they have a woman wearing coveralls? My son tells me it’s because she’s not part of their company. But why not? It’s a glaring oversight.

Yesterday, one of my twitter friends linked to this video. (Let’s hope it plays here.)

This is a great video. Except for one thing: it points out how only skinny girls (and women for that matter – except for Molly, on Mike and Molly, both of whom are currently on diets I think) are allowed on tv, but the video itself shows only slim girls. So we still don’t see any chubby girls. (And while I’m on the topic, I really hate the term overweight, because it’s relative. I prefer to try to reappropriate the word ‘fat’ as a value-neutral, descriptive adjective rather than a moralizing, often seen as self-hating word. But I’ll live with chubby, big or ‘of size’ over overweight any day. But I guess that’s another post too.)

My son and I often sometimes watch the Food Network together. It’s always been the only thing I like watching that seems innocuous enough to have my child in the room at the same time and then he started getting into it. We tend to watch more of the cooking competitions now (Chopped, Top Chef, Next Iron Chef) although we also adore Pitchin’ In with Lynn Crawford and enjoy Glutton for Punishment with Bob Blumer. Because there are so many commercials, we started talking about why they’re made and how they try to make us want to buy things. We’ve started to ask what we’re being sold.

But I’m realizing the programming isn’t just vapid, lazy-me time. What’s interesting to me, now, is that women may not always be represented in the same numbers as men on the shows, but the people on the shows always talk about that subject. When Chef Lynn is on a shrimp-fishing boat for a few days with a group of men, she likens the experience to proving herself in the man’s world of professional kitchens. (Also, what is UP with that? A woman’s stereotypical place is in the kitchen — as long as it’s unpaid work for her family. But as soon as it becomes paid work, it’s a man’s world?) The female contestants on Top Chef talk about how there are only three women in the show, or they’re the last woman left. When one of the contestants on Top Chef Just Desserts insulted another contestant by calling him a girl (which they didn’t bleep out, strangely), I talked to my son about it , and we wondered why it might be an insult to be called a girl when there’s nothing wrong with being a girl.

There are also fat people on the Food Network, and it’s rarely a topic for discussion. They’re just there, doing what they’re passionate about. That’s kind of revolutionary, isn’t it? I’m starting to wonder if the Food Network is the most feminist, most fat-positive tv I can expose my son to.

So what about you? What (if any) tv shows do you let your ids watch? What (of any) conversations do you have about the shows? Do you care or notice or talk about how narrow the apparent options are for boys and girls?

I’m mad at Gerry Badger. It’s been a few months since I read most of The Pleasures of Good Photographs, mostly cover to cover. But if anything, my anger has grown with the passage of time.

It may be my expectations were too high. I was interested in reading it when I first heard about it, but when Joerg Colberg mentioned the essay “From Diane Arbus to Cindy Sherman,” shortly after my first gender post, I felt like I had to read it.

It’s a good book. I love reading critical analyses of photography, and Badger’s writing is great. His essay, “From Diane Arbus to Cindy Sherman: An Exhibition Proposal,” is smart and insightful. He gives a brief history of the significant contribution of women to photography, from the first published photobook (not William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature after all, but Anna Atkins’s Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions) to women who were at the forefront of photographic modernism (I don’t know whether to blame my ignorance or the great patriarchal eraser of art history for the fact that I haven’t heard of Germaine Krull or Florence Henri). Badger even argues that Imogen Cunningham’s nudes are better than Weston’s. The main focus of the essay is a more recent generation of American women photographers who worked from 1965 to 1985, which he describes as a lost generation, because they haven’t been given their proper due in the history of late twentieth-century photography. He names Judith Golden, Bea Nettles, Marcia Resnick, Joyce Neimanas, Susan Rankaitis, Eileen Cowin, Barbara Crane, Betty Hahn, Jo Ann Callis, Joan Lyons, Ellen Brooks, Barbara Kasten, Nancy Rexroth and Barbara Blondeau. Have you heard of any of them? I hadn’t.

Badger suggests that one of the reasons for their exclusion from the photographic canon lays at the feet of John Szrkowski, the director of the MOMA’s Department of Photography from 1962 to 1991, and his tremendous influence in the art photography world. He promoted straight, NYC-based street photography, and all the women above had more studio and darkroom-based practices elsewhere, often taking a more directorial approach. “Although male photographers, including Arthur Tress and Ralph Eugene Meatyard, for example, would arrange scenes to be photographed in the 1970s, this approach seems particularly suited to women photographers, partly because they had something specific to say – something metaphotographic, one might propose – and perhaps also because photographing outside on the street was not without its attendant dangers for a woman.”

(I just need to take a detour here and respond to Badger’s claim that photographing on the street is more dangerous for women than for men. This is flat-out wrong, and perpetuating this myth just contributes to rape culture. In fact, statistics show that men are the victims of violent crime in public far more often than women and girls. Most violence against women is perpetrated by people they know, in private spaces. Presumably Badger thinks street photography is more dangerous for women than men because our vaginas can be penetrated. But stranger rape is very rare. Unfortunately, sexual assault by friends, family and acquaintances is not. Sorry for the sidetrip but I just couldn’t let that fallacy pass without addressing it.)

Let’s look at what women had to say thirty to fifty years ago. I recently found a used copy of Michele Landsberg’s Women and Children First, which was published in 1982. It contains essays that bring together some of her feminist columns from the Toronto Star, which she started writing in 1978. The title comes from Landsberg’s argument that government programs for women and children are always the first to be cut (or not even started in the first place). The book provides a fascinating history of feminism in Canada, and imho should be required reading for all Canadians, men and women.

Thirty years ago, Canada’s Criminal Code did allow a maximum sentence of life in prison for rape, but only with proof of vaginal penetration. “And if proof of vaginal penetration can’t be found, the importance of the attack is so diminished in the eyes of the law that no matter what terror was experienced, no matter how prolonged or ugly the nature of the attack, from forced fellatio to jamming objects into the woman’s orifices, the maximum sentence under the law [was] five years. Of course, if the attack was committed against a man, the maximum sentence [was] ten years.” Landsberg writes about a case in the US where a man violently raped his estranged wife in 1978 (in the presence of their two-year-old daughter no less) and he was acquitted solely because he was her husband.

Thirty years ago, there was no pay equity legislation. In 1979, the average earned income of Canadian women who worked for the full year was 63 percent of the full-year earnings of men. (Today that figure is 71 percent.) Landsberg writes, “Consider: a man and a woman, both with the same experience, are working side by side at the same job. On the average in Canada, he will be earning two-fifths more than she will, despite the fact that she is, statistically, better educated and more reliable. What is the difference between them? Privilege, based on owning the right set of reproductive organs.” A 1979 survey, by Dr. Margrit Eichler of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, found that roughly half the male teachers interviewed thought that women should be fired first when there are job cutbacks.

My own mom, a registered nurse, told me about her own experience in 1966 when the pay of (female) public health nurses was reviewed and compared to the pay of (male) health inspectors. While registered nurses need four years of post-secondary education, health inspectors take a six-month course. In the end, it was decided that health inspectors should be paid more than nurses because they have families to support. This despite the fact that most of the nurses my mom worked with were single mothers (of course, back then, there was no maternity leave so women quit when they got pregnant – so it makes sense that the only working women with children would be the sole earners for their families). “Affirmative action for women is another topic of furious debate. I have often heard men sneer at affirmative action as the most contemptible of reverse discriminations. ‘Wouldn’t you be ashamed to have it said that you only got your job because of special discrimination?’ they often say to [Landsberg]. Why, I wonder, do these men never feel ashamed that they almost certainly enjoy their jobs, status, and income because of the overwhelming special privilege given to men?”

Thirty years ago, two-thirds of people living in poverty were women. Landsberg blames this fact on the mythology that women’s primary task is wifedom and motherhood, and that task comes without material reward in our economic system: “Why aren’t women rewarded then, for the housewifery and motherhood that are so sentimentally exalted in the mythology of ‘the little woman’? Why is poverty the mostly likely lot in life for women who have devoted themselves solely to these sanctified tasks? The answer is simple. Her worth is defined only in relation to man. The whole world beams upon her devoted motherhood until her husband leaves her. Then what avails her secret brownie recipe, her gleaming floor? She has no skills worth selling in the outside world and so must become that most despised and impoverished of all humans in Canada, the welfare mother. Now her motherhood has something tainted about it; intimations of filth and degradation surround her. The shudder we once reserved for illegitimacy is now awarded to the women unlucky enough to have children but no longer any man to serve.”

Thirty years ago, the (female) editor of Roget’s Thesaurus neutralized a number of gendered terms, like changing mankind to humankind. “The Globe and Mail was outraged. ‘Neutered!’ exclaimed the headline of its editorial — a Freudian slip if there ever was one, since the Globe has always argued that ‘man’ words like ‘mankind’ were neuter, not masculine, to begin with.” If you think these language changes are not important, Landsberg suggests you “imagine a small boy growing up in a fictional Amazonia, where phrases like womankind, she, chairwoman, God created woman in her own image, all women are created equal, womanhood, and all of woman’s history, are the dominant norm, and everything male is a kind of subvariant, afterthought or abnormality. Would you expect little George to grow up and apply for jobs as chairwoman of the board, or even waitress, actress, or alderwoman?”

(It might be tempting to say we’ve come a long way since then, but I’m not convinced. We may have stronger penalties for rape and a broader definition of sexual assault, but something like 60 or 70 percent of rapes still go unreported. We may have pay equity legislation but somehow we still don’t have pay equity. There remains a 21 percent income gap between men and women – not much better than the 10 to 25 percent Landsberg cited thirty years ago. We may have paid maternity leave in Canada, but we still don’t have enough affordable childcare and the work culture still doesn’t help dual-income families balance work and family. Women remain among the poorest of the poor in Canada. Almost one-quarter (24 percent) of Canadian women raising children on their own are poor and 14 percent of single older women are poor.)

Now, I’m not saying that the women photographers listed by Badger all dealt with these issues directly in their work. I’m not familiar enough with their work to know. I’m just saying that thirty to fifty years ago, women had a lot to say.

So why am I mad at Badger? Here’s a man who gets it. He understands the complications of what feminists are trying to dismantle. Before his essay, it hadn’t quite occurred to me that my general preference for ’straight’ photography might be the result of sexist conditioning. Obviously, as my first post on gender shows, I was approaching the idea that our visual tastes might be shaped by sexist preferences. But I didn’t think as far as Badger does. When I first saw Cindy Sherman’s work — I remember pulling the book down from my university library’s shelf — I hated it on sight. In fact, I often find that my first response to a lot of women artists’ who work along the alternative or directorial themes Badger sees is that I just don’t like it. Give me Edward Weston and Stephen Shore and all the rest of the photographers Szarkowski promoted any day. As Michele Landsberg points out, “the more we talk about the ways in which women are victimized and oppressed, the more we alienate the many young women who very naturally scorn to identify themselves as underdogs. [...] The very individuals whose wrongs are to be exposed and sufferings relieved would much rather see themselves, thank you very much, as winners, not losers. Happily deluded that they themselves are invulnerable, they reject the critique along with the sackcloth and ashes.” That is how I felt when I first saw Cindy Sherman’s work.

Well, I’m mad for a few reasons. For one, he only shares these insights after most of his book focuses on white male photographers, all practitioners of the ’straight’ photograph, all pretty well-known already: Walker Evans, Eugene Atget, Richard Avedon, Martin Parr, John Gossage and Robert Adams. Of the essays in the second part of the book, two focus on the work of one woman photographer each: Susan Lipper and Anna Fox. Other than the essay I’m discussing here, the rest are mostly about men. Badger does use one of Eileen Cowin’s images for the cover, but it feels like too little too late. And he starts the essay with a long excuse about why he’s focused on men, even though he’s well aware of the bias:

“I am sure that the kind of photography I particularly like is made primarily by male photographers. The reason why I like it is probably because I am male, and have been conditioned to like it, and so on and so forth. [...] As a critic, I have not written as much about women as I have about men, but then again, I haven’t been asked as much. Critics tend to write about certain things because they are asked, and I think that many women photographers quite naturally ask fellow women to introduce their monographs or review their shows.”

Don’t critics have a responsibility to bring good work to the public’s attention? You could argue he’s trying to do just that by writing the essay, but giving women photographers an essay or exhibition of their own just doesn’t cut it for me. Badger offers “a suggestion for an exhibition that would rectify this state of affairs, or at least illuminate a corner of recent photographic history that has been somewhat neglected.” But one exhibition is not going to rectify this state of affairs at all. If women and minorities are only represented exclusively in the context of women and minorities, their work remains outside the canon, an alternative to it. It doesn’t do anything to get at the root of the problem: privilege. And that’s just not acceptable.

That said, you have to start somewhere. And an exhibition is as good a place as any. My biggest beef with Badger, though, is that he makes the suggestion, but it seems like he wants someone else to act on it. Maybe I’m not being fair, but I didn’t get any sense of urgency or agency from the essay. I don’t think he’s actually interested in making this exhibition a reality. He just wants to point out the gap and have someone else make it happen. No doubt he thinks it’s a job more suitable for a woman, since it’s really a woman’s issue. Joerg Colberg, not usually one to step down from a contentious discussion, did the same thing when he said, “I hope that especially ‘From Diane Arbus to Cindy Sherman’ will not only be read and discussed widely, but that it will also result in the exhibition (and re-evaluation!) of overlooked female photographers Badger proposes.” He’s not going to discuss it beyond that sentence, but he sure hopes someone else will.

It seems to me this is a major part of the problem. There are good, smart men of influence who understand the issues that feminism is fighting, but they don’t see it as their place to take up the fight. Badger says, “I can lay my hand on my heart and say that I never consciously consider the gender of a photographer when looking at work.” But maybe it’s time that he did. How else to combat unconscious bias but with conscious thought and action? If not him, then who?

____

* The first essay in Women and Children First, “Drink Up Your Shrinking-Potion” is positively brilliant. So brilliant and so out-of-print that I’m seriously considering breaking copyright and retyping the whole thing, just so more people can read it.

Derbygirls Blog has been featuring guest posts by derby girls about what drew them to the sport initially and what keeps them in it. This post by Rachel MadHo about being queer and a derby girl stood out to me in particular, especially this part:

“Within the derby community, minority though I may still be, I am neither invisible nor spectacle. I can’t think of another context where being a minority does not mean being in the margins. My difference, my queerness, is known and acknowledged—yet I am not treated like the Other. Most of my leaguemates see the real me, and appreciate instead of gawking. They get it. Even the straight ones.

“Because, I think, there is a queerness about rollergirls—whatever their gender preference in partners. There is an understanding that as women, the world we’ve been given and the roles we’ve been assigned aren’t quite right, don’t quite fit. There is a determination to do things differently, to in fact do everything we aren’t supposed to do: act out, speak up, take up space, know ourselves and be true to ourselves, own our sexuality and whatever it means to us, fight for what we want instead of accepting what we get, always have each other’s backs.”

A day or two before that post showed up in my reader I was just remarking to myself that my latest images are feeling awfully heteronormative to me, and I don’t want that. So at some point I’m going to have to seek out queer derby girls. It feels a bit mercenary but I think it’s important to include that perspective.

* * *

I’ve been working on editing my show coming up in March. Editing is HARD. Especially with this derby girls series, where I have some definite ideas I want to get across. I find myself getting attached to particular items in a derby girl’s home, and I want to use the images with those things in them even if they don’t really work. I can’t seem to get any distance from the things… is there a word for inappropriate attachments to things? To give you a few more examples, I’ll start with Lawna Mower who I photographed a week or two ago:

I love the Barbie/pageant winner topping her tree. But I wish I’d chosen a better height for my camera because I’m pretty sure nobody else’s eye will go there. And there’s too many angles for my taste.

I love the tinsel on her light cord, the repeating lines of the plates in her dish rack and the vintage high chair. But they’re all a little too far apart and too close to the edge of the frame. (I’m constantly crushing myself into corners to try to fit stuff in…)

This is probably the best picture from the shoot. The light was nice, but the only thing I was attached to was her green toille (?) curtains, which I couldn’t fit in anyways. What to do?

Of the images you’ve seen before, I offer these confessions.

I LOVE Suzy Slam’s candle. Is there a name for that gesture? (I also love her socks!) But I think she’s just a little too centred in the frame somehow.

Baroness von Spike’s husband is a famous cartoonist and I just loved seeing the word Gynecology on the wall. But do you even notice it?

Hey! Maybe you can help me out. Will you tell me if you even noticed the things I love? That might be a first step to letting go.

Anyways, editing is HARD. I wish there were resources to help, but I haven’t seen any. Don Weber and Alec Soth are both great editors, imho, and they’ve both helped me, but I’m pretty sure it’s such an intuitive thing you can’t really teach it.

Just the other day, the Globe and Mail covered a recent study that showed that “On average, men were 4.5 per cent more likely to receive promotions at any level than white females, 7.9 per cent more likely to get promoted than minority males and 16.1 per cent more likely than minority women. These results remained true, even when controlled for age, education, years at the company and performance evaluation.”

There’s been a lot of discussion in the literary world recently, started by the critical acclaim for Franzen’s Freedom. This article from Slate is the best I’ve read on that topic. Here is an excerpt that really speaks to what was on my mind in my first post:

“All this is speculative, you might find yourself thinking. I agree. All we can do here is speculate. But one example comes to mind, concerning a New York Times review of Schooling, a poised, ambitious debut novel by Heather McGowan, which made use of stream-of-consciousness and other experimental fiction techniques to tell the story of a precocious girl who has an intense relationship with a male teacher at her boarding school. The reviewer—a man—concluded that such difficult, “fissuring” techniques were justifiable in Ulysses, when Joyce was writing about Leopold and Molly Bloom and a post-war world, but not in Schooling because, “By comparison, the small, private story of Catrine Evans and Mr. Gilbert at the Monstead School has no greater reach. Where is the experiment in this experimental fiction?” To this reader, the reviewer’s outright dismissal of crucial issues in female experience—the way male desire shapes female ambition and sense of selfhood; the way authority is always located in male attention—betrayed a telling assumption about the smallness, the unimportance of women’s experience. Ironically, his very dismissal only underscored the significance of the issues Schooling was exploring.”

I saw a letter responding to a white man (not being in the tech industry I don’t know his name at all, but he’s probably important) who claimed that the tech industry was “more merit driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are. If your idea rocks and you can execute, you can change the world and/or get really, stinking rich.” The response to his claim pointed out that it does in fact matter how old you are and what sex you are. She went on to call the guy out for sitting on the sidelines of discussions about how to get women more involved in the industry.

And here is an excerpt from the letter that I thought particularly compelling:
“You are a successful, young, white male who has the ear and eye of many powerful men in the tech industry, and you – like too many of them – have sat on the sidelines over the years scratching your heads or scratching your balls. Not many of you have taken positive actions to make positive changes in the system to create more opportunity for ANYONE who is not white and male.

“I’m not talking tokenism. I’m not talking special “Minority-only” or “Women-only” forums – but tearing down and rebuilding a foundation that truly addresses the inherent and deeply-entrenched barriers that keep women back and to a lesser extent – but no less important – keeps minorities back as well.

“I’m not looking for a handout, however, as long as the foundation under us all favors men – and in the case of tech startups young men – we’ll never get to parity or even a reasonable representation of women helming tech startups. ”

And just in case you’re at all skeptical about the existence of gender bias, I offer this video about the Bechdel test for movies. I saw it first a few months ago and it kind of shattered me.

Getting back to photography, I did find a few competitions that offer hope. Critical Mass is a contest in which photographers pay an initial fee to submit 10 photos. They’re reviewed by an initial small jury, and the best 175 are moved onto the next round, which gets judged by a whole lot of influential and renowned jurors. They announced the top 175 finalists recently and I counted the men and women. There were three I couldn’t figure out from their names or googling whether they were men or women, so I just didn’t count them. But of the other 172 finalists there was a precisely 50/50 split between men and women. I thought this must be the result of a blind judging process, because it’s the highest ratio I’ve counted yet, but they don’t judge blindly. The photographers’ names and biographies and statements are part of the judging process. Kudos to Critical Mass!

*I started this post more than a week ago, so the numbers are at least a week out of date and I’m too tired to update them… He was at 125 I think when I last counted.

Wow. There’s been quite a flood of traffic here over the last few days, but it’s slowing down now. Last week I corresponded a bit with the author of 500 Photographers about some of the issues I mentioned in my recent post about women in photography. He refused my request for permission to quote some of his emails here, saying that he didn’t want to enter the discussion publicly because he doesn’t know enough on the subject and his blog was never intended to engage in that subject. I suppose I could quote him without his permission, but I’d prefer not to.

Still, the correspondence got to me. On the same day, I attended training at work about the requirements of new legislation regarding workplace violence and harassment. The training raised three stories from the last decade(ish) involving workplace violence and harassment. Two of the three stories involved women being harassed by men in positions of power in their workplace while their employers did virtually nothing. Lori Dupont and Theresa Vince. They are horrible stories. When I got home, I got a package in the mail from one of the derby girls I photographed. She had a document on her fridge when I went to her home called Domestic Violence Bill of Rights. She left an abusive relationship three years ago, and she still needs this reminder on her fridge. I asked if I could have a copy of it for my project, and she was happy to oblige. She said, “Every time I think about throwing it out, I put it back on the fridge.” When I opened her envelope the other day, it was the original that she sent, while she kept the copy. So it was a heavy day.

The next day, a friend sent me to this book review. It is worth reading. No doubt the book is worth reading too. I’ll do it when I’m feeling less raw.

Anyways… Friday was my day off, and I was still thinking about women and photography. I decided to do the numbers on resources that I think represent women fairly well. I also want to find out more about how many women are studying and practicing photography, to see how those compare with the people getting shown, but I think that will take more effort. Anyways, I emailed Flak Photo to see if there was an easier way to count the contributors, like a textual list of names or something. As part of the correspondence, I gave him a link to my post, and he decided to broadcast it through his channels. It caught me off guard, because it’s such a rambly and barely coherent piece of writing, but now people are commenting on it and discussing it elsewhere too.

Most of the discussion seems to be happening on Flak Photo’s facebook page and in the comments on the original post. But it’s also happening on flickr here and a little bit on the original thread I referenced. It seems to be dying down now.

I spent a couple hours counting the proportion of women on Flak Photo and Fraction Magazine. They both show photography I like, so it was quite enjoyable. My numbers were off on Fraction, as the editor, David Bram, pointed out in the comments to my post. He got 43 percent. My counting on Flak is probably a bit off too, but it’s a large enough sample size that it’s probably reasonable. On Flak, I went back to Nov. 1, 2009 and counted 211 photographers in total that have been shown since then. 41 percent of them are women.

Also, one of the admins from La Familia Abrazada asked for clarification of my comment that the photos of mine that got in were cheesy or overly sentimental. When I went through the photos that made it in the pool, I realized there were two that made it in that I quite like and think are good photos and not cheesy. But two made it in that I do think are cheesy. Don’t get me wrong, I like them. As pictures of my kid. But not as fine art photography. Anyways… I would share the images, but I don’t want to sidetrack the conversation, which I never really intended to be about my work. Some commenters, particularly on the facebook thread, have gone down that rabit hole, and honestly, I’m fine with the idea of my work being crap. I don’t think it’s all crap, but I’m not convinced that the photos I posted in my post are at all good. I’m still very early in my journey, and I still have a lot to learn. Maybe I would be more concerned about people thinking my work is bad if I was further along in my journey, but I’m not. I guess I just needed to get that bit off my chest.

We live in a sexist world. I was about to get sidetracked into a rant about how thoroughly our society encodes gender in our children despite our best efforts, but thanks to the delete key, I just saved you from it. So I will just say, read this book review.