* Alyssa Rosenberg articulates my annoyance with the glamorization of "housewife":

This is a show [Real Housewives] where the term that distinguishes the franchise, "housewife," is pretty much stripped of all meaning. You don't have to be married to be a Real Housewife. You don't even have to be dating anyone particularly seriously. And you're almost certainly not simply a stay-at-home wife or mom if you've been found interesting enough to be on the show. You're running a business, or a charity, or at the very least, stirring up a hell of a lot of trouble semi-professionally. Being an American wife doesn't mean anything in particular these days. That definitional void might be scary, but it's also an opportunity to fill it up with something valuable and interesting and varied.

Interesting. I've always seen the show's title as a shallow attempt to redefine successful women solely by their roles as wives and mothers. But perhaps it works the other way, too—housewives can have it all. Even jobs!

* Via the Washington Blade: D.C. police chief Cathy Lanier has launched an investigation into a satirical flier circulated around the force announcing "D.C.’s First Deaf Mute Gay Marriage."

* Not only will watching porn cause you to get raped, it may also kill you!

* Graph! Canada loves gay marriage. And "Kisses to the 3.5 percent of gay-affirming Jamaicans," Rick Rosendall writes at GLAA Forum.

* NOM tour hits Maryland, attempts to prevent all video evidence of the event:

[youtube:v=qe9QNdcRplw]

Photo via The U.S. National Archives

Alyssa Rosenberg points to the trailer for the latest project starring Hairspray's Nikki Blonsky. It's called "Huge," and it appears to be a story about triumphing-against-fat-camp-and-learning-to-love-your-body. Like Rosenberg, I'm all for tackling body image issues among teens head-on, but given that the trailer alone features a. obsessive dieting by the popular girl, b. as Rosenberg describes it, "a scene of Blonsky swiping [said popular] girl's abandoned dessert," c. a voiceover announcing, "in life there are no small issues," and d. the title "Huge," I'm worried the show will be indulging in a series of fat stereotypes only to knock them down with a requisite "but I love my body!" at episode's end. Then again, the  concern trolling that's already piling up in the comments for the YouTube trailer suggest that tonal issues aside, teens could really use a show like this.

* My Sex Professor's Debby Herbenick on a condom-distribution program at a Provincetown, Mass. elementary school.

The new policy allows for the distribution but apparently requires that children/young teenagers speak with a school nurse or counselor before they can receive a condom, an aspect of the policy that not everyone agreed with due to concerns that the conversation may be a barrier for some to asking for a condom. However, as their elementary school education class does not instruct on how to use a condom, this aspect of the policy may provide that type of information—and other types of conversations/counseling that I would hope any concerned adult would ask someone who is that young and either sexually active or thinking of becoming sexually active.

* Alyssa Rosenberg takes a hard line on actresses who coast on an "America's Sweetheart" reputation when dabbling in terrible and misogynistic dreck: "there ought to be genuine penalties for making rotten movies, particularly ones in which smart actresses debase themselves to turn in rotten portrayals of their fellow women."

* Via Holla Back DC!, former Holla Back intern and D.C. 11th grader Brittnie Smith has written an op-ed at the Examiner on sexual harassment and assault on public transportation:

Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) doesn’t do a good job on meeting the needs of women’s safety. From April 2009-March 2010 Holla Back DC! has received thirty-two reports of verbal sexual harassment, twelve reports of groping, (four of which were thigh grabs), four reports of physical assault, four reports of stalking, and three reports of public masturbation on public transportation. There were five incidents that were reported to either WMATA officials and/or the police. Out of the five cases, there was only one positive response, which led to the perpetrator’s arrest. This incident causes women to feel more fear than security when taking public transportation in DC.

* s.e. smith at FWD/Forward on the limitations of anti-discrimination legislation.

* Cara Kulwicki at the Curvature questions the U.S. government's reluctance to bankroll an end to prison rape:

the answer to the supposedly burning question isn’t difficult—the federal government needs to give prisons more money to specifically address this problem. Though not up to wardens to address, I think it’s worth pointing out that we’d have lots of money to spend on the issue if we stopped senselessly incarcerating people like non-violent drug offenders. And it’s definitely worth mention that we don’t have a big issue with spending money on prisons to begin with. The prison industrial complex is big, big business—and while $1 billion sure is a lot of money, it’s chump change compared to what we pour into incarcerating people every year. At around a mere 2% of what is being spent already, a whole lot of people—who we insist on locking up against all logic and reason—could be a hell of a lot safer. So what, exactly, is the problem?

Photo via Augapfel, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

More from Tiger Beatdown on manlit: This time, Garland Grey on the role of privilege in co-opting Jane Austen, a la Pride and Prejudice and Zombies:

Austen had to work very hard to hammer out a structure and a flow and a rhythm to the story, and you pull up next to that process in your giant SUV of male privilege and start plugging your electricity and water into it, taking all the work that Austen did to get the thing published, all of the work that made her writing world famous, and you make YOURSELF world famous. . . . it seems that when a woman works with a man’s material, they are given a more restrictive license to do so; their work is always assumed to be “less than” than a man’s work. And HEAVEN FORFEND that a BLACK WOMAN recombine the work of a white woman such as Margaret Mitchell, like Alice Randall did in The Wind Done Gone. Remember what a pointless shitstorm all that was?

Also, there weren't hardly any zombies in it!

* Seconding this New York Times op-ed urging Attorney General Eric Holder to enact strong standards to help end prison rape: "Predictably, state and local corrections officials determined to preserve the disastrous status quo are pushing back. Mr. Holder must hold the line." In related news, "Immigration and Customs Enforcement is investigating allegations that a guard at a central Texas detention facility sexually assaulted female detainees on their way to being deported."

* In defense of Lynn Hirshberg's devastating MIA profile: Alyssa Rosenberg on the narratives celebrities create, and the value in dismantling them:

Queasy but great entertainment—and great entertainment journalism—have often come out of the disjunction between established celebrity narratives (at least the ones that are meant to be taken seriously) and reality, or the breakdown of a once-true narrative. Vanessa Grigoriadis's 2008 Rolling Stone profile of Britney Spears came as the former teen pop star was punishing her handlers, America, and herself for imposing a restrictive, virginal life story on her by going publicly, shockingly crazy. But the piece also exposed that story as false in the first place. Britney was sexually active before her breakout album, and she'd had breast implants. What was interesting was less that she and her management team lied about those events, but how she succeeded, and then failed, to live out the history that was retroactively created for her.

* Via the Curvature: Watching an ultrasound of a fetus does not deter women from having an abortion.

* SAFER Campus on the testimony of a woman who was raped at UV A in 1984, and the strange sexual assault policies that remain at the school today:

[N]one of the rapes reported to UVA (and consequently reported to the federal government) has resulted in sanctions. There is something wrong with all of the different pieces of this picture. I would add that the procedures for UVA’s sexual assault board include two options that are basically mediation—one literally called mediation, and a “structured meeting” that seems to be the same as mediation except the discussion is more structured? What? Notably, if a student chooses a structured meeting, they must waive their right to a formal adjudication before the Sexual Assault Board. (Oddly enough, students are allowed to pursue formal adjudication if the are unhappy with the results of a mediation…as long as they don’t sign anything that says they can’t…) Neither the mediation or strcutured meeting can result in sanctions. Perhaps this speaks to why the 52 reported rapes at UVA resulted in no sanctions? I would really like to know what channels UVA’s sexual assault cases go through most often.

Photo via daniel.julia, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

* Zack Rosen at The New Gay on the assumption that gay men love Sex and the City: "assumptions about my relationship to SATC make me about as angry as being called fabulous," he writes. "We’ve all gone on bad dates or slept with someone who never called us again. We do not all, however, live in a New York City haze of money and extreme fashion. We do not all act as if women and gay men are half-formed creatures that will die flopping on the floor if they cannot find a mate. And most importantly, we do not all subscribe to the notion that the life lived by the SATC gals is a mirror image of that undergone by the contemporary urban gay male."

Rosen isn't just peeved at the constant comparisons between all gay men and a set of sexually promiscuous, frivolously spending, Cosmo-swilling white ladies; he's also unimpressed with the film's depiction of actual gay men: "this movie . . . features a gay wedding between two men who hate each other, love an all-white color palette and hired Liza Minnelli to sing 'Single Ladies.' I’ve hosted orgies that were less stereotypically gay than that."

* Who would you rather work for: Andrea or James?

Madeline Heilman at New York University once conducted an experiment in which she told volunteers about a manager. Some were told, "Subordinates have often described Andrea as someone who is tough yet outgoing and personable. She is known to reward individual contributions and has worked hard to maximise employees' creativity."

Other volunteers were told, "Subordinates have often described James as someone who is tough yet outgoing and personable. He is known to reward individual contributions and has worked hard to maximise employees' creativity."

The only difference between what the groups were told was that some people thought they were hearing about a leader named Andrea while others thought they were hearing about a leader named James. Heilman asked her volunteers to estimate how likeable Andrea and James were as people. Three-quarters thought James was more likeable than Andrea.

The story goes on to examine the experiences of two transgender scientists at Stanford who transitioned mid-career—one transitioned to male, the other to female. I wonder who had a better time post-transition?

* SAFER Campus on WaPo's recent examination of campus rape: When you headline a story "Schools trying to prevent and respond to sexual violence," shouldn't you then report on some schools that are actually trying to prevent and respond to sexual violence?

I found the title of the article “Schools trying to prevent and respond to sexual violence” in the Washington Post to be extremely misleading. I expected to read a some stories of how schools are adequately and sincerely making efforts to prevent and respond to crimes such as rape, but instead I found myself reading a boring, shallow article that barely grazes the real picture of violence on college campuses and how institutions are dealing with it.

* Student journalists at the University of Utah who secretly inserted words for genitalia in the school newspaper will not be penalized. Apparently, publishing "penis" and an unidentified "slang term for the vagina" are not, in fact, outlawed in the school's Code of Conduct. "Administrators said academic holds on the journalism students were lifted after they determined the student code was not violated by the prank, which spelled out the words in large capital letters within The Daily Utah Chronicle's farewell columns."

* Alyssa Rosenberg points to another lady-centric movie I will definitely see:

[youtube:v=j92Rka-FtUw]

* I am in love with Kerry Howley's book review of Paco Underhill's "What Women Want"—an examination of the consumer behavior of what Underhill terms "the female of the species" of humans. Marry me, Kerry Howley's book review:

Instead of telling us what women actually buy, Underhill considers a product and deigns to divine its male or female origins. Often, the thing he doesn't like is the "male" thing. The product he does like he attributes to the growing and glorious power of the woman consumer. McMansions, which Underhill considers vulgar and atomizing, he deems male. For New Urbanist communities, we are told without benefit of explanation, you can thank women. And because women are in charge now, McMansions are going out of style. ("Good-bye, McMansions. And hello to a new species of home that accommodates the female of the species.") In a typical passage, Underhill notices that pillow quality in American hotels is improving. He attributes this, on a hunch, to pillow-demanding women travelers, which sounds plausible. But might good pillows merely be a response to the taste preferences of an increasingly wealthy society? Would a world without women necessarily be a world with a smaller proportion of soft pillows?

* Who wants to go see Love Ranch with me? Alyssa Rosenberg describes the plot: "Older couple fights for the legalization of their brothel and prostitution in general while [wife] falls for a much younger, exceedingly sexy Latin American boxer." I'm sold.

[youtube:v=cC4i83ejkbo]

* Via THE LINE, it's a headline fail!:

Hmm!

* Speaking of pillows: Are dead ladies sexy, and are they sexier having expired from a girls-only pillow fight? Sociological Images points to some recent instances of sexualized violence for fashion's sake, including "a fashion shoot in which women were depicted as having died in a pillow fight."

* Amanda Marcotte on D.C.'s "modesty police" who shame Supreme Court nominees for leaving their legs uncrossed and First Ladies for showing just a touch of cleave:

The modesty police here or in Saudi Arabia use sex as cover to shame women for having the temerity to walk around in public while possessing lady parts. Creating a situation in which everyone is staring at your crotch or boobs in hopes of finding some transgression from arbitrary modesty standards is just a way to pick on women for being women. I've often been tempted to take pictures of what I was wearing when some guy on the street harassed me, just to point out that if your harasser is determined enough, a hoodie sweatshirt and a pair of jeans can be considered hoochie-mama clothes that somehow demand harassment.

Photo via Romantic Crafts, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

* SAFER Campus asks why reproductive coercion—or birth control sabotage—ain't criminalized yet. One woman shares her story, naturally, on Facebook:

A recent event has caused me to question [what] it means to be sexually assaulted . . . While sleeping with a guy [he] decided to take off the condom without me realizing it and when he was fingering me he pulled out my nuvaring without telling me. I saw [my]  nuvaring on the ground and he admittedly told me that he had pulled it out. The next day I wrote Eric an email asking him to never contact me again.

I think that birth control sabotage should absolutely be considered sexual assault; consenting to one sex act doesn't imply consenting to all of them, and consenting to sex with and without a condom are two very different things. (Just in the interest of clarification: You can remove the NuvaRing for up to three hours and still be prevented from pregnancy).

* Alyssa Rosenberg is eager for Hollywood to write some gay love stories that aren't expressly political.

* Violet Blue points us to "Super Sexy CPR," a video that uses super porny imagery to teach the elements CPR. Perfect for the next time you need to resuscitate a lingerie model, but sexily.

* My Sex Professor gives you a primer on incorporating the foot into your sex life.

* Nerve ranks the sexiest women and men of LOST. You fools are so wrong about Eloise.

* Susannah Breslin with a great essay on Max Hardcore, the porn giant currently imprisoned on obscenity charges:

I had seen Max’s movies. I found them terrifically depressing. To be clear, I have seen many, many (far too many, really, come to think of it) movies that fall into the explicit, depraved, and explicitly depraved category. I’ve seen cophrophagy porn, senior citizen porn, a porn in which Ron Jeremy appeared as a baby in an adult diaper and a bonnet, midget porn, world-record setting gangbang porn (I was present for one of those, and it’s hard to say which was worse), so-called “ready to drop” pregnancy porn, and a movie in which a series of young women had sex with men and then promptly threw up onto a black tarp spread over a sagging bed after taking what I assumed to be Ipecac. Suffice to say, it takes a lot to shock this reporter when it comes to porn movies. Max’s movies aren’t shocking — not most significantly. They are sad. Everyone suffers. No one is happy. If joy is located at one end of the spectrum, this is where its opposite resides. This is the monstrous mating of unfulfilled longing and untenable hate. Their progeny: an abomination.

(Unconvinced? Try this.)

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Alyssa Rosenberg nails it on why today's romantic movies suck so bad: They're only about romance. The great romantic films of yore, Rosenberg notes, forced romantic love to duke it out with some other big force in the characters' lives—like Nazis:

[T]he reason older romantic movies were good is because they tended to be about something other than simply the romance. In It Happened One Night, Clark Gable's scoop is at risk. In His Girl Friday, it's Rosalind Russell's professional integrity. In the Thin Man, there's crime, in Casablanca, Nazis.

. . . In American romances, and particularly romantic comedies, today, there is no problem that's not directly related to the main characters' ability, or lack thereof, to love. It doesn't matter if it's jobs, parents, a precocious niece, or the end of the world. It's all about the love affair. Finding love will help all those characters find fulfilling employment, forgive their mothers, embrace their siblings, overcome low self-esteem, whatever. It's an incredibly limiting plot-assumption, not to mention a guarantee that characters will be hopelessly self-centered. And that self-centeredness is just exhausting and diminishing and requires completely predictable endings. Characters must find love if they're to find redemption or success in any other area. It's too bad. Sometimes in the past, people walked away for the greater good. There was heartbreak that was real, and not intended to be fixed by the opening credits.

As Rosenberg notes, this syndrome particularly affects romantic comedies. These plotless wonders have reached crisis level. I'm convinced that resolving this particular plot point would alleviate most of my complaints with the romantic comedy's persistent representation of women as uptight bitches who are just in need a good fuck, and men as flavorless cyphers who have volunteered to do the fucking.

Let's review the major conflicts in a small (but representative!) sample of romantic comedies from the past 20 years:

Bridget Jones' Diary:

Conflict: Woman who is traditionally unlucky in love unexpectedly acquires two romantic suitors. One is a jerk; the other has a possible girlfriend.

Resolution: Suitors duke it out. Jerk is revealed to be even larger jerk; other guy unexpectedly leaves possible girlfriend. Romance is preserved.

The Wedding Planner:

Conflict: Wedding planner falls in love with charming doctor. The romance is interrupted when the planner discovers that she is planning the man's wedding—to another woman! Wedding planner decides to marry some other dude instead.

Resolution: The doctor calls off his wedding with the other lady. Wedding planner calls of her wedding with the other dude. Romance is preserved.

Leap Year:

Conflict: A woman cannot propose to the man she wants to marry, for it is uncouth for women to propose to men. She travels to Dublin, where it is acceptable on one day every four years for a woman to propose to a man. There, her boyfriend proposes to her, preserving romance momentarily. However, it is later revealed that her boyfriend is a jerk, and she calls the wedding off.

Resolution: After that, some random dude she met in Dublin proposes to her. Romance is preserved (BONUS: no woman was forced to propose to a man).

Sleepless In Seattle:

Conflict: Woman from Baltimore is engaged to a nice but unimpressive fiancee. Man in Seattle's wife is dead.

Resolution: Man's son convinces him to declare his widowhood over the radio. Woman writes him a letter. Man's son, impersonating his father, tells woman to meet him on the top of the Empire State Building on Valentine's Day. Woman travels to Seattle to secretly stalk man. Later, she returns to New York to be with her real boyfriend. Man's son sneaks away and flies to New York by himself in an attempt to meet woman. Boy's father chases him. Woman breaks up with her fiancee for some reason.

Resolution: The man, his son, and the woman meet on top of the Empire State Building. Romance is preserved.

The central plot resolution device in any of these stories is to push any potential romantic rivals out of the picture long enough for our two main characters, whom the filmmaker has randomly assigned to be destined to be together, to manage to slip a ring on each others' fingers before the credits roll.

Rosenberg is right: Filmmakers need to wise up and realize that competing romances are not the only sources for conflict in a film about romance. I'm not saying that The Wedding Planner would have been better if there were Nazis in it, but wouldn't the Wedding Planner have been better if there were something like Nazis in it? Surely, romantic comedy writers can come up with some external force to engage with our heroes' romantic pursuits that is more compelling than a stand-in fiancee or a roguish Irishman.

Thanks to Alyssa Rosenberg for pointing to the new trailer for Roman Polanski's upcoming film, "The Ghost Writer." As Rosenberg notes, the movie looks extremely silly, from Kim Cattrall showing up with some sort of non-specific accent, to a sign for the "Fisherman's Cove Inn" ominously swinging in the wind, to Pierce Brosnan acting as blatantly evil as he can possibly get away with. There is a silver lining here, however.

Finally, we've got the perfect rejoinder to one of the most common Roman Polanski defenses out there—you know, the arguments Polanski defenders throw out in order to justify not prosecuting a convicted rapist who skipped the U.S. to avoid serving time for his rape. That argument is this: "But Roman Polanski made the Pianist!" And if Polanski had been forced to actually serve jail time for bedding a 13-year-old, the argument goes, perhaps the fabric of time would have been irrevocably torn, resulting in the Pianist never been made, or something!

This was the argument preferred by the hundreds of Hollywood luminaries who signed a petition for Polanski's release: "Apprehended like a common terrorist Saturday evening, September 26, as he came to receive a prize for his entire body of work, Roman Polanski now sleeps in prison." In other words: Roman Polanski makes good movies (just like we do!). Give him a pass.

If The Ghost Writer is half as bad as the trailer, it looks like it's time for the free pass to be revoked. Now, an appropriate response to the "But he made the Pianist" argument might be this: Well, if Polanski had been kept in prison last year instead of being whisked away for house arrest at his Swiss ski chalet, where he reportedly finished up work on The Ghost Writer (presumably to ensure that that dramatic musical swell behind ominously-swinging sign was synced up just so), then—my God!—maybe somebody else could have made this movie, someone who wouldn't cast Pierce Brosnan in it. Plus, Polanski would have actually served his time for raping someone. And everyone wins.

Patience is a virtue, possess it if you can
Seldom found in woman, never found in man.

We often hear that "patience is a virtue." It's the second half of the sentiment largely goes unspoken: Patience is a virtue for women. What is patience, exactly? In Helper By Design, Elyse Fitzpatrick's guide to submitting to your man in the name of God, patience is defined as the "power to endure without complaint something which is disagreeable." That's right, ladies—our gender is number one in leading lives of quiet desperation.

Throughout history, this "power to endure" has proven . . . inconvenient. While patience has its perks in dealing with events that lie entirely outside of our control—war, famine, terminal illness—it becomes a bit of a bother when applied to the realm of romantic relationships. Wait to be asked on a date. Wait to be swept off your feet. Wait for sex—if not until marriage, then at least 90 days. Wait for him to bend down on one knee. Once hitched, wait on him. Then, die.

Why are women encouraged to wait around for major life events to just happen to us? Patience, my dear. These relationship milestones have been engineered and reinforced along traditional gender lines in order to test a woman's ability to shut up and sit pretty, while encouraging men of action to make all the decisions around here. But unfortunately for the patience lobby, us women have figured a few things out over the history of time. One: Our vaginas won't implode upon completion of premarital sex. Two: Our significant others can still love us without investing two paychecks worth of bling into one of our virtuous little fingers. And three: Waiting does not work. Ever.

In light of these developments, some have chosen to trash those pesky romantic milestones altogether, refusing to see virginity and weddings as indicators of our worth as women. Others have flipped the gender script they're based upon: Ask out. Initiate sex. Propose. But some just can't let go of the passivity thing, and they're going to try their hardest to make feminine patience work in the 21st century. For them, the ideal of passive patience needn't be discarded; it's just got to be re-coded and re-sold as proactive patience. Nowadays, getting men to come to you doesn't have to be a pathetic waste of time—it can be a subversive, brave, and even—yes—feminist act of empowerment!

Coincidentally, all of these people appear to be concentrated in our nation's record labels, movie studios, publishing houses, and newspapers. Behold, pop culture's vision of a feminism of patience: No need to abandon traditional marriage—just celebrate women who are strong enough to get what they want (that ring). Don't propose to your significant other—just subversively coerce him into doing it for you. Don't bother waiting around in your ivory tower for your prince to come—just make damned sure you're on the receiving end of that fairy-tale ending. Girl power!

—

Exhibit A: The works of Taylor Swift.

[youtube:v=2CZQZohbZcQ]

Hoo boy, how are we going to reconcile this one, ladies? Taylor Swift sings songs about waiting around, being a princess, and crying for her "Romeo" to rescue her from her dad, who is so mean. Then, she makes videos for these songs where she is literally waiting in an ivory tower for her prince to come:

Romeo take me somewhere we can be alone
I'll be waiting all there's left to do is run
You'll be the prince and I'll be the princess
It's a love story baby just say yes

Okay. Breathe. Despite the traditional trappings—Romeo, waiting, prince, princess—it's not hard to find a girl-power lining in this song. Swift is coaching Romeo here. She's giving him exact instructions on where to find her. She's charting out their escape route. And she's imploring him to say yes to her demands. That is, until we get to the fairy-tale ending:

Romeo save me I've been feeling so alone
I keep waiting for you but you never come
Is this in my head? I don't know what to think
He knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring

And said, marry me Juliet
You'll never have to be alone
I love you and that's all I really know
I talked to your dad, go pick out a white dress
It's a love story baby just say yes

Ooh! So close! Notice how Swift whiles away her time waiting, crying, wishing, hoping, praying, etc. while all Romeo has to do is . . . go over and talk to her dad. It's not exactly rocket science, folks. And yet, Swift expends a whole lot of emotional energy in order to goad the love of her life into performing the most basic of tasks, instead of just, like, dealing with her father herself, or realizing that her father is a dick and she's 18 so he can't tell her what to do anyway. But whatever—surely we can channel all of Swift's emotional energy into some sort of feminist reading of her work? Alyssa Rosenberg, noted critic of passivity in popular culture, sees Swift as feminist, in a way:

I am an enormous sucker for . . . Taylor Swift's "Love Story," which is an absurdly mature and lovely piece of pop songwriting. "I was a scarlet letter" spoken as a declaration of pride, devotion, and sexual desire is kind of amazing as a commercially successful act of feminist reclamation.

I don't see the phrase as a "feminist reclamation" so much as a mixed literary metaphor inserted into a song about waiting to get a ring on that finger. And "Love Story" is not Swift's sole offense: In "You Belong With Me," Swift passively spins elaborate fantasies that the boy of her dreams is dating her, and not his girlfriend. In the song, Swift is "Dreaming bout the day when you'll wake up and find / That what you're lookin' for has been here the whole time." Since Swift refuses to just ask him out or something, her solution is to aggressively strut her passivity in front of his face at every opportunity.

But let's be fair—while Swift's princess persona is a bit dull, Swift herself has been spending her pre-wedding days writing and recording hit crossover records. That's something, Ann Powers argues for the Los Angeles Times:

the authority these fledgling artists claim is a great sign of feminism's ripple effects. Swift might play a princess in many of her songs—in fact, the best parts of "Fearless" meditate on the princess myth and how reality subverts it—but in the studio she's her own boss, writing and producing those fairy tales.

This is the Sarah Palin theory of feminism. If she's a woman, and she does stuff, it's feminist—even if that stuff is writing songs about waiting around for boys do stuff to you. These women don't deserve our ire, but they don't deserve a cookie, either. Swift should be celebrated as a promising entertainer who writes catchy tunes I like to listen to on the radio. Feminist? Not so much.

—

Exhibit B: The cautionary tale.

[youtube:v=PITgjb9Xtr0]

If "Anna", the central character in the upcoming rom-com Leap Year, is a "princess," it is in the urban dictionary sense of the word: She is a beautiful, well-heeled control freak with a serious thirst for a solitaire diamond. Anna wants to propose to her boyfriend, but she can't, because girls can't propose to boys. So our determined young heroine finds a patience loop-hole: Propose to her boyfriend on a day that only comes around once every four years, because it is socially acceptable to do so, in Ireland, on that day alone (?). Anna hops on a plane to secure the man of her dreams on her own terms.

But ho ho, no, not so fast, independent woman. You've still got to wait—for your plane to get re-routed, your car to get blocked by a sea of cows, your ass to fall down a muddy hill, and a charming and handsome Irishman to accompany you on your hilarious misadventures. In fact, our heroine has to wait juuuuust long enough for her boyfriend to realize that he, in fact, wants to propose to her—and for the charming and handsome Irishman to begin to aggressively court her also.

Moral of the story: There's nothing more irresistible than a woman who desperately needs to get married as soon as possible . . . as long as she doesn't end up doing the proposing. That would be pathetic.

—

Exhibit C: Team Bella

Bella Swan, the heroine of the Twilight series, gets a lot of flack for being a passive lump of femininity with no defining characteristics besides her tasty blood. (Rosenberg has penned an exquisitely written anti-Bella screed). By series end, that blood will catapult her into vampire royalty, making her a—you guessed it!—princess. But in New Moon, the second installment in the Twilight series, Bella actually takes on a ton of pretty sweet hobbies.

She fixes up old motorcycles! She jumps off cliffs! She goes on joyrides with dumpy bikers! She sees movies with her friends! She uses e-mail! Okay—so our expectations for Bella's extracurricular activities are pretty low. She actually spends the better part of New Moon staring out of a window, watching the seasons change as she "endures without complaint something which is disagreeable"—bad vampire break-up. But the motorcycle thing is pretty rad, right? Too bad she only does the more interesting stuff to prove how vulnerable and suicidal she is in an attempt to coerce her ex-boyfriend to come back and save her from herself.

Bella's empowerment of desperation presents the most difficult form of patience to re-cast as a new feminism. But let's give it a try—if we can't give up the wedding shit, and we can't give up the princess shit, and we can't give up the patience shit, then we have got to find some way to justify this to ourselves. Sady Doyle, in a brilliant turn, points out that Bella is passive in the way that men in porn are: They're faceless, save for one sizable talent (tasty blood = big penis), and somehow they've got tons of perky, tanned blondes servicing them for no apparent reason. This is exactly what happens to Bella—she does nothing, she is nothing, and hot guys fight over her. (Nevermind that one other thing Bella doesn't do: Sex before marriage). No, it's not feminist. But at least women aren't alone in this peculiar set-up. Plus, it helps religious ladies get off, apparently, so proceeds go toward a good cause.

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Exhibit D: Feminist v. Princess

Last year, the Washington Post published Rachel Beckman's "One Ring Circus," a story about the years Beckman spent waiting, wishing, agonizing and flat-out fantasizing that her boyfriend Eli would propose to her. Beckman is more attached to the romantic relationship milestones than most—she began imagining Eli's proposal after their first kiss. A few years down the road, she had formed an "Engagement Watch Team" among her coworkers to chart Eli's every move. The obsession was not all white taffeta and seating arrangements; the anticipation of the proposal haunted her. One Valentine's Day, Beckman "carefully checked every dish of food for a diamond ring so that I didn't accidentally swallow it and become one of those proposals-gone-bad stories in the bridal magazines." When Beckman, then in her early 2o's, realized Eli wasn't popping the question that moment, she wept.

Unsurprisingly, the diamond fever left Beckman with some personal conflicts:

I felt like engagement was the one off-limits topic. I didn't want to pressure him or spoil the big, elaborate surprise proposal (that he hadn't even started planning). I was caught in a Catch-22. I could be hands-off and leave it all to him (feminist Rachel says no), or I could be hands-on and get what I want (princess Rachel says no).

I don't doubt that Beckman has been largely influenced by the feminist movement. But the distinction between the "princess" who waits patiently for her boyfriend to propose to her and the "feminist" who actively coerces her boyfriend into proposing sets up a bit of a false dichotomy. The main difference appears to be that the princess waits around for her prince to ride up on his horse, while the feminist pressures her boyfriend to man up and play his assigned role.

A desire to get married is not necessarily an anti-feminist one. The problem is when the decision to wed is left exclusively to the man, leaving the woman to waste years of emotional energy as she waits patiently for him to do so.  The whole point of the milestone is to set up a relationship based on feminine patience and masculine decision-making. Beckman's "feminist" solution is to micromanage the process—to talk openly about her desire to get married, open up negotiations as to the time frame, and instruct Eli on the perfect ring. In doing so, Beckman converts her private agony into proactive patience, but she can't go so far as to pop the question herself—in order to fulfill her lifelong engagement fantasy, she must submit to Eli's better judgment.

Beckman may see this subversive engagement planning as a feminist development, but really, women have always coped with a lack of institutional power by working behind the scenes. I appreciate Beckman's essay, because it's good to remember that achieving patience takes more than switching on your feminine tractor beams and waiting for your prince to come. Getting what you want while seemingly doing nothing is work. Even in 1964, Burt Bacharach knew that just waiting around and being a woman wasn't going to cut it. You have to strut your patience. You have to work your waiting.

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"Wishin' and Hopin,'" a ditty made popular by Dusty Springfield, instructed women to stop their traditional wishin', hopin', thinkin', prayin', plannin', and dreamin', and instead, get off their asses and do stuff: like "the things he likes to do" and wearing "your hair just for him." As the song demonstrates, aggressively pursuing what you want isn't always an act of female empowerment.

Photo via George Eastman House

"Russian Roulette" has been branded Rihanna's "comeback single" in order to mark her first solo effort since being assaulted by then-boyfriend Chris Brown in February of this year. Following the assault, the feminist blogosphere exploded with criticisms, defenses, and theories relating to the R&B singer's personal tragedy. In the following months, Rihanna became a staple on feminist blogs.  The pop star has been consistently mentioned in discussions of sexual assault—but she's just as often been invoked to fawn over her clothing choices and speculate about her love life. In places like Jezebel, where feminist issues and pop culture obsessions both receive heavy coverage, Rihanna's abuse has only fueled interest in her more traditional pop-star duties, like carving out a unique style and churning out catchy songs. In 2009, Rihanna's public identity has emerged as a conflation of high-wattage pop star and domestic abuse survivor.

Rihanna herself, on the other hand, has felt comfortable only playing the pop star part—and has remained extremely tight-lipped about her abuse experience. She has never publicly identified as a feminist or an advocate for victims of domestic abuse. As I prepared this post, I realized with amazement that I had never actually read any full interview with Rihanna. (And, full disclosure, I really like Rihanna, and tend to follow the domestic abuse coverage alongside potential Justin Timberlake hook-up news). The pop star has managed to maintain an extremely high profile in feminism without saying much of anything at all. Rihanna is certainly no Lady Gaga, who has positioned herself in the center of the gay rights movement, even as she releases decidedly apolitical pop tunes (largely about heterosexual sex). It's not so strange for a pop star to opt out of discussing politics (and her personal life). But it is an odd formula for crafting a feminist idol.

Recent critiques of "Russian Roulette" have made clear that feminists are yearning for Rihanna to step into that role. After hearing the song, Alyssa Rosenberg wrote about her personal wishes for Rihanna's career. "When 'Silly Boy' leaked as a Rihanna track a couple of months ago, I thought it was a perfect career move for her: upbeat, vocally playing to her strengths, and by far most importantly, a rebuke to a guy who would treat his girlfriend badly," she writes. "I do understand that it's extremely difficult to leave an abusive relationship, and I respect that.  But I thought it would have been terrific for someone to overcome such a relationship in public.  Instead, Rihanna is using a song about embracing being terrorized as her comeback single." Jezebel's North was similarly creeped out by the song, writing: "What I'm actually most worried about is her label's thinking on this song . . . if anyone pushed a domestic violence victim to record a comeback song about gunplay, that's something to get angry about."

But the disappointment and anger over the subject matter of Rihanna's new single has also been accompanied by concerns over aesthetics. Rosenberg admits that the song "isn't much good"; North writes that it "kind of sucks." Perez Hilton, writing exclusively on the track's artistic merits, expressed that he was "shocked and saddened" by the lackluster production (though apparently unconcerned with the overtones of domestic violence). Rosenberg and North disclose the song's suckiness as if it's beside the point, but I wonder if the double expectation that Rihanna be both a successful pop star and a model survivor of domestic abuse is responsible for the perceived feminist failure here. The song's aesthetic problems extend to its lyrics, which, while "dark" and "edgy," don't appear to mean anything in particular, and certainly don't qualify as a clear "defense" of domestic abuse. Couplets like "As my life flashes before my eyes / I’m wondering will I ever see another sunrise" and "So many won’t get the chance to say goodbye / But it’s too late too pick up the value of my life" clearly connote violence. But I can't agree with Rosenberg that the song is about "embracing being terrorized"—the main problem with the song is that the lyrics don't convey any specific perspective on the darkness.

"Russian Roulette" may not have succeeded as Rihanna's "comeback single," but it's important to make clear which comeback we're talking about—is it her return to the world of pop, or her recovery from an abusive relationship? Rosenberg "thought it would have been terrific for someone to overcome such a relationship in public." But why does Rihanna's return to music have to come only after she's ready to announce that she's "overcome" domestic abuse? And given Rihanna's obvious reluctance to make her private life public, how could anyone expect her to live up to the feminist obsession that's been brewing over her life and career for the past nine months? Perhaps she isn't ready to play the public role of empowered survivor, and perhaps she never will.

I doubt that Rihanna's critics would be raising the same concerns over her missed feminist opportunity if she had released an infectious club jam like "S.O.S." or "Disturbia" which completely steered clear of an abuse theme. Problematically, both Rosenberg and North argue that the lyrics of "Russian Roulette" do evoke issues of domestic abuse—and go on to suggest that Rihanna is either doing it wrong, or being coerced by her handlers to do it wrong. I don't think we should expect Rihanna to incorporate her new-found feminist fame into her pop songs—like Perez Hilton, I'm more disappointed that the song isn't so hot. But when Rihanna does decide to make a public nod to her experience with domestic abuse, shouldn't we refrain from suggesting that she's not expressing herself correctly as a victim?