Drunk Feminist History

After spilling 1,850 words in my last post lambasting Conan O'Brien for his awful sexist video game reviews, I feel obliged to highlight some surprisingly feminist entertainment to restore balance to the Dropout blog.

While we hold our feminist principles sacred, not all entertainment needs to offer sophisticated social commentary.  I love watching feminist comedy shows like Inside Amy Schumer, but sometimes I just need to turn off my brain and be entertained.  Comedy Central's Drunk History, surprisingly, fills this niche very well.

As the title suggests, Drunk History doesn't provide sophisticated, highbrow entertainment.  The show's creator gets a storyteller drunk and the storyteller then attempts to tell the audience an interesting story about a historical figure or event.  As the story unfolds, a team of actors in period costume faithfully acts out the inebriated story.  Add some low-budget special effects and some celebrity cameos and you have an entertaining (if unsophisticated) show.  [Note: The UK has its own version of this show, based on the US version for once.]

One might not expect particularly progressive or feminist themes given the show's dependence on drunkness, but I've been pleasantly surprised on two fronts.

Female Storytellers

First, the show includes a surprising number of female storytellers.  In the show's first incarnation as a Funny or Die series, 2 of the 8 storytellers (25%) were women.  This ratio stayed the same in Series 1 on Comedy Central (2013); 6 of the 24 storytellers (25%) were women.  Season 2 (2014) saw the ratio increase to 30%, with 9 of 30 storytellers being women.  Season 3 (2015) increased the representation even further to include 15 women among the 36 storytellers (42%).  At this rate, Season 4 might easily have 50% female representation among its storytellers.

Stories About Women

Second, an increasingly large minority of the stories focus on women.
[Full episodes for seasons 1-3 are available behind a paywall on Hulu.]

Funny or Die Series: 1 woman's story out of 8 total stories (13%)

• Oney Judge (episode 3)

Season 1: 4 women's stories out of 24 total stories (17%)

• Mary Dyer (episode 4)
• Mary Ellen Pleasant (episode 5)
• Patty Hearst (episode 5)
• Dolly Parton (episode 7)

Season 2: 9 women's stories out of 33 total stories (27%) 

• Claudette Colvin (episode 1)
• Sybil Ludington (episode 2)
• Nellie Bly (episode 2)
• Sylvia Robinson (episode 3)
• Peggy Shippen (episode 8)
• Babe Didrikson (episode 9)
• Frances Cleveland (episode 10)
• Edith Wilson (episode 10)
• Dolly Madison (episode 10)

Season 3: 8 women's stories out of 36 total stories (22%) 

• Griselda Blanco (episode 2)
• Harriet Tubman (episode 4)
• Virginia Hall (episode 4)
• Dorothy Fuldheim (episode 5)
• Kentucky Daisey (episode 7)
• Nellie Bly & Elizabeth Bisland (episode 8)
• Mary Phelps Jacob (episode 11)
• Ann Druyan (episode 13)

If the trend continues, we can expect roughly one in four stories in Season 4 to focus on women.

This isn't 50/50 representation, but the show does a nice job including entertaining stories, voices, and performances from women without making a big fuss about it.  It's just what they do.  If I wasn't a feminist blogger I probably wouldn't have noticed I wasn't getting 100% white male stories.  (The show also makes a point to regularly include stories highlighting minority groups.)

Ultimately, this silly show makes me wonder why more media products don't do more to present women's stories.  If a show full of drunk people can do the right thing by women and minorities and be successful, it can't be that hard. (I'm looking at you Conan.)

Carrie Underwood, Sing a Different Tune!

Recently, I accidentally listened to Carrie Underwood's new single, Church Bells.

I generally feel like I have a bias against Underwood. Ever since Jesus Take The Wheel, I have felt like her style just always seems a little too dramatic and heart-wrenched for me.  So when I hear a new song from her, I try to give her the benefit of the doubt--- that if I don't like her song, it's because of my unique preferences, not because it's mediocre music.  Perhaps this is why I left the radio on when Church Bells came on.

However, once again, I was left extremely unimpressed and peevish.  "Why the heck does Underwood keep singing about these violent revenge fantasies?" I wondered.

You see, the plot of Church Bells revolves around Jenny, a beautiful poor girl who marries rich, and discovers the marriage isn't working and that she's married to an abusive alcoholic.  After praying for help and listening to the church bells, Jenny poisons her husband--- and then goes on to listen to the church bells once again at hubby's funeral (unfortunately a verse where her ghost listens to church bells at her own funeral after she gets her lethal injection is missing).  This song has much in common with another Underwood hit, Blown Away.  While arguably a better song, Blown Away again tells the story of a young woman getting deadly revenge on a man (drunken father) who has abused her (death by tornado this time).

These songs tap into a tedious trope of romanticizing the abuse of women for dramatic affect.  This trope is overly and woefully familiar throughout the country genre, and art in general, and now also in the work of Carrie Underwood apparently!  As Underwood is a bright, cheery personality with a relatively happy public biography, these murderous tales always seemed like a strange subject for her to keep harping on about to me.

While I understand the cheap appeal of these stories, and the easy emotion one can tap into to create a compelling song, these just leave me with an overwhelming sense of not just their unoriginality but their inertia.  Do we really need more songs telling the sad tales of birds in gilded cages who have to resort to violence and death (whether murder or suicide, or both) to end their suffering?  Do we need to continue to romanticize the tragic downfall women commodified and beaten by men?  Can we stop waxing lyrical about drunk, violent men as if they are an inevitable fact of life, and who can only be stopped by poetic justice?  The sad consequences of drunkenness are a hugely popular subject in country music (just behind broken hearts, teenage pregnancy and well, drinking)--- perhaps we can find a new way of broaching the subject.  Haven't we been singing about these things for literally centuries?  Maybe we can find a different way for the stories to end--- murder and suicide are not the only two options here!

Do you know what song I would love to hear?  A song where Jenny gets the resources together to get a divorce and get out of a relationship she got into for all the wrong reasons.  A song where Jenny finds a local support network--- a sister, a friend, a doctor, a helpline volunteer--- who help her find a place in a shelter or file charges against her abusive husband.  A song where Jenny gets her GED and finds a rewarding job, realizing that she can be valued for more than her body and can contribute meaningfully to her community.  A song that tells women that there are other ways out of abuse and unhappiness other than violence or self-harm.  A song where Jenny's abuser goes to therapy and comes back to her years later and apologizes for his behavior.  A song that tells men that they too can get help, can break cycles of violence and sexism, and can be a part of the healing process.

There you go, Carrie Underwood, there is your next song!  There is a lot more to sing about than those sad church bells!

Conan the Sexist Creep

Anita Sarkeesian and her team at Feminist Frequency have spent the last few years discussing "representations of women in pop culture narratives,"  particularly through a series of great videos documenting a range of tropes and other sexist trends, particularly in video games.  I love these videos and, while they are very compelling, somehow I always thought "yeah, there are some creeps out there, but most people aren't THAT bad."

Then I found myself watching Conan.

I don't usually watch Conan, but the rabbit hole that is YouTube led me to the show's "Clueless Gamer" segments.  In these segments, the show's host Conan O'Brien "reviews" new video games with a friend/staffer and occasionally a special guest or two.  The segments are basically product placements, but since Conan isn't a gamer, his reactions to the games add a "humorous" entertainment factor.  Unfortunately, what was intended as light entertainment left me feeling very creeped out as a female viewer.  After pretending that the segments' rampant sexist comedy was fine, I have decided to  document the phenomenon in damning detail.  I have included YouTube links (with start times) for nearly all my examples, so enjoy the creepy sexism in full!

Documenting the Sexism

As of this writing, there are 29 Clueless Gamer segments.   Not all games lend themselves to sexist comedy and (thankfully) 13 of the segments (Michael Phelps: Push the Limit, Atari 2600, PC Horror Games, WWE 2K14, AT&T Stadium, Watch Dogs, Call of Duty Advanced Warfare, Mortal Kombat X, Halo 5: Guardians, Doom, Far Cry Primal, UFC 2, and Mario Kart 8) are basically free of sexist material (but not free of sickly violent material).  Keeping the Mario Kart 8 review free from sexism is a low standard however.  Actually, the Mario Kart review involved the losers having penises drawn on their faces, so fail I guess. . .  Penis-drawing aside, Conan still managed to introduce sexist material into reviews for several games you'd think would be safe: 

• Conan finds a female non-player character (NPC) in a leadership role intriguingly attractive but "a little bitchy" in his Kinect Star Wars review.
• Conan closes out the Minecraft review with some homophobic humor.
• Conan suggests that Batman would be emasculated by his loss to Wonder Woman in the Injustice: Gods Among Us review. (Bonus points for feminizing the co-host with a lacy satin eye mask for comic effect).
• Conan finds humor in invading women's personal space in the Resident Evil 6 review.

While I might describe these preceding examples as casual sexism, Conan's video game reviews also demonstrate larger trends discussed by Anita Sarkeesian and Feminist Frequency.  For example, several of the reviews demonstrate the Women as Reward trope when Conan expects to earn sexual rewards after completing in-game tasks.  After killing a bunch of zombies surrounding the female NPC in Resident Evil 6, he argues, "I just saved her life, right?  You'd think she'd sleep with me."  Similarly, in the Skyrim Elder Scrolls review, he starts a quest hoping for a sexual rewards and is clearly disappointed when the NPC doesn't lead him to the bedroom.  When she offers to teach him about trading instead (the point of the quest) his crestfallen response is, "That's not what I wanted."  He then complains about how unreasonable and unfair women are when it comes to providing sex.  Finally, after spending most of his The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt review trying to have in-game sex (more on this below), he is practically orgasmic when finally winning graphic sexual rewards for in-game quest and boss-battle successes.

Being a Boss with a Compulsion to Apologize

I'm not a huge Lena Dunham fan.  She's an outspoken champion for women, so I feel obligated to pay attention to her.  But her show hasn't enticed me; I read Not That Kind of Girl and personally found much of it unsympathetic and unrelatable.  I've subscribed to her newsletter, Lenny, but more often than not I just roll my eyes at the titles and delete them.  For the most part, her work is just not my style . . . and because of that I often don't give her a break.

For some reason I read her recent post for LinkedIn:  Sorry, Not Sorry: My Apology Addiction.  (Maybe it had something to do with her fantastic headshot at the top of the article.)  Once I got past the trendy title, and the Beyonce-referencing first paragraph, I was ready to dismiss the article as yet another redundant---however earnest and frankly accurate--- piece about how women apologize too much and need to learn to have more confidence.  But then I got to this paragraph:

"I say sorry all day . . . I am a woman who is sometimes right, sometimes wrong but somehow always sorry. And this has never been more clear to me than in the six years since I became a boss." (emphasis mine)

I realized that Dunham was talking about my experiences.  As someone who runs a team and has direct reports, I have to make decisions and tell people what to do.  Most of the time the team works in harmony.  But as with anything, screw ups and disagreements happen.  Sometimes decisions have to be made that can't please everyone.  This falls to me, and I'm ok with that.

Advice from Eve Ensler

I have to admit that I have never seen nor read the Vagina Monologues.  At the time I first heard of the play in high school, I was annoyed by what seemed to me its shock-value title.  As time went on and my feminist community grew, it became embarrassing to admit that I'd never seen the show, so I would pretend I too was super familiar with whatever others we referring to.  Now, I just haven't had the time!

But curious to know more about the play and the woman behind it, I went to see Eve Ensler give a lecture for the Institute for Women's Leadership at Rutgers University on March 31st.  I was pleasantly surprised by the clever, passionate, and upbeat woman I found there and am now very curious to read the play!  I was very impressed with Ensler's ability to speak about injustice and suffering but to maintain a generally cheerful and hopeful disposition.  When she disagreed with someone, she spoke with thought and passion.  So many times when I speak with other feminists (or listen to myself speak) I hear a lot of anger, frustration, and burnout.  While Ensler certain expressed anger and frustration, she was able to move past it to provide a hopeful, productive, level-headed response.

Let me share some of the thoughts and advice she shared with us.

There will be no change without a struggle.

This is great life wisdom in general, but: In response to a question about how frustrating it is to talk to people who don't understand feminism, Ensler reminded us that we can get lazy with our activism.  When working to make change and to challenge power, we are going to get pushback and we are going to get attacked.  Ensler urged us not to get comfortable in certain 'levels' of activism, but rather predicted that we need to be more bold, disruptive, and creative in our efforts to bring about change.

2 Things Every Girl Needs

To do this, Ensler suggest we each need two things: (1) a inner shield--- an inner strength that resists and protects us against attempts to injure or destroy who we are, and our foundational beliefs about ourselves and our world, (2) a posse--- a group of people who support, energize, and believe in us and can help us heal.  Ensler reminded us that we are not alone in this struggle, and that it's imperative to remember this, "They will defeat us if we think we're alone."

Love People into Change

This one is a little hard to hear for me.  I've heard a lot of talk about bringing about change through "radical love" or a "methodology of love."  My general reaction is that if our enemies aren't coming to the table with love, why should we?  Also haven't they taken enough from us already that we don't also have to pour our love into them?  I guess I need to rethink my understanding of love.

Ensler explained that to make change, we have to meet people where they are at.  "It takes time for people to untangle themselves from what they've learned and the way they process things."  She argues for a feminist movement that remembers to be forgiving and provides space for mercy and for people to change their minds, be confused, and grow rather than just hurrying to classify people as bigots, racists, sexists, misogynists etc. and not letting them move beyond those labels when they try.

Don't Apologize

One student asked Ensler how to make men feel more included in feminist activities, such as attending The Vagina Monologues, and this kind of set Ensler off.  Ensler responded by questioning why women who write or create material about women need to apologize for it.  She wondered why men are not interested in or can't express interest in something that is about women.  Ensler posited that most men would say the respect women as equal, so there is no reason why they should not have interest in work by or about women.  Between a man afraid of going to see the play, and a man interested in seeing the play, Ensler advocated dating the man expressing interest in what women think and feel.

If you live your life afraid to say who you are, then you can't be who you are.

I actually don't remember the context for this statement, but I have been thinking about it a lot.  I think we often fool ourselves that we can keep parts of ourselves hidden, locked off, or just for ourselves because other people won't respond well to them, and that that can work.  But Ensler challenges this.  Maybe if you can't express your full self, then in reality, you can't really be your full self.

Body Identity Crisis

Earlier this year, I discovered I have hips.

I'd cleaned up my diet, bought a fitbit, and started noticing positive changes with regard to my health and well-being.  This, ironically, precipitated something of an identity crisis.  Let me explain.

I survived my adolescence and early adulthood without having too much to say about bodies and their connection to personal identity.  As an atypically tall human female with a healthy relationship with physical activity, I mostly missed the body acceptance struggles many young women experience.  No popular category ever seemed to apply to me (petite, curvy, athletic, etc.) so I went about my life without thinking about body identity very much.  Only once did "body type" specifically enter my consciousnesses when I happened to catch the Miss Teen USA pageant.  Staring at a line of 50 young women with exactly the same body type (cut & paste 50 times with different hair and a different gown), I thought, "That's really dumb" and moved on.

At least that's what my conscious brain was doing.

Rey from Star Wars: The Force Awakens

My sub-conscious adolescent brain was reading dystopian science fiction and identifying with the post-apocalyptic heroines fighting for justice.  In terms of body shape, think Rey from the most recent Star Wars film.  Unbeknownst to me, I was also identifying with what I will call social identity tags (I am sure there is an academic term for this). In my mind, the "Rey" type was tough, competent, resilient, asexual, and single-purpose.  Also, note the general lack of hips.

This body identity worked for me for a long time, even as reality challenged the tough, competent, resilient, asexual, and single-purpose parts on a regular basis.  Then I discovered my hips.  This isn't as dumb as it sounds.  If you plug my bust, waist, and hip measurements into all the (very scientific) online body type calculators, I come out exactly half-way between "hourglass" and "straight/athletic."  My hip and bust measurements are about the same and my waist measurement isn't hugely different either.  For a long time, it was easy to interpret this more toward the straight/athletic/Rey side.  After improving my heath habits however, the interpretation shifted slightly but inexorably toward hipped reality.

Don't Tell Me What to Do

Don't Tell Me What to Do!

Amy Poehler shouted this at the camera at the end of guest appearance on SNL's Weekend Update segment 'Really?' which focused on the issue of birth control in America and American politics.  This brief moment has stayed with me, echoing in the back of my mind.

It seems like the kind of thing a child would shout, being unable to form a nuanced, logical argument.  But when Amy shouted it, to me it seemed completely radical.  After countless articles, speeches, rallies, discussions, years . . . patriarchal society still doesn't get it.  We've tried the nuanced, logical argument approach.  What it boils down to is that these patriarchal, sexist, misogynist, racist, prejudiced systems and people have no right to tell us who/what/how to be and what to do.

Don't tell me what to do!  It gets at the fundamental issue of power imbalance.  You think that you are better than me, more capable than me, that I should obey you because you are a man.  Well you aren't and I'm not going to.

The fact that Amy Poehler is wise and bold enough to shout this at the top of her lungs on national television is a beautiful gift.


via GIPHY

Try saying it some time yourself.  Preferably to someone who is trying to silence you or control you.  It's pretty great.  I've done it.

At lunch at work, my coworkers had the tendency to fuss around me whenever I was cutting an apple or pear.  My female boss would ask me if I wouldn't rather let one of the guys use the knife for me.  Male coworkers would instruct me on how to hold the knife.  Seriously?  How do these people think I have survived this long unable to cut an apple?  I still have all my fingers and limbs.  One day I retorted, Amy's voice in the back of my mind, "Don't tell me what to do!"  No one was giving the men in the office tips on wielding culinary instruments.  If they didn't need to tell other people what to do, they didn't need to tell me.

When getting into a discussion that requires challenging sexist or racist points of view, whenever I made a strong point male coworkers, flustered that I had 'scored' as it were, would joking tell me to "just go and [insert something related to my job]."  While meant as a good-natured way to acknowledge that I was right and that they were wrong, the fundamental joke about the statement was  the unspoken truth that the world would be better if I would just go disappear, just go shut up---so that they didn't look bad, so that they didn't have to hear something that took them safe zone of male privilege.  The goal of such a statement was in the end to silence me as a woman (and protect them from ever having to truly acknowledge that they were wrong or ignorant).  It would all be fun and games until someone accidentally said "just shut up woman and make me a sandwich."  I've now deployed Don't Tell Me What to Do 'jokingly' back at them.

It almost always shuts down the sexist behavior immediately.  It so cleanly and precisely exposes the underlying assumptions that men should control women and that men know better that women and that women should obey men.  It's like a sharp knife that cuts right to the bone.  It avoids getting bogged down in debating the nuances of politics, nature vs nurture, whether or not you have statistics at your finger tips to back up your claims . . . it just points out:  you think you're better than me, well, you're not.  When I want your advice, I'll ask for it.

You're not the boss of me.  Don't Tell Me What to Do.

Primary Day

Today is a big day for Ohio. It's the day that we as voters actually matter. It is primary election day. For some reason that I've never really understood, Ohio is a hugely important state in national elections. Maybe it just boils down to electoral votes and delegates, maybe it's something else, but either way, voting here is always important. In a state that never consistently goes red or blue, every vote matters, so I went to cast mine today.

I wanted to have a voice, to take the time to say "This is who I believe would lead and represent the country/county/area well, and they support the things I believe in." However, saying that is not always easy, especially in the part of Ohio I grew up in and currently reside in. I live just north of Cincinnati. Until the past two presidential election cycles, all of the counties in the area went red. About as bright red as they could get. When Obama first won in 2008, that was the first time in my life I had ever seen Hamilton County (the county that contains Cincinnati) go blue. Every other county was still bright red, however. I live in prime, gun-loving, pro-life, pro-god-in-schools, anti-gay, anti-anybody-who-isn't-a-white-Christian territory. I've watched Bernie Sanders signs be placed on street corners at intersections, only to be defaced, damaged, or removed and replaced by Trump signs within a matter of days. If you are liberal-leaning in this part of Ohio, it's often not worth the effort or risk advertising it.

Given the area I live in, and given recent events that unfolded in the past few days as Trump made appearances very near me in West Chester, and not too far away in Dayton, I went to the polls a little apprehensively. When I went to vote, I was asked for my ID (problematic in itself. See this John Oliver video for more- LINK), asked to verify my name and address, then I was asked which ballot I wanted to receive: republican or democrat. I stood at the table, and before I muttered my answer, for the first time in my life I was actually afraid to cast my vote for a non-republican party. I became very aware of the two older white men glaring at me as they waited for their voting cards, after they heard me respond with "Democrat, please." I became very aware that Ohio is a state that allows concealed carry, and that many people in this area support and take advantage of that law. As I went to vote today, I was reminded of all of the things that were done by generations past to ensure that I could even go vote in the first place, and I was also reminded of all of things that are being done to people who don't agree with the hateful rhetoric being touted by a certain candidate. After voting I spoke of my unease with a relative of mine, who is rebellious in that she dares to be a female democrat in the heart of the south. She told me that I was not alone in my fear and anxiety, that she was also afraid to show support for either democratic candidate because she feared the repercussions. She was afraid her car would be vandalized, or worse, that she would be shot for simply displaying signs or putting a sticker on the bumper of her car.

The only time that I ever feel patriotic is when I go and vote. I'm not sure that the same can be said for me today. Instead of feeling pride in trying to make my voice heard, I felt something much different. I felt ashamed that this process has become such a circus, and a second-rate one at that. I'm ashamed that while my voice and my vote might go the opposite way, the image that this country is projecting internationally is one of hatred and intolerance. Today, I voted, and today, I felt ashamed that I was afraid to be heard.

Marketing: the enemy of women in film?

A few weeks ago I attended a female-centric film festival in New York.  This was my second time at the film festival.  I was really excited to go back because I had a really good time the first time around.  I was hoping to learn more about the barriers that hold women back in the industry and learn the innovative ways women were coming up with to break those barriers down or at least circumnavigate them.  I was particularly excited to attend a panel of female short film directors speaking about barriers, and a panel on unconscious bias.  With all the talk about diversity and gender discrimination in the industry, I thought this festival would be full of vibrant solutions and ideas for the future.

Unfortunately, this really wasn't my experience.  (I write about it more in this post for TYCI.) Most of the solutions proposed rather seemed to support the status quo, and panels were often fraught with disagreement as panelists argued over what the right solutions were, or even what the problems were.  Most disappointingly, digital media was almost never mentioned, which had been something I had expected to hear a lot about. I suppose that this teaches me one thing: it's silly to treat 'women in film' as a monolith, full of women who all have the same experiences and share the same opinions and perspectives.  There is power in having a diversity of approaches to making change; when one solution doesn't work, perhaps another might be more effective.  One size does not fit all.

However in thinking back over what I saw and heard at the festival, and trying to figure out what helpful lessons I could glean--- even if they weren't the ones I was expecting to find--- one issue floats to the surface: marketing.

Several times throughout the festival, filmmakers mentioned clashing with marketing teams and described how marketing ended up becoming an oppressive and/or anti-feminist force under which they or their projects suffered.

When asked about why her film Jennifer's Body, while very amusing and written by a popular, Oscar-winning writer, had flopped so badly, director Karen Kusama described how much of the film's problem was the way it was marketed.  (You can watch here.) While she had envisioned the film as a horror/girl comedy made mostly for women in which Amanda Seyfried played the main character, the marketing team's main approach revolved around "We've got Megan Fox. She's hot."  The film ended up being marketed as a sexy horror film, directed towards young men, and starring Megan Fox.  I found this really interesting, because I remember when Jennifer's Body was being marketed and distinctly remember deciding not to see it because it looked like a stupid sexy-Megan-Fox vehicle--- it didn't look like something was made for me, included me, or respected me.

Kusama says the film confused the marketing team by being both a comedy and horror, and being a story that mostly centered around girls and girls' experiences.  The "default setting" Kusama says for marketing then becomes "just market it to boys."  Kusama recalls being flummoxed by trailers that never showed the main character of the movie (Amanda Seyfried's character) because it focused on teasing whether or not Fox's body would be exposed.  Kusama also mentions begging the marketing team not to ask Megan Fox do press with porn sites because it would have just been too demoralizing to the actress.  "We're selling a lie,"  Kusama commented on the marketing strategy, and emphasized how impactful how the movie is framed in the press and to critics can be.

I found Kusama's story about Jennifer's Body really thought provoking, because it got into the details of an issue I had heard hinted at many times in other places.  It pointed out a harsh reality that even once you've made your female-centric, female-lead film . . . if the marketing team is not on the same page as you and doesn't share your goals, they can still kill you film, bury your message, and make your project inaccessible.  Often times we are so focused on just getting the film made, and making a good film, everything that comes after is a bit of an afterthought.  However, the way the film gets marketed can be a big fight that can make or break whether your story gets heard and reaches those you are seeking to reach.

So perhaps this is one thing women can do to improve the representation of women in film/television on and off screen: get more marketing savvy, become feminist marketers, select marketing teams carefully, and stay in control of the marketing of your projects!

Dropout Reads: The Chalice and the Blade

Its been a while since I've done a feminist book review, so when Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future became available through my public library's digital collection I decided to give it a try.  Unbeknownst to me, this book is considered a seminal work in women's studies and remains a best seller under Amazon.com's "Women's Studies History" category.

I must admit that I found the book to be a bit of a mess.  I've found that "seminal works" often cover too much ground, lack focus, and end up repeating themselves haphazardly in their quest to revolutionize established systems of thought.  All three criticisms apply in this case.  Despite these shortcomings, however, I believe the book's underlying premise offers great value.  Let me explain.

 

The Premise

Eisler's thesis revolves around two proposed societal models: partnership societies and dominator societies.

• Partnership societies value creation and renewal.  Their interpersonal relationships link people, connect them, and stress affiliation.  Power and organization are used for enabling and actualizing functions. 
• Dominator societies, in contrast, value violence and destruction.  Their relationships are ranked such that some individuals hold superior positions over those deemed inferior.  Its power structures pursue domination. This model arguably prevails in our current reality.

These models don't revolutionize much on their own, but Eisler goes one step further.  Most of us assume that our persistent dominator proclivities trace all the way back to cave men hoisting clubs and dragging women around by the hair.  Eisler argues the opposite, that Neolithic partnership societies existed for thousands of years before a few rouge dominator groups invaded and crashed the party.  As such, creative, equal, and supportive societies are not Utopian fantasies.