Family Dialogue: Put Feminism at Forefront
I love Jezebel, a pro-woman blog focused celebrity, sex and fashion. Typically they're spot-on on most issues that are important to me. But this post raised my eyebrow:
Anti-Gaga PSA Warns Parents About Dangerous Pop Culture Icons (click for entire post and CommonSense.org video)A commercial for CommonSense.org—a site for parents who are terrified of how pop culture could poison their children—features two tweens suggestively dancing to a thinly-veiled Lady Gaga ripoff. And this serves as a warning about "racy role models."...Because you never know what kind of drugged-up whore your daughter will turn into after experiencing things, like, you know, the world around her.
I'd like to start off that I'm a raging left-of-lefty queer bent on challenging the status quo. If you've ever read a word of what I've written I'm sure that's been communicated. And while I detest the belief that all sexual expression is taboo and forbidden, I highly encourage questioning the role of women as bodies available for sex and nothing else.All youth imitate pop culture. I did when I was young and danced in front of the bathroom mirror while singing into a hair brush. But imitation without context presents a problem.Too much of pop culture values women as bodies, not people and creates expectations that for girls and women to be important they must be available and ready for sex. Young women and girls watch sexual exploitative videos of women and recreate it. If this is done without dialogue, this recreation goes without context. The messages? Accept the heterosexual male gaze, be open and available for sex, perform sexuality at all times. The messages lost? Confidence in sexuality, power over your body, not needing to be sexually active if you don't want to. These are messages that come out in dialogue, and parents* should be facilitating the discussion.I work with youth, and in my experience a painful majority of parents let the media inform their children without any discussion or dialogue within the family about what the messages spewed by the media mean. I am well aware many pro-family organizations are often paralleled with anti-queer, anti-woman, anti-sex, nationalist and racist agendas. But I caution us -- the awesome people fighting against sexism, racism, heterosexism, cisgenderism and the lot -- from equating family dialogue with bigotry. And no, Gaga-esque images should not be censored from youths' experiences, but the images youth do see need to be contextualized within an anti-oppressive framework.Therefore, I highly encourage feminist dialogues to occur in family units -- whether one parent, multi-parent or community family structures. This is necessary to challenge the oppressive messages we receive day in and day out from media giants. And while I applaud aspects of sexual freedom and power expressed by Lady Gaga and women before her (Remember Madonna? I was the 9-year-old performing "Life a Virgin" for my imagined audience), we still all need to have conversations with young women about what it means to be a woman in society, what society expects of women, and how to be a whole women in an oppressive environment.Common Sense has that right: parents have power. We need to use this power to fight oppression in all places.*I use parents to refer to all adults who work to shape the life of a young person, fully recognizing the many structures in which these relationships take place: biological parents, adoptive parents, foster parents, step parents and single-, coupled-, multi- and community-parenting structures.