Topless coffee, or How to find the perfect cup size

Perhaps you've heard of the new term "sexpresso," the melding of Hooter's-style waitresses with a Starbucks-type barista. There's Cowgirl's Espresso, whose theme is "Giddy Up;" Java Girls, featuring "sexy barista models;" and The Sweet Spot Cafe, where you can get "a delicious drink with a wink and a smile."

But now, the coffee industry has thrown bikinis aside in favor of topless coffee. In Vassalboro, Maine, the Grand View Topless Coffee Shop is open for business.

Interestingly, the company is reported to have received 150 applicants for the 10 positions available. This begs the question: Is this kind of employment degrading or empowering to women, particularly in this economy?

According to the local newspaper's report, here are what the topless waitresses themselves are saying:

Asked whether the shop is degrading to women, [Susie] Wiley said, "No, I love it. I find it very empowering, not degrading."

"It's just a body part," [waitress Kris Kelley] said. "There are more serious issues to worry about in this country than something like this."

Of course, many female residents of the town have a different opinion entirely. Still, one has to wonder, if these women are in control of the ways they choose to reveal their bodies, are they being objectified? If they find this to be a choice for economic survival, is it still a choice? Feel free to log your opinions in the comments section.

I do have to say that while the sexpresso shops mentioned above are mostly run by women, the Grand View Topless Coffee Shop is run by a man...a man who lives in the motel attached to the shop.

I think this is sort of creepy.

And the owner's comment in the local newspaper story?

We want to keep the girls respectable, not trashy...The biggest thing is keeping people happy.

Hmm...one has to wonder who he's keeping happy: the waitresses or the clients.

Oscars? Yup, still a boys' club.

The fact that the award itself is named after a man should tell us something, but many of us will still crowd in front of our television sets this evening and tell ourselves that this is a fair, unbiased representation of the best acting/directing/producing/artistic talent in the movie world.

However, when we polish our lil gender lenses, we'll find that this just is not the case.

Consider, for instance, what Melissa Silverstein of the Huffington Post points out (and this is just a sample):

-None of the Best Films Feature a Woman as the Lead

-Directing is Still a Boy's Club

-Women of Color Dominate the Supporting Actress Category Congrats to Viola Davis (Doubt), Penelope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona), Taraji P. Henson (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). The best actress category is white and not a single of the male acting nominees are of color.

-A Woman Still Has Never Been Nominated for Best Cinematography

Hesse also points out that "the only categories in which women have more nominees than men are Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress."

I also have to recommend Monica Hesse's piece in the Washington Post, which asks, among other things, why we have a gendered Best Actor / Best Actress category in the first place. She also quotes the following 2008 study from the University of Southern California:

The study evaluated nearly 7,000 speaking roles in recent Oscar-nominated movies, finding that only 27 percent of those roles belonged to women. In films with female directors, however, the percentage jumped to 44 percent.

As I'm munching on popcorn and soft pretzels with friends, I'll be pondering the gender inequity of tonight's events while cheering on my favorite nominees. It's tough to do both at the same time, I admit. But alas, this is the plight of a feminist movie fan, is it not?

A little "Changeling" needed for gender roles

Last night, my partner and I finally got a chance to watch The Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Angelina Jolie. I'd been anticipating this movie since it's release months ago, and now that it's out on DVD, my expectations had grown to gargantuan proportions.

And I can't say I was disappointed. My partner, Joe, actually cried at this film, and anytime Joe cries at a movie, it gets two thumbs up from me. (My tear ducts are a bit less reliable, as anyone remotely familiar with my gene pool will tell you.)

The plot followed real events in 1928 when a boy, Walter Collins, was reported missing by his mother, Christine Collins. Five months later, the police presented Christine with a boy who claimed to be Walter, but was not in fact her son. Despite her protests to the contrary, the police refused to believe her stories and went as far as having her committed to a psychiatric ward against her will.

To me, the film's greatest triumph was it's ability to portray the cultural creation of hysteria in women. The word hysteria comes from the Greek hysterikos, which means "of the womb" or "suffering in the womb" (think of the English term, also derived from the Greek, "hysterectomy").

Hysteria became used as a catch-all diagnosis for "womanly diseases," especially those involving faintness, nervousness, sexual dissatisfaction or really any attempt by a woman to subvert the status quo. Particularly prevalent in the Victorian era, hysteria was frequently used as an excuse to institutionalize women who refused to ascribe to their place in society.

In laywoman's terms, it was what they labeled wild ass women in order to get them under control. And control is really what this movie is about. Almost all of those in power are men -- the police officers, the head doctor at the psych ward, and even the pastor who befriends Christine, yet controls her story for his own purposes.

Perhaps the only time in the movie when we find solace in female redemption from patriarchal control is in the psychiatric ward, when Christine meets another female patient, Carol Dexter, played by Amy Ryan (who plays Beadie in The Wire, one of my favorites). Carol explains to Christine that all her control has been taken away from her. If she asks to speak to the doctor in charge, she will be assumed to be unable to deal with authority. If she becomes silent, she is diagnosed as withdrawn. If she claims her innocence, she is seen as delusional. In short, she is trapped.

And while many women do not end up in a psychiatric ward, many certainly feel trapped by patriarchal forces, unable to find our voice or make ourselves be heard.

There are a lot of disturbing and haunting moments in this film, but what haunted me the most were the number of times that Christine, in all her unbearable grief and frustration, smiles -- actually smiles -- at the men in charge. It's as if she realizes that she's tried everything else, and nothing works. They won't listen to her directly, so she has to charm them instead. It's eerie.

So tonight, I'll be rooting for this film as I watch the Oscars. (See my next post for reasons why my cheering won't be quite as loud in other categories...)

Stimulize this!

Today, the Senate voted to approve Obama's $838 billion stimulus plan. With the Dow tanking, and more and more folks are losing their jobs, this Democrat should be cheering.

And I am, somewhat.

But I'd be cheering a heck of a lot louder if the provision for increased family planning funds -- which would have given low-income women better access to costly contraceptives and other health care procedures -- had not been removed from the bill in an attempt to compromise with conservatives.

To me, this one's a no-brainer. You want to help the economy? Allow a working mother with several kids at home to purchase contraceptives at an affordable price so that she can feed, clothe, and house the children she already has without worrying that there will be yet another mouth to feed in 9 months. Want to create more jobs? Provide a healthcare option that leads to more opportunities for careers in the medical field, better care for patients, and safer pregnancies.

In my opinion, what this all comes down to is a nationwide fear of women's bodies. For some reason, many in our culture appear to be absolutely frightened at the mention of anything involving a vagina. For instance, in my College Writing courses, when I ask students to analyze an advertisement for its negative portrayal of gender roles, they are consistently able to articulate male genitalia but twist themselves in ridiculous knots in trying to avoid saying any word, synonym, or descriptor for female genitalia.

We have some kind of switch in our brains that flips on and causes a light to blink "controversy" whenever we talk about women's reproductive systems. But it doesn't have to be an uncomfortable or controversial issue. It's our bodies, after all. It's our health and our lives.

In addition, it's important to recognize that family planning does not construe a pro-abortion mentality. If both sides of the pro-life and pro-choice aisles are beginning to dialogue on how to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place, we must first recognize that the first and best way to do so is to give women access to contraceptives, regardless of their income level.

This should have been a non-partisan issue, one that left us stimulized to do the right thing and allowed us to envision a plan that would empower women to make responsible choices instead of taking those choices very away from them.

International Gender Lens: QUEBEC

For many of the last few posts, I've focused on gender issues in the United States, particularly in regard to politics. Now, however, I'd like to introduce a new feature of this blog: the International Gender Lens.

Every few months, I'll be interviewing folks who live in other parts of the world, asking them what their noticing about gender constraints in their neck of the woods. My hope is that this will help us as feminists see things a bit more globally, allowing us to widen our sense of "women's issues" to include more than just an American agenda.

Granted, I haven't traveled very far for this first entry. I mean, for goodness' sake, we share a border with Canada already. However, Quebec is a place with a unique identity, one that doesn't always conform to those of its geographic neighbors.

Enter my best friend since first grade, Sarah. After college, Sarah moved north to Quebec City and has lived their ever since. She's married to a Quebecois and teaches English as a second language. She's also studying literature.

First, a little explanation of this picture. After a 12 hour train ride to visit Sar, I looked across the station in Montreal to discover...well...my twin. As you can see, Sarah and I are wearing pretty much the exact same pink and brown striped sweater. This is a pretty good example of how in sync we are, even from many miles away.

Not to stretch this metaphor too far, but this is the kind of thing I'm hoping for in the International Gender Lens: the experience of traveling all over the world only to find that women have more in common with one another than we might think. While recognizing our different struggles, we can find allies in each other. This is my hope.

RL: What's one negative gender issue that you notice in Quebec that you didn't notice in the U.S.?

SM: In Quebec, where I now live after growing up in central Pennsylvania, women must keep their maiden name at marriage. This is great…a tenet of the feminist credo. The problem is that women married in Quebec cannot choose to take their husband’s last name if they desire to do so. Even more creative solutions to the “last name dilemma,” such as a combination of the husband’s and wife’s last name are not permitted. So can this political stance be considered feministic or simply restrictive?

Freedom of choice is one of the core values of our post-modern society. So Quebec’s supposedly-feminist stance forcing women to keep their maiden names is in fact as limiting as laws obliging women to take their husbands’ names. Some women, even self-identified feminists, would choose to take their husbands’ names. One reason is so that their families can be identified as a unit, each member having the same last name.

Since married couples cannot share the same last name, this law complicates choosing last names for children. If given a name combining the last names of both parents, the children now have different last names than both their parents. It becomes even more complicated when children with hyphenated last names marry other children with hyphenated names. What names do they choose for their children? Will their children have four last names? Most likely not; so a choice will have to be made. In most cases in Quebec, couples in this predicament choose the last names of their fathers, which is just as patriarchal as the traditional system.

This “last name debate” reminds me of Ammu’s dilemma in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Although her twins were seven years old, she still had not given them a last name:

"For the time being they had no surname because Ammu was considering reverting to her maiden name, though she said that choosing between her husband's name and her father's name didn't give a woman much of a choice."

I want women (and men) to choose the last name that they deem the best solution for them. It bothers me that my government dictates to women that the only way to be feminist is by keeping their fathers’ names.
RL: What's one positive development in regard to women that you appreciate about Quebec?

SM: Quebec has actively promoted a gender-equal society. One way that the Quebec government has done this is by instating a public daycare system that only costs the users seven dollars a day. This means that many mothers can work without exhausting most of their income on child care. The program’s raison-d’être is, “to help parents balance their work and family responsibilities."

Another of Quebec’s policies, its Quebec Parental Insurance plan, inaugurated in 2006, has led to greater gender equality in the workplace. One year “maternity” leave now includes fathers, so men no longer have an advantage when applying for a job since the employer recognizes that a man may choose to take parental leave. Employers that had been weary of hiring women because she may take a year’s maternity leave cannot justify such a decision any longer.

Couples have taken advantage of this program. In Canada about 90% of mothers took leave from their jobs. In Quebec, 80% of men choose to take parental leave. (2006 figures).

One reason that so many Quebecers have used the program is that the policy is very flexible. The parents can choose to split or even share the year. The government provides seventy-five percent of the salary and employers are required to retain the same position for when the worker returns to work. The government pays up to 75% of the salary the person is missing during the leave.

3. Can you share a moment this very week where you personally encountered a gender issue?

Well, I've spent most of this week studying, so I guess I'd say that when I think of education, I'm grateful that I live today and not even 100 years ago. Also, I know that even if I do have kids, I can continue my education as a mom. I don't know if it's the same in the States, but moms can get the same grants and loans going part-time to college as those without kids get as full-time students.

The American Virgin

I just had to take a minute to introduce a new addition to my blogroll: The American Virgin. Inspired by Therese Schechter's documentary of the same name, this blog chronicles current events surrounding the topic of virginity.

And wow, is it ever fascinating stuff.

Here's just a sneak peak from today's post:
From the website of The Passion For Christ Movement where you can order your own Ex-Masturbator t-shirt.

No lie.