The Rage Diaries

What else are the little people for, princess?

'Tis the season: Phil and I are loading up the TiFaux with holiday movies and unwinding after our hectic days by watching and heckling them, one by one. Last Thursday's showing was a particularly risible little film, A Christmas Wedding, starring Sarah Paulson as The Drip, Eric Mabius as The Blockhead She's To Wed and Dean Cain as The Guy She Should Have Run Off To Aruba With But Won't.

The plot was clearly grown in a test tube; DNA contributors included Preston Sturges, InStyle Weddings and Donna Van Liere (the woman who "wrote" the "novelization" of The Christmas Shoes). Usually, these holiday films are good for giving Phil and I a good laugh or twelve as we notice unintentionally sinister set-ups or patently ridiculous plot developments or actors' obvious "Just give me the check" performances. But this movie just made me exceedingly cranky.

How do you implement affirmative action in the DCUniverse?

WARNING: This post is all comics babble. If you are not a comics reader, you might want to just skip it.

One of the funniest and truest lines ever uttered on the Simpsons belongs to Edna Krabappel. When she ditched Comic Book Guy at the altar, she explained their incompatibility with, "It's like I'm DC Comics, and you're Marvel." I don't have any elaborate theories as to which gender tends to lean toward DC and which one toward Marvel.

RIP, Club Libby Lu

Saks Inc.

(SKS) is shutting down the unprofitable tween-girls chain Club Libby Lu, five years after buying the upstart business and three years after first exploring its potential sale.

The chain, purchased in 2003 for

$12 million

, had 11 stores at the time and has since grown to 78 stand-alone shops and 20 locations within department stores once owned by Saks. Club Libby Lu's closure should be completed in six months.

-- Dow Jones 

It appears that princess parties were a leading indicator of a slowing economy. However, it seems that grown-up princesses still represent a growth opportunity: Disney's wedding dress line recently announced plans to produce gowns for brides who wear size 16 and up, and they proudly touted the new "platinum" gown in the Sleeping Beauty line. It would be interesting to see if the Disney Brides business holds up in these times because Disney's perceived as a premium value for the brand.

ETA: Idly speculate and ye shall receive ... check out today's NYT article "Disney Builds a "Lifestyle Brand That Isn't Cartoonish."

The "Aw, you're just jellus" defense is so unorginal

Writer Ann Marlowe thinks that Sarah Palin got to be the VP candidate not because Steve Schmidt decided that she would be a galvanizing factor in the race ("Steve Schmidt: the Driving Force Behind John McCain," LAT, Oct 6, 08), but because she tried harder and goshdarnit, it worked.

Whilst conveniently overlooking how Palin got her start in politics -- other pols recruited her in an effort to win over younger Wasilla voters ("Barracuda," TNR, Oct 22, 08) -- Marlow argues in "Why Elite Women Hate Sarah Palin" (Forbes, Oct 7, 08) that:

[W]ith Palin, it comes down to wanting it badly enough and being singleminded. It means spending a lot of time in deadly dull meetings talking about school bond issues or where to put a new off-ramp.

Except according to sources, it's not like she even put in quality time there either ("The Palin Problem," Newsweek, Oct 13, 08.

I respect that as a writer, Marlowe's looking to make a buck off an argument that is sure to get her attention and future assignments. (I don't think much of her editor, who apparently didn't not ask "Really?" at least once during the piece, but when is one supposed to expect rigorous critical thinking from Forbes anyway? Or, you know, arguments based on documented events?)

But she's dead wrong with her assertion that so-called "elite" women hate Palin because "The lesson of Sarah Palin for privileged women is to try harder. And that may be the toughest one to hear."

Palin did not get her slot on the ticket owing to overweening ambition -- which she does have -- because it's not like that quality makes her sui generis among politicians. She did not get that slot because she tried harder. She got that slot because someone somewhere made the cynical calculation that she'd galvanize the electorate. People may "hate" Palin but I'm thinking what they really loathe is what she stands for -- calculated and substance-free political theatre and the enfranchised idiots who fall for it every time.

My heart can't take much more of this drama

Seriously. This election season is tough on me.

So McCain picks Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his VP candidate. She may be the one to deliver that speech on gender that we haven't heard yet (and, as it turns out, could have been delivered were it not for the concerns of Clinton's senior feminist adviser). Palin's certainly the one to galvanize the anti-choice ranks.

With the reactions all over the place, the one that sticks with me thus far is the one from Slate, where Melinda Henneberger writes: "A naked grab for the Hillary vote? Yeah, and so what? Does progress ever happen for other-than-pragmatic reasons?"

I am not sure having someone in the office John Nance Garner once described as "not worth a bucket of warm piss" is necessarily progress if that someone backs an antichoice agenda and sells a presidency that's helmed by Mr. "Why Shouldn't Women Get Paid Less?" (Cheney's vice-presidency aside, the office isn't exactly known for being a change agent.) Perhaps the progress will come when someone figures out how to say that there is a difference between electing a woman and embracing women's issues. Perhaps the progress will come with people decide they're more than their gender, and vote according to their hearts and minds.

The thing that set me off today, part the first

Would you like to know why I'm cranky today? I listened to "Will Clinton Delegates Snub Obama For McCain?" on NPR.

I am not sure which irritates me more: the Hillary partisans who just cannot let it go, or the resurgence of the "Hillary Harridans" in the media. You just know that if McCain pulls it off in November, feminists are going to be blamed. I can already imagine the clucking op-eds about how mother-daughter conflicts in feminism ultimately tore the Dems apart.

There's not even a refuge on the comics page.

ETA: GAAAH! It was a total mistake to listen to "Clinton Delegates Wrestle with Moving On."

Spare me all that baby mama drama

Oh, Fox News, you crazy little vixen. You've just been at sixes and sevens since your number-one lady target eased out of the race. First there was E.D. Hill working herself into a tizzy over the Obamas' secret signal to Hizbollah, and now there's producer Jessica Herzberg's decision to refer to Michelle Obama as a "baby mama."

Below are the issues I have with this little lapse in judgment:

1. "Baby mama" is pretty much understood to be a term that men use to refer to the women they impregnate, but do not maintain a sustained partnership with. Michelle Obama bore her first child after six years of marriage to Barack Obama. In other words, she does not fall within the colloquially understood definition of "baby mama."

2. It is not okay to call Michelle Obama a "baby mama" just because she once referred to her husband as "my baby's daddy." Not to get all "it depends on what the definition of 'is' is," but that apostrophe matters; it's Michelle basically calling him "the father of my children" in a more colloquial manner. Again: not the moral equivalent of calling someone a "baby mama."

2a. And even if Michelle Obama did call her husband a "baby daddy" (which she did not), that doesn't make it okay for any news organization to do so. If you think that any cable news channel calling Michelle Obama  a "baby mama" is okay because you heard once (and incorrectly) that she called her husband a baby daddy, then I'm sure you're fine with any cable channel calling John McCain a cocksucker because you read that he once called his wife a cunt. What? It's not? Then neither is your specious "reasoning" about why it's okay for national news organizations to hang loaded labels on people.

3. And let's not kid ourselves: the phrase "baby mama" is loaded. Just because Tina Fey feels free to use it at the box office doesn't make it okay for every woman to slap it on to other women*. "Baby mama" is another way of saying "welfare queen," and deliberately applying it to the well-educated and accomplished Michelle Obama is a way to make people think, "Oh, Christ, another one of them no-count [fill in the blanks]." It's a race card.

So, yeah. I have a problem with referring to Michelle Obama as anyone's baby mama. I have a problem with Jessica Herzberg's judgment. And I have a problem with anyone who tries to defend what Fox did here. Anyone got a problem with that?

Enter the Ellen Jamesians

This primary season was bound to create a national dialogue about any one of a number of deep divides in the U.S. -- class, ideology, race or gender. What I am finding interesting is that in declaring Obama the winner, we haven't really opened up a dialogue on racism, but on feminism.

Witness the cluster of blog posts and articles that have emerged since Tuesday:

Hose down

Do y'all have to wear pantyhose to work?

I don't -- never have, and I hope I never will. I am apparently quite typical for my generation, according to today's WSJ:

For women who entered the work force before the 1990s, hose were considered as necessary as underwear. But many twentysomethings have never worn panty hose at all.

The fashion shift has left some baby boomer managers feeling that their hose make them look frumpy. Kathy Garland, the 54-year-old chairwoman of the Northern Dallas area for the National Association of Women Business Owners, says she finally threw out a bag full of hose last week. An executive coach herself, she noticed a few years ago that she was the only woman wearing hose at a formal business fund-raiser. "Younger women don't even think about panty hose," she says.

-- "Bare-Legged Ladies: Hosiery Reveals Office Divide."

Although the column ponders whether ties are the male sartorial equivalent of pantyhose, I call shenanigans on that. Comfort is not the primary issue; cost is. Last time I checked, men weren't rolling their eyes because their repp tie had just gotten a run in it. Pantyhose are a ripoff and I'm glad to see them falling out of style.

One movie I don't think I'll be seeing

The Women holds a permanent spot on my Top Ten Movies Of All Time list. I watch that sucker a few times a year and am always struck anew by something in it. I can recite entire chunks of dialogue or, more often, just confuse people by randomly holding up my hands and exclaiming, "I've had two years to grow claws, Mother! In Jungle Red!"

The casting is perfect, the direction is perfect, the attention to detail is perfect.

Well, I have just seen the trailer for the remake and ... oh, it is a crime. You know what? I don't care that this movie apparently functioned as the Employment Act for actresses over 20 in Hollywood. I care that the trailer suggests that this is a chick-flick caper instead of the coolly intelligent and elegantly incisive social comedy of the original. You do not get points for casting lots of the ladyfolks when you cast them in something that is dumber than the original. It insults both the actresses and the audience.

The Women is such a fantastic movie. Seeing this trailer makes me wonder what's next -- Goodfellas reimagined with Jonah Hill as Henry Hill?