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Newsweek’s big lady-baiting package this week offers a detour from the catfighting between Princeton Nobelist Paul Krugman and the White House (What? You can call it that when boys do it, too!) in order to focus on the creeping “diva-ization” of America’s young women:
Reared on reality TV and celebrity makeovers, girls as young as Marleigh are using beauty products earlier, spending more and still feeling worse about themselves. Four years ago, a survey by the NPD Group showed that, on average, women began using beauty products at 17. Today, the average is 13—and that's got to be an overstatement. According to market-research firm Experian, 43 percent of 6- to 9-year-olds are already using lipstick or lip gloss; 38 percent use hairstyling products; and 12 percent use other cosmetics. And the level of interest is making the girls of "Toddlers & Tiaras" look ordinary. "My daughter is 8, and she's like, so into this stuff it's unbelievable," says Anna Solomon, a Brooklyn social worker. "From the clothes to the hair to the nails, school is like No. 10 on the list of priorities."
Why are this generation's standards different? To start, this is a group that's grown up on pop culture that screams, again and again, that everything, everything, is a candidate for upgrading.
The article’s premise, essentially, is that women will spend a lot of money (see infographic) on things that are judged by enlightened society to be feckless and unnecessary. Yet these imposed norms about beauty get less play than the footage of hens-in-waiting clucking about lip gloss.
Perhaps the sensationalism arises because the pressures on women are so timeless. While gamely revealing her own, er, elaborate, grooming habits, author Jessica Bennett makes the fair point that TV shows like My Super Sweet 16 “raise the bar for what's considered over the top.”
But I don’t think girls are any any more worried about sprouting crow's feet than they used to be. Rather, the 21st century has amplified the traditional idea that appearance can be perfected via externalities. Leaps in technological capacity—regarding both products and the marketing thereof—have increased the pressure on us all. Suddenly, young women can learn where to get liposuction, and Botox (themselves improvements over the Ice Age techniques of never eating and never aging) via text message, or Web advertisement. They can compare themselves to schoolmates and celebrities instantly on Facebook. When I was a 'tween, you had to wait for YM magazine to come in the mail before you felt bad about yourself.
As usual, the immensely talented Sarah Haskins nails the convergence of stupidity and modernity better than I do: “Products that use pictures of science” are clearly the culprit.
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The talk of teacups and helicopters has me thinking about Taken, the fourth most popular movie in America and a film engineered to play on the worst, most irrational fears of American fathers—think Babel plus white slavery. A former CIA agent played by Liam Neeson is trying to spend more quality time with his 17-year-old daughter. She announces that she is going to spend the summer in Paris with a friend. "Paris!" he exclaims, "Paris is very dangerous." (Spoiler alert!) There is much talk of a seedy Gallic underworld. She persists, and he gives in despite his better, CIA-trained instincts. When she arrives in Paris she is immediately sex-trafficked by crafty Albanians. The Parisian police are in on it; Paris, it turns out, really is an amoral anarchic sexually perverse dystopia. Leaving U.S. jurisidiction sure was a mistake!
Liam Neeson tortures and kills some non-Americans and saves his daughter before anyone can touch her virginity, the loss of which is obviously the worst thing that could ever happen to an American 17-year-old female. Morals include: 1) Never let your virgin daughters leave the soft, warm womb of the United States and 2) The CIA is an omniscient, omnipresent organization whose competence and essential goodness should never, ever be in doubt.
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Margaret, Marjorie, I've been studiously avoiding reading your posts on The L-Word finale until now. My prosecutor recorded it and—tell me this isn't love—waited until I could watch it with her last night. Finales tend to be disappointing; this one was as well. (And how disappointing that we didn't get to see more of Lucy Lawless as the butch detective, a little wink to her longtime role as lesbian icon in Xena.) But gosh, the show was fun while it lasted. In the last season I enjoyed watching them turn Jenny (possibly the least believable lesbian on the planet, except maybe Erin Daniels as a tennis god—yeah, right) into an all-out bitch who hurts every last friend. I kinda enjoyed how much fun they had making everyone into Jenny's potential murderer; I'll vote for Bette. But the sixth season didn't have nearly enough sex. The fifth season included Tasha and Alice going at it with some excellent hungry heat, which they didn't have this season. And aside from them, there was all kinda kitschy sex: sex on a movie set! Sex in a movie trailer! Prison sex! Car sex! Bridesmaid sex! Adulterous sex! Shane, that hounddog, racing away from angry girls who've just had the best orgasms of their lives! Oh lordy, I laughed so hard at it all. And I cannot tell you how wonderful it was to watch girls do it the way girls really do it—not with long nails, like a porn movie for men, but down and dirty. Straight folks get this in their dramas and comedies all the time—realistic, well-shot heat—but I've never before seen it depicted well so consistently for lesbians. Just that deserves some awards.
And oh, how I loved Pam Grier being rescued from the purgatory of the blaxploitation bin. She should have a show all to herself, somewhere, somehow.
But you both should know that the biggest surprise audience—bigger than straight men, who didn't watch as much as expected—was straight women. They ramped up the clothes in the second season into goofy-looking femme wear specifically to appeal more to that Sex in the City-missing demographic. Thank god for Tasha and Shane, who provided at least a minimum weekly requirement of butch girls, one for whom I could pine. I got more good dyke hit off Rachel Maddow most weeks than off most of The L-Word. Not that I'm complaining! I could have gone on watching dyke drama with those femme gals for years to come.
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Because my taste in entertainment can tend toward the awful, last night I spent 90 minutes watching "For the Record," a faux documentary starring Britney Spears as the fallen pop starlet trying to stage a wobbly comeback. In sum total, it was pretty sad. The tired-looking, droopy-eyed, beweaved Britney comes across like a horse that's been ridden to the brink of exhaustion, and yet her minders continue to drive her onward, regardless of the fact that she's a barely functioning zombie on the verge of collapse. (All in service of a new album, fittingly called Circus.) In a nice deconstruction of the spectacle, Choire Sicha deems Spears "sick," and she sure looks it. Shots of the girl in action reveal her staring dully out car windows as the paparazzi bum-rush her ride, spacing out in chairs as she gets dolled up by makeup artists and hairstylists again and again, seemingly grinding through one more day to score a comeback that she denies she needs to make to regain her Princess of Pop title. The only time she lights up is when she's looking in the mirror.
While Britney's personal "revelations" range from the mundane to the strange—"What was I thinking?" and "Everyone shaves their head" among them—what's really mind-boggling is the constant swarming of the cameras around her as she attempts to live her life. This time, we see the view from inside the feeding frenzy—and it's pretty tragic. As her caravan emerges from a subterranean parking lot, the mechanical door rolls up to reveal a crowd of onlookers that resemble the Earthlings encountering the space aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Without a doubt, what we're watching is a 21st-century freak show, and Britney is its star. Since the show aired, some bloggers have denounced Spears for courting the cameras that she claims she wishes would leave her alone, but the fact of the matter is that the slobbering media hounds work for us, the American public, and if Britney Spears is a monster, we're the Dr. Frankenstein who made her.
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So behind every squeak is a little bit of grease? These super-clean super-moralizers usually do turn out to have been railing against themselves all along. And if I feel like looking away, I guess it's lucky for me that I have finally given in and made the leap from sordid reality to ... sordid reality TV. Yes, I was always a little vain at never having seen a single minute of American Idol or any of the other shows, but I am a frail hypocrite, too, because now my daughter has me hooked on something called Millionaire Matchmaker, starring this fabulous woman named Patti Stanger, who teaches boys (some of whom are getting on in years) how to be respectful on dates; Big Patti would have made quick work of the Luv Guv!
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Today's Washington Post review of the new Robert Redford movie Lions for Lambs calls it "strangely inert'' and says its take of the war on terror "plays too often like a college colloquium, with one extended scene of a classroom debate suffering from all the sleep-inducing effects of the real thing.'' Not only that, it accuses the film of "ambiguity.'' Ouch. But is it really such a bad thing to walk out of a political movie without a headache from repeated blows to the brain? I saw a screening last night with my movie-crazy 11-year-old son—who, needless to say, does not go for "inert''—and his only criticism was that they should have shot it on film. "A great movie,'' he thought. And for better or worse, not exactly My Dinner With Andre.
My only quibble was with the particulars of the spanking the movie gives the Judy Miller stand-in, played by Meryl Streep, for the media's role in selling the war in Iraq. OK, whuppin' deserved, but not in the way it's set up. Streep's veteran reporter is torn over whether to make what she sees as the clear moral choice—refusing to broadcast an exclusive about a new American military initiative in Afghanistan altogether, or maybe breaking the story with the crawl line, "In another breathtakingly bad idea from our government today ... '' Or, she could do the wrong thing by just reporting the story. No ambiguity there, but also no relation to the many ethical choices reporters actually face. Still, this is no polemic; it's a love note to our troops, a movie with lots of heart but no pat answers, and one that might even jump-start some of those uncomfortable political discussions we tend to shy away from.
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