Nothing Says Happy Holidays Like Domestic Violence

I am really bad about sending holiday cards, but this year I figured I try and send them to a few people that I don't see on a regular basis and who regularly send me cards, cause I'm all adult and responsible now.

I am crafty and my husband is an artist so I don't like buying cards, but really, you can only make so many things in a year. I am also particular about messaging, and it is surprisingly hard to find a secular, non-sappy, attractive card free from bad puns. Unfortunately, this year did not offer many alternatives. It did however offer what could be the most offensive holiday card in the history of Hallmark:



If you can't see what is going on in the picture that I made my husband take while I held them up righteously indignant in the middle of the CVS aisle, it is an image of two gingerbread women (we assume they are women, since traditionally in illustration only women have eyelashes...). One is missing the lower portion of her body with the caption "First he dunked me in milk, then he bit off my legs."

Fail.

Where the Wild Things Are

Spoiler Alert

All of the hullabaloo about how Where the Wild Things Are is too scary for kids seems to have missed one key factor: it is far more boring than it is scary. During the showing we went to there were about six kids from about ages 6 to 10 sitting near us and by the time it got to the really violent sequences none of the kids were even looking at the screen because they (like me) had lost interest about five minutes after Max reached the island.

I am part of the multiple generations that grew up on the illustrations of Maurice Sendak. Granted we all remember the illustrations more than the story, and they did sort of terrify me, but I was still really excited to see it come to life. My husband and I were lucky enough to get to explore the Where the Wild Things Are exhibit at the Sony Metreon back in 2002. We were the only people there and made quite the rumpus because they really got it right - right down to the shading on the palm trees.

I was particularly excited for the movie because it was costumes and not CGI (at least mostly) - and in that aspect it certainly did not disappoint. But if all a movie has to offer is aesthetics you only really need to watch the trailer, which had all of the most visually appealing snippets, anyway.

As Jezebel noted, the book is short - really short. The part that has etched itself in our cultural memory is the illustrations (what the Metreon exhibit got oh-so right). So, maybe pretty landscapes and neat costumes are all we should expect. Unfortunately, however, I think the movie doesn't just not get the book right, it does it - and it's viewers - a disservice.

The sections that have been deemed too scary for kids are not scary because of the terrible teeth and claws. They are scary because Jonze and Eggers could not decide who the wild things were. Sendak based them on his foreign adult relatives (which is a whole other problem to dissect), but in the movie they are sometimes adults with romantic relationships and sometimes whiny children with hurt feelings.

Sure, part of the process of growing up is realizing that adults usually are whiny children with hurt feelings, but in this case those adults enact an abusive relationship. The wild things' size, knowledge of the island, and interpersonal relationships position them as adults through most of the film (as do their names typical of a generation older than Max), and while Max once or twice growls them into submission, he spends most of the movie watching them physically and emotionally hurt one another with the fear that they will harm him.

Then of course there is the infamous line, "I'll eat you up I love you so." The only emotion we have had up until that point is anger and insecurity, so what has come to be a marker of the movie's "take away" (that we love our children even if we must discipline them? That we love them despite their sometimes justified though inappropriately enacted anger? Your guess is as good as mine) is not actually in the movie. In perhaps the most disturbing and strange and wtf!?! moment in modern cinema, the character (KW) that says it does in fact eat him up in order to protect him.

But, if we decide to go with it as a metaphor based on the movie until that point, then it seems the lesson we are supposed to take away is that maternal figures (who KW is positioned as) will do anything to protect their child from an abusive father figure (Carol). Moreover, that kind of love is smothering since Max can't breathe and is pulled out covered in bile and spit, though the raccoon who is also hanging out there seems to be fine. Told you it was weird.

But again, the most disappointing part was that it was just plain boring. Once you have seen the costumes, learned that war games always end in tears, and watched the wild things whine and lose their tempers and hurt each others feelings in the exact same way five times, your mind wanders: In my husband's case, about the mother's agonizing worry over her child running away (the only part that diverged from the ten sentences of text, and the only part Sendak did not particularly like) and my related concern that Max must have been starving.

Of course Sendak seems to be really happy with the Jonze/Eggers interpretation of his beloved book, so maybe I should just "go to hell" and go see that other childrens book they have taken liberties with. But, I can't remember ever wanting to leave a movie half way through simply because I was bored. Nor have I left a movie disturbed by strange (lack-of) character development (no, more snow and dirt clod fights, but we can still throw rocks at owls?), and upset that I had just wasted all that time sitting there, since even crappy action movies keep your attention. Sadly, the only redeeming factor of the viewing was that we patronized our local historic theater.

Image via JSYK.

A Crime Against Women

When an awful crime, like the recent shootings in Pennsylvania, occurs I am not one to obsess over coverage. I usually wait for the initial media blitz to pass and then find out more information a day or two later.

So, it was not until I saw this post at Shakesville that I realized that the fitness center shooting was not just a random act of crazed violence, it was a gender-based hate crime.

Even if I had been paying attention to the headlines, I would not have known that it was specifically women that were targeted. Yesterday, all of the headlines were in the similar vein of "Four Dead in Fitness Club Shooting." In fact, when I specifically Googled "women killed in Pennsylvania shooting" I only had two results on the first page that mentioned women in the headline - from Canada and Australia.

But, all one had to do was to read any article to realize that the shooter was the only man that was killed or injured. Three women are dead and nine are injured, but it seemed almost impossible for reports to underscore that this was a gender-based crime, even as they quoted the killer's hate-filled blog. As a commenter at Shakesville noted:

I also noticed that the opening paragraph lists the women as "people", then later mentions that they were all women. It does have the disorienting effect of erasing the misogyny of the killer, doesn't it?

And she is right. Headlines make a difference. They are how we frame events and decipher the onslaught of information surrounding them. Which is why I was relieved to see that just as I started putting two and two together so did all of the smart feminist bloggers.

This morning, this post at Feministing also pointed out that this is not the only gender-based shooting in recent years. And as Jessica pointed out, very few people connected the misogynist dots then, as well.

It is important to note that this is not a new phenomenon. A similar hate-crime was committed in Canada in 1989 at the Ecole Polytechnique - in that case, the shooter was convinced women were stealing his job, in this one they were denying him dates. Which is why I was relieved to read the article Jessica pointed to in The Christian Science Monitor.

Not only does the article identify this horrific act as gender-based violence, it provides a context and history of misogyny:

Misogyny has been around since almost as long as men and women have. The first poem written in Greek that still exists is called "Woman." Its author is anonymous, and it amounts to a harangue against the female sex.

While the gender-equality movement has made strides in the past century when it comes to some of the more blatant forms of societal misogyny, such as banning women from academic and professional settings, misogyny persists in American and other cultures around the world, according to historians.

"This killer fits into a long pattern of males who harbor hatred towards all women, the image of 'woman,' and towards individual real women, and who take out their frustration on a female scapegoat," says David Gilmore, an anthropology professor at Stony Brook University in New York and author of "Misogyny: the Male Malady."

Thankfully, the headlines have changed today. Hopefully they mainstream media will begin to connect the dots between this and other gender-based crimes, as well. One can dream at least.