Zeisler - Feminism and Pop Culture

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE

MY NAME IS ANDI, and Im a pop cultureholic. I subscribe to twelve different magazines and have piles and piles more gathering dust in various parts of my house. I have elaborate plans to someday make sense of the hundreds of books and CDs I own, but for now they sit on shelves and in storage receptacles crying out for order. I have a uselessly encyclopedic memory for bands, album and song titles, and lyrics that came about because I spent much of my first two years of high school hiding out in the library and reading back issues of Rolling Stone. My computer brims with podcasts and blogs that would require eleven more hours in each day to keep up with, but even if I had those extra eleven hours Id likely spend at least eight of them watching TV.

Im lucky, however, because I can legitimately say that keeping up with popular culture is my job. Twelve years ago, I cofounded Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture with my high school friend and fellow pop junkie Lisa Jervis. Lisa and I were both obsessed with how women were represented in pop culture. On every channel, in every magazine, in every darkened movie theater, we saw the way pop culture limited womens rolesthey were girlfriends and victims, hookers and corpses, sex bombs and cock teasesand we wanted to talk about why. As ardent feminists and voracious readers, we were primed to dig into some analysis of how feminism had affected pop culture and vice versa, but apart from some deeply academic (and thus somewhat inscrutable) papers and books, we couldnt find much. And so we decided to write our own. We started Bitch as a zine in which our love of pop culture and our dedication to feminism could mingle, and in the process we tried to reframe pop culture: No longer a guilty feminist pleasure, it could be a locus of activism. We wanted to talk about why women rarely appeared on the covers of Rolling Stone or Spin and why, when they did, they were invariably missing most of their clothes. We wanted to talk about why daytime talk shows treat teen girls pursuing sexual pleasure as a problem to be contained. We wanted to talk about why the unisex Big Wheels of our youth had been replaced at the toy store by gender-specific pink Princess Coaches and blue Rough Riders. We wanted to talk about the fact that pop culture was not just the fluff that came over the airwaves and through the newsstands but rather was the material from which young peoples impressions of their world are molded.

Im not totally sure when pop culture took over a significant chunk of my own social education, but I do know that, as for many women, my discovery of what I came to know as feminism was sparked by pop culturepop culture involving Burt Reynolds, to get embarrassingly specific. I have no idea what I was watching around the age of sevena TV show? a movie?but the image that shocked and enraged my young self was that of Mr. Reynolds entering a bathroom in which a woman was showering, popping his head behind the shower curtain, and snapping a photo of the unsuspecting lady. Folks, I was livid. At an age when nothing seems more private than nudity, and nothing more undignified than having that nudity exposed, I wanted to hunt down Burt Reynolds on behalf of that showering gal and kick him in the shins, repeatedly. It would be years before I read texts and novels that articulated the pain and powerlessness women experience from sexual harassment and assaultworks such as Susan Brownmillers Against Our Will and Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eyebut in that moment I was ready to start fighting so that no woman would ever again have to know the violation of being surprised in the shower with a flashbulb.

Through my years editing Bitch, speaking at colleges, and talking with fellow pop-loving feminists, Ive heard many stories in which a girls simmering anger at being catcalled on the street, belittled by a male teacher, or simply made to feel like just a girl was later made clearer through a snippet of film dialogue or a passage in a book. Popular culture has become our common language, and to become fluent in it is, like it or not, a key part of making sense of the larger world. Pop culture is also a key route to making the concept of feminismwhich still manages to send many women and men into a kind of nervous tizzyboth resonant and relatable. Perhaps the most gratifying part of my work has been seeing others make connections between popular cultures representations of women and girls and the need for feminismnot as a lofty, highfalutin, political movement but as a part of everyday life. I regularly read letters from high school girls saying things like, You know, I thought I was the only one bothered by [name of TV show or movie], but Im so happy to know Im not alone, and from adult women and men saying theyre happy to have a way to talk with their daughters about sexism in a contemporary context. Letters such as these are the best proof that offering a feminist critique of pop culture is, unfortunately, a job that still needs doing.

In outlining the long and often contentious relationship between feminism and pop culture, this book only scratches the surface of its history. There are places where Im sure Ive left out something important or defining. So if you, like me, are a book-collecting, magazine-subscribing, TV-obsessed, feminist pop omnivore, I probably dont need to tell you to look at this book as just the start.

Actually, this is quite a bit easier said than done. Definitions of popular culture depend on whos defining it and what his or her agenda is. In a purely literal sense, popular culture is any cultural product that has a mass audience. In Shakespeares time, it was the theater. In ours, its everything from Top 40 radio to The Simpsons to Paris Hilton. But historically, pop culture grew out of low culture, the uncouth counterpart to so-called high culture. If high culture comprised the art, literature, and classical music made by and for the worlds educated elite, low culture was the baser stuff with which the masses contented themselves. As the phrase pop culture gradually came to take the place of low culture, it was defined more by what it wasntelegant, refined, eruditethan by what it was. Mass culture that supposedly engaged the prurient interests and visceral (rather than cerebral) urges of people assumed to be ill educated and unworthy of real art. Museum exhibits were high culture, comic books were low; literature was high culture, pulp magazines and novels were low. As the Marxist literary critic Walter Benjamin wrote in his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. High art was supposed to entertain, yes, but it was also supposed to inform, enrich, and inspire. It was considered enough, however, for popular culture to simply amuse.

Thus pop culture came to be understoodand, by many, looked down uponas that which entertains masses of people by distracting them and by calling on their common references. (Entertaining, of course, is a subjective word: I, personally, am not entertained by Sylvester Stallone movies, but even though Ive never sat through the entire length of one of them I cannot deny knowing the names of at least eight. Why? Because Mr. Stallones oeuvre entertains enough other people that his movies have become part of a lexicon of our culture.)