Sacha Jones's Blog, page 7
February 4, 2018
Me too, Tonya
I, Tonya is a must-see film for our times revealing what some (too many) young woman go through to try and make it to the top of their chosen sport, especially if they don't quite match the exact image of the ideal female in that sport, as American ice-skater Tonya Harding did not. She didn't look the part, she was too chunky and 'trashy' compared with her more refined and thinner competitor, Nancy Kerrigan.
I had a very similar experience with my ballet career, my perfect physical adversary was called Megan. I wrote a book about it, but it's no film in the making. Because I was not nearly as tough as Tonya. I didn't have a mother who pushed me too hard (or at all), or a boyfriend who bashed me on a regular basis, as Harding did. And so, that she got so much further in her intensely competitive field than I did, shows just how tough she was (I was a little bit tough).
And that's what this film shows brilliantly, the toughness of this woman, and one suspects many other women too, who have to fight against obstacles put in their way at every step, many of them obstacles that are not put in the way of men.Of course Tonya did not ultimately win her battle - unless the film, which tells her side of events, is a victory - being banned from skating competitively at the age of 23 when she was in her prime, for something she didn't do due to her boyfriend telling the authorities that she had done it, namely knew about the plan to injure her rival Kerrigan, an accusation which the film shows to be patently false. An accusation which anyone who has been a competitive sportsperson at that level would know a fellow competitor would never do, risking it all to injure a rival, when you want to beat them fair and square, especially a true competitor and thoroughly decent person and brave battler like Harding.
So in the end it is a film about winning the war of your truth being told while losing the battle of being the best skater in the world, as Harding could have been. That's a war worth winning but one we shouldn't have to fight so hard for, if at all.
Hopefully this kind of truth-telling about women's battles won and lost can help to make sure that subsequent generations of women won't have to fight quite so hard to get the rewards and recognition they deserve.
February 1, 2018
Kick her in the pussy
Pussy features in my stand-up comedy too...
I'm with her (to the right of his pussy-kicking foot)
but not quite in the same way that it features in the stand-up comedy of international superstar comedian Dave Chapelle who kicks off his latest, and he says last Netflix comedy special with a joke that he wrote expressly in order to finish with the punchline: 'So I kicked her in the pussy'. The wider purpose of this worthy exercise was to prove how 'easy' comedy is for him, which he says is the reason why he is quitting. It's too easy. Arrogant much? Just a bit.
He also thinks it hilarious to mock the audience for not seeing the punchline coming when he had announced that this was the way he wrote comedy, shitty punchline first. He didn't call it shitty, of course. He thinks it's comedy gold.
I saw it coming and didn't laugh, but I wasn't as wrapped up in the experience as those in the audience would have been having bought their tickets wishfully hoping that when he came out charging with his pussy-kicking joke, he was somehow going to redeem the sexism of it in the rest of the show and they weren't going to be subjected to a whole hour of the same. Those people, other than his fellow sexists, laughed nervously at the pussy punchline and not because they thought it out and out funny, at least that was my interpretation of the audience's reaction to the kicked pussy.
Needless to say the pussy he wrote a looooong joke in order to kick in his punchline was white. The last kicked 'pussy' (woman) he made overt fun of on stage was that belonging to the brutally murdered, brazenly justice-denied wife of OJ Simpson, the man he described as 'the most interesting, articulate and intelligent dude' he'd ever met.
We didn't turn him off at that point, though my finger was hovering on the trigger.
But when he almost immediately started in on an Asian woman in a previous audience who he said he could tell was a bitch just from her face I did pull the trigger. Presumably he thinks that because he married an Asian woman Asian women, like white women, are fair game for his overt and deliberately provocative sexism.
It's clear he wants a reaction from women. To me it's clear he doesn't like women at all. And he invariably gets a reaction from some brave woman or other in the audience, which he then happily reports back on and mocks in his subsequent shows.
He's having fun, clearly, which is great. I guess that's what it's all about for so many male comedians, public self-pleasuring at the expense of women. Indeed he apparently goes on to defend Louis C.K. and say he suffered more than his female victims. Yeah, d'man knows what women suffer, it's nothin' compared to what the brothers suffer, even the white brothers. Of course. It has always been so and always will be.
I'm done with Chapelle, as is this woman on Twitter:
I’ll go ahead and speak for the silent majority: Dave Chapelle, you suck. Grasping to be edgy and controversial is boring, easy, average, and not in alignment with the times. Not to mention your punchlines are more like hate crimes, but I assume that’s your chosen comedic brand.10:16 AM - Jan 3, 2018
My next post is on a young male comedian who is not only not sexist but is bold and evolved enough to use his stand-up - which is hilarious - to confront the problem of male sexism. He deserves a separate post.
I'm with her (to the right of his pussy-kicking foot)but not quite in the same way that it features in the stand-up comedy of international superstar comedian Dave Chapelle who kicks off his latest, and he says last Netflix comedy special with a joke that he wrote expressly in order to finish with the punchline: 'So I kicked her in the pussy'. The wider purpose of this worthy exercise was to prove how 'easy' comedy is for him, which he says is the reason why he is quitting. It's too easy. Arrogant much? Just a bit.
He also thinks it hilarious to mock the audience for not seeing the punchline coming when he had announced that this was the way he wrote comedy, shitty punchline first. He didn't call it shitty, of course. He thinks it's comedy gold.
I saw it coming and didn't laugh, but I wasn't as wrapped up in the experience as those in the audience would have been having bought their tickets wishfully hoping that when he came out charging with his pussy-kicking joke, he was somehow going to redeem the sexism of it in the rest of the show and they weren't going to be subjected to a whole hour of the same. Those people, other than his fellow sexists, laughed nervously at the pussy punchline and not because they thought it out and out funny, at least that was my interpretation of the audience's reaction to the kicked pussy.
Needless to say the pussy he wrote a looooong joke in order to kick in his punchline was white. The last kicked 'pussy' (woman) he made overt fun of on stage was that belonging to the brutally murdered, brazenly justice-denied wife of OJ Simpson, the man he described as 'the most interesting, articulate and intelligent dude' he'd ever met.
We didn't turn him off at that point, though my finger was hovering on the trigger.
But when he almost immediately started in on an Asian woman in a previous audience who he said he could tell was a bitch just from her face I did pull the trigger. Presumably he thinks that because he married an Asian woman Asian women, like white women, are fair game for his overt and deliberately provocative sexism.
It's clear he wants a reaction from women. To me it's clear he doesn't like women at all. And he invariably gets a reaction from some brave woman or other in the audience, which he then happily reports back on and mocks in his subsequent shows.
He's having fun, clearly, which is great. I guess that's what it's all about for so many male comedians, public self-pleasuring at the expense of women. Indeed he apparently goes on to defend Louis C.K. and say he suffered more than his female victims. Yeah, d'man knows what women suffer, it's nothin' compared to what the brothers suffer, even the white brothers. Of course. It has always been so and always will be.
I'm done with Chapelle, as is this woman on Twitter:
I’ll go ahead and speak for the silent majority: Dave Chapelle, you suck. Grasping to be edgy and controversial is boring, easy, average, and not in alignment with the times. Not to mention your punchlines are more like hate crimes, but I assume that’s your chosen comedic brand.10:16 AM - Jan 3, 2018
My next post is on a young male comedian who is not only not sexist but is bold and evolved enough to use his stand-up - which is hilarious - to confront the problem of male sexism. He deserves a separate post.
January 29, 2018
"I don't know if it was a mistake"
Words of wisdom from the Grammy's exec called Ken who was
asked to comment
on the decision not to ask Lorde, the only woman in the lineup of nominees for Album of the Year 2018, to perform her own music on the night of the awards ceremony (she was instead asked to be part of a group tribute to Tom Petty. She declined. Go girl!).Another Grammy's exec, this one called Neil -- hang on, there's a pattern forming here; I don't know if that's a mistake -- offered his view that 'it's always hard' (I doubt that, Neil), but the show they delivered, including 'endless appearances' by Sting and Bono, and a 45-minute opera, was 'the best we could do to put on a really balanced show.' Balance on *this* Neil.
Timely feminist poem written in the 70s by Jenny Holzer
pinned to Lorde's Grammy night dress in a Time's Up protest.Huston we have a problem: the world's top music execs in charge of deciding who gets to showcase their talents to the world and ultimately to succeed as artists in that world, if industry support is necessary to that success, which it no doubt is, are called Ken and Neil and are men who fit their generic white-male privileged names to a tedious tee in thinking that blatant gender exclusion is not a form of systemic imbalance and discrimination, or at least who know it is but who have the audacity to go public with this brazen bullshit and to hold up their hands and say: 'I don't know'; 'We did our best'; 'It's hard.'
Good on Lorde's mother for posting this in response to illustrate the systematic nature of the US music industry's discrimination against female artists since the inception of the Grammys, a sexism that is maybe even more brazen today than ever in the push-back against the 2017-18 women-led Me Too and Time's Up movements against gender inequality and male sexual harassment in the entertainment business and beyond.
Your time's almost up, boys; so take courage indeed, girls; 'The worst is a harbinger of the best.'
January 24, 2018
A Womb With a View of Virginia
If we continue to exaggerate our differences
of sex, race and religion, we risk
becoming united only in
our opposition to
one another;
the united
fates of
none.
January 22, 2018
The Post with the Most
The Post
is not obviously a movie about gender politics, but that's what makes it all the...
more effective as a vehicle for challenging gender stereotypes that continue to devalue and overlook what women have done over time to improve the human condition and always with obstacles put in place for them by men.
And the historical nature of the The Post that was written by a woman and man screenwriting team in 2017, the year that the fight to overcome the presumption that men are better at everything that matters and are more deserving of the top jobs and rewards in life than women went mainstream and global, manages to show us how pervasive this injustice was in the 1970s and how far we think we have come since then, but in actuality how little distance we have travelled.
Not all reviewers agree with this analysis.
One reviewer wrote that the gender lament of the film as portrayed by Streep actually 'feels like the wrong performance for these angry #MeToo times', a male reviewer he was and with that word 'angry', a man who shows that he doesn't get it. It's not about 'anger', it's about justice, a goal that encompasses the full spectrum of emotions and is more about solidarity and sisterhood and taking action against injustice than anything as negative and crude as anger.
But some other men are stepping up to the challenge of thinking and writing from a more gender-aware and justice-minded perspective about women (and men), and two of the reviews of The Post written in this country (not published online) have surprised me in this respect by not finding a way to diminish Streep's performance and praise Hanks', but rather openly acknowledging the strength and subtlety of Streep's performance in playing a much more complex role than the one Hanks' character plays, kind of like the difference between the roles that women and men so often play in life in general.
One writes: 'In the end it is her film' acknowledging the greater acting challenges of the role Streep takes on in portraying the first woman publisher of a major newspaper working amongst men, having inherited the role after her husband died (committed suicide), and while surrounded by men who don't respect her or think she should be there at all.
Another reviewer commented on how 'watchable' and 'appealing' Streep is in the film, adjectives that are not often heard in public descriptions of women over 60 (over 40) in any setting.
So although it's no 'Wonder Woman', I think The Post and these sorts of positive and feminist-forward reviews by men represent significant progress in the battle for women's talents, equal and unique, to be recognised by the gender that has resisted and actively opposed this idea for so long.
I have been reading and watching for this stuff for more than twenty-five years and know how rare it is to find men openly acknowledging women's value in the workplace and beyond. It sounds like a small thing but in my view it is the biggest thing of all. If men can publicly show respect and admiration for women - when and where deserved, of course - then I think we are well on our way to a more equal and empowering world for all, on and off screen.
The strongest feminist moment in the film is when the cocky character Tom Hanks' plays wakes up to the truth of the what his wife (Sarah Paulson) says about that Streep's character having shown a bravery far outstripping his own in deciding to publish the papers and risk going to prison and the end of her family's newspaper for defying the president's injunction against publishing such papers, a truth told to him by the woman who helps him into his coat every morning.
If all men could be encouraged to wake up to the strength and bravery of women - the kind of bravery shown in the #MeToo movement indeed with women speaking out knowing they will be hated and blacklisted for it, as they have been - while understanding and admitting to themselves and others the limits of their own bravery for not doing nearly enough to fight this injustice in the past, then brave they, and we, will be.
So Streep's performance as the brave Katherine Graham is not 'the wrong performance' for our 'angry times,' it is exactly the right performance for our unjust times to show us how far we might have come had we recognised what Hanks' character is made to recognise in the film, but no doubt failed to recognise at the time, and that our failure to progress has had little to do with the existence or not of a free and unfettered press. Indeed as the 2016 election shows, if there is one factor that brought in Trump and his mission to destroy the free press - and god knows what else - it is the ongoing resistance of men (and many women, too) to the idea that women can and must be allowed to play their vital part in leading us forward into a brighter and freer world.
more effective as a vehicle for challenging gender stereotypes that continue to devalue and overlook what women have done over time to improve the human condition and always with obstacles put in place for them by men. And the historical nature of the The Post that was written by a woman and man screenwriting team in 2017, the year that the fight to overcome the presumption that men are better at everything that matters and are more deserving of the top jobs and rewards in life than women went mainstream and global, manages to show us how pervasive this injustice was in the 1970s and how far we think we have come since then, but in actuality how little distance we have travelled.
Not all reviewers agree with this analysis.
One reviewer wrote that the gender lament of the film as portrayed by Streep actually 'feels like the wrong performance for these angry #MeToo times', a male reviewer he was and with that word 'angry', a man who shows that he doesn't get it. It's not about 'anger', it's about justice, a goal that encompasses the full spectrum of emotions and is more about solidarity and sisterhood and taking action against injustice than anything as negative and crude as anger.
But some other men are stepping up to the challenge of thinking and writing from a more gender-aware and justice-minded perspective about women (and men), and two of the reviews of The Post written in this country (not published online) have surprised me in this respect by not finding a way to diminish Streep's performance and praise Hanks', but rather openly acknowledging the strength and subtlety of Streep's performance in playing a much more complex role than the one Hanks' character plays, kind of like the difference between the roles that women and men so often play in life in general.
One writes: 'In the end it is her film' acknowledging the greater acting challenges of the role Streep takes on in portraying the first woman publisher of a major newspaper working amongst men, having inherited the role after her husband died (committed suicide), and while surrounded by men who don't respect her or think she should be there at all.
Another reviewer commented on how 'watchable' and 'appealing' Streep is in the film, adjectives that are not often heard in public descriptions of women over 60 (over 40) in any setting.
So although it's no 'Wonder Woman', I think The Post and these sorts of positive and feminist-forward reviews by men represent significant progress in the battle for women's talents, equal and unique, to be recognised by the gender that has resisted and actively opposed this idea for so long.
I have been reading and watching for this stuff for more than twenty-five years and know how rare it is to find men openly acknowledging women's value in the workplace and beyond. It sounds like a small thing but in my view it is the biggest thing of all. If men can publicly show respect and admiration for women - when and where deserved, of course - then I think we are well on our way to a more equal and empowering world for all, on and off screen.
The strongest feminist moment in the film is when the cocky character Tom Hanks' plays wakes up to the truth of the what his wife (Sarah Paulson) says about that Streep's character having shown a bravery far outstripping his own in deciding to publish the papers and risk going to prison and the end of her family's newspaper for defying the president's injunction against publishing such papers, a truth told to him by the woman who helps him into his coat every morning.
If all men could be encouraged to wake up to the strength and bravery of women - the kind of bravery shown in the #MeToo movement indeed with women speaking out knowing they will be hated and blacklisted for it, as they have been - while understanding and admitting to themselves and others the limits of their own bravery for not doing nearly enough to fight this injustice in the past, then brave they, and we, will be.
So Streep's performance as the brave Katherine Graham is not 'the wrong performance' for our 'angry times,' it is exactly the right performance for our unjust times to show us how far we might have come had we recognised what Hanks' character is made to recognise in the film, but no doubt failed to recognise at the time, and that our failure to progress has had little to do with the existence or not of a free and unfettered press. Indeed as the 2016 election shows, if there is one factor that brought in Trump and his mission to destroy the free press - and god knows what else - it is the ongoing resistance of men (and many women, too) to the idea that women can and must be allowed to play their vital part in leading us forward into a brighter and freer world.
January 18, 2018
The first First Baby
Jacinda and Clarke, the parents to be of the first First BabyYou know times are a-changing for the better and the braver
when the leader of your country announces she is pregnant.
Fittingly this happened today in New Zealand, the land that was first to grant women the vote.
And the Dad, the third First Man we've had in this country, will be the primary caregiver of the world's first First Baby that is due in June, which will be another first.
It's a brave new world indeed, and I for one can't wait to see how well these two trailblazers show us how it can be done, they both seem ideally suited for the tasks.
January 16, 2018
Ice is nice
Given that justice might be likened to a drug for the feeling of euphoria it brings that is all too often fleeting with the high hope fading and in its wake, a legacy of disappointment and failure to live up to the spirit of justice, I think I might be forgiven this cheap pun (ice being heroin's street name, if the American movies I watch are to be believed) to mark
Iceland's recent move to make it illegal to pay women less than men
for equal work, adding a burden of proof on all employers to show that they are in fact complying with the law and actual punishments if they are found to be not complying. Imagine that! Actual punishments for non-compliance of a gender equality law. What is the world coming to?! This is a world first indeed, though equal pay legislation has been in place there and in all democratic countries around the world since the 1970s, but has remained unequal not least because the majority of law enforcers in these countries have continued to be men who, it turns out, are not so fussed in practice about the equality and justice for all they have written endless theoretical treatise on ever since the Enlightenment in the 1770s.
But not in Iceland anymore. Today in Iceland equality becomes real, in large part because that country boasts an equal number of male and female parliamentarians. The commitment is to have 100% compliance with the law of equal pay for men and women by 2020.
So although I have no actual idea if ice is nice (I like a cube or two in my vodka), and have never been to Iceland, where there is clearly a great deal more to be charmed and chilled by than actual ice, I think this practical commitment to equality between the sexes and to honouring those Icelandic women who walked off their jobs, in home and out, to fight for this equality forty-plus years ago, is a sign that the world, one country cube at a time, is finally becoming actually enlightened to the practical challenges that real equality and justice between the sexes (and between humans) presents, thanks to the women who are enlightening those other people in the world who are not women. And that, my friends, is nice. Nice ice.
January 8, 2018
Black is the New Golden and Women are the New...
In her presidential speech accepting the Cecile B. DeMille Award for outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment, Oprah Winfrey spoke passionately about her pride in being the first black woman to have won the award (awarded since 1952 to 49 men and 14 women in total), and about how she was inspired to pursue her dreams when watching as a little girl in 1964 Sidney Poitier become the first black person to win an academy award for best actor.
But overall her speech and the Golden Globes ceremony in general was a celebration of our times in which women are speaking up to men in power and saying no to their abuses of that power, with most women at the ceremony wearing black in solidarity with those women who have spoken out as part of the Me Too Movement and Oprah saying to a standing ovation:
“For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dared to speak their truth to the power of those men. But their time is up.”
Also in solidarity with this feminist movement the Big Little Lies actresses brought female activists to the ceremony as their guests rather than their male partners, while a female-centred and anti-sexual-abuse-themed film, Three Billboards , won best film and various other awards.
So it would seem that this is not a passing news story or a political moment in time to be replaced by the next big noise, at least not if the powerful women of the world, like Oprah, whose mother was a domestic cleaner, and like all of us in our own brave, little and big ways, have anything to do with it. And they/we do.
Oprah for president 2020? Sounds like a golden idea to me.
January 4, 2018
Off with a hiss and a roar
The year off to a stormy start with the storm chasers out in force at our local Takapuna beach this morning at King Tide after a full moon last night and record high winds this morning.
Not so much fun for campers...
Single file out of the North Shore this morning before the road was closed. Hopefully it's not a case of an ill wind that forebodes no good for this critical year.
December 29, 2017
The Year of the Frock
So according to some, 2017 is/was the Year of the Cock, though, as I noted in
my earlier blog under that title
, this is a western twisting of the Chinese Year of the Chicken, a designation that makes rather more sense, given all that we get from the chicken compared with the cock.When I wrote this earlier blog on Jan 6, fifty-one weeks ago, it was before the Women's March and the Weinstein revelations and the #MeToo movement and the box-office smash hit feminist films Hidden Figures and Wonder Woman and TIME magazine's pronouncement of the sexual harassment "whistle-blowers" as Persons of the Year, all of which, and much more besides (including the election here in September of a woman PM that made international headline news), contributed to such a surge of feminist activism and interest in exposing and fighting sexism around the globe that the word 'feminism' became the most searched for word in 2017 and voted Word of the Year by Merriam-Webster for 2017.
Who would have thought it would take the election of the world's biggest cock to finally, after the tireless efforts of dedicated and much derided feminist campaigners for more than two centuries, liberate and listen to the chicken?
Well I didn't think. But I did sense the beginning of this long-awaited and hard fought for uprising at the Women's March in Auckland two weeks later, when so many women, here as around the world, showed up with their voices and their placards to protest that king cock and loudly and openly identify with the feminist cause.I'd been on a fair few feminist marches before this one and never seen anything like this level of collective anger and support for the sisterhood, with there being so much to lose for those, especially women, who identified with the much despised 'F-word' and movement. But now, in one short year, that once reviled word is the word (and cause) of the moment and women (and men) who identify with it are hailed as brave instead of hated as bitter, man-hating harridans, at least by many, if not most.
So in honour of this seismic shift I designate 2017 The Year of the Frock, with "frock" loosely woven to mean whatever item of attire you chose to wear -- or not to wear -- that celebrates the life-giving and hate-trumping power of the world's egg layers, with and without feathers.
