Have you heard about the Miss Representation campaign? Misrepresented as a movement seeking respect for women, and reform in media, the  movie I saw ends up using the media they complain about to disrespect women and treat us as if we’re stupid.

Before you do anything, I must first warn you that the film clip is full of sexually charged pictures of scantily dressed young women. I can’t recommend that men look at it. On the other hand, all of the images in the film were, apparently taken from movies and magazines that most of us are familiar with. So, ladies, first go see this film, and gentlemen click over with your eyes closed and listen to it. The movie plays for nine minutes and I promise that you won’t be bored. Come back here when you’re done if you want to hear my rant.

Back?

OK. Here’s the deal. Those images were shocking all stacked up that way, because they show us what we are getting every day. We don’t always notice, or we don’t realize the damage that is being done, because the images are usually spaced out and they are slipped into a wider context that keeps them from standing out much of the time.

These images push in on us everywhere we go. I haven’t had a TV in years, but even I recognized some of the images: the anti-gay marriage Miss California trouncing across the stage in her bikini, the girl on the motorcycle from Transformers 2. When I saw both of those images the first time (and the fiftieth, in the case of Miss California), I was disgusted. And yet, I see these things all the time. I don’t want to see them. I don’t seek them out. I’m simply not sure how to escape them.

I am grateful to the makers of the Miss Representation movie for shining a light on the depraved way our world views women as objects to be used for pleasure and discarded at will, simply so we can upgrade to a newer version. As if women are no different from iPhones.

But that’s where my happiness with the film ends.

I’m not going to remark on the motives of the filmmakers, but the film they’ve given us looks a lot like a slick presentation trying to make us vote for women rather than men. As if putting women in power will solve the world’s ills.

We see two statistics:

• Women hold only 3% of clout positions in telecommunications, entertainment, publishing, and advertising
• Women comprise only 16% of all writers, directors, producers, cinematographers, and editors

And then Jane Fonda tells us:

Media creates consciousness, and if what gets put out there that creates our consciousness is determined by men, we’re not going to make any progress.

Really? Men are the enemies?

Well maybe not all men. We flash from Jane Fonda’s earnest face and go directly to pictures of Pat Buchanan and Glenn Beck. The message is clear. Men like Pat Buchanan and Glenn Beck are out to hurt women. The images move on from Glenn Beck to sexy, scantily clad young women as if Pat Buchanan and Glenn Beck are somehow responsible for the Hollywood films that are full of sex and nudity.

Could it be that these people who have put together such a slick and sophisticated film about media don’t understand that the order in which they present their clips moves us to think badly of certain men? Who produced and directed the disgusting Transformers 2? Why weren’t their faces flashed in this film?

I don’t watch TV or follow politics, but some of you may. I ask you, were most of the evildoers shown on the screen, conservatives and Republicans? I saw Hannity (with a label under his face saying “enough already”), Carrie Prejean a self-proclaimed Christian who doesn’t see anything wrong with parading nearly nude in front of millions, and  O’Reilly and an offensive guest making PMS jokes. There were many, many clips from Fox News with people I didn’t know, looking like idiots who cared nothing about women. And no clips from any other networks!

Really? The other networks don’t have slutty-looking women news announcers and men saying stupid things about women? I find that hard to believe.

I’m not pro-Republican or pro-Fox News, but I still think the film is heavily weighted so as to sway public opinion against conservatives in the upcoming elections.

They really never say anything about anyone in Hollywood. It seems to be all about Fox news. Then they show a couple of good-looking young male mayors who are shocked and saddened to find that the US is so far behind the rest of the world in regards to women in politics. We are told that women make up 51% of the country and from there they take us immediately to Gloria Steinman who tells us that we’ve been choosing our national leadership from 6% of the country.

Scccrrreeeeeeeeeech. Put on the brakes here.

Women are 51% of the country and that means that men are 49% of the country. But we’re all going to feel ridiculous voting for men now that Gloria has given us her little “aren’t we silly” chuckle, and told us we are choosing our national leadership from 6% of the country. How does she figure? She says we are choosing our leadership from:

• Male
• White, European American (until 2008)
• Married, Heterosexual
• Over 35
• College Educated
• Professional Degree

What is her point? We should perhaps elect women of color who are unmarried and/or lesbian, under 35, and who have never been to college? 

If you say women make up 51% of the country, then you have to say we are choosing our leaders from 49% of the country. If you say homosexuals make up 2% of the country, then you can say we are choosing leaders from 98% of the country. If you say people if color make up 28% of the country, then you have to say we choose our leaders from 72% of the country.

It’s not OK to put women on one side with no restrictions so you have a big number full of blacks, Hispanics, lesbians, old, young and all over the place educationally, and then put the leaders on the other side but judge them by several different criteria. We cannot fault the men for being over 35 or for having college degrees. Or for being heterosexual and married. Lots of women are over 35, and have college degrees. Lots of women are heterosexual and married.

I don’t know what the intent of the filmmakers is, but I feel as if I’ve been assaulted by manipulative media, yet again.

Our problem is not men in leadership. Our problem is men who are selfish and evil in leadership in the country and in Hollywood and in publishing. If you replace those selfish sinful men with selfish sinful women the problem will not be solved. We need self-sacrificing people in leadership. It doesn’t matter if they are male or female or white or black. It doesn’t matter if they are 30 or 60. Women in general are just as wicked a men in general. Baby girls don’t really come into this world as sugar and spice ad every thing nice. Replacing the men in power with women won’t do us any good at all.

We need to look at what individuals believe before we vote. Voting for a candidate just because she’s a women is a stupid, bigoted thing.

Kind of like the Miss Representation film.

But check out their site. This is an all-out campaign, urging us to take pledges, to donate, and to buy the curriculum. Yikes! I’m all for putting clothes on women and treating them with respect. Let’s respect them enough to speak truthfully for starters and stop treating them like stupid sheep to be manipulated to further our own cause.

I used to drive cab in Anchorage, Alaska. One day I picked up two strippers to take them to work. They spent the entire ride talking about how classy their dancing was at The Bush Company and how slutty the dancers were at PJs. I listened, amazed that the two young women in the back of my cab had actually convinced themselves that their lap dances were art while the other girls were just common sluts.

The girls justified taking money from husbands and fathers who had abandoned family responsibilities in favor of sexual fantasy and they assured one another that they were providing meaningful entertainment with their art.

How far removed they were from the real world where people didn’t do drugs all night and pay for sex. And how far they had fallen from what God made them to be.

But their conversation gave me hope. Somewhere under their g-strings and pasties, these girls wanted to be worthy of love and respect. I thought as long as they were still wanting to be worthy, they had a chance of recovering and finding a way back to a place of decency.

Unfortunately society has redefined decency, so today we are more apt to agree with the girls in the cab, and say that stripping really is a meaningful art form that we should watch on TV.

Here’s an article that suggests slutty girl singers on primetime are hurting children. I’m not sure what can be done about it. Once you loose something on the world, it’s hard to reel it back in.

I was reading an article the other day about the Gossip Girl books. In searching for info on them I came across a TV series that had been spawned by novels. I don’t have a TV so I don’t keep up with what’s available to children these days. I was surprised to find that in six years we have gone from complaining about raunchy books that promote mean girl attitudes and using sex for gain to having the stories played out in living color with real actors (and we’re even calling this series the Best. Show. Ever. Yikes!)

But I keep hoping that we might hit rock bottom one day and people will start thinking good, happy, healthy characters in books are fresh.

I recently asked my daughter and her friend, a budding novelist, why books with angels or demons and paranormal sex were so popular. They thought it was because children want to feel powerful.

That’s nothing new. Children have always felt powerless and dreamed of the day they would have power. But the characters I liked best when I was young didn’t take revenge or use others. They had power because they were smart and thoughtful. They had the power to sacrifice for the greater good. They had the power to love and forgive.

Children today, though, may think they need more power because they feel so powerless in this world where the TV news shows splash disaster and sexual abuse and torture into their living rooms night after night. The monsters my children face are more evil than the ones I faced. Maybe I should expect children to want power to destroy rather than to forgive.

Teen girls have no superpowers, though, and they are more and more often settling for the one power that is readily available. The power to use sex to get what they want. They will trade sex for love, sex for drugs, sex for money or fame or popularity. They are too young to understand the damage they are doing to their souls. They are too young to realize that using sex to manipulate others makes a girl die inside. Girls are created with a need to be cherished, and since The Fall they’ve been born with a desire to be worshiped. When they use sex in an effort to get the love/attention/power they crave, they know they are unworthy and unlovable. They may not be able to tell you this, but they know somewhere deep in their souls. It’s a terrible burden they must bear.
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This post was included in the Carnival of Young Adult Literature for August, 2011. Check out this post for more great posts relating to young adult books.

I was playing with my sister’s Sony, trying to find out how to load books on it so I could teach her, and I came across this bit above.  Check out the digital rights box. (Click on the image to make it larger.) Reading aloud not allowed.

I was already ticked because I recently discovered that there is no way to lend my Amazon Kindle books to other Kindle users. That is not OK with me. One of the things I love best to do with books is share them with my friends and family so we can discuss them. I have tried and tried to find a way to share ebooks and I’ve been unable to do it. As a result I never buy or read books on my Kindle anymore. It’s too bad, because I loved that Kindle. But it’s a matter of principle with me. I won’t pay for a book that I don’t own and that I can’t pass around as I see fit.

But now the e-book people want to tell me I can’t even read a book aloud to my children or mother? What a bizarre and stupid rule that is.

So my infatuation with e-books is over for now. I’ll wait until they take off their stupid digital rights thingies and let us own the books we buy before I give them any more money. Meanwhile I’m downloading a lot of free books, which doesn’t help the authors much.

I think we need to start complaining to let the publishers know that they need to get rid of their digital rights devices and let consumers read aloud and even lend books willy-nilly, as wild and uninhibited and dangerous as that might feel to them.

 This article is not about teen books, it’s about teen sex.

But what teens are doing has a bearing on what they are reading. And what they are reading has a bearing on what they are doing.

What I found most interesting is this, found at the very bottom of the article:

Tania says she and her friends talk about the right and wrong of what they do. “We learn morals from other people’s experiences,” she says.

According to Mitchell, now many sexual rules have gone, young people can develop personal ethics. “We need to understand that kids will have sex when they are not married,” she says. “Our concern would be to make them safe and enjoy it.

We learn morals from other people’s experience? How messed up is that?

And why on earth would we be concerned with making sure kids enjoy the sex they are having? 

That is so silly. As if they need to enjoy it more. Isn’t the problem that they do enjoy it a lot already, with a whole lot of people they shouldn’t be enjoying it with?

And should we really just give up? I mean, kids are going to commit suicide whether we like it or not. Does that mean we should teach them to enjoy it?

Just because the rules have gone and kids are developing their own personal ethics (code language for following the pack off the cliff) doesn’t mean we need to teach them to enjoy sex. Maybe we need to teach them to enjoy being responsible and obedient and hard-working, and self-sacrificing.

Teen sex is greedy. It’s selfish. It’s not about commitment and love and hard-work. It’s about enjoying yourself and who gives a flip about the other person? I don’t owe you anything–no strings attached. Why would we need to teach them to enjoy that? We are all greedy enough without being encouraged.  We need to teach kids to fight their ugly selfish urges.

Are there books out there that don’t glorify the sex but paint a true picture of it? I think the movie Juno did a great job of being real without glorifying the sex (and without condemning anyone) while showing that there are some consequences.

What else is out there?

Jennifer Sky Band is distressed that publishers rejected her memoir saying she didn’t dish enough dirt.

Mean girls sell? Sure they do. Is a former teen model really surprised by this revelation?

Or did this gal just get turned down because no one has heard of her and she can’t write well?

Probably people do know who she is. I don’t, because I don’t have TV and I never buy pop culture magazines and I don’t read the newspaper.  But I have a hard time believing that anyone who was in the modeling world (I had to two friends who were models in high school) is not aware that teens have been reading junk for a long time. Even I know that, as cloistered as I am.

And yet I love this bit:

Aren’t we, adults who run the media, responsible for what our youth encounters? Why would we ever want our youth to grow up on sensationalized gossip?

It’s all about the money,  Jennifer. Surely you can understand this.