Category Archives: Uncategorized

I haven’t written about the Newtown Connecticut shootings yet.  I have plenty to say on the subject but I wasn’t ready.  I was too sickened by it.  And I didn’t want to just respond with my gut.  I wanted to think long and hard about how I feel about this issue and then respond. 

I was deeply changed when I learned about the Montreal Massacre.  In 1989,  a gunman walked into an engineering classroom at the École Polytechnique in Montreal.  He asked the 60 or so students to divide up by gender and sent the men out of the room.  He proceeded to kill the remaining women telling them that he was there because they were feminists and he hated feminists.  When one of them tried to insist they were not all feminists, he said that if they were women studying to be engineers than they must be.  Fourteen women were killed.  Even today, there are debates about whether this was an act of violence against women. 

In 1998, Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden killed five people in Jonesboro, Arkansas, four students and a teacher at their middle school.  All those killed were women. 

In 2006 Charles Carl Roberts IV shot ten girls, killing five in an Amish one room school house in Pennsylvania. 

I could go on an on with this list.  To see more, click here.  What strikes me about all these shootings, however, is the similarities of the shooters.  What do you see?  White?  Yes.  Male?  Yes.  We live in a culture of fear that teaches us to fear men of color.  Big mistake. 

While we spend all our time discussing gun control and mental illness, I want to step back and figure out what these young men were taught about women and girls and respect.  I think therein lies a big piece of the puzzle. 

I couldn’t write about this after it happened because I am tired of girls and women being killed all over the world.  I hate all the NCI-CSI-SVU shows that center their shows around the horrific killing of women.  We know it happens, I don’t want to WATCH it. 

This Valentines Day (my favorite day of the year as some of you know!), the V-Day Movement, started by Eve Ensler is organizing 1 Billion Rising.  http://onebillionrising.org/  Check it out.  UMass Dartmouth is participating, along with hundreds of other cities, towns, schools, and communities to stand up and say we need to stop the violence.  Find an event near you and go support it.  Be part of the solution.  Stop watching television shows that base their plots on dead women.  Think about what other things you can do to help.  Speak up.  Interrupt hate speech.  Stop rape jokes.  Speak up when women are put down.  Defend others different from you.  Practice self-love.  Get help if you need it.  Change the world. 

Happy Valentines Day.  Love, Juli. 

Last June I wrote a blog about the use of the word girl.  Just this past week, a male feminist blogger I follow, The Current Conscience, spent some time on the same subject.  Now I am not one to judge many things without first trying them out.  For example, most of the foods I dislike, I will try, try again, just to double check, particularly those my husband loves, like lamb.  (Yuck!). 

So, of course I watched the entire first season of Lena Dunham’s Girls because I felt it was important not only to support a woman written and produced and directed show, but it was also a supposedly feminist coming of age story of millennials, the very age group I have intimately worked with, albeit not the rich version. 

And after watching most of season one, I wrote a blog about the use of the word “girl” and how I felt that Dunham was tearing apart much of the great work done by 2nd (and 3rd) wave feminists for embracing the term in her show.  Read it again here:  Girls.

So, now we’re onto Season 2 of Girls and Ms Dunham (would she allow me to call her Ms?) has now started receiving accolades from the TV and Hollywood award givers.  “Over the weekend, Dunham won Best TV Comedy Director at the Director’s Guild Awards. She is the first woman to win in this award in the  42 year history—which while much hasn’t been said about it—is a huge deal.  Dunham won for her direction of the pilot episode.”(Lena Dunham).

So yes.  This is a BIG deal.  She has also won Golden Globes for Best Actress in a Comedy and the show won for Best Television Series. And she’s only 26 years old.  Of course she has famous artist parents and two of the actors in her show also have famous parents, Allison Williams and Zosia Mamet, but is that really relevant?  Might be a discussion for another day. 

So now I am eating my words and watching Season 2 because as I keep saying, if people like me don’t support women directors and writers, who will? 

I watched part of the Superbowl.  It aired during the end of a cast party my husband and I were hosting at our home.  I just finished a two weekend run of the play, Dinner with Friends, by Donald Margulies, produced by The Barker Playhouse.

We had the game on in the background and would occasionally look up during the commercials to see what was playing.  Everyone left at halftime and I sat back on the couch to relax.  Beyonce came on, looking gorgeous, as usual.  I looked at my husband and said “no white woman could look like that without harsh criticism.”

I think of the criticism of Brittany Spears at the 2007 MTV music awards,  Jennifer Simpson in 2009 with her tight fitting jeans and Christina Aguilera whose co-star Adam Levine on “The Voice” was given kudos for defending her after media commentary that she was too fat.  Even Lady Gaga has been criticized for being too fat.  On the horrible celebrity site Celebuzz.com, they posted pictures of her and her “curves” in Brazil. 

Lady Gaga shows off her curves in a bikini

This is the stuff that makes me want to boycott all things Hollywood and all things music industry.  And in some ways I wish I could  give all the power in the world over to people of color who honestly seem to embrace diversity in bodies with a much broader view than many white women and the very white media. Or maybe just get rid of the white media and see what happens. 

Gaga has further gone to develop a website called Body Revolution where she has outed herself as struggling with anorexia and bulimia most of her life and encouraging others to write about their “flaws.”  Feministing posted an interesting commentary on it here. 

This also begs the question why we have different unattainable beauty standards for one set of women versus another?  What are young girls to do with these messages?  A young black girl sees Beyonce and is empowered by her strength, her beauty and her talent and then sees Chistina Aguilera and hears people call her fat.  How confusing must that be to young girls who don’t see themselves represented in our media in any diverse way? 

I want to re-define how we talk about women.  I want that talk to be about their talent about their strength.  I don’t want our definitions of them to be connected to what size jeans they wear or who “wore it better.”  It sometimes feels overwhelming to think about a world where this isn’t what we do and isn’t how we relate to women. 

I am connected to many women’s media organizations who are trying to re-frame the paradigm.  It is not happening quickly enough for me.  On the edge of my 44th birthday, I want to live in a world that helps me love who I am– brain, body and soul, not live in a world that makes me question everything I put in my mouth, everything I put on my body, and how I express that to the world.

If we can’t do it for ourselves and the women we love, can we at least begin some small steps for my  nieces and all the girls coming up behind us, who in many ways, have even more pressure that my generation ever did?  What small steps can you make today to change this culture? 

You can start my shifting the conversation from looks to brains.  Try that just for one day.  I’ll be cheering for you. 

I don’t like to rant.  No, seriously, I don’t.  I like to write well constructed arguments about particular topics that interest me or piss me off.  But for some reason, January has been a pretty shitty month and it has consumed me.  So instead of racking my brain for the perfect critique which has consumed each Wednesday; and instead of writing I’ve just avoided it. I’m going to rant about my month and then we can just move on to February and things can get back to normal.

There’s a great women’s online news site called Women’s ENews.  I met the founder when I attended the Feminist Intensive last year.  They have a section in each weekly posting called “Cheers and Jeers.”  I’m going to steal that idea for my end of November rant.  And please excuse how personal this might get.

I’ll start with that so we can at least end on a positive.  On January 4th, I saw some disturbing posts on facebook by my husband’s niece and nephew about their mom.  His nephew and his partner lived with us for three weeks last January so we got very close with them.  I called him to find out what was going on and he told me his mom was in the ICU.  Two days later my husband and his brother had booked flights to fly to Mississippi to see their sister, who was at that point, in Hospice.  I joined him two days later so I could be with him and his family for the funeral.  She was 56.  He lost his other brother in a motorcycle accident when he was only 20.  He lost his Dad when he was 19.  Sometimes having a bigger family means losing a lot more. 

I came home and was thrust into the last two weeks of rehearsal for a play I am in called Dinner With Friends.  It took us all much longer to get comfortable with our lines than I am comfortable with and ended up being quite stressful and frustrating.  Furthermore, a day after I got back, I got sick.  I was out of work three days for the funeral, then three days the following week for a really bad cold.  I went to the doctor after MLK day and she felt I just had a bad cold even though I had a killer sinus headache and my boss and my administrative assistant were insistent that I had a sinus infection.  I worked all week but wasn’t improving.  Saturday, the day after the show opened, I developed a fever and had to go on stage feeling horrible.  I went back to the doctor on Monday (another two days out of work)and she decided I probably did have a sinus infection.  DUH!  So 18 days later, I’m starting to feel a teensy bit better.  I stress the word teensy.

It was below 10 degrees here for like a week.  Enough said about that.

The university is suffering a ba-zillion dollar deficit.  It’s not quite that bad, but it’s bad enough and stressful and worrisome.  And when you already have a small budget to do the kind of work I do, it means doing it with even less.  There’s only so much money for the women and the gays, you know?

One of my best friends had a very bad infection and was hospitalized far, far away from me.  I was worried.  She’s okay now, but it was scary for a while.

Obama was inaugurated on MLK Day.   You really can’t beat that.  My favorite quote of the speech was “from Seneca to Selma to Stonewall.”

My play opened last Friday and it really is such a neat Theatre, the B arker Playhouse. Their claim to fame is that they are the oldest little Theatre in America. It is filled with such nice people, and a lovely cast and crew.  And I just adore Kevin Broccoli, my director.  If you haven’t seen his work, please try to do so.  He’s the new up and coming King of Providence, I think. 

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler hosted the Golden Globes.  I could care less about the award part but watching them made me happy. 

We re-financed our rental property and are going to save about $400 a month.  There was some deal by the Feds that would help you re-fi even if you were under water.  Nice.  Thanks Obama.

And I saw David Sedaris.  He was funny.  But the stuff that was the funniest is so gross I can’t possible publish it here.

To February!  In our family, this month is known as Birthday Month! 

Let’s drill down a bit further to see who votes for these movies.  According to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, “There are three ways to become a candidate for membership in the academy: land an Oscar nomination; apply and receive a recommendation from two members of a branch; or earn an endorsement from the branch’s membership committee or the academy staff.
The membership committees then vote on the candidates and those who get a majority are invited to join.”  http://www.oscars.org/academy/members/invitations.html

Trashed – Directed by Candida Brady (documentary)

I wrote this in 2010.  But as I was bitching the other night, at my husband, of course, about how I had done all the figuring out of the presents, all the shopping and all the wrapping, while teaching a course, rehearsing for a play, preparing a huge talk and teaching yoga ON TOP OF MY DAY JOB, I thought it might be fun to revisit it.  And I’m just not ready to write about another school shooting where the majority of the dead are girls and women and the killer is a young white male.  (It will come, I promise). 

I watched a re-run of Family Guy last night. In this episode, Lois freaks out because she is exhausted from Christmas preparations. She sets fire to their tree and goes on a rampage through the town of Quahog. This episode really resonated with me, even though I don’t have children. I have done the majority of the shopping for the approximately 40 people on our list, many of whom are nieces and nephews on my husband’s side of the family. It’s now up to 50.  How the hell did that happen?   Last Saturday I spent hours wrapping all of those presents. And I’m still not done. I have to pick up something for my Dad, find the perfect book about trains for my Godson, get something for my neighbors who were overly generous last year, a gift certificate for my brother in law and his wife, go to Target and get dog toys for nine dogs, and maybe something else for my mother. I’m way ahead of the curve this year.  I did most of this last weekend as we are leaving today for New Hampshire to do my family’s Christmases so I had to be ready.  I did spend Saturday baking shortbread cookies and Sunday grading papers, making two lasagnes for a Christmas party, and wrapping most of the gifts.  And there are still three more things to buy, which coincidentally have been on my husband’s To Do list for a week–pick up two gift cards and a bottle of white wine.  Guess who will probably be doing that?

Then I have to buy the ingredients to make a Christmas Eve dessert, develop a shopping list for Christmas dinner, which will include making another dessert, and finish wrapping the gifts I haven’t finished wrapping, including some I need to wrap when my husband is elsewhere. This part is easier this year as we tried NOT to buy anything for each other so I just have a couple of things to throw in his stocking for Christmas morning. And I won’t wrap them.  I’ll make my pie tomorrow am when I am in New Hampshire and we’ll come up with something to bring to Christmas Eve that morning after we’re back. 

Christmas has become a race to exhaustion. And while I love to buy Christmas presents, I wonder if we have stepped too far afield of its meaning. While we hear all the time that we have to “get back to the real meaning of Christmas,” like a new group on Facebook called “Let’s keep the Christ in Christmas,” none of this addresses the pressure that, in most cases, women face during this time of year.

And why does the holiday pressure fall on women? I know I am the one who nagged my husband about decorating the house. This year our tree was up without lights for a WEEK.  And when he finally got motivated to put them on, while I was out at an event one night, he couldn’t find the lights.  he spent most of Saturday looking all over town for white lights and we ended up with colored ones.  There is one fake stupid looking wreath hanging on our garage.  Our house really looks blah. But I am really over it.  I was the one who wanted our house to look “pretty” in my neighborhood. I was the one who went to get a tree and then decorated the whole thing while he cooked dinner one night. I did manage to get him to come shopping with me for some of our nieces and nephews, but I couldn’t get him to move at the pace I needed. Am I the one who puts this pressure on me? Do women bring this on themselves? Or are men happy to let us take charge?

I often get a good cold this time of year. Women run themselves into exhaustion, staying up late wrapping presents or baking cookies or decorating. I wonder if next year, instead of getting back to the real meaning of Christmas, maybe we could begin to think of an equality of Christmas, where no one person in the home takes full responsibility for the increased chores that come with this beautiful season of lights.

So yes, I wrote that paragraph two years ago.  Did it happen?  Clearly not.  I think the best Christmas I had, so far, was the year we went away to New York to have Christmas with my birth family.  I think it was fun because I wasn’t worried about pleasing my family in anyway.  Maybe we need to start spending Christmas in the Caribbean.  Now there’s an idea.  Merry Christmas!

Yesterday I did my first ever keynote presentation at The James J. Kaput Center for Research and Innovation in Mathematics Education.  I’m sure some of my readers are like “WTF?  Math Education?”  Dr. Parker knows NOTHING about that. 

My talk was titled “Choosing Science:  Succeeding without Visible Role Models” and I looked at the representation of women across the STEM fields and then examined the representation of fictional scientists in Hollywood and television.  The talk will be available in the next week or two as a download. (As an actor and director, I will watch it and critique everything I did wrong, to improve upon it for future use).

But what resonated with most, the day after, was a comment made by a Ph.D. student from Turkey, who stated that women’s representations as scientists in Turkey is more equal and she questioned whether these issues were western or U.S. based.  This comment gave me pause.  Of course I think media representation issues are based in the U.S., but I don’t think I have thought enough about this from a global perspective.  When I think of France, I picture a similar advertising to the US, but does that play out the same way in commercials? 

We do know that in politics, the U.S. lags behind many European countries in how women are represented.  England and Germany have had women as their leaders, for example.  But what kind of commercials are shown and who runs their media.  One comment from a colleague, from England, was that he felt as if the U.S. is spewing it’s crappy media across the pond towards Europe; that every time he goes home it feels more like the U.S.  I guess I need to ask some of my friends in Europe–I have two in England, one in France, and one in Switzerland what their experience is. 

If you have any ideas on this subject or suggestions, please send them my way.  This work I am engaged in, on representation seems to get more expansive the more time I spend on it. 

I think in my next blog I will do a mini study on representation of women and girls in Christmas movies.  Or will there be nothing to write about?

I maintain a list of blog ideas to write about.  Today I’m going to spend a short time ranting on a few of them, just in time for the Holidays!

The ABC Series, Scandal, now in it’s second season, is a must watch for any feminist supporting television watcher. I will provide you with three reasons you really should watch this show. 

First, Kerry Washington, the lead actor, who plays Olivia Price, is the first female Black lead on a major network since the 1974 show Get Christie Love starring Teresa Graves.  Other shows with leading Black women have included cable’s TNT’s HawthoRNe produced and starring Jada Pinkett Smith and HBOs The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency starring Jill Scott. Both of these drama’s were short-lived, with HawthoRNe pulled after three seasons.  Diahann Carroll was the first African-American woman to star in a sitcom, Julia, which debuted on ABC in 1968 and ran for three years.

Next, Scandal is also the first dramatic network television series written and produced by an African-American woman for an African-American woman in the lead role. Shonda Rhimes, the creator, head writer, and producer of Grey’s Anatomy and it’s spin-off, Private Practice is a role model for other women in television writing and production.  Another first is the show’s inspiration, Judy Smith, Washington, D.C. crisis communications pro, now co-executive producer of the show.  Smith served as Special Assistant and Deputy Press Secretary under the first Bush Administration earning a “reputation for being straightforward, honest and hard working,” along with being “instrumental in . . . controversies surrounding the nomination of Clarence Thomas . . . and the Gulf War.” Smith started a company “Smith & Company,” specializing in crisis management and media relations.  Some of her clients include Monica Lewinski and Michael Vick.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judy_Smith

The third reason you should watch this show is because it is really good.  It is a political thriller with twists and turns that constantly leave you guessing.  I have only watched part of Season two and am counting the hours until the weekend when I can get caught up on the rest of the season as well as finding a way to watch Season one.  

I owe my inspiration for this blog to my friend and colleague, Cynthia Cummings, who encouraged me to watch the show as part of my exploration into women’s miss-representation. 

Last night on my drive home from performing in a staged reading of The Seagull and dinner with a friend, I heard this story on WGBH, Boston Public Radio about the first witch trail in the Hamptons.  What interested me was a study that found those accused of being witches were often women about to come into inheritance, thus making them independent women. Women, who were accused of witchcraft, “often were spinsters, barren, ugly, extremely successful, independent, reclusive, litigious, or willful” (http://www.angelfire.com/mi4/polcrt/SalemTrials.html).

In Connecticut, there are known to be 35 witch trials “between 1647 and 1697, as well as two more in the 18th Century, of which a total of eleven resulted in executions” (http://www.witchcraftandwitches.com/trials_connecticut.html).  We also know of the case in the East Hamptons in 1658.  And approximately 80 people were accused between 1648 – 1663 in Massachusetts, executing 19 of them.  The numbers vary, but the closest “guesstimate” is about 30 women and a few men were executed during this time.  (Compared to thousands in Europe prior to this).  Women who did not confess to witchcraft were the ones most often put to death.  Those who did confess were given a break but then ostracized from their communities.  

So why am I carrying on today about the witch trials, other than the fact that it’s Halloween?  If we look back and see that most of those executed were women and that “most of those women had somehow manifested an independence or insubordination deemed inappropriate and even potentially disruptive or dangerous, should provide one of the most telling explanations of all. It is also worthy of note that most of the accused were middle-aged, without sons or brothers; they thus stood to inherit property and to live as autonomous spinsters, an existence that in and of itself threatened to defy or unseat the carefully maintained and cherished patriarchal order of this seventeenth-century society” (http://www.shmoop.com/colonial-new-england/gender.html).  

We are about to possibly elect some Republican men who would probably fit in quite well in 17th century New England.  Let’s do a quick recap of the last few months.  Todd Akin, a congressman running for U.S. Senate in Missouri, said rape survivors don’t need abortions because “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Joe Walsh, a House incumbent in Illinois, asserted that “with modern technology and science, you can’t find one instance” where abortion is necessary to protect a woman’s life or health. And most recently, Richard Mourdock, the Indiana state treasurer and Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, who Mitt Romney has endorsed, stated that “even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen” (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2012/10/todd_akin_and_richard_mourdock_banning_abortion_for_rape_victims_is_the.html).  

This complete dismissal of women owning their bodies feels like we’ve traveled back in time to Salem.  And the misogyny of these Republican candidates is not just about rape and reproductive rights.  It is also about the old evil spinster who will live into her 90s and have no access to Medicare or Social Security because her benefits will be destroyed.  Most of the policies being proposed by these men are about keeping women in their place, witch is exactly what the witch trials were about.  When asked about pay equity for women, Romney could not answer whether he thought it was important, but that women needed “flex time” so they could get home to their children to make dinner.  What I surmise from this statement is that he is not concerned with women getting equal pay, but concerned that we stay in our “proper place.”

So on Halloween I ask you to pause and reflect on all the women (and men) who were killed in the name of Patriarchy and to think hard about what choices you will make next week at the Polls.  Will those choices include expanding the rights we have as citizens (equal pay, medical marijuana, national healthcare, reproductive rights, marriage equality, euthanasia,  gays serving openly in the military) or will it be about shrinking those rights and sending women back to a time when speaking our mind could end in burning at the stake or a long trip to the insane asylum?  Happy Halloween!