The Fem Spot

When did email become the standard for doing business?

True, it puts everything we communicate “on the record.” But it’s also a wall, separating one human from another. And even at work, we should feel free to be personal. What is wrong with being personal anyway? And if you’re just one cubicle away from each other, why not use the old standby: speech?

Allow me to relay a recent snafu that occurred at my place of business as an illustration of just how terrible email truly is (read: the Devil made it). SPOILER ALERT: there will be “crying at work” as tagged, so stay tuned.

I am a journalist, who up until six months ago, worked in an office environment that suited me. On days I would go in, I had many a pleasant conversation with coworkers. My editor was one who felt her job was to edit my stories for grammar and style. She did not rewrite them, as I’m told most editors tend to do. It was bliss.

I write a lot of investigative, human interest pieces. My news beat, often unfettered by actual news, requires that I lift a lot of rocks and ask a lot of questions. It’s the perfect job for me, really, because I have a very low threshold for intimacy. I meet someone and immediately I search for a quality they possess that I like. Then, I focus on that quality. I look them directly in the eyes. I tell a story in exchange for one they tell me: something personal about me for something personal about them. I am patient and calm. People feel relaxed. They trust me.

When I return to the office, I write up these human stories, careful to be honest, yet considerate. (I would probably be forced to deviate from this pattern if I were interviewing rapists and murderers, but mostly, I’m interviewing stay-at-home moms about their community service projects.) The language I use when writing is consistent with the language I had used during the person-to-person encounter.

Earlier this week, for instance, I spoke to a mother who had recently organized a fundraiser for her 7-month-old son’s plagiocephalic skull - the baby’s head is deformed owing to an excess of time spent lying supine. I remember being very impressed with how straightforward this woman was about her feelings: guilt, fear, sadness. She also talked about her struggle to learn more about the syndrome. Her family doesn’t own a computer, she said. At night, when the baby’s father was watching their two children, she would sneak out of the house and visit the public library.

I marvelled at her courage. In the first place, she was openly admitting to not having the $4,000 or so needed to buy a corrective helmet for her son, which he would wear over the course of three to nine months for 23 hours per day depending on how successful the reshaping process is. In the second place, she was admitting to being ignorant. She was saying these things loud enough for at least 75 people to hear - for it was roughly 75 who attended her fundraiser and contributed donations. And, she wasn’t afraid to take her shortcomings to the press in the hopes that other mothers might learn from her mistakes.

We sat and talked at the rose garden where the fundraiser had occurred just two days earlier. She shared. I learned. I enthusiastically wrote the story and submitted it for editorial review.

I put the story in “Edit 1,” the first stop in our database. My new editor (I’ll from here on out refer to him as “the Emailer”) corrected it and placed it in “Edit 2.” I read it next, feeling it was made somewhat better (and somewhat worse) by his corrections, reedited it, and stuck it in “Edit 3.” I assumed he would peruse it again, make any final changes and then format it for publication. This is the way I’d been doing it for six months at this office and the way I’d done it at my former office.

I’ve grown accustom to the Emailer’s butchery of my prose. He’s never given me the slightest bit of direction - although, once pressed, he told me to make my story ledes more “catchy” - but has instead chosen to take more time than would probably otherwise be required to rearrange or replace the words I write. Once, I thought I’d caught on to his personal likes and dislikes: I used two hyphens instead of parentheses when including a tangent idea in the article. He changed it anyway. Perhaps, thought I, I should start writing the opposite of what I want to see in print so that he’ll change it and make it “right.”

This is apparently an argument that’s been going on between reporters and editors since before the flood. The central source of discontent among writers as I understand it is that their name goes next to their articles, whether they remain their articles after publication or not; and yet editors believe that they’re the ones who’ll be held accountable for printed errors.

Really, both sides are correct: the public will scrutinize the writer, condemning him or her for erroneous material, while the employer might chastise the editor (manager). The Emailer once passed along criticism from a public official (he emailed it, of course). I would have loved to have said “I told you so,” but then my bitchy retort would have been on the record. I would have loved to have said that I told you that the writer is the one who really takes the fall. The official, rather upset about some of the quotes I’d used from a source who was unhappy with him, will probably be a bit cooler to me in future. This doesn’t effect the Emailer…only me. And we both get yelled at by the 79-year-old man who’s obsessed with the municipal tennis courts, though I doubt the Emailer ever found himself being called a “princess” for interrupting.

On Tuesday, after spending hours interviewing the aforementioned mother, and hours writing a story that I was, yes!, emotionally involved with, I asked the Emailer to read it first before my other pieces so that I could reread it before he formatted it. He obliged. To my surprise and disgust, the brave mother in the garden became the audacious matron in the “arboretum.” What?! I didn’t meet her in an “arboretum” I met her in a “rose garden.” The latter is a fine way to describe it: a term suited to the environment and to the story. With this woman, all of the walls had come down (especially the impersonal walls of email) and we were just humans conversing, being open, honest and personal with each other. I wanted to respect that open communication in the story, not mock it with pretension.

This was just a source of minimal irritation to me at the time. After all, I already knew he knows more four-syllable words than me. The Emailer had once told me I did “Yeoman’s service” when I filled in for a vacationing reporter. I had to look that one up too, I admit. But it seems to me that in writing so, he had defined and limited my position. A Yeoman was traditionally a middle-class landowner who farmed his own fields. Doesn’t he realize, that once in “Edit 3,” my fields are no longer my own? Couldn’t he just have said…er written, “Good job?”

Nobody’s perfect. I’m often overly sentimental in my writing. In my opinion, the Emailer is bad with verb tenses. He also has an unusual obsession with the words “subsequently” and “albeit.” The story is all the better for two people having created it rather than one.

Later that day, before stepping out to a board of education meeting, I checked my business email to see if anything else was going on. There were three emails from the Emailer in the remote Outlook Inbox: one with my initials, one that said “Recall: (my initials)” and another entitled “stories.” Having just finished a series of articles on an unsuccessful effort to recall an elected official, I thought that perhaps the “recall” in the second email meant that I was getting fired. With just three minutes to go before necessary departure, I stared at my Outlook browser stunned.

Here’s the upside of email, I guess: if you’ve sent somebody an email and then changed your mind you can recall the email. This holds true if you, say, accidentally send an email. But it doesn’t always work.

The first email, the one with my initials in the subject line, was not intended for me, but was rather about me. It was intended, I think, for our office manager, who has the same last initial as I do and whom I report to for all things not editorial (whatever they may be). Could it be that the Emailer began typing that last initial - which just happens to be the first letter of our email addresses - in the “To:” field and then let Outlook fill in the blanks? Seconds later, when he realized that he’d sent the email to me, did he try to recall it thinking email recall an infallible solution to his “Oh, shit!” moment of truth?

There are people who believe that there’s no such thing as an accident. If that’s the case, then the Emailer meant for me to know that he gossips electronically about me with the office manager. He wanted me to know that he knew before I even finished that I was, as he perceived it, sneaking into the database and reediting my articles. And he wanted me to know that he’s aware that I’m frustrated by his many alterations. (I think those same people might call this a “power trip.”)

I felt like I’d been transported, without my knowledge or consent, right back to high school; and all because of a misdirected (?) email. I felt like the popular girls were making fun of me all over again. If he knew I was doing something wrong, why didn’t he walk the four feet and ask me to stop doing it? Fear of confrontation? You manage people; confrontation is your life!

The email really hurt my feelings. I called the office manager, hysterical. How could they do this to me? I have rights. I should be treated with respect and…oh…oh…here it comes…there’s a lump in my throat…a quiver in my lower lip…I’m very emotional…release the flood gates!!!

I cried.

I cried at work. Well, I cried on the phone to my boss. If I’d hid behind an email, he wouldn’t have heard me gasping for breathe through sniffles and snorts. But of course, that’s what the Devil wants you to think: email is easy, email is safe.

Four minutes after he’d recalled the email, the Emailer wrote the “stories” email directly to me. It directed me to highlight the changes I make to articles after he’s already made his own changes. (pause and overly dramatic “what?” gesture with my hands) That’s cool with me. And honestly, I’d have been fine with that at the time. All of this drama could have been avoided were it not for email.

All that remains now is the fact that I cried at work. And I’m a girl, so one slip and cry and your male coworkers will start to expect it from you. Forget that I’m taller than Napoleon Emailer; he’ll still think I’m weak. “Don’t tell her she’s wrong/late/difficult because she’ll cry,” they’ll say between puffs on their cigarettes. It’s all down hill from here. If I’d been the one to send an email, I wouldn’t be in this predicament now.

Instead, I’d probably be sitting in a rose garden (this is my blog and no emailer is going to tell me how to write it!).

My husband and I spent last weekend in historic, beach side Cape May, New Jersey. It’s the kind of place where front doors stand wide open and boutique storefronts are still a la mode. As I’m not really a swim-in the-ocean-kind-of-girl (owing to an irrational fear of sharks) I opted for on land adventures.

We set out from our bed and breakfast on Saturday morning a bit dazed from a night spent in a foreign bed, though nonetheless ready for shopping, eating and building sandcastles. But seeing that it was drizzling, we decided to visit Cold Spring Village instead, a mere three-mile jaunt away. There among the transplanted and restored buildings of old, educators dress up and perform “interpretations” of life in the 17-1800’s.

It’s funny how this is obviously a place targeted at kids: a genuine learning experience with arts and crafts and train rides to boot. And yet I watched scads of parents move their kids through the two and three hundred-year-old buildings, wondering why so few of them stopped to ask questions. The operators had cleverly fashioned a scavenger hunt out of historic objects belonging to each location. In and out went the families without stopping to absorb. “Here’s the hatchet, Mom,” a young girl said just before she was whisked away.

J*** and I don’t have children. We asked a lot of questions for our own benefit. We decided that if we’d lived back in the day, we’d have run a printing press. (There were women printers, we learned.) We would have dug up the local dirt, laid out the rubber tiles and generated early versions of US Weekly. (Not really!) I’m a journalist today. He’s a Web designer. We’d have been perfect for the job! This was the happiest part of the visit.

We also found out that very few farmers owned books in the 1700’s and early 1800’s (sad). The books they did own would have been purchased from a publisher and then taken to a book binder to be compacted into book form. It was a very expensive process. And so few farmers and their wives had time to read, even if they were able. It was a long, backbreaking day to be sure.

We visited the local one-room schoolhouse (mixed), the inn/tavern (sad because women were prohibited from entering the tavern and partaking in the spirits: warm beer, hard cider, wine, etc.) and the bakery (very happy indeed). Finally, we took a seat at the kitchen table in the Spicer Leaming House, circa 1700. It was under those low ceilings and above the wide plank floorboards where we learned the real secrets of the day.

Maybe I’d already learned them long ago; perhaps on a field trip to Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts, before I was shuffled out of the room by an impatient teacher or parent. Maybe I had only forgotten them. But I’ll never forget this secret history of women’s work now.

And I’ll never again take for granted my washing machine. Needless to say, if I’d been born in 1800 on a farm in Cape May, I wouldn’t have had one. And I would not have had servants to wash my three sets of clothing either. I would have washed them myself - along with those of my husband and my six to eight children - twice a month in warm weather, once a month during the rest of the year.

I would have bent down to slip a yoke over my shoulders and I would have filled buckets on either side of me with water from a well: one gallon in each bucket at eight pounds a piece. And then I would have hauled an estimated 400 gallons of water (per wash) over to the fire for boiling and then back to the spot on the yard designated for laundry and into a large basin.

Put this in perspective: a modern-day bathtub holds about 50 gallons of liquid…so think about lugging and heating and lugging and dumping eight or so bathtubs of water.

Oh…and I was pregnant during this chore…because a woman had to be in a constant state of pregnancy. Parents didn’t name their children until they were about 10 months old, after which time they were expected to have outlived the risks of infant illnesses and death. I probably gave birth to 10 or so children during my 40-year stay on this planet (yup! that was the average lifespan for women) because of the 10, only 60 to 80 percent would survive infancy.

I probably reserved all of the love in my heart for the survivors, before I robbed them of their childhoods. I needed them, you see? I needed my two-year-old to churn butter, my four-year-old to chop wood and my six-year-old to darn socks. I needed their help for raw survival until it was time for them to marry at about age 15 and start the cycle of survival all over again. If it weren’t the baked goods, there really wouldn’t have been any reason to live at all.

So there I was, age 30, and celebrating the marriage of my eldest child and then nine months later the birth of my first grandchild. And by the time I was 40, I’d probably died from one of two main causes: childbirth (only #2) or first degree burns. I didn’t have a stove, just an open flame in the hearth of our one-room home or the make-shift fire pit in our yard. But I wore heavy wool frocks, and sometimes…sometimes I would catch fire leaning over the flame to cook a meal. And a burn has the potential to become infected. Infection owing to burns was the most prevalent cause of death for women in rural America in the early 1800’s.

Who knew?

The interpreter at the Spicer Leaming House seemed pleased with our intense scrutiny of her presentation. But I found myself feeling far from pleased. Not only did I feel guilty for undervaluing the convenience of my washing machine, but I thought about an earlier version of me who lived back then without convenience, without antiperspirant, without medical remedies and without a glass of wine or two to numb the pain of existence. I thought about making love with my husband in a way that is enjoyable for both of us and felt sorry for a woman back then, lying on her back while some sweaty, stinky man writhed on top of her. I thought of my opportunities to read newspapers and books, wear non-constrictive clothing and flush waste away in toilets (latrines suck). I knew how I would miss sipping an ice-cold martini, speaking my mind and following my heart.

And then I thought of every time I’d heard someone imply that historically women have had a free ride. “Men did all the heavy lifting,” some say. “Women just did the laundry.”

Well, I’d like to see anybody today agree to lifting and carrying 3,200 pounds of water just for clean clothes.

On the way home, my husband joked about not finding a fitness club in the village. I told him that he was welcome to do the laundry.

I saw it. I liked it. I think it’s about 45 minutes too long…

But, as you would have expected that scenario to play out, my husband, like a little boy in jammies stumbling downstairs on Christmas morning, brought me to one of the first screenings of The Dark Knight in Manhattan.

There were crowds. There were long lines. But the end result was that two satisfied superhero junkies boarded a bus back to New Jersey and had plenty to talk about.

On that bus were a man and a woman talking “Batman.” And yes, almost every cliche was invoked. I said, “Christian Bale is soooooo dreamy!” He said, “Those action sequences were awesome!” I said, “The love triangle was dynamic.” He said, “The three-way chase scene was exciting and funny!”

Not really. But I’ll admit to enjoying the film as one might expect a heterosexual female to: I wanted good looking men in couture to fall all over themselves when vying for the affections of a complicated, heroic female character.

But wait? Christopher Nolan, the director, wouldn’t know a complicated female character if she bit him on the ass. His idea of female depth is upgrading from a sweet and pretty lobotomized actress (Katie Holmes) to a less than beautiful, somewhat quirky and slightly more intelligent one (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Maggie is great, but she needs more to do, more to say before she gets shuffled into the category of “whole characters.”

Come to think of it, Nolan has a history of marginalizing female characters. In Insomnia, he gave us the thoroughly good, lapdog cop Hilary Swank. And, there was also the bland yet mysterious hotel manager Maura Tierney. There was potential for both characters to develop into someone more than a pushover (Swank) or a quixotic shadow (Tierney)…but they didn’t. The same thing goes for the cardboard cutout of Bruce Wayne’s mom we’re given in Batman Begins (I bet you didn’t even notice her).

You start with curiosity, Nolan, and then develop your director’s vision into one that is courageous enough to look women in the face. Like the caped crusader himself, we’re complex…much more so than a miscast Scarlett Johansson’s version of a Cockney vagrant in The Prestige.

Gyllenhaal’s Rachel is definitely more interesting than the previous love interest. But it will take a lot more thought and respect from the filmmakers if The Dark Knight team is to resurrect the franchise for a third installment involving Catwoman: respect for the long and diverse history of this character. She’s been everything from an amnesiac (one who doesn’t know her own identity) to a thief (one who steals herself a new identity). She’s been a vamp, a helpmate and a sensitive lover. Catwoman is an important female figure in this mythology because she’s been able to transcend the role of love interest and become a force of her own in a man’s world.

Historically, Catwoman has represented everything from pent up female aggression to not-so-cleverly disguised anatomical innuendo. Tim Burton managed both extremes with Michelle Pfeiffer in the vulgar 1992 Batman Returns. Pfeiffer’s anti-heroine has an agenda: avenge her own human death at the hands of a sadistic tycoon (Christopher Walken). But she’s also out for a roll in the hay. And the film’s predictable script wouldn’t be complete without the words: Just the pussy I’ve been lookin’ for!

I’ve been thinking about Catwoman for days now. I don’t even like her as she’s existed. But here’s a thought: since the new Batman franchise is rooted in reality (ha!) with a gritty, human drama at its core, why not keep to that standard with the execution of one of the only enduring superhero women? How about if all the cat-themed adornments and leather really stand for something? And Catwoman can have a past that’s as dark and affecting as Batman’s. She can be a villain and a heroine at the same time.

What if Catwoman is a prostitute? Don’t play at being shocked. Her cat ears and rubber tail, her slender physique loosely shrouded by black rubber…all of this spells S.E.X. And sex sells…in Hollywood, in brothels and on the street. Catwoman can then be a real woman, prowling the night looking for prey; first allowing men to prey on her and then subsequently punishing them. Maybe she’s a prostitute from day one…or maybe she’s a woman who was raped or saw a rape in progress and decided to intervene. Whatever her back story, Catwoman has the potential to be both heroine and anti-heroine, good and bad, sexy and chaste. In other words, she can be complicated.

And she can, and should, be sexy. There’s nothing wrong with sexy. Sex is good. I like sex. If they cast Shane from The L Word, they would kill two birds with one stone: Catwoman would appeal sexually to both sexes.

Of course, Nolan probably won’t face any of these suggestions from male studio heads. After all, the next film, like all the others, is designed for and marketed toward men…and The Dark Knight is making everybody rich. Just ask Entertainment Weekly: “The conventional wisdom about superhero movies to be sure, is that they attract teenage male nerds and older male nerds who think they’re still teenage nerds. But a reported 48 percent of The Dark Knight’s audience was female, and that number probably would have been even higher had so many women not flocked to Mamma Mia!” (”Knight Fever” Aug. 1)

Wait: 48 percent of the audience at The Dark Knight was female? (That’s like the percentage of Democrats who voted for Hillary in the primary, almost half.) According to EW columnist Mark Harris, Hollywood has a history of undervaluing the female reception of movies. This year, Sex and the City was a “surprise” hit for the money men. And so were Waiting to Exhale (1995), The Princess Diaries (2001), My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), The Devil Wears Prada (2006) and this past January’s 27 Dresses: all profitable, and all clearly marketed for and received by women. There’s a trend here.

Nobody’s about to fix something that ain’t broke, however. Chris Nolan, should he choose to recreate Catwoman, will probably be allowed to do whatever he wants. And because nobody in Hollywood has picked up on the information that “chic flicks” can be and are lucrative, in addition to the “surprise” female turnout for recent superhero fare, nobody’s about to force the issue.

I’m really part of the problem. I would have gone to see The Dark Knight even if the hubby hadn’t insisted. And whatever they do to Catwoman, I’ll be there to receive her. My money, combined with the cost of admission from the other 47.99 percent of the girls in line to see Batman III, is just as good as any man’s money.

But that doesn’t change the fact that I think Catwoman has potential…and I wouldn’t mind it one bit if she showed us a little more than skin.

I resent post-feminists. Really, they should be called anti-feminists. I don’t like people saying there’s no need for a feminist movement anymore. It’s just not true.

If you insist, you can be critical of the third wave of feminism because it lacks a central goal. The first wave yielded suffrage and the second got us equal opportunities in the workplace and abolished legal sex discrimination…allegedly. But the reason that we have a third wave of feminism is because the second wave didn’t finish it up. And while I am grateful for “equal opportunities” at work and laws that punish sex discrimination, I know there’s still more to do.

The goal of third wave feminism, however ambiguous, is to make the world a place where women can acheive happiness in whatever form it may come. If you object to calling feminism as it exists today a “movement” or even a “wave,” I’ll oblige and call it…er…a “party.”

And at this party, I’m not asked to leave anything at the door. I don’t give up my girlish whims when declaring my feminist ideals. I’m married…to a man. I have men friends. But when I look around and see how some men are treating some women, I know that I am right to be a feminist. (It has perhaps become a dirty word, like liberal…I’m that too.) Ultimately, I just want women - all women - to be happy, bra or no bra.

Case in point: CNN.com just posted an article about sexual assault on American female troops. See?

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/07/22/military.women.sexual.assault.ap/index.html

It starts when we’re young. Little boys often resent the little girls who can run just as fast as, if not a bit faster than, they can. Some boys believe that they’ve inherited the Earth. They have a role to play - a gender role - and that involves them always being stronger, faster and smarter than girls. That means that little girls are supposed to be smaller, softer and ignorant than boys. And little gay boys…well, the Earthlords don’t quite know what to do about them.

So the arrogant little straight boys set up shop in the sandbox on the playground, around which they build a feeble fortress that signals “keep out” better than it poses a physical barrier. Bucket of sand after bucket of sand are stacked at the box’s approaches, and little girls and little gay boys know that they aren’t welcome.

Well, I would have none of that, I imagine. I can picture me (a tall, chubby bruiser of a girl) sauntering up to the fortress and slamming a fist into the sand wall, sending shards of course dirt everywhere…into their eyes and up their noses. It makes them cry. I shattered that gender barrier in more ways than one.

But wait! I lie. Not about being a big little girl, but about shattering the wall. I desperately wanted to play in the sandbox but they wouldn’t let me in. I didn’t make them let me in, and I didn’t make them cry. I cried. I ran away.

Because I did - because many little girls ran away - the sandbox got bigger and bigger over the years until it contained practically the whole world. And we feminists are starting from scratch as adults, trying to shatter the gender roles, while the next generation of Earthlords is conquering new sandboxes and declaring it a straight boys’ world.

Feminism will always be a necessary tedium, whatever the post-feminists say.

The United States military is one such expanded sandbox that requires the attention of the feminists. It has kept the fortress intact for many years, unwilling to evaluate the quality of life for female soldiers. The article states: “But the large number of women serving today in Iraq and Afghanistan is forcing the military and Department of Veterans Affairs to more aggressively address (sexual assault and harassment)?” This begs the question: why weren’t they addressing it before?

It’s not enough that one woman claims to have been raped or abused by a fellow soldier, it must be many. So now we have: “Of the female veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan who have walked into a VA facility, 15 percent have screened positive for military sexual trauma.” And: “In January, the VA opened its 16th inpatient ward specializing in treating victims of military sexual trauma.”

Did you know this? I didn’t know this. Our military keeps the sand walls strong and high so nobody can peek.

The article tells the stories of a woman harassed by a U.S. soldier - that would be like “friendly fire” - and one who was raped by Iraqi enemies. All told, the 2006-07 fiscal year saw 131 reported rapes and assaults in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that’s probably less than the actual number of occurrences. A 2006 military survey found that of those women surveyed who indicated they had experienced “unwanted sexual conduct,” only 20 percent said they reported it.

I guess it really doesn’t matter what the final tally is.

It doesn’t matter because one rape is too many!

We get it. The Earthlords don’t want us in their sandbox, and they sure as shit don’t want us in their military, on their police force, in their law firms or at their construction sites. The problem is that, now that they know how to wield their anatomical differences (i.e. superior physical strength, penis, and raw testosterone) to do maximum damage, they’ve decided to hurt and abuse those women who encroach on their play space. And that’s not to mention what they do to gay men and women, which is in some cases worse: the violence against Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena resulted in their deaths. In the case of Shepard, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney didn’t want Matthew in their bar. And as for Teena, John Lotter and Marvin Nissen didn’t want Brandon (nee Teena) in their (read: men’s) pants.

Is it possible to identify the factors that make little boys point and shoot imaginary guns before they’ve ever seen one on television? My brother, the psychologist, has explained to me that the point and shoot mechanism is a display of aggression common to both sexes in the first years of life. “Give a group of kids one toy, and they’ll either share it or fight over it,” he says. But more often, they fight.

On the playground, kids are prone to organize themselves according to their relative levels of aggression. It’s called “social stratification.” They have a caste system, but instead of basing their peer assessments on money or beauty, they look out for and align themselves with kids wielding the same level of aggression. And psychologists haven’t yet finalized the answer to the question: Is it nurture or nature? This means that they haven’t decided whether kids behave as they’ve observed their parents do, or in a way that their minds and bodies compel them to.

It’s probably a little bit of each. But this makes it almost impossible to solve. Trying to get the Earthlords to let us lowly girls into the sandbox is like trying to get an egg inside a bottle: you have to change the climate. Heat in the bottle reduces the pressure inside it enough to let the egg slide through an opening that was previously too small.

So that means that the weaker caste should throw firecrackers into the sand fortress.

Yeah…more violence! Won’t that solve everything?

No, it won’t. The Earthlords will just build higher and stronger walls of sand.

And that’s why we still need a feminist…party.

Teeth is a movie about a teenage girl who, while desperately trying to maintain her “purity,” discovers that she has some special anatomy beyond her chaste cherry. Let’s just say that the title of the movie doesn’t beat around the bush (no pun intended).

I feel justified in calling this film a comedy. My husband laughed uncontrollably during all four of the movie’s “vagina-bites-off-something-phallic” scenes. I too giggled, but I also crossed my legs. I don’t have a penis and I wasn’t reacting squeamishly to the idea of having one severed, but I tensed up nonetheless.

Why? Here’s what I think: not only is the vagina a mystery to men (the vagina dentata myth has infected many cultures over the past two to three thousand years), but the vagina - my vagina - is also a mystery to me. A man’s sexual anatomy is external; and until the clitoris was “discovered” in or around 1559 and even after that, doctors thought that female genitalia was either less productive than the visible male genitalia, or simply inverted male genitalia. And as we well know, human beings tend to fear what they don’t understand.

That’s not to say that I have feared my vagina. But until I discovered my clitoris, I too thought it useless. (And I do know for sure that I don’t have any teeth down there.)

What is perhaps the funniest element of Teeth is that it depicts a scenario wherein a seemingly problematic condition is desirable. In other words, I should want a toothed vagina because it would give me a position of power: the power to castrate. What the heroine discovers about her carnivorous cunt is that she can control it; she can chew at will. And that makes her a kind of superhero. Rapists and even less physically offensive misogynists beware: you don’t want to make it angry!

Now here’s the really funny part: men are actually offended by this movie. It seems that some men find the idea that multiple characters abuse our heroine and put her in the defensive position of having - or just wanting - to use her special gift offensive. They think the movie hates men.

To be fair, Dawn goes through a difficult sexual awakening. She’s date raped. Then, her gynecologist fondles her without rubber gloves. She finds out the sensitive boy is really an asshole with a bet that he could bed her. Finally, she castrates her insensitive stepbrother for ignoring her dying mother’s calls for help while, yes, he was fucking his girlfriend du jour. Oh…and the movie is a cliffhanger: Dawn hitches a ride with a dirty old man who makes sexually suggestive face and tongue movements. She smirks at the camera. Cut to credits.

This is obviously satire, and the entire film is done with a wink and a smile. But some have taken it seriously as if it’s a condemnation of men as a whole. Here are some quotes from the film’s forum on the Internet Movie Database:

“According to this movie every single guy is either a rapist/molester or is a weakling. Only self-loathing men could possibly like this movie. My beef is with the way ALL men are portrayed in this film. Again, nearly every single one was a rapist. The lone man who wasn’t portrayed as such was so ridiculously weak that he couldn’t even handle his own son.”

“If a movie was made about a man killing women and he was the hero for doing it, I guarantee you feminists would explode like the next atomic bomb. This movie is garbage.”

So let’s talk about the film as if it were serious. I’ll address these concerns. Yes, it seems Dawn knows very few strong, yet decent, men. A teenage couple who are abstaining from sex offers up one example of a nice, well-adjusted male. He doesn’t follow his dick around with a voracious appetite for abusing or demeaning women. And the film does not present him as a weak character.

Yes, Dawn’s stepfather has not disciplined his son effectively. When the father tries to evict the young man at the end of the film, the son commands his Rottweiler to attack. But let’s face it: the son was a nightmare from day one. And the father was a compassionate man struggling with a sick wife. Since when do love and compassion signal weakness of character? According to these writers, men can either be good or bad with strength but not without. Deemed weakness doesn’t compute. It is unacceptable.

Some men are weak, as are some women…it’s a relative assessment in each case. The same goes for cruel and inhumane behavior: it’s performed by both sexes.

As to the assertion that cinema has never glorified male killers of women, I give you The Manchurian Candidate, Misery and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (a partial kill). Each film contains a loathsome female whose downfall comes from a man’s hand, a downfall which is anxiously and resoundingly applauded by men and women alike. We justify the violence against women because the victims have hurt or killed people.

Come to think of it, women have been routinely victimized in horror movies for our relaxation and enjoyment. Many feminist thinkers believe that the slasher genre of motion pictures is a direct rebuttal to the feminist movement. Many of the ways women die in these movies are sexual (a phallic weapon through the mouth or abdomen, a simultaneous rape and act of cannibalism, etc.). And many of the villains represent sexual or reproductive power (the mother in Psycho, the queen/mother alien from the Alien franchise, and of course the cast-off concubine in Fatal Attraction).

None of these examples do I take seriously. It doesn’t make me think that all women are as cruel and sterile as Nurse Ratched just because there’s no overpowering alternative in the film. And Teeth doesn’t make me think that all men are male chauvinists or rapists. I think that these horror motifs reflect not what exists in actuality, but what we fear. Amusement helps us divert our fears. If my husband hadn’t been laughing with Teeth, as I believe the filmmakers wanted him to, he would surely have screamed or cried. And rather than think about what the filmmakers might have been saying about mean mommies in Psycho, I get a good chuckle when I picture Anthony Perkins wearing that ridiculous wig. And that shower scene…guffaw, guffaw, guffaw!

Men who fear movies about having their balls cut off by a toothed vagina, really need to grow a pair first.

I have many a feminist topic to rant about. But today, I feel a bit under the weather…and that tends to put me in a sentimental mindset. During my usual a.m. news perusal, I came across the following video:

http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-44263

The leatherback turtle is an endangered species, according to the United States government, which recently woke up to the possibility that we’ve destroyed the habitats of polar bears. Leatherbacks can grow to weigh as much as 2000 pounds. They are threatened by extinction owing to several human behaviors. They often become entangled in fishermen’s nets and drown. They have been known to mistake plastic bags and other discarded human waste floating in the sea for jellyfish and ingest the waste, causing bowel obstruction or choking. And their eggs, which they lay on the sandy beaches of Florida, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, are often harvested for food by predatory egg poachers, human and animal alike.

There’s a certain amount of trust that is being betrayed it seems. Mother turtles lay their eggs in the sand and return to the sea. It’s an instinctive tradition. Once the eggs hatch, the hatchlings crawl toward the ocean - some inexplicable force calls them home. Both mother and child trust the world, trust the animals of the Earth and trust themselves to make the journey safely.

As I watched the video of the wee turtles flopping helplessly toward the water and then being swept away, I wept. Their behavior was so natural, so innocent, that I couldn’t help but want for their safety. I feel sorry that the leatherback turtle leaves so much to chance when human choice would have it that these docile creatures go with the flow and yet often find their flow obstructed. We may have the power to choose how we live, but it seems to me that the turtle does not make choices. The turtle simply behaves as its instinct dictates.

So while we may choose to eat the turtle eggs as a delicacy, the little ones struggle to travel what must seem an enormous distance despite what might have been an easier choice to nestle in the warm sand.

Somehow Pixar understands this. Its new film WALL-E is the toast of the critical world. And I loved it too but not because the animation is pristine - which it is - or because the expectation that humanity will destroy itself is so transparently available to viewers - which it is; but because WALL-E is just like the turtles in a way. He has religiously compacted our waste for 700 years, without stopping to consider his own fears, his own loneliness or his own mortality. It’s not the close shot of his inquisitive eyes that draws me in; rather it is a wider look at the little robot wheeling to and fro, doing as he was intended without fail…no matter what…

The robot does develop what we perceive are feelings. Pixar has made rather a blank canvas of the character onto which we project our own emotions. But there’s still the actuality of his preceding 700 years of repetitive behavior.

We think that our ability to choose makes us better than creatures of instinct. But what we fail to consider is that we have the choices we do because others do not. We can choose to eat turtle eggs now, and until we have eaten the last of them, because the leatherback instinctively crawls from eggshell to ocean and back again. We can choose to eat cow and pig meat and treat livestock cruelly on the way to the slaughter because the livestock cannot choose to fight us back.

But someday, all the eggs and polar bears and cows and pigs and fresh air and hope for a brighter day may be gone. And all because we abused our power to choose and looked upon harmless instinct with contempt. We can be so cruel.

Perhaps we should take a lesson from the giant sea turtle at large and the giant sea turtle Crush from Pixar’s other masterpiece Finding Nemo. How does Crush know when the little baby sea turtles are ready to swim on their own? “Well, you never really know, but when they know, you know, y’know?” he said.

And without making a conscious choice, the wee ones swam safely along.

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 than 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.

Now that Hillary Clinton has “suspended her campaign,” it’s safe for the media to release some of the feminist discourse that may have been held back. It’s safe because Clinton can’t use anybody’s words against them, and even if she tried, nobody would listen because the issue of her candidacy is moot.

I have a big mouth so I’m happy to do the job.

Gloria Steinem contributed an opinion piece to The New York Times: “Women Are Never Front-Runners.” She asks, “Why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one?” She answers, “(B)ecause sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was.”

This means that the qualities of gender – masculine and feminine – are identified as the nature of the corresponding sex. Therefore, women are feminine by their very nature and are expected to be sensitive, gentle criers. And because tears are anticipated, a woman becomes a cliché if/when she does cry. (“Is it that time of the month?” men ask.)

Most people would prefer that their leaders don’t cry. This preference has given birth to a “no-tears rule” according to Steinem who commends Clinton’s “courage to break” said rule. Some reacted with sympathy when Clinton choked up in a January question and answer session: the poor woman is overtired and needs to thaw. Others said that she’s a phony.

There’s a biological reason for tears and it has nothing to do with sex and gender. Strong emotion of any kind – from sadness to happiness and back – can cause humans to weep. The protein-based hormones prolactin, adrenocorticotropic hormone, and leucine enkephalin build up causing psychic tears to well, and receptors in our tear glands read intense emotions and force these tears to flow. (How’s that for unisex science?)

The fear that Clinton’s crying when talking to a small group of women indicates that she will cry when talking to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for instance, is irrational, but it exists nonetheless. It’s the giving in to intense emotions that bothers some people; they see it as a sign of weakness.

There is no evidence that can resolutely prove that women cry more than men do. Even people who criticize Clinton and her soppy display probably cry themselves, but they do so behind closed doors.

I like Steinem’s theory because it agrees with mine: we are confused about the difference between sex and gender. Not all females are feminine and not all males are masculine. The problem with the assumptions about sex is that they are often false, and only sometimes true. Clinton cried when a freelance photographer asked her a sympathetic question: “How do you keep upbeat and so wonderful?” But just because she’s a woman who once happened to be somewhat overwhelmed by personal assurance, does not mean that she’ll have the same reaction to Raul Castro in the flesh. (I would cry at the sight of Castro, but I highly doubt that she would.)

People who believe that once a crier always a crier, in the case of women, are probably the same people who suspect and worry that Barack Obama is a Muslim. And if he’s a Muslim, then he must be a terrorist, right?

I’m surprised the press let this next one slip by and can only conclude that they ignored this comment because they have been walking on eggshells around the race topic. Michelle Obama had the following to say in a 60 Minutes interview with regard to her husband’s safety during the campaign: “I don’t lose sleep over it because the realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know. Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know. So, you know, you can’t make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen. We just weren’t raised that way.”

The statement begs the question: who does she think is going to shoot him? And she’d have to answer carefully because each potential answer has a built in crapshoot. If she were to say “a white person,” she’d be guilty of her own form of racism, perpetuating a stereotype that racist whites want to kill blacks. If she were to say “a black person,” that’s almost worse. She’d be perpetuating a stereotype that blacks are out there with guns shooting each other.

Michelle’s statement is problematic for Steinem’s theory because it still ascribes a nature to each race. In order for the two ideas to agree, Michelle’s answer would have to be either “a woman” or “a man will shoot my husband.” But somehow, I doubt that’s what she had in mind.

And she can’t simply respond “some crazy person.” Because that lunatic has a sex and a race, both of which are visible in her mind’s eye.

Finally, I’d like to turn to a June 6 commentary by Rebecca Walker, as posted on CNN.com. “It is time to turn the page on myopic gender-based Feminism and concede that while patriarchy is real, so is female greed, dishonesty and corruptibility,” she wrote. I wonder where she got the idea that humans generally uphold the notion that women are morally superior to men by their nature.

If we can’t say unequivocally that women cry more than men, then we can’t say that they are uniformly more sensitive, caring or generous. And we can’t take that another step and say that they deserved the right to vote in 1920 because they were angels and not citizens, or that Edith Wharton deserved a Pulitzer Prize in 1921 because she was a saint and not a talented writer, or that Hillary Clinton deserved the right to be president because she is a holy vessel and not a qualified leader. I can’t recall any legitimate argument for emancipation that was based on a sex moral foundation. It would lose all of its steam the minute an Erzebet Bathory draws blood or a Martha Stewart obstructs justice, etc.

The argument that Walker is disputing, however, is the same one Steinem has observed: people still think that effeminacy is the nature of all women. Effeminacy is the nature of some women…but there are others with a tougher stance. For us to evolve past the point of marginalizing men and women based on masculine and feminine expectations, we will have to do away with such terminology and the idea of gender entirely.

With the hustle and bustle of daily life, I sometimes forget to listen to the little girl inside. She whispers, “I want to be a film director when I grow up.”

Several days ago, I saw a curious red balloon dancing in the rain. It gently rose and fell with the wind. I immediately ran outside to take a picture. Why? What is inspiring about a lonely red balloon?

When I took a moment to listen to my little girl inside me, she reminded me of the little French movie from 1956: Le Ballon Rouge by Albert Lamorisse. It’s about a little boy who befriends a red balloon and travels with it all about Paris for a day. And in the end, he flies away from a group of bullies who’ve popped his friend the balloon, clutching the balloon’s balloon friends who’ve flown over to play.

That’s a simple premise for a very lovely movie about friendship and imagination. When I was young, and even today, it spoke to me about the power of will and make believe. And where there’s a will, there’s a movie. I wanted to tell the stories created in my mind with much the same simplicity. I became a filmmaker and made two short films with very little dialogue and lots of fanciful imagery.

As I grew older, I realized that so few films spoke to me in the same way as Le Ballon Rouge had. There are many reasons for this: dialogue is often obvious and overstated, tropes exhaustively explored in films marketed at me and other twenty-something women are superficial, etc. Increasingly over the years, I have felt excluded from mainstream cinema because I have felt that so much of what happens on the inside of a character is exploited on screen. Additionally, the roles of women in these movies are marginalized: female characters are either sexy or matronly, but are rarely neither or both.

“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly.” Laura Mulvey points out in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema” that fictional cinema has a long-standing tradition of falling in line with the male phallocentric gaze: filmmakers have reflected male dominion, which has been at large in the world, in their movies.

“The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of woman stands as lynch pin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies.” To me this means that men want women to be powerless, but it is female submission to this desire that makes that power all the more relevant. If we women said “No!” and “Fuck you!” more often, we’d minimize this phallocentricism…in theory.

We are obsessed with the phallus in human society, today and historically. Swords, guns, buildings and rocket ships all make use of this physical presence, one that is outward and potent. The vagina on the other hand is inward and secretive. How could imagery in motion pictures possibly reflect this? In truth, there are few that do.

There Will Be Blood, the 2007 Oscar-nominated loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, works on this level of contempt for the female and castration of her power. Filled with flat, dry landscapes, one cannot miss the enormous erections of phallic oil towers and the seminal gushes that emerge there from. And yet Sinclair was sympathetic to the plight of the common female prostitute, as much as he was the working man. Gone is his socialist message. In the only scene in the movie that does depict a prostitute, she is heard but not seen. And there is no supporting imagery in the film that makes a case for her struggle. She and her vagina are sidelined.

How can I love the movies when they so blatantly offend me by castrating the presence of women?

I love the movies because every so often there is a little gem that comes along and speaks to me. The red balloon represents for me my vagina on screen, you see. It gets blown about and still follows the one sensitive person to whom it is instinctively drawn. “Look at me,” it says. “Love me.” Meanwhile, a gang of bullies thrusts after it and tries to pop it by throwing stones.

In 1993, Jane Campion made The Piano wherein she ties a female character’s identity to an instrument. I particularly like the scene in which Harvey Keitel, lusting after Holly Hunter, finds a hole in her stockings as she plays her piano. He pokes the hole with a stubby finger. Later on, Hunter’s own finger is cut off in an horrific instance of spousal reprimand. If the finger is meant to be a phallic image in the visual language of the film, then Hunter has been castrated. There’s also an unusual shot of the back of Hunter’s head wherein the camera tracks into her neatly-wound bun. This is the filmmaker asking the viewer to ask, “What’s this character thinking?” I think this entire movie is Campion’s way of exacerbating the tendency of cinema to take away all the power from women, including their right to keep secrets.

And last year in 2007, Adrienne Shelly’s film Waitress was released posthumously. The film’s female lead bakes pies and the pies stand for her secret emotions: she doesn’t want to be pregnant so she makes “Bad Baby Quiche.” At one point, she considers making a pie with a banana in the center. Wait! “Hold the banana,” she says and takes it out of the vaginal center of the pie. (I love this movie!)

Words cannot express my relief at witnessing a film about a woman who rejects the imposed obligation of motherhood and who embraces her own sexuality in the process. And yet she says to her lover, “I don’t want you to save me.” (I love this movie!)

Last week the movie Sex and the City was released and did big box office numbers; in fact, it had the largest opening weekend for a movie targeted at women, who statistically don’t rush out to the theatres on opening weekends. I liked this movie. But unfortunately, the female characters still reflect the male gaze that has created them. Carrie Bradshaw may have a new big closet, but it is a gift from a wealthy, powerful man. In an episode of the television series, Bradshaw likened this man to the Chrysler Building. She enables him to be so by assuming the passive role in their relationship. He is the skyscraper to her walk-in closet. (This only works for me because it seems to work for both of them.)

The little girl in me wanted to grow up to be the first woman ever to win an Academy Award for Best Director – maybe she still will. But I’ll have to do it on my terms with my women characters and my red balloon clutched in my small, chubby hand.

The trouble with pronouns is that they carry a lot of baggage: not just anatomical baggage, but gender baggage too.

It’s not always easy for a person to know, really know deep down inside, which pronoun to use. As to sex, which is a constant, not everybody’s genitals distinctly reflect one or the other. In some cases, what could be a penis turns out to be a clitoris.

An intersex person may have one set of genitals on the outside, but a contrary set of anatomy on the inside. Often at birth, “normalizing” surgery is performed to correct this naturally occurring phenomenon.

As to gender, it is sometimes difficult to stay within the relative guidelines for feminine and masculine of the particular era in which you live. A young boy who’s a crybaby, for instance, suffers terrible indignities at the hands of his less emotive peers. A young woman who exhibits ambition and active aggression is often labeled “bitch” or “witch” because she doesn’t fit the socially acceptable feminine ideal.

If you are born with or evolve to have confusion in either of these areas, pronouns become a problem. After all, there are only two bathroom options at school: his and hers. You must conform to one or the other.

A pronoun, simply put, is a part of speech that substitutes for nouns. “He” therefore substitutes for John Doe. But when you read “he” your mind automatically assumes several things about John Doe, even if you don’t know his proper name. You assume that Mr. Doe has a penis. You assume that he exhibits masculine traits. Historically, those traits are active ones, those that inspire motion or change.

Those small assumptions lead to larger assumptions. He might be a leader of some sort, a rule maker. He is probably strong and confident. He fights battles and woos women. John Doe has gone from “identity unknown” to “He, the Conqueror” in two letters flat.

Jane Doe is not always this lucky. She might be a maid or a seamstress. She is probably maternal and naïve. She makes cookies and her marital bed.

I exaggerate of course, but I do so to prove that “he” and “she” do not lie flat on the table. They spring to life with meaning. If everything were “it” we’d be safe. We wouldn’t have sex. We wouldn’t have gender. (This would be a safe world, albeit dull.)

The same thing happens with other words in the English language. “Witch,” for instance, is used exclusively – and relentlessly – to describe a she that is less than cordial. “Bitch” is similarly used.

You’d never hear an abrasive man referred to as a “warlock.” And “stud,” the word traditionally employed to identify a male dog, connotes the antithesis of “bitch” with regard to humans. Studs are generally thought of as pleasing men, accommodating men. Bitches are a nasty sort.

So when MSNBC talk show host Chris Matthews reportedly called Hillary Clinton “witchy” and labeled her laugh “the cackle,” he was unwittingly perpetuating a long-standing sex inequality. For him, she is “She Devil,” “Nurse Ratched” or “Madame Defarge.” “He _____?” “Nurse _____?” “Monsieur _____?”

Then CBS radio and MSNBC television personality Don Imus had also reportedly called Clinton the Devil in 2006: “that buck-toothed witch, Satan.” He said that Clinton is Bill Clinton’s “fat ugly wife, Satan.” Does that make you want to take a shower?

Tennessee Representative Steve Cohen, a Barack Obama supporter, likened Clinton to Glen Close’s character in Fatal Attraction, a crazed woman who refused to end an affair with a married man. Now aside from the obvious offense at comparing a Presidential candidate with a mentally unstable rabbit killer, this comment forces us to consider another topic entirely: whose fault was the sex? While Alex Forrest did result to, shall I say “drastic?” measures to get Dan Gallagher back into the sack, he was the married sexual partner. He had made the promise never to cheat. He had committed sins against his wife in the first place…and yes, Forrest was a raving lunatic. But I digress…

The fact of the matter is that even Fatal Attraction came down to the basic dilemma: who do you trust? “He” or “she?” Somebody should ask the bunny. But can we trust it? What do we know about it from “it?”

And that’s the trouble with pronouns.