Gender Bending Halloween

I never got the skimpy sexy Halloween costume phenomenon when I was younger. Now in "middle age" (gasp!) I get it in a "Oh, okay, you don't really feel sexy most of the time and this is your one day to be what you really want to be" way since that is how I always interpreted dressing up for Halloween. It's a day to be something you could never actually be: a famous person, a fictional character, an animal, a flower. There's also being horrifyingly scary like a zombie with a machete in its head and flesh falling off. I've always appreciated the topical joke costumes, too, especially at parties where they make fantastic conversation starters. But mostly I followed "the being what I could never be" impulse and even as a little girl, I wanted to dress as boys. The only costume picture from my childhood is of me as a cowboy. Not a cowgirl, a cowboy. When the first Pirates of the Caribbean movies came out, I went to a party as Johnny Depp. I not only dressed like him, I acted like his character the entire night with his accent and naughty tendencies. It was an absolute blast!

Somehow, I never questioned my right to dress as a man for Halloween. When I was in high school, one of the costumes I was most excited about was Charlie Chaplin. I was a sophmore and had just discovered his movies. I studied his comical walk and cane twirling and carefully compiled a costume complete with fake mustache and proudly went to school. I couldn't wait for people to recognize me! I was quite sure there wouldn't be any other Charlie Chaplins. To my dismay, I was mistaken the entire day for Hitler. I tried to tell people that Hitler copied Charlie Chaplin's mustache because Chaplin was one of the biggest movie stars of the day, but to no avail. They scoffed at me and wrote me off as some kind of psychopath. Thus began my love/hate relationship with Halloween. More times than not, I've boycotted the entire event.

But years later, the itch to dress up on Halloween overrode my usual reticence. I think it may have been around the time that Phantom Menace came out (1999) and Star Wars fever had been revived. I remembered how I worshiped and adored Han Solo was when I was kid and decided to be him. I studied pictures online and found everything at thrift stores. My boyfriend and I joked that he should go as Princess Leia and to my delight he agreed! There is nothing more fun than dressing as the opposite sex and trying, at least for a night, to walk in the others' shoes. My man was the cutest Princess Leia and I was so proud to be with him that night.

So imagine my delight to see fifteen years later, a man and his daughter doing exactly the same thing. I love that a grown man can submit to the request of his little girl because, "Equality goes both ways." I read comments online from a lot of men complaining about women wanting more rights as if there's a limited number of rights in the world and we women are going to use them all up! The fact is that the freer one group is, the freer we all are to be not who our culture or our society or even our government tells us to be, but who we really are.

Courtesy goodmenproject.com

Balancing Work and Family

Is it just me or has equality for women suddenly become a very mainstream topic? It seems like every day there's a news story about it. It's like we finally got fed up of living the lie that we've achieved equality and decided to just tell it like it is. This week, Jennifer Garner opened her mouth to utter a simple truth. In every interview she gives, she's asked about work-life balance and yet no one has ever asked her husband, Ben Affleck, that question. "And we do share the same family." She says, "Isn’t it time to kinda change that conversation?"Absolutely, it is about time.

Courtesy people.com

Hooray for the Baby Daddy

I like Jude Law, I really do. He's handsome, he has a great voice, and he's a wonderful actor. But it disturbed me when the many press stories that he was about to become a father for the fifth time was  greeted with nothing but hoorays and congratulations and what-a-wonderful-person comments on Facebook. Literally every celebrity, media outlet and even my friends were posting this as good news.

I'm thinking, if this was a woman having her fifth child with the third father, two of whom she not only didn't marry but didn't even stay with long enough to still be in the relationship when she got pregnant, after cheating on her first husband and leaving her first family, we would crucify her. She'd be called a slut, irresponsible, a horrible person, and not fit to be a mother. And those are probably the nicest things she'd be called.

Courtesy zimbio.com

"Whilst they are no longer in a relationship," Law's rep said, "they are both wholeheartedly committed to raising their child."

What? He's wholeheartedly committed to raising a child with this woman, the last woman and the first mother of his three children? Seriously? Is anyone buying this? It's just not logistically possible if what we're talking about is raising a child. But then I realize that isn't what we're talking about. All he is expected to do, as a man, is to pay for the cost of raising the child and show up every once in a while to take them on an outing. And that's the other side of this double standard: What a woman does for her children is never enough and what a man does is insignificant as long as he pays up.

Birds in NYC

I can't remember how I came across this sweet little blog called Bird. Young women in their 20s and 30s are interviewed about their jobs and careers. They talk about their boyfriends. They talk about living in New York. They talk about their lives so far. The beautiful photography, typography and layout all contribute to creating an intimate look into how other people live and how young women are making their mark in the world.

Courtesy birdnyc.co

Bias That Blinds Us

I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area looking for a job. I lived here back in 2008 after being hired by eBay for what promised to be the coolest job, combining my love and experience in filmmaking and my talents and experience in marketing. The job didn't pan out and I left. I wish I'd somehow persevered in this dream idea but there's something about not fitting into a box, not doing a job that has a title or not calling yourself one thing or another, that can be debilitating.

The human brain wants to categorize things. It's how we make sense of the world and it's what makes us smart. But it can also make us blind. Google made a video about this bias and how it affects the workplace and especially innovation but I think it applies to all areas of our life. How many of us are shut out because we can't be seen? And what or who are we shutting out because of our own biases? Even more important, what about ourselves are we denying because it doesn't fit? Wouldn't the world be a richer, more diverse and interesting place if we could keep our minds open?

Another (Not So) Radical Idea

When I graduated from college twenty years ago, I wrote a senior thesis. I was in the Women's Studies program and even though we could take a senior seminar to complete our degree, I volunteered to write a thesis because I wanted to challenge myself. The subject of my paper was "Why We Need to Include Men in the Feminist Movement." At the time, it was a radical idea and not one that was well received by my peers. I was, in fact, ridiculed by my professor in my thesis workshop. I didn't report that incident because I knew it was an unpopular idea and I knew I would take crap for it. But I also fervently believed that it was ludicrous for 50% of the population to get together to talk about their rights without including the other 50% in the discussion. In the minds of those who were threatened by my idea, including men would be "asking for their permission" or "allowing them to dominate the conversation," and both of those fears are completely justified.

But what I was suggesting was that we take care not to pit ourselves against men, that we don't stereotype them the same way we have been, that we don't assume all men are sexist. I knew, from my personal life, that they are not. I knew that there was a lot of support out there from men, men who wished their lives could be different as well. Post-college, I noticed a trend. Nearly all of my intimate relationships were with men who had been accused of being gay at some point in their lives; because they cared about their appearance, decorated their apartments, liked to cook, made friends with women, hugged in public, or just liked to talk about something other than sports, beer or women. There was never a question of whether they actually were homosexual. They were not. Never had been, never would be.

The fact was that because they didn't fit into the stereotype of what society expects men to be -- and in my mind they are far more desirable than the stereotype -- they must be gay. There must be something wrong with them. It's not normal for a man to be like that. So it made perfect sense to me that men and women should work together to denounce these stereotypes, to be ourselves (whoever we are) and to stand up against treating people one way or another based on their bodies. It's no different than treating people based on what language they speak, what country they're from, what color their skin is or what kind of car they drive. People are people and we're all different. But we're all people. We should all have the same rights and no person should have rights over another person.

Emma Watson, an elegant, intelligent, talented young woman, has been tasked by the United Nations to tackle this issue and she has come up with the same idea I had twenty years ago: To include men in the feminist movement. I could look at this as if we haven't come very far but I don't. At the time, my statement was made to one classroom and a single faculty member at one University in one state in the United States. Now, the statement is being made to the United Nations and the entire world. I hope people hear the message and respond. Enough is enough!

I'm a Feminist Too

I just discovered Laci Green. The Internet is so vast. We see things flying around on Facebook and have this illusion that we're "seeing what's going on" in the world. The fact that we have shared online experiences tricks us into thinking that we've experienced everything that's going on when in fact, we're just partying in the same room while a whole world is outside. It's both the benefit and the detriment of social media. While we can more easily share ideas and rally behind a single action, we can also more easily ignore and miss other ideas and fail to put our attention where it might be more useful.

So back to Laci Green. She is doing what I would be doing if the technology existed when I was her age. It's the reason I started this little blog. I started my senior thesis in college, twenty years ago (!), with the same sentence that she starts this video with. In essence, my name is and I'm a feminist. Because it was then and still is a "dirty" word. I'm sickened by the comments that people have made on the YouTube page. Hateful, violent things presented as some kind of logical argument by people who probably consider themselves to be normal and nice. People who use those mouths and hands to love people and do jobs and drive cars. But in the privacy of their home, they virulently defend a social system that oppresses men and women and is the main cause of social inequality.

All of the the ills of the world -- war, slavery, poverty among them -- are the result of these dichotomies that force men to fight instead of talk and women to fuck instead of lead. Excuse my language but clearly the world is not right and I'm glad that Laci Green has the guts to say it. As many times as it needs to get said!