Pricey $ex $chizophrenia

I find these two stories in the news this week oddly disturbing: (1) Good Morning America's profile piece on Sugar Daddies and (2) the conviction of Cecil Suwal, the 24-year old woman who helped manage a high class prostitution ring (known for uniting NY governor Eliot Spitzer with paid-for lover Ashley Dupré).



Helloooooo? Anybody else see a problem here? There is little difference between services like SugarDaddies.com and Suwal's company Emperor's Club VIP - in fact, the relationships that Suwal profited from are merely a neat subset of those promoted on the web (where people are looking for all kinds of emotional and physical arrangements) - just made formal in the marketplace by a series of discrete financial transactions. I understand that people may not like these relationships or respect them or the parties involved - and that's fine, judge away -  but criminalizing them seems excessive, especially in this economy when we can be taxing them.

Samantha Powers as Obama Aide

The Huffington Post is reporting that Samantha Powers, the Obama campaigner who made some unsavory remarks about Hillary Clinton during the campaign, will become senior director for multilateral affairs at the National Security Council, supporting Obama and interfacing with Clinton. To refresh, Powers' comment to a Scottish Newspaper regarding Clinton in the campaign were that "She is a monster, too... She is stooping to anything... the amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive."

Keep an eye out to see how this gets characterized next week, and let's hope the media is above making this into a cat fight.

Friday update: Movies Directed by Women

Sadly, no major releases of any pics with ladies n the directors chair this week. I'll throw some support behind Slumdog Millionaire for those who haven't seen it, as Loveleen Tandan shares directing credit with Danny Boyle and it's still in the top ten.

Hot or Not - Rate the Congremmen

Oh Arianna Huffington. I love you so much thatI cry a little on the weeks that you’re absent from Left, Right, and Center. And I freely admit that I have spent more than one occasion sitting in the car mouthing your scathing political commentary so I can perfect your charming accent. But first during one of your pre-election rants, you call Sarah Palin a bimbo. You can say a lot of things about Sarah Palin, but I do think “bimbo” crosses one of those lines where it’s the kind of gross, personal, and gender specific attack ( could you not have used the more neutral “ignorant” or “airhead”?) that the left accuses the right of using all the time. If you’re gonna complain about something, you can’t go run and commit the same offense when it’s your turn. Needless to say I was a little disappointed.

And now this in the sidebar of The Huffington Post:

My heart flutters a little – I want to like this. But I just can’t abide. I know that if there were the same thing but with women instead of men, I’d be railing.

I do realize between this post and last I’m starting to sound all humorless feminist. I assure you I’m not – I’m pro porn, enjoy South Park and the comic stylings of Brad Neeley – I’m fun, I swear! I just think we can’t pursue humor like this until it’s cool to do on both sides. So, hold off for another 50 years or so till we’ve got equal numbers on Capitol Hill, capiche?

Daba Daba Do!

So I stumbled upon the Dating A Banker Anonymous (DABA) blog last night (missing the NY Times article about this on Monday). In case you missed it, the members of DABA, which started as a sort of informal social get-together/group therapy session for those whose boyfriends and husbands work/ed in the financial business, now blog about their experiences and how their upscale lifestyles have succumbed to the downturn. They refer to their beaus as FBFs, which stands for “Financial-Guy Boyfriend” (though for years I have been trying to popularize the acronym a friend penned:  IBDB, which stands for “investment banker douchebag”) Woe are they, as their loved ones  (pun intended, as may of them have broken off with their adored partners who they no longer love) lose status, job security, and discretionary income.

[caption id="attachment_22" align="alignright" width="300" caption="NYT article 27 Jan 09 "][/caption]

My problem with this blog is the tone. Lord knows that I enjoy a wry witticism, a gut busting one-liner, a silly play on words and even an occasional fart joke or two. But these postings are only kind of funny. The women themselves describe their blog as “very tongue–in-cheek,” but there’s no very here. Their posts are not dripping with over the top descriptions of the Bergdorf shopping sprees or lavish nights inebriating flitting from club to club. It’s just whining. There’s not even a nod or a self-reflexive moment to let us know that they’re being ironic – no fourth wall break, no wink to the reader or apology to clue us in as to how to read what they’re writing.

I’ll admit there’s a certain lightness to it. These women are savvy – they don’t write about their losses entirely sincerely. But the tone is more snide than sarcasm, like these women have this we-know-it’s-a-little-ridiculous-but-we're-entitled-to-our-moment-to-bitch-and-if-you-don’t-like-it-then-suck-it attitude that makes me agree with the commenter who wrote "makes me want to laucgh and punch you in the face at the same time" - good thing these ladies are anonymous.

There’s not an ounce of genuine empathy or concern for what their partners are going through: the very real loss of identity their husbands/boyfriends professions suffer as the careers they have invested their identity in crash alongside the market. That's kind of what we do to them as a society - ask them to put their emotional and personal stock in success and providing. Then these men lose that, and you're upset about not going to the ballet? If it were the other way around, the feminists would want to string these heartless folks up by their testicles.

What's worse (and forgive me for waxing too bleeding heart like the loyal NPR listener I am here), but a lot of hard working people who aspired to be homeowners were sold on the American Dream by your boyfriends and husbands and got really hurt. Really. The aspiring middle class (albeit, not entirely devoid of their own responsibility for signing on to huge amounts of debt) got taken advantage of by those FGFs.  And you, you ate and drank and shopped your way through the housing bubble, and spent the commissions and earnings and bonuses of your loved ones, income that destroyed people’s finances and jobs and retirements and drove the world’s economy into the gutter. You, yes you, have some role in that.

So have some shame, and keep your grousing to cocktail hour at Nobu. Infinte bandwith be damned, there is no room for your whimpering drivel here and that gentle dusting of what you call sarcasm doesn’t exculpate you from responsibility for what you write, or from your role in sowing this economic mess.

Inaugural Post

I write this post a little over one week after the inauguration of Barack Obama. The year 2008 has been an interesting year for women (men too) in many respects.  Certainly as politics goes the ascension of Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin as contenders on the national political stage was a significant breakthrough for women in the mainstream. The Christian Science Monitor reports that modest gains in parity across the board were made so that Congress is now 17% women/83% men and in state legislatures the breakdown is 24% women/76% men. There’s some ways to go until we reach a sampling that reflects our society, but politics proves more promising than entertainment.

The Celluloid Ceiling Report from the University of San Diego confirmed that for 2007 (numbers for 2008 should be released in the next 1-2 weeks) women made up 15% directors, producers, writers, cinematographers and editors working on the top 250 domestic-grossing films in 2007, with directors numbering a low 6%.  These statistics are deceptive – they don’t take into account independent media production or commercial television production, and they beg the question as to what’s the ratio of women trying to make it into these fields vis-à-vis men, which is necessary to know if we’re trying to examine and root out the discrimination we assume is at work.
Every year, there is some splashy piece in the New York Times or LA Times that bemoans the state of women in Hollywood, either on the screen as the creative force behind the story, and our attention is drawn to the issue for a brief moment. Then we settle back into the status quo until the next article. This column is a response to that ennui.
I think it’s time we focus a persistent gaze onto this issue and the broader issue of how women and men are creating, consuming, and appearing in the media manifestations of our technologically-driven culture. To be clear, I don’t advocate for some sort of cultural affirmative action for chicks. Rather this blog is a critical intervention by which I aim to pose questions to make us think about who we are and what we want. For example, regarding women as directors, I don’t think that a sort of token system whereby women are handed gigs makes sense to of a sense of correcting a wrong makes sense. I DO think that women and men are underestimated as consumers of good storytelling that involves either women in front of the screen or behind the camera. I DO think that we have a marketing and genre problem – the existence of the broad genre of “chick flicks” seems to leave no space for films featuring women and directed by women that have broad and/or commercial appeal to both genders. I DO think we expect female audiences to have bi-sexual interest in protagonists (meaning they watch stories with both men and women in the lead), while we assume men are single-sex oriented (lovin’ only the male leads). I DO think television has broken some of these barriers in important ways (which somehow seem not to translate to its big screen sib). And I DO think marketing executives should be challenged to find a way to mobilize men as an audience for good stories that happen to be about/by women.  In this internet-driven micro-targeting culture, we are increasingly marketed to and treated as the sum of our properties (m/f, age, race, zip code, income, political party, etc), rather than who we are.
Thus in this inaugural post I am calling for an adjustment. We are on autopilot and in this, the so called era of change, I'm issing the rallying cry that we look at things a little more thoughtfully, or hell, look at them at all.   - TVB

Greetings and Salutations

Welcome to The Belle Curve. This site will be a forum for the provocative and sometimes funny insights into the nature of gender and culture by Tara Von Baron.