Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

It might be better to call today Equal Pay Day 2008 instead of Equal Pay Day 2009. Why? Because the average American woman would have to add the wages she has earned thus far this year to her wages from 2008 in order to catch up with the average American man’s 2008 earnings. 

Progress has been made: when the Equal Pay Act passed in 1963, women earned 59 cents for every dollar made by men; today it’s 78 cents. The Lilly Ledbetter Act, which Obama signed in January, made it easier for women to be able to sue for past discrimination by giving them more time to file. The Paycheck Fairness Act, which would close loopholes in the Equal Pay Act while protecting employees who discuss wage information and increasing the remedies available; this bill has passed the house, but you still need to remind your Senators about its importance.

Such legislation will not be enough to truly achieve equal pay, however. It is also necessary to make sure that women have equal access to high-paying professions (which means making sure that women continue their educational gains and generally working to fight the gender biases that undermine women when it comes to interviews and promotions) while, at the same time, working to make sure that female-dominated professions are appropriately compensated. An easy example is that, even when the economy is booming, teachers should earn more than Wall Street bankers; pushing around numbers to create wealth for some people should not be valued more than helping youth become critically engaged citizens—though those teachers who do have that goal in mind often find themselves struggling against the current educational.

But I digress. A more challenging area is domestic work. A more equitable division of unpaid labor in heterosexual couples would offer women engaged in those relationships more opportunities to pursue careers that require long hours, but that’s not the whole story. There’s also the issue of upper-to-middle class (mostly white) women carving out careers alongside (mostly white) men while less wealthy women, usually women of color, watch their children for a relatively low wage. Efforts like the New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights can help make some immediate improvements in the lives of these workers, though they cannot alleviate the problematic irony.

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• Bipart bad, reason #2905: Equal pay for equal work passed House (bilerico.com)
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• House passes legislation fighting wage discrimination. (thinkprogress.org)
• Equal Pay For Equal Work? (womenshealthmag.com)
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The New York Times today published another article about single-sex classrooms. While there’s no mention of what happens to genderqueer kids or kids who otherwise present gender outside the traditional binaries in schools that divide the girls from the boys, they do at least include a few statements about how such classrooms reinforce stereotypes:

Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, said separate classrooms reinforce gender stereotypes. “A boy who has never been beaten by a girl on an algebra test could have some major problems having a female supervisor,” she said.

The best evidence of how problematic these sorts of classrooms can be, however, comes perhaps not surprisingly from the male teacher of an all-boy classroom:

he said he can “be a little more stern” with his students now. “If I get in the face of a girl, she would just cry,” he said. “The boys respond to it, they know it’s part of being a young man.”

Girls “just cry”. If this is the sort of attitude that a male teacher holds about girls, what do you think classroom conversations about girls and women are going to sound like? Despite their best efforts, apparent in this article, it’s impossible to select books that entirely exclude female characters: every little boy needs a mother. The way a group discusses a less-privileged group in the absence of any of its members has never been pretty.

Moreover, even if the girls spend time learning about strong women, they will certainly also read books with male protagonists. To avoid this would require avoiding too much of the canonical literature: the girls will learn about men, but the boys will not learn about women. This replicates the requirements of a patriarchal society in which women must know about men in order to survive, but men need not know much beyond how to derive pleasure from women’s bodies. Sex-segregated classrooms provide little opportunity for this paradigm to be challenged.

Finally, the all-girl classroom described would have been an absolutely miserable place for me growing up. Working in small groups (a method chosen because of girls’ supposed cooperating and nurturing tendencies) was always Hell for me; I would always have been the girl depicted in the article as left alone at her desk with her face in her hands, and no “I’m surprised at you” talk would have changed that, or if it did, I would have payed for it at recess or lunch. Then again, my Aspergian tendencies mean that some people would class me as having a manly brain, which to me seems like just another way of dismissing whole classes of women who don’t fit stereotypes, whereas classrooms like these simply try to erase such individuals.

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Since the UN focus for International Women’s Day is ending violence against women and girls, I thought I would expand today on my reasons for wanting non-violent metaphors for creativity. It isn’t just my personal disgust with violence. The simple fact is that valuing and normalizing violence, as using it as a metaphor for artistic creation does, is not transgressive; it is neither daring or brave. We live in a society in which violence, especially violence against women, is the norm. 

War is all around us, whether you live in an invader nation as I do, in one that has been invaded, or in a land in which the story is far more complicated than that. Rape is a weapon of war, as well as something done in private bedrooms by the men women believed they could trust most or by on-duty policemen to vulnerable women. Crowds come forward to defend public figures accused of rape. Policemen attack teenage girls in custody. Children are allowed if not encouraged to beat up peers who express gender in an atypical way. When celebrities stand accused of domestic violence, people worry if their careers will survive and assume that the victim must have done something to cause the violence.

Violence is the accepted norm to which artists must create in opposition. This does not mean that you cannot portray violence in your work, for the portrayal of violence properly done can be a profoundly anti-violent act. The key is not to enact or give worth to violence as you do so. Understanding your process in non-violent terms is only the beginning.

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Dollhouse has a lot of potential but, like most TV series with that much potential, has a lot of fine lines to walk. One of the less charged ones has to do with its existence as, in part, an action series: I’ve seen a few shows start out with promise only to fall into too much mindless action (Andromeda, I’m looking at you). I’m not too worried about tech and explanations thereof taking over because, while this might hamper character development, the technology is deeply entwined with the thematic issues.

 The more charged lines are what gives the show a creepy edge: these call for an intense degree of self-consciousness to prevent them from becoming mere reproductions and amplifications of social phenomena. There’s the kinda geeky hipster guy who runs the “treatments” wiping and implanting personalities and who is absolutely convinced that the people he “treats” are living the dream; note that we mostly see him doing this to beautiful women. The series name with its reference to Ibsen’s drama certainly help maintains a degree of apparent self-consciousness on this front. 

 Another issue is corporate speak. In addition to the “treatments”, the memory-wiped and personality-implanted operatives are called simply “actives”. Then there’s the bit about preferring to call missions “engagements”. If not carefully managed, such language can become normalized within a series.

 Finally, there is the fact that the Dollhouse itself represents a sort of human trafficking (Echo wasn’t exactly a wholly willing recruit), but not a realistic one. How do you do that without falling into appropriation and without grossly misrepresenting the issue? This first episode, Ghost, has given me no evidence of how, if at all, this is to be achieved. 

These are just quick first impressions. I also have some half-formed thoughts about Echo’s “handler”. Did you watch the premiere of Dollhouse? What did you think?