Archive for January, 2010

Corporation:FAIL! Teens, Sex & Violence

I am not an avid TV watcher, but I keep up to date with what’s going on in pop culture through the status updates on my Facebook news feed. After MTV aired the episode of Jersey Shore where Snooki, one of the guidettes, gets punched by a guy at the bar, I read Facebook statuses of friends like “damn that bitch got smacked” and “that’s so crazy, pumped for next week’s episode”. I was interested in how MTV would deal with the violence, so I sat at home and caught a re-run of that episode. After the show, MTV stated they did not condone violence and if you are in a situation where you are being abused, please contact a hotline and seek help. It felt like they were clearing their name, airing a 60-second PSA on dating violence, after glorifying violence against women. I doubt the millions of viewers who drank in Jersey Shore sat around afterward discussing gender violence, or how fucked up it was on MTV’s part to promote the episode using that clip. Most people were excited to catch next week’s episode and hoped it was as juicy.

February is Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month, and I’ve been watching an influx of shows, PSAs and segments created by the mainstream media in order to combat this “rising epidemic” of teen dating violence and “sexting”. MTV has launched their own campaign against ‘digital drama’ and ’sexting’, A Thin Line, with a website full of expensive-looking videos, quizzes and stories targeted towards teens. As a young womyn of color and a product of this generation, I couldn’t help but notice how much money MTV executives were spending to create a website for teens with hired teen actors and a $10k challenge. Is this what MTV is presenting to my peer group? A handful of badly-written scripts, supposedly “for us” with some edgy graphics?

Katie Couric’s featured video was on teen dating violence, and was basically “A Thin Line” for mothers. The video did offer heartfelt stories, alarming statistics and voices of real victims of violence, but what I got out of the thirty-minute segment is terror that clueless mothers across America are jotting down mental notes listening to Couric & Co.’s advice. Couric suggests that parents should ban their child from using his/her phone at night and keep the computers outside the bedrooms. If my mother banned me from my phone after 9 p.m. to keep me safe from violence, I would have told her to stop paying attention to novelas! Follow Couric’s advice if you want your daughter/son hating you; adolescence is hectic as it is, no need for more tension in the household.

As a young feminist-activista growing up in Bushwick, I was aware of violence; I would hear couples arguing in the streets at night, witnessed husbands raising their hands at wives, and know girls who think when a guy gets crazy jealous its because he loves her. Going to high school in the Lower East Side, I became more involved with the activist scene and declared myself a feminist. After the murder of a seventeen year-old Tina Negron at a local supermarket by her boyfriend, a neighborhood coalition formed called The Power of Peace. POP wants to put an end to violence and promote peace through organizing marches, events and community projects. Through empowering young people to make change, we can create environments and give them the knowledge to make smarter decisions. I doubt my friends have seen the Couric special or heard of “A Thin Line”, and they probably wouldn’t show much interest in it, since we’re not represented. Corporate media, we’re smarter than you think we are, so give us respect and show an interest in what we actually have to say!

Do women need “rescuing”?

1.12.10 Carmen | 1 Comment »

To describe the first day of Feminist Winter Term would be too challenging a task for a paragraph, so today I made the executive decision (for your benefit, as well) to simply blog about each day individually.

It began with the classic feminist icebreaker: “when did it click?” There was laughter and there were tears, and one heartbreaking story about someone’s four-year-old niece, who said she wanted to be a president when she grew up…and knew that in order to do so, she needed to grow up to be a boy. We checked out the local area, hit up Babeland and Bluestockings (what kind of feminists would we be in NYC without such things?), and then stopped in for our first meeting.

The Ms. Foundation. Speakers from were also in attendance from the Barnaba Institute as we crowded into a conference room and listened to stories of sex trafficking, girls as young as 9 forced into sex slavery and kidnapped off the streets by pimps who beat them and then convinced them they were meant for each other. The stories were a challenge to listen to, not only because of the wrenching imagery, but also because of my nagging gender studies conscience, which wanted so badly (and then raised my hand) to ask –

Do you think it’s a problem with sex work, or do you think a lot of this is also masculinity and sexuality and how we talk about them? If we gave women agency, and control, wouldn’t these pimps be powerless?

There was hesitation from the presenters and from the audience, although a few receptive voices backed me up. There is more to human trafficking, after all, than the capitalist needs and demands- there are people doing these things. And do women need “rescuing?” Well, I suppose anyone would need such a thing if they were being beaten, killed, and forced into sex slavery. But does it deny sex workers whom opt-in to sex work, and operate either independently or within an “organization,” and reap successful capital, to summarize sex work as inherently dangerous? And why are we worried only about rescuing the victims, and not finding those sniveling, pathetic people committing the real crime- abuse- against them? (As you can see, it was thoughtful to say the least.)

I left early and hopped the C Train with setting up to do.

Shelby Knox. She sat with her usual ease, blending in with us mere mortal feminists before she delivered her story. Some of us confessed to have never seeing The Education of Shelby Knox, but anyone who has ever met Shelby knows that that’s the least of her worries- instead, we tackled intergenerational feminist divides, how to unite our movement, and exactly what we young people, gathered by Soapbox Media, think of being called the “Forth Wave,” a term Shelby likes to use to describe herself.

If the people I’ve met so far, and the cards I’ve handed out, the smiles I’ve received, and the casual discussions about rape culture I’ve had at FWT so far have taught me anything, it’s that a term about what is to come is the best for us: because we’ve got a lot of energy in the works. (Also, cheers to encouraging someone to buy Yes Means Yes! – I remain loyal, ladies.)