Dinner with Tina Fey
November 8, 2008
Over the past couple of months – as I have let the frequency of my posting slide some owing to a hefty workload at my new job and a stressful PhD application process – I have spent my leisure time observing the antics of one delightful Tina Fey. A fan of 30 Rock and Mean Girls, I usually think of her as Liz Lemon, feminist television writer/producer extraordinaire, or the encouraging high school math teacher with a second job as a button-wearing bartender at the local mall; but in the last few weeks, I have gotten to know her as an Emmy winner, a Sarah Palin dead ringer, and as a pair of sexy legs sprawled out on the “Weekend Update” desk on the Saturday Night Live television set.
Those are great legs! But what we all really love about Fey is her shtick: a wry and bold sense of humor that appeals to everybody: from 10-year-old boys who love fart jokes, to girly girls who laugh at pop culture satire. She is beloved for her brain in the way, historically, so few women have been – and that’s what makes her special.
If I went to a party and we decided to play the game in which everybody announces the five people, living or dead, they’d invite to dinner, I would definitely choose Tina Fey as one of my guests. True, she’s alive and the possibility does exist that our paths might cross and I would get to ask her a thing or two about how she started her career as a writer and eventually became a renowned film and television personality. But I don’t want to risk it: so she’d be my living guest sitting next to other famous women who lived and achieved notoriety in an earlier time.
During this game, somebody would of course say “Jesus.” “I would invite Jesus for sure,” he or she would announce. Then, the rest of us would sigh because our choices are less noble.
“Hitler,” one would shout. I’d frown. “Abraham Lincoln!” Hmmm…okay. “Julius Caesar.” I like that last one to be sure.
But alas, my choices would be: Lizzie Borden, Joan of Arc, Edith Wharton and Heloise, wife of Peter Abelard and brilliant scholar by her own merit. Having dispensed with the delicious appetizer (fried mozzarella or an insalata caprese – whatever has cheese), we’d get right down to business. “Ms. Borden, did you really kill your father and stepmother with a hatchet?” I ask.
“And Joan, was it hot under that armor as you marched into battle, driving the English out of France?”
“Ms. Wharton, do tell me whether or not you intended readers to derive a moral from the story of Ethan Frome?”
“Heloise, was the sex with Abelard really that good?”
Yes. Yes. No. Yes. But what I really want to talk about is Tina Fey and her rise to stardom: “How were you able to cultivate a successful Hollywood career and be mother to a beautiful female toddler at precisely the same time?”
“What do you really think of Sarah Palin?”
“Describe for me your take on feminism: are we beyond needing it or is there still a reason to stand up and fight for equal rights, equal pay and control over our own bodies? Do you think women are our own worst enemies?”
“And do you really hate flip flops (because if I had my way, I’d wear flip flops all the time)?”
When I think of Tina Fey carrying that cardboard tray of hot dogs in the series opener of 30 Rock, I can’t help but grin. I remind myself by a handwritten post-it stuck on my computer screen: “Don’t buy all the hot dogs,” it reads.
See, Liz Lemon was standing in line to buy a hot dog from a street vendor one day when somebody cut in front of her and she got so mad that she bought the entire cart of hot dogs just to maintain the integrity of the principle of the thing. That’s something I want to do everyday – more or less – but I don’t because I have the post-it. “Don’t buy all the hot dogs”…even if you really, really, really want to.
So, once I pay due attention to my favorite serial killer, warrior, author and romantic, I want nothing more than to split the warm, flour-less chocolate cake with the woman who has broken almost every barrier and every mold. (Perhaps I should have asked Hillary Clinton instead of Joan.) But no, I’m talking about Tina Fey and her wonderful, crooked grin that seems to say, “R*****, I know exactly who you are, because I’m just like you…and nobody understands you better than me.”
Then, we have a good Scotch, a good cry and a good hug. And I thank her for giving little girls somebody warm, strong and funny to look up to. Because, when you think about it, there really is noone else who doesn’t make them feel fat or stupid if they let them. Tina Fey helps us feel comfortable in our own skin.
What do we really want from our female leaders?
July 3, 2008
I know that the American national political race is a popularity contest to some extent. But just how much of the process is sexual?
Before she conceded the race, I voted for Hillary Clinton in the New Jersey Democratic primary. I have observed and have commented on some of the nasty things people have had to say about Clinton. I get it. She’s just not as likable as Barack Obama and that translates to her lesser popularity.
Now, I’m not saying that Obama hasn’t been poked fun of during the past many months…but the witch iconography that has been applied to Clinton is pervasive in the political pundit arena, as well as in some of the online chat locations where average men and women, such as myself, visit and babble. Consider the following imagery:
This type of “humor” is rooted in the fear and dislike Americans collectively feel for strong and confrontational females. Men, in particular, may find Clinton frightening because she threatens to usurp their authority, rendering them castrated, so to speak. Hence, we have these images:
Whether she’s thought to use her thighs to crack nuts or not, her thighs have become another source for our general dislike of Clinton:
The sign reads: “Hillary Special…Two Fat Thighs with Small Breast and a Left Wing.” So not only has Clinton been compared to a notorious, cackling killer of small animals, she is also compared to a piece of meat; and as such, she doesn’t make the grade. I guess that instead of going to law school, travelling the world, raising a daughter and perfecting her political prowess, she should have been starving herself, getting breast implants and posing for Vogue magazine with Angelina Jolie. That’s really the job of a woman in politics, right? (And while we’re on the subject of Ms. Jolie, do people really believe she’s strong enough to pull off any of the stunts in her new movie Wanted? She looks like vermicelli.)
Clinton’s relationship with her husband is also under intense scrutiny. Take a look at these:
What these prove is that she can’t win either way. If Bill Clinton is seen to have influence over her choices, she ceases to exist entirely. If people perceive that she’s the one in control, she comes off as a dominatrix.
I don’t have these ideas of Clinton and I haven’t considered her likability when choosing her as the next President of the United States. I don’t want to have a beer with the woman, I want her to run a country of potentially 400,000,000 morons who do consider her likability in these terms.
I asked a conservative colleague of mine what he thinks of Clinton. “She’s a liar,” he said. “She tells people what they want to hear. She panders to a specific audience.” These are legitimate complaints. I don’t necessarily agree with him, but he has obviously put some thought into a relevant argument against her electability.
But then he said, “I have absolutely no respect for any woman, including my wife, who catches their partner cheating and stays with them.” Whoa! Hold on! What? He took his argument to the place I am now disputing: a contest of sexual likeability and gender marginilization. If he’s thinking ill of her because she made a decision to forgive, or at least to move on with, a lecherous husband then I cannot support his earlier analysis of her integrity. He’s alligned himself with the Wicked Witch of the West and the Nutcracker theorists and put Hillary in a place of sex and gender based scrutiny. He’s decided to judge her based on her place in a marriage rather than her place in the U.S. Senate.
I probed further. It turns out, this conservative has a longstanding issue with Bill Clinton. “Because of Bill,” he said, “the blow job became very popular with 13-year-old kids. They now think that blow jobs are not sex.”
I want to work with this idea in two ways: 1. Is this really true? and 2. What does this have to do with Hillary?
Our Guys by Bernard Lefkowitz is a journalist’s investigation of a 1989 rape in Glen Ridge, NJ. Several popular atheletes raped a mentally disabled girl in one of their basements. They used a baseball bat and a broom handle, in addition to their dicks, to penetrate the young woman. As it turned out, many of these atheletes were not used to “face-to-face intercourse.” “Sex was something that was done to them, not something they actively participated in. Hand jobs and blow jobs-jobs that girls performed at their bidding. The guys were the formen supervising their work crew.”
Lefkowitz’s analysis of this trend was that the blow job was not something the boys considered to be “sex.” And it wasn’t an act that put pressure on them to perform well. Sexual intercourse is often judged successful if both participants get off. If the girl didn’t get off, the boy would have been said to have failed. But the blow job was just something for girls to perform successfully.
This all happened in 1989 before the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal of 1997, and many people who read the book could identify similar thinking in high schools across the country. I think that Bill Clinton, therefore, did not invent the blow job as a means to avoid intercourse. He just put that concept on television.
And where is Hillary in all of this? She’s not the one with her dick in somebody’s mouth. She’s not the one on her knees under a desk. And she’s not the one watching this unfold on television like an episode of The Jerry Springer Show.
So how does Monica Lewinsky’s job reflect negatively on Hillary Clinton? We American’s have thrown every standard in the book at Clinton and she’s managed to meet or cleanly dodge most of them. She has a bright smile and healthy skin. She looks slender in her trademark pantsuits. She teared up when she got emotional about her wishes and dreams, and slammed her fists down hard when objecting to Obama’s smear tactics in Ohio.
The problem for Clinton is that every time she has changed to fit our fickle standards, we throw another one in her direction. If we tell her to be tough, she is. Then we tell her she’s a “bitch” or a “witch.” Then we turn around and tell her she’s too soft when she cries or publically forgives a cheating spouse. She can’t win.
And she won’t until we decide what we want. Americans can be really picky, it seems.
We’re picky about our Hillary Clintons and not about cheap, plastic footware. I get blisters just thinking about these:
One of my friends told me he thinks people hate Clinton on a case-specific basis. “It’s not every woman,” he said. “It’s this woman.”
So let’s hope that the next woman to run for President doesn’t come with her own Bill.
3 comments