Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Gifted women, Hair, Harry and Gayliens
Going on a reading rampage since I have all this free time. Reread Smart Girls, Gifted Women, which I originally read in middle school and finished Rapunzel's Daughters which has been on my reading list for a while. Smart Girls was updated to included more data on the original women in her study to see if they had changed. When I read the first edition years ago, it seemed a cautionary tale, but reading now how "many gifted women continue to struggle with waning belief in their abilities, with the need to submerge intellectual goals in the "culture of romance", and most alarming, with a lack of a sense of purpose" I find myself falling into that trap. Well not the part about submerging goals in the culture of romance because the romance thing isn't happening either. In a way, I was a little annoyed at the author for dismissing the women with happy family lives and jobs like nurse and teacher as less fulfilled. I guess her point was the not so happy family situations and divorces that happen if the fairy tale romance turns sour, but who can predict that, just as the perfect job can also turn sour with sudden layoffs.
Rapunzel's Daughters also focused on women and their attitudes towards hair. Looking over the AAA abstracts, it seems as if good hair/bad hair among African Americans is a much-talked about topic but she goes beyond to also talk about Mexican-American "cholas", how parental and romantic relationships impacted choice of hairdo, how chemo and alopecia patients deal with hair loss, why Felicity's haircut caused a fuss (now she could use Joyce's head shaving from the "Amazing Race" and Cassandra's haircut on "America's Top Model" as examples) and why lesbians feel pressure to cut their hair. I remember the latter being a question posed during frosh orientation at BMC; here the answer is to identify themselves to other lesbians and more commonly to signal to men that they're not interested in being pursued. I found this somewhat ironic--the orientation is pro-female, not anti-male, and you'd never hear about gay men making themselves look less attractive so women won't pursue them (on the contrary the stereotype is that they end up looking more attractive with their sense of style if you believe the fab 5). This part of the propaganda at women's colleges--you can let your appearance go since you're only around other women and there are no guys to make you feel pressured--seems to be missing the point. Shouldn't you want to look good for your own sake and not because of the guys? I've been seeing a lot of episodes of "What not to Wear" and "Ten Years Younger" and they end up bugging me--it's always a blonder, made up woman in feminine pointy shoes that they want to see and no matter what issues the guy has, it's always her that has to change. Though now at least with "Queer Eye" we see the guys madeover too.
Saw Harry Potter on Sunday in Laurinburg. Was pretty jam-packed. "Goblet of Fire" was my favorite book and the movie was good too, though they left a lot out, including themes which are probably going to be important next time around. Cho and the Patel twins were perfectly cast though Fleur seemed rather plain, just a typical blond French girl rather than the seductive half-Veela in the book. There was less involved mystery than in the book which made sense since the whole plots around the elves, Sirius, Percy and the missing Ministry person , gambling and most of the World Cup scenes would have added another hour or so to the movie. But there wasn't the same setup for the next movie with the dementor kiss and Ministry denial, and the priore encantum effect was never explained. And what of Igor running off and Fred & George's getting the prize money to open a joke store?
Going through AAA abstracts, so many tempting talks to go to, most dealing with Mexico and transnationalism or cyberspace. Also one on "gayliens" on Star Trek. Wrote the guy giving the talk--luckily not his dissertation topic since it'd be sad to be the one to tell him that all the series have been cancelled. Have read arguments on the internet with people lobbying for a recurring gay character on Star Trek, not just among the aliens of the week. I guess Star Trek since it takes place in the future is a hope for some people and its multicultural casting has deemed it progressive. But somehow it doesn't seem to translate--for race, all you have to do is hire a black actor to have a black character but you can't just hire a gay actor to make the character gay. It's not as if the black characters ever date outside their race (even the blind Geordi ends up making out with a black woman). I guess the much hyped Uhara-Kirk kiss brought people's hopes up even though in the episode it was coerced just as the female trills kiss in DS9 apparently didn't count since they had once been married heterosexuals before the trill changed bodies. On the other hand "Firefly" in one hour had an interracial *human* couple, a "registered companion" who also "serviced" women, a sadistic old man who tortured the captain for kicks, cutting off one of his ears, a PTSS/brain-op teen who took out 3 men with an automatic with her eyes closed, and a crew which threw in some bad Chinese every so often. Pretty intense though a little too violent for my liking--no stun settings here!
Going on a reading rampage since I have all this free time. Reread Smart Girls, Gifted Women, which I originally read in middle school and finished Rapunzel's Daughters which has been on my reading list for a while. Smart Girls was updated to included more data on the original women in her study to see if they had changed. When I read the first edition years ago, it seemed a cautionary tale, but reading now how "many gifted women continue to struggle with waning belief in their abilities, with the need to submerge intellectual goals in the "culture of romance", and most alarming, with a lack of a sense of purpose" I find myself falling into that trap. Well not the part about submerging goals in the culture of romance because the romance thing isn't happening either. In a way, I was a little annoyed at the author for dismissing the women with happy family lives and jobs like nurse and teacher as less fulfilled. I guess her point was the not so happy family situations and divorces that happen if the fairy tale romance turns sour, but who can predict that, just as the perfect job can also turn sour with sudden layoffs.
Rapunzel's Daughters also focused on women and their attitudes towards hair. Looking over the AAA abstracts, it seems as if good hair/bad hair among African Americans is a much-talked about topic but she goes beyond to also talk about Mexican-American "cholas", how parental and romantic relationships impacted choice of hairdo, how chemo and alopecia patients deal with hair loss, why Felicity's haircut caused a fuss (now she could use Joyce's head shaving from the "Amazing Race" and Cassandra's haircut on "America's Top Model" as examples) and why lesbians feel pressure to cut their hair. I remember the latter being a question posed during frosh orientation at BMC; here the answer is to identify themselves to other lesbians and more commonly to signal to men that they're not interested in being pursued. I found this somewhat ironic--the orientation is pro-female, not anti-male, and you'd never hear about gay men making themselves look less attractive so women won't pursue them (on the contrary the stereotype is that they end up looking more attractive with their sense of style if you believe the fab 5). This part of the propaganda at women's colleges--you can let your appearance go since you're only around other women and there are no guys to make you feel pressured--seems to be missing the point. Shouldn't you want to look good for your own sake and not because of the guys? I've been seeing a lot of episodes of "What not to Wear" and "Ten Years Younger" and they end up bugging me--it's always a blonder, made up woman in feminine pointy shoes that they want to see and no matter what issues the guy has, it's always her that has to change. Though now at least with "Queer Eye" we see the guys madeover too.
Saw Harry Potter on Sunday in Laurinburg. Was pretty jam-packed. "Goblet of Fire" was my favorite book and the movie was good too, though they left a lot out, including themes which are probably going to be important next time around. Cho and the Patel twins were perfectly cast though Fleur seemed rather plain, just a typical blond French girl rather than the seductive half-Veela in the book. There was less involved mystery than in the book which made sense since the whole plots around the elves, Sirius, Percy and the missing Ministry person , gambling and most of the World Cup scenes would have added another hour or so to the movie. But there wasn't the same setup for the next movie with the dementor kiss and Ministry denial, and the priore encantum effect was never explained. And what of Igor running off and Fred & George's getting the prize money to open a joke store?
Going through AAA abstracts, so many tempting talks to go to, most dealing with Mexico and transnationalism or cyberspace. Also one on "gayliens" on Star Trek. Wrote the guy giving the talk--luckily not his dissertation topic since it'd be sad to be the one to tell him that all the series have been cancelled. Have read arguments on the internet with people lobbying for a recurring gay character on Star Trek, not just among the aliens of the week. I guess Star Trek since it takes place in the future is a hope for some people and its multicultural casting has deemed it progressive. But somehow it doesn't seem to translate--for race, all you have to do is hire a black actor to have a black character but you can't just hire a gay actor to make the character gay. It's not as if the black characters ever date outside their race (even the blind Geordi ends up making out with a black woman). I guess the much hyped Uhara-Kirk kiss brought people's hopes up even though in the episode it was coerced just as the female trills kiss in DS9 apparently didn't count since they had once been married heterosexuals before the trill changed bodies. On the other hand "Firefly" in one hour had an interracial *human* couple, a "registered companion" who also "serviced" women, a sadistic old man who tortured the captain for kicks, cutting off one of his ears, a PTSS/brain-op teen who took out 3 men with an automatic with her eyes closed, and a crew which threw in some bad Chinese every so often. Pretty intense though a little too violent for my liking--no stun settings here!
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