I turned 26-years-old yesterday and my mom was in town for the big B-Day. Time with my mother is never dull. I’ve become loud, opinionated, slightly inappropriate, and a lot of fun at times largely due to my mother’s influence. So, its no surprise that in a mere 48 hours, she left me with some interesting thoughts and she inspired me to write this post.
As some of you may have noticed my avatar is a picture of me wearing my homemade “Bitch is the New Black” t-shirt which I is one of my favorite homemade stenciled letter t’s (this is as artistic as I get kids!). I made the shirt almost immediately after Tina Fey hosted the first Saturday Night Live after the writers strike. On that episode, Fey and Amy Poehler reunited on “Weekend Update” and delivered an amazingly funny sketch on women’s news during which Fey announced her support for Hillary Clinton saying, “Bitches get stuff done” and “Bitch is the new black.”
http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/play.shtml?mea=229113
It was hilarious and I thought it very effectively used humor as a way of addressing the role of sexism in this year’s presidential campaigns. It’s no secret that Hillary has faced enormous sexism this year as she has consistently been called shrill, or too emotional (for crying during the New Hampshire primary), or accused of “pimping out” her daughter, or being too easy on Bill, or called out for showing too much cleavage, or even harassed by people on the campaign trail yelling for her to iron their shirts. I feel that the image of Hillary Clinton as a bitch is really at the root of this problem (smart, assertive, competent women have never been super popular and it has been especially bad in the age of Britney, Lindsay, and other train-wreck overly-sexualized female celebs), so it was great to see Fey humorously embrace the word “Bitch” and challenge those assumptions. (I’m sure the Bitch magazine crew was psyched!). Naturally, I ate all of this up. It’s not often you get to see a feminist voice use humor on national television to call people out for ridiculous sexist beliefs.
Since I am naturally obsessed with humorous t-shirts, I felt the need to make this shirt and proudly wear it around, which I have been doing for about a month. The shirt has gone buckwild at karaoke night at a local dive bar, traveled to Boston for the Women, Action, and the Media conference, and done a lot of wandering around DC. It’s been SUPER fun to wear because it always gets a good response. My friend, Heather, provided the typically female friend response, “That’s awesome. Bitch IS the new black!.” While my friend, Gabe, provided the standard male response, “Dude, that’s a hectic shirt.” So, I’ve been loving the way the shirt gives opportunity to be funny AND bring up the issues of sexism in the media, the coverage of Hillary, and really the perceptions of assertive, competent women that we frequently see in the media. I’ve been considering it a pretty sweet method of doing good feminist work in an engaging, fairly non-threatening way (since it links back to Fey’s humor).
So, imagine my surprise when my mom saw the shirt this weekend and her first response to it was, “I think you better not wear that shirt in public with everything going on in this campaign.” I was baffled, the shirt was all about the campaign! But, my mom read the shirt as bitch versus black as a race; in other words, Clinton versus Obama. I’m glad she mentioned it because I hate the idea of perpetuating the notion that feminism is a white, upper class women’s movement and I could definitely see how someone unfamiliar with Fey’s work might think that the shirt was a statement on the Oppression Olympics (who is worse off, women or black people) theme of this campaign, which I find horrifying as whole (I spend a lot of time around Second Wave feminists, who in my mind, are a little too eager to frame the race as woman versus black and who deserves to be President first). I feel like this race should be giving us to think about the ways that race and gender intersect to create oppression not creating a distracting debate about who is more oppressed. I think this is one of the reasons I was moved by Obama’s speech on race. Instead of competing in the Opression Olympics, he encouraged Americans to engage in a frank debate about race. I’d love to see more frank discussions about race and gender in this race, instead of this non-sense debate about who is worse off. Now, I’m concerned I’ve been totally misrepresenting my beliefs in my awesome feminist t-shirt!
So, I have to admit now, I’m quite curious about how other people read this shirt. Should I stop wearing it? On the other hand, doesn’t wearing the provocative shirt help start these tough conversations about gender, race, the campaigns, the media, and American culture? How many people are seeing the shirt in a humorous matter and how effective is Fey’s humorous message as a feminist project? It’s all so fascinating! In the era of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, I want to believe that feminists can use humor to address gender discrimination in the same ways that Stewart and Colbert use humor to address the idiocy of the conservative agenda, but my mom’s read on the shirt really alerted me to the ways that it can be quite challenging when your audience is not in on the joke. Thoughts on how we can really make humor work for women? Is Fey on the right track?
Special Bonus- Fey-related thought:
While you’re checking out Fey on SNL, make sure to watch this fake commerical for Annuale. I’ve always had a major problem with these birth control pills that treat menstruation as a disease to be eliminated. It’s a precedent that makes me really nervous. What other things about being a woman are we going to pathologize? So, I love this sketch which totally mocks the concept as ridiculous. I also think that the pink Chuck Taylor is totally boss.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/10234/saturday-night-live-annuale
3 Comments
April 9, 2008 at 2:12 am
I don’t think “Bitch is the New Black” is about “who is more oppressed.” Tina Fey doesn’t mention race in the rest of her monologue. The monologue was about empowerment through bitchiness, rather than being the kind of women who do whatever Oprah tells them to do. “Bitch is the New Black” was just a clever catchphrase, and it’s a play on race only in that she was saying — in part — that some people like Senator Obama in part because he’s black. Tina Fey was advocating for people to like Senator Clinton because she’s a bitch. I think that is as deep as it goes.
Congrats on the new blog.
April 10, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Ashley’s mom here. Well, I’m glad that I generated some thought and inspired a blog entry. Congrats on the blog, I enjoy the thoughts and links. I have to disagree with Pete that the quote was a play on race at all. The Tina Fey’s comment “Bitch is the New Black” was a fashion reference and had nothing to do with race. It was a hysterical skit to empower Hillary that I enjoyed even though I am a Obama supporter. However, when I saw Ashley’s T-shirt, I immediately thought that in light of the race debate, many people (especially blacks) who may not be familiar with the clever Tina Fey comment, would be very offended and the quote would be misinterrupted. My personal favorite Tina Fey’s comment from that skit is, “Bitches get stuff done,” which seems to be my MO. (Mother’s Day is coming up) If wearing the “Bitch is the New Black” were to generate a civil debate regarding race by people who had never seen the skit, then the T-shirt (IMO) would be okay to wear in public. However, it may not generate debate, but instead generate more tension by someone seeing it, misinterrupting it, not talking about it, and perpetuating more racial tension that I think Obama and his campaign are trying to overcome and I hope will be accomplished. Wearing it to a specific women’s event would be okay. Wearing it on the day of the Martin Luther King Memorial Parade in DC would have been asking for trouble. I think hearing feedback about whether or not you should continue to wear the shirt from anyone who is aware of the skit would not be answering your doubts especially the two comments here that are coming from a white male and an older white female.
May 4, 2008 at 11:54 pm
Just a thought, but other powerful women in the world who are confident have managed to avoid being called bitches, so I don’t think the “Hillary is a bitch” symptom is nearly as simple as you put forth.
Margaret Thatcher, Condi Rice, Oprah, even Martha Stewart, who is a convicted criminal, don’t get the same Bitch mystique. So I don’t know that I believe “Bitch is the new Black,” but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep wearing the shirt