Tangents & Deep Thoughts
So, yesterday I was watching that silly Bravo series, "Great Things About Being", and it set off this annoying series of Deep Thoughts in my head. The theme of the night was "Queer" and it mostly very cute & tongue-in-cheek. But several things irritated me, and hence the setting off of the Deep Thoughts.
1. Out of the 15 or so "commentators", there was 1 lesbian and 1 bisexual woman, and the rest were all gay men. The majority of the Great Things specifically appealed to gay male sensibilities, such as Cowboys, Showtunes and Mommy Dearest. The few lesbian themed Great Things were like, "you can experiment during college!", "you bring up ratings for flagging shows!" ala The O.C. or "you're always having babies on tv!" ala Friends and The L Word. It all seemed from the Straight Man Lesbianic Fantasy more than anything else, you know?
Suddenly I realized, this show probably wasn't for lesbians at all. Like everything else, it's designed to appeal to the 18-34 male demographic - gay or straight - because that's who advertisers want to sell to, and therefore they dominate everything on television. It's all simple economics.
But then I started thinking about something else I'd recently read, although I can't find the link. Did you know that many gay men work in the same service jobs typically employing women, like administrative work, nursing, waiting tables etc, but on average they almost always make more? I know this is true from my own person experience, especially in retail jobs. I don't think it's a conscious decision from the employers end, but they always pay the gay men more than women. It doesn't work that way for gay women & straight men - my lesbian manager at Home Depot made like, half her straight man counterpart.
2. This spun me off into another equality tangent... I recently saw the movie Iron Jawed Angels, about the Suffragette movement and securing women's right to vote. Except, it only secured the right for WHITE WOMEN to vote. Black women weren't even allowed to march in the Suffragette parades, at least not in the front, and it would be another 50 years before they could vote in the United States. It just makes me scream.
3. Then, this spun me off into another tangent, this time on Thomas Jefferson. Specifically, the fact that while he was writing the Declaration of Independence, he was FUCKING HIS BLACK SLAVE and hiding his mulatto daughter from the world. When the Founding Fathers were creating this country and spouting all this great stuff about liberty and freedom for all, they didn't really mean "for all" - just wealthy, land and slave owning white men. So this country was basically founded on lies, lies, lies.
4. Of course, this spun me off into YET ANOTHER TANGENT, this time about Washington DC and the fact that people who live closest to our government are barred from actually participating in it. Yes, they can vote in Presidential elections and they get to have a Mayor, but they have no Representatives in Congress or the Senate. You know, there are more people in DC than the entire state of Wyoming, but they still can't get representation. It's like the biggest "fuck you" from the government ever, really.
5. That was pretty much the end of the tangets, because I can think for HOURS on that particular little injustice.
I guess the lesson from all my tangetting is basically, progress and empowerment is a really slow process, and there's a lot of fucked up "left behinds" along the way. You can't sit back and rest on your laurels when something is accomplished, because chances are you still have a lot of work to do.
But it's still tempting to be all bitter and wallow in how fucked up everything is. For a little while.
1. Out of the 15 or so "commentators", there was 1 lesbian and 1 bisexual woman, and the rest were all gay men. The majority of the Great Things specifically appealed to gay male sensibilities, such as Cowboys, Showtunes and Mommy Dearest. The few lesbian themed Great Things were like, "you can experiment during college!", "you bring up ratings for flagging shows!" ala The O.C. or "you're always having babies on tv!" ala Friends and The L Word. It all seemed from the Straight Man Lesbianic Fantasy more than anything else, you know?
Suddenly I realized, this show probably wasn't for lesbians at all. Like everything else, it's designed to appeal to the 18-34 male demographic - gay or straight - because that's who advertisers want to sell to, and therefore they dominate everything on television. It's all simple economics.
But then I started thinking about something else I'd recently read, although I can't find the link. Did you know that many gay men work in the same service jobs typically employing women, like administrative work, nursing, waiting tables etc, but on average they almost always make more? I know this is true from my own person experience, especially in retail jobs. I don't think it's a conscious decision from the employers end, but they always pay the gay men more than women. It doesn't work that way for gay women & straight men - my lesbian manager at Home Depot made like, half her straight man counterpart.
2. This spun me off into another equality tangent... I recently saw the movie Iron Jawed Angels, about the Suffragette movement and securing women's right to vote. Except, it only secured the right for WHITE WOMEN to vote. Black women weren't even allowed to march in the Suffragette parades, at least not in the front, and it would be another 50 years before they could vote in the United States. It just makes me scream.
3. Then, this spun me off into another tangent, this time on Thomas Jefferson. Specifically, the fact that while he was writing the Declaration of Independence, he was FUCKING HIS BLACK SLAVE and hiding his mulatto daughter from the world. When the Founding Fathers were creating this country and spouting all this great stuff about liberty and freedom for all, they didn't really mean "for all" - just wealthy, land and slave owning white men. So this country was basically founded on lies, lies, lies.
4. Of course, this spun me off into YET ANOTHER TANGENT, this time about Washington DC and the fact that people who live closest to our government are barred from actually participating in it. Yes, they can vote in Presidential elections and they get to have a Mayor, but they have no Representatives in Congress or the Senate. You know, there are more people in DC than the entire state of Wyoming, but they still can't get representation. It's like the biggest "fuck you" from the government ever, really.
5. That was pretty much the end of the tangets, because I can think for HOURS on that particular little injustice.
I guess the lesson from all my tangetting is basically, progress and empowerment is a really slow process, and there's a lot of fucked up "left behinds" along the way. You can't sit back and rest on your laurels when something is accomplished, because chances are you still have a lot of work to do.
But it's still tempting to be all bitter and wallow in how fucked up everything is. For a little while.