A Feminist Review: Take This Waltz

This small, Canadian romantic indie film starring Seth Rogen, Michelle Williams and Luke Kirby and directed by Sarah Polley seems like it should a moving and insightful film about relationships (much like Michelle Williams earlier movie, Blue Valentine, was). However, despite its female centered love triangle, the film offers little of interest.

If you were to read the synopsis of this film on IMDB it would tell you that “A happily married woman falls for the artist across the street,” a pretty uninformative summary since it’s apparent from the first scene that Margot is unhappy and struggling in her marriage.  The film follows Margot (Michelle Williams) as a slightly off-kilter aspiring writer married to chicken cookbook-writer Lou (Seth Rogen). Margot meets Daniel (Luke Kirby) while doing research for a pamphlet she’s writing and then again on the plane, only to discover that he lives on the same street as her. And so begins their romance, full of clichéd significant looks and fevered whispers, as they get lost in the forbidden.

Unfortunately, my two sentence synopsis was far more interesting than the movie itself, since much of the movie was long shots of Williams looking confused and depressed and Rogen acting oblivious.  The music was a particularly pretentious brand of lackluster indie and on the whole, the film just felt like it was trying too hard to be profound.

In reality, the best parts of the film came from Margot’s interaction with her sister in law, Geraldine or the brilliant Sarah Silverman. Silverman’s character is a recovering alcoholic who, at the end of the film, offers one of the two best lines in the film, “Life has a gap in it, it just does, but you can’t go crazy trying to fill it.” (She’s also a part of a legitimately funny scene involving the incredible world of water aerobics, I tried to find a clip of it online, but alas, I failed).

It’s after the water aerobics scene when we get the second best line of the film, delivered by a naked older woman in the women’s locker room (a great scene by Polley that doesn’t shy away from the normally unsightly issue of aging and women’s bodies); Margot is wistfully considering the merits of “something new” with Geraldine and the woman smiles wisely and replies “New things become old.”

There was a subplot of the film that had some potential as well had it been developed a bit more, in particular the issue of Margot’s sexuality. It’s obvious that Margot and Lou are not the most sexually active of couples since we see Margot attempt to seduce Lou several times, only to be rejected in favor of his cooking. While the lack of sex doesn’t seem to especially bother him, it could be argued that one of the reasons Margot continues to seek after Daniel is the promise of sexual discovery that he offers her. At one point in the film, there is a montage of Daniel and Margot having sex  (it sounds spicy, but really, don’t get excited) where it becomes apparent that Margot is finally able to explore that part of herself; the premise was interesting and one that I think many women can identify with, however I think it could have been fleshed out a little more.

I wanted this film to be good; the trailer was interesting, all of the actors are talented, and Polley is a promising new director (who I would be interested in seeing more of in the future). While there were good moments and unique ideas being toyed with, the film was, in reality, a lukewarm portrayal of a good topic; in short, I was bored most of the time.

Healthy Options

On January 20th, American news media started reporting that the Obama administration has decided to expand preventative care for (cis) women around the country. By 2013, health insurance plans must cover all FDA-approved forms of birth control, from the Pill to the intrauterine device to Plan B without copays. Also included without copays, according to this HuffPo article,

are breast pumps for nursing mothers, an annual "well-woman" physical, screening for the virus that causes cervical cancer and for diabetes during pregnancy, counseling on domestic violence, and other services.

My mind is blown.

I still remember when I went on the Pill as a hormone-riddled high school student, and how much my mother emphasized to me that, her disagreement with my choices aside, it was important to her that I have access to safe and affordable contraceptives. Up until I stopped using hormonal contraception a few years later, she made sure that I had access to an annual OB/GYN visit and covered my copays. It was "only" $10 each for the visit and the prescription, but as a student, $10 was quite a bit of money. My mom saved me approximately $130 each year for the check-up and the knowledge that I was preventing a pregnancy I was entirely unequipped to handle at that time. Wow.

This expansion of the law- if it's implemented as written- seems like it could be an enormous step forward for encouraging cis women to take charge of their health. Increased access to preventative care as listed in the article not only assists someone with estrogen and a uterus in choosing if, when, and how to reproduce, but permits that person additional leeway by opening up available options (IUDs, for example, can be rather pricey). If "other services" can include hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for menopausal women, too, then that's a step forward in increasing access to hormones for someone who may be transitioning their body (i.e. male to female). For students and young people who don't have the means to support those copays, or who don't have supportive parents the way I did, this expansion could make a huge difference in terms of their access to information and care. It's like Planned Parenthood gone wild.

Worth pointing out as well is the fact that this shifts the burden that cis women have historically had in health care costs. Condoms, vasectomies, and spermicides aside, the responsibility for preventing pregnancy has been unfairly placed on cis women's shoulders since the Pill became accessible fifty or so years ago. All of the major innovations in contraceptives- particularly hormonal- have focused on altering cis women's body chemistries and functioning. I'm not saying this is entirely bad, particularly in light of the fact that prior to the Pill cis women often had very little say in what their partners did or didn't do to keep pregnancy at bay, but it has resulted in cis women having higher ongoing costs when they want to prevent pregnancies or ensure that their reproductive systems are functioning well. While only certain things will be covered- for example, I doubt the expanded coverage will include alternative contraceptive planning methods like the fertility awareness method- it's certainly better than nothing.

To me, though, all this will be worth very little if people aren't given accurate and thorough information about their bodies, reproduction, and health as they grow up. The focus on abstinence-only sex education in the U.S. hasn't done a whole lot to impact teen choices, other than to limit access to contraceptive information and generate an increase in sex behaviours that come with other risks (i.e. sexually transmitted infections). It also puts a focus on penetrative, penile-vaginal sex that forgets the multitude of sexual expressions and the way our reproductive systems impact our bodies. Estrogen- one tiny hormone- is responsible for so many things, from weight fluctuations to breast development to serotonin production. That's right! A sex hormone is related to a happy hormone! Who knew?

So while I applaud the steps the current administration is taking to ensure that cis women (and, hopefully, all women) have equal access to preventative care, I would also ask that we push harder to ensure that people have equal access to information so we know what to ask for. The Pill is great, unless it causes you to develop blood clots or breast cancer or suicidal ideations, so it's worth knowing that these are potential risks. It's worth being told what HPV is and why it's a concern for whom so you can accept or decline the vaccination and screenings. We need to be taught from an early age how bodies work and how to take care of them properly so that we can choose to do so. But thank you, in the meantime, for this wonderful step forward.

Note: this article was also posted on Go Girl Magazine.

Links of note

Right- so I've fallen behind in news posts because being "funemployed" means that I spend way too much time on Lamebook and not enough time engaging in important issues. Gotta love it! So here's my attempt to put on my grown-up pants and get back into the swing of things.

First, I've got a heartbreaking piece from Janell Burley Hoffman about fat-shaming and her seven-year-old daughter, which is a quick peek into the challenges parents face when raising their kids in a culture that makes it okay to shame bodies. As a non-parent, I don't have to respond to my young daughter's desire to have a flat stomach, but this piece raises questions for me about my language and what I am and am not modeling for young women in my life. How can all of us be more conscious of our words and gestures so that young girls- young people- don't grow up with the same prejudices and self-loathing that so many of us did?

Along the same lines, Heather Cromarty has a few choice words for the Marilyn memes out there. While I can see how easy it is to reduce Marilyn Monroe to her appearance- that's what we do with famous women, right? Especially the ones who were typecast as sex symbols- it's important to take the time to break down what exactly we're saying when we make the claims we make (especially the ones in these memes).

Next up, an informal study by Becky Chambers raises some interesting points about sex and gender representations and choices in online roleplaying games. My partner was actually the first one to send me this link, and the subject is something we've discussed repeatedly over the course of our relationship (we're both nerds). Basically, it can be summarized as "lots of cis guys like to play female characters in games." What makes this article so cool is that the author gets some feedback as to why, and it's more than just "if I'm going to look at a character on a screen for six hours, I want it to be a hot female." No really, it is. It's a long article, but worth reading as it breaks down not only the responses of the players but also the gendexing of the game developers.

Finally, this piece about Cynthia Nixon's recent remarks on her sexuality left me speechless with awe. The "choice vs. born this way" argument about sexuality has always left me a bit uncomfortable because each side has its openings for bigotry and persecution (nouveau eugenics, anyone?) and it seemed like a waste of energy. Who cares why anyone is or isn't gay? Nixon does a beautiful job of articulating this sentiment and illustrating it with her own experience, so I highly recommend that you check it out. If you're too lazy to click the link, I leave you with this quote:

I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not. Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate? It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate.

That is all.

Love and sex in the middle of the road

Photo courtesy of plannedparenthood.org

Those of you who follow the Feminist GoGirl might've noticed that I have yet to do a post about sex and safety. It's an important topic, I believe, but it's also one that I've been avoiding. Why? The brief explanation is that most articles that focus on sex, safety, and women wind up being treatises on how not to get raped- and to me, that result is so abhorrent that I've been extremely wary of approaching the topic at all. I don't want the things I say here to be construed as blame, shame, or dire warnings; while I have limited control over how readers receive my words, I want to be as explicit as possible from the beginning.

We are sexual beings, and whether we're engaging in a friends-with-benefits road trip or a torrid one-night-stand tropical vacation, this is okay. As long as your behaviour is okay with you- by which I mean your mores, your opinions, your comfort level- and is consensual, you're fine. Please say this to yourself, as often as you'd like, to make sure the message sinks in. There is nothing wrong with being a sexual being.


I feel the need to emphasize that because, all too often in my line of work, I meet people who blame themselves for the sexual assaults they've faced. "I was passed out drunk at a party," they say. "What else should I have expected?" My answer to that has been, and always will be, that we should expect everyone else at that party to put on their grown-up pants and not get down and dirty with someone who's unconscious. It's not that bloody hard, people! It's not like you trip, fall, and wind up naked and sexual. And if they're conscious when you start but pass out halfway through...God gave you two hands. Go use the washroom.



In all sobriety, I'll note that for a lot of people lines are often drawn with a fuzzy marker. As I've said in previous posts, things that constitute clear-cut sexual predation to me are things that don't faze others. If you feel comfortable with the behaviours being thrown your way, then go have fun! Here, though, I'm going to list your rights- your global, human rights- to use as guidelines when getting frisky on the road. This way, it's all fun and no hurt for everyone involved (unless your frisky comes with kinky, in which case pleasepleasePLEASE establish a safeword).

1. You have the right to consent. This means you have the right to give it and to receive it. Consent is not the absence of no- it's the presence of an enthusiastic, rafter-rattling YES. You don't need to sit down with a laundry list of things you'd like to do with your partner, checking them off in a legalistic fashion. Think of fun ways to find out if your partner is comfortable and to say when you want something done differently! Examples: "I'd really like to _____ your _____ right now; may I?" or "Mmm. Do _____ again with your _____." Insert appropriate vocabulary as needed.

2. You have the right to intervene. One of my favourite webcomics did a couple of strips on this a few years ago. If you see something going on that makes you feel squicky, don't be afraid to find ways to put a stop to it. You can pretend to be the long-lost friend, pretend to be a slavering drunk on the person being creepy, call the police, enlist the person's friends to help, or even just check in with the person that you think is being targeted. There are so many ways to cockblock a potential sexual assault. I recommend looking at the Green Dot Project for ideas on how to make sure that your friends, strangers at the club, or whoever you're concerned about is having a good time.


3. You have the right to use protection. I don't just mean protection against pregnancy. I mean protection against sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Take the time to learn what your options are. Hell, bring some with you! Especially if this is a one-night stand, you don't know your partner's history and your partner might not know what they are (or aren't) carrying. Remember that HIV takes approximately three months to show up in a blood test, and antiretrovirals- the medication they give you if you think you've been exposed to HIV- will make you very very sick for the next 30 days. Play it safe. Know what cultural norms are in the area you're visiting, and come up with safe ways to negotiate protection use. And if your partner-to-be refuses to protect, feel free to walk away.

4. You have the right to have backup. This goes hand-in-hand with #2. If someone's super-pushy about taking you away from your friends (or the crowd), take a step back. Text or call a friend if something doesn't feel right. Before heading out for a night on the town, feel free to declare your intentions so your friends know when to intervene (true-life example: "I plan on dancing with EVERY SINGLE PERSON at this salsa club and then leave them drooling!"). Take the number of a reputable cab company with you so you always have a ride home. If something doesn't seem right, let someone know.

5. You have the right to walk away at any time. Tease, slut, virgin scaredy-pants...I don't care what they call you. If you decide in the middle of things that this just isn't what you want, there's no crime in not finishing. Like I said before: your partner has two hands (or some equal capacity to finish themselves off). If you don't feel safe saying something, then please put your safety first. Getting you out of a bad situation safely is more important than anything else.

6. You have the right to call it what you want. Lots of places and people limit their definitions of sexual assault to very narrow concepts (i.e. excluding spousal rape). If you believe that what someone did was rape, even though the jurisdiction you're in thinks it wasn't even a crime, then it was rape. You might not ever be able to put the offender in prison, or even in a courtroom, but that doesn't change your experience. You don't have to call it bad or drunken sex if that's not what your experience of it was, and you can seek out any services (i.e. advocacy) that are appropriate for you. End of discussion.
If you're looking for sexual assault-related resources, RAINN provides a partial list of international organizations.

Theme of the Month: Sexuality

Sex is everywhere in the U.S., whether it's being used to sell products on billboards or being discussed as the sacred gift we give our spouses. Somehow, no matter how much we want to control or liberate it, it's everywhere. With just under seven billion people on this planet, there are just under seven billion sexualities being experienced and expressed by all of us. We're exploring partners, exploring acts, and exploring possibilities.

Sexuality is more than just acts or behaviour, however. It's everything about sex, from what we expect, to what we think about it, what we fantasize about, what we want to try, and what we want to remain in our heads. It's the acts we love and the acts we abhor. It's the constraints we set for ourselves. It's the who, what, when, where, why, and how. It's also what we're taught, either deliberately or inadvertently, by the people and institutions and cultures we live with every day.

So for this month, we're going to explore sexuality in its good and bad entirety (or, at least, as much as is possible to do). We invite you to share your thoughts, experiences, and questions on this fascinating and diverse topic.

From Erica: loving my balance on this fence

Something that's been bothering me for a long time is biphobia.

For some of you, the automatic response to that is to say "of course, it's a huge problem!" And for others of you, the automatic response sounds more like "huh?"

Here's the thing. We've got a lot of homophobia floating around out there, from straight folk as well as queer folk, about who can/should/does love whom and how acceptable that is or isn't. We've got a lot of literature, research, and theories making themselves heard in academia and the broader news media about what gayness means and how it comes to be, and of course about how gayness is affected by race, socioeconomic status, sex/gender identity, and more. There are gay folk who turn sexual desire into a political act, gay folk who loathe themselves, gay folk who just want the heteronormative lifestyle with a same-sex partner, and gay folk who don't care. There are promiscuous gay folk and celibate gay folk, and gay folk somewhere in between. But there's a long string of politics running from each end of these spectra to the other, and the overarching message is that it's okay to be gay. It's even better to be proud to be gay!

Being bisexual, bi-queer, or just bi- all labels that vary in definition and distinction from one self-identified bi person to the next- comes with a very different story, and that's what I want to talk about today.

In my experience, gay and lesbian folk can be gay or lesbian in many different ways, and as long as they say they're sexually attracted to individuals of the same sex and gender identity, people pretty much take it at face value. As long as they're not engaging in heterosexual behaviour at the same time, it usually goes uncontested. Not always, but usually.

For bi folk, it's a constant challenge and a constant quest to "prove" one's sexuality. I'm mostly speaking about the overarching rhetorical themes surrounding bi women, since bi men have a whole different set of stereotypes thrown at them, but some of these things speak true for anyone in the bi camp. Here are the things I've been told, as a bi woman, that I'm "really" going through:
-I'm not really bi. I just want attention.
-I'm not really bi. I just want to be part of the queer community while remaining in a safe, heterosexual relationship and use monogamy as an excuse to avoid being outed as straight.
-I'm not really bi. I'm not polyamorous.
-I'm not really bi. I look too femme.
-I'm not really bi. I'm actually 100% into women, and just can't face the truth.
-I'm not really bi. My sexual predilections, while not vanilla, aren't spicy enough.
-I'm not really bi. I want to attract the sexual attention of more men who find women-who-have-sex-with-women (WSW) hot.
-I'm not really bi. I'm not promiscuous enough.

Here's the truth, coming straight from this horse's mouth: I'M BI-QUEER-SEXUAL. I'm sexually attracted to males and females, men and women. I've been attracted to folk who play with androgyny too, though my trend has been pretty gender normative (as politically incorrect as that may be). As trans advocates have been saying for a long time, and as everyone else needs to start learning soon, sexuality is not the same as sex is not the same as gender identity is not the same as sexual behaviours is not the same as an entire person. Here's the thing. I like dresses, and I like playing with makeup from time to time. I've played with gender, and I feel most at home in a mainstream-White clothing-hair-makeup identity, with a dash of hippie thrown in. I'm a jealous person, and while I support peoples' rights to be polyamorous, I recognize that I'm not really capable of having an open, loving, safe, and happy relationship with someone who has other partners.

Monogamy works for me. As such, that means that when I settle in with a partner, my partner-based sexual behaviours fall into either "straight" or "gay" territory, as long as other people are defining it. For me, it's always sex, but for everyone else, the label matters. My current partner happens to be man-identified, male-identified, and straight-identified. I love him, and I see no need to justify that fact. Being with him makes desire women no less, and if he were a woman, that would make me desire men no less. I'm not on any fence for a lack of ability to choose one side or another; I'm balancing on the fence and able to reach both sides because I enjoy both.

Some straight women are jealous of the attention that bi women get for being bi, because of the myth that WSW are somehow sexually more available and more gratifying than straight women. Some lesbian women resent bi women like me, who can "pass" as straight if they want to. The truth is that both of those realities are horrible. The "attention" I get when I come out- the catcalls, the "Oooh, does Nick get threesomes?" questions- isn't fun at all. It's negative because it pins me into a stereotype that I don't fit. And the ability to pass as straight means that I'm expected to be complicit in heterosexism and homophobia because I'm not "one of Them," which is revolting and just plain wrong. I'm not bi to get queer attention and I'm not bi to get straight privileges. I'll admit that I get the privileges if I'm not careful- but that's something I seek to avoid as much as possible.

So here's an idea for people to chew on and maybe learn from: let my sexuality be itself. Being bi doesn't make me a traitor to anyone or any cause. It doesn't make me an attention-seeker, it doesn't make me a disempowered sexual beast, and it doesn't make me a liar. All it does is make me find people of multiple sexes and genders attractive, and makes me more aware of the negative treatment non-heterosexual sexualities get in our society.

For a further step, take this into consideration: stop thinking in terms of "heterosexual" and "homosexual." Think in terms of attraction (who you like), behaviour (who you do), and desire (who you want) instead, because the three are interconnected but not identical and because human sexualities are far more complicated than our two boxes can permit. When people talk about "gay people," consider how that term is an androcentric exclusion of lesbians and a heterocentric exclusion of a variety of sexualities, and a denial of the variety of personalities and preferences that the term is intended to encompass.

Above all, if you take no other step, please consider this: I like my view from the fence. It's a lot broader and more comfortable than being confined to one side or another. Please let me be up here, with all my cohorts, in peace.