My mental circus, inside and out.

There was Janeway, the star captain.   Tough, gritty, sarcastic.  Star Trek always took risks for its time, and a woman starship captain was one of them.  But then, Janeway was ridiculed on The Simpsons through the figure of her fan, the comic store owner,  as if only lonely men with social disorders could possibly like her.

Posted by: EmmaPele at December 31, 2007 21:17 | link | comments (1)

In part, the media reflects what is already there, but it is also busily creating our realities as well.  For older women, this is quite serious, since it affects our incomes, our career paths, our emotional well-being, our ability to find intimacy, and our sense of satisfaction and efficacy, just as mafidl says.  Emma knows a bunch of women who are very powerful leaders (including her mother), but the media is so entrenched in backward thinking that it just can't seem to accomodate this reality.

CSI:  CSI isn't too bad, in terms of gender balance.  The women scientists are at least treated seriously, even though they tend to be the emotionally driven ones, with their sensitivity putting the lab at some sort of risk.  (Same with the African American man, who is connected to addiction.) You might ask, however,  why the love interest for Grissom is young Sarah, his protege, rather than the experienced and highly competent Catherine Willows  This appears to be a big male fantasy on TV now, the wise aging head of the office and the protege.  The glass ceiling is pretty obvious, in that you rarely, if ever, see women in these wise-aging-head-of-the-office roles, much less with a young male protege.

Emma has read recently that Sex in the City provided a sexy older woman figure in Samantha, but she questions just how  enlightened this portrayal is, given how vacuous those characters seem to be.

In terms of advertising,  there are many ads in which a young man faces the prospect of attraction from an old woman, and this is supposed to be the source of hilarity and disgust. 

Posted by: EmmaPele at December 31, 2007 00:15 | link | comments

Women in the Media

Emma is contemplating 50 this morning.   Emma doesn't really feel that old, except for a bit of creakiness, and she's more mentally fit than most of her students, that is for sure.  She attended a meeting with a doctor who wants to start a focus on aging effort at her university, and wants to bring in people from the humanities to help out.  Emma has a hard time even getting her mind around the notion that she is aging, and yet it appears she is now fully a part of this category, having gotten her notice from the AARP.  What she said at the meeting was that the media needs to be reformed.  And so, she has decided to chronicle the slams against older women in the media, so here we go.  Send any of your own sitings to Emma's email or leave a comment. 

Dexter:  Vincent Masuka, the forensics expert, is talking to Angel Batista, the recently separated homicide detective, about going to a bar.  When Batista suggests a place, Masuka says the women there are old, with "sagging tits."  Meanwhile, the audience is treated to a stream of images of naked young dead women and one live young woman (Debra Morgan) with a workout obsession.  Masuka, though strange and bald, ends up picking up a young "hottie" at his own favorite bar.  Esmee Pascal, the lieutenant and the oldest regular character on the series, is portrayed as obsessively jealous and irrational, while the FBI investigator, Frank Lundy (played by old Keith Carradine) is wise and insightful and a love interest for the young Debra Morgan.

On the other hand, there is this totally depressing story.

Posted by: EmmaPele at December 29, 2007 22:41 | link | comments (2)

Making a Christmas dinner is really a huge amount of work, and now that Emma has taken over this duty from her mother, who died two years ago, she is in awe of those women from the 1950s who managed to do it all without 1) a microwave, 2) a dishwasher, 3) a bread machine, and 4) a self-cleaning oven.  When Emma was poor, she didn't have any of these things either, but she never tried to put on a five course meal for an army of people.  These women mashed the potatoes, kneeded the dough, basted the turkey, rolled out the pie dough, actually *ironed* the cloth napkins, vaccumed with a vaccum cleaner heavier than an anvil, washed the dishes *by hand,* and all in heels, a skirt and pantyhose.  Somehow, they came to the table with their hair neatly done (with plastic rollers the night before) and clothes neatly pressed.  Compare to Emma, hair untrimmed, in socks without shoes, worn jeans, red courdoroy jacket splattered with a mix of whipped cream and mashed potatoes, and hands smelling of turkey carcass.  The cloth napkins were not ironed.  The glasses were only partially matched and one of her guests pointed out that they were on the wrong side of the plate.  With all of the many conveniences of a contemporary suburban kitchen, Emma is quite exhausted, fairly drunk, and wishing she had a robot maid that would finish loading the dishwasher.  Those women of the past!  What marvels they were, so devoted to the idea of civilization, of manners. 

Posted by: EmmaPele at December 26, 2007 10:07 | link | comments

Unlike the recent events in Burma, the crackdown on monks in Cambodia hasn't gotten much press.  They are protesting for religious freedom, land reform, and the rights of indigenous people (the Khmer).  They are defrocked, accused of being "fake monks" and sometimes sent to Vietnam where they are imprisoned and tortured.

Posted by: EmmaPele at December 22, 2007 21:10 | link | comments