SFGate: Neva Chonin: "OK, how about this: I want to see less girl trouble in 2007" [View All]

[omega minimo]

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/31/PKGMQKFQ5I1.DTL&hw=Neva+Chonin&sn=003&sc=921

POWERLESS
- Neva Chonin
Sunday, December 31, 2006

“All power corrupts, but we need the electricity.” -- Unknown

Happy New Year. I'm sitting in a wee house above Muir Beach, watching surfers detonate against the hard waves, and woe, there is a power outage. No Wi-Fi, no coffeemaker, no TiVo, no toaster. Deprivation, desperation. Might as well write a column. It being a certain time of year, I've been thinking about what I'd like to see in 2007, in terms of cultural evolution or crass entertainment or social progress. I am drawing a blank. To quote the title of my favorite Moby album, everything is wrong. And when everything is wrong, it's difficult to know where to begin.

OK, how about this: I want to see less girl trouble in 2007. I want girls to wear underwear, be smart and eschew pole dancing unless they're getting paid really well for it. And could we also get a little more prime-time exposure without having to expose ourselves, please? For example (and you knew I had at least one), one of my favorite series of 2006, "Heroes," revolved around a cadre of average people suddenly discovering they possess extraordinary powers. So why, since women make up roughly 50 percent of the population, are only two out of these eight "heroes" female? Perhaps we're meant to assume that the "heroic" gene has a preference for the Y chromosome; or maybe we're supposed to accept the gender discrepancy as an anomaly, just as we're supposed to accept that the two women who do make the cut are both sexy blondes -- one a stripper, the other a cheerleader -- like a pair of archetypal wet dreams. While I'm bemoaning discrimination on TV, I'll mention another favorite series, "Lost," and a favorite character from that series, Hurley. Hurley, for those of you who don't watch the show, is a sweet stoner dude who happens to be morbidly obese. I think I speak for most "Lost" fans when I say his weight only makes him more lovable, because there's more to love, you see. That said, there is zero chance, zero, that a network would cast a girl as large as Hurley in any series, anywhere. Not in a world where a show about a supposedly "plain" girl, "Ugly Betty," stars a chicklet who looks like a prom queen bedeviled by bad hair and braces. In sum: Women barely rate as "heroic," and no one wants them if they're homely.

Apparently no one wants them in the real world, either. A New York Times article quoted on Plastic.com finds the male-female pay gap has actually widened for women with a college education, thanks to a combination of continuing discrimination and women shifting from office careers to child rearing. (The latter, of course, might be solved if America, like other countries, had government-sponsored day care, but that smacks of communism, so ...) When Plastic.com invited readers to discuss this increasing wage disparity, the replies proved enlightening. "Women hold a surprisingly strong position in household kitchens," opined one. "Now what is more important, some corporate officer at a Fortune 500 company or the person who makes the food they need to survive?" Dude, who knew the family cook held such clout? Not the abolitionists, or Harriet Tubman would have reversed the underground railroad to lead straight back to the master's pantry. Same commentator: "More and more when I hear about workplace gender inequality, I think it is mere penis envy, women bitching that the grass is always greener for the guys. All the while, women never had it better in their history."

I haven't heard anyone seriously refer to penis envy since -- well, I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone seriously refer to penis envy. Didn't that vanish from the psychoanalytic canon back the '60s? Whatever. The contention that women have never had it better might well be true -- men can no longer, in this country anyway, legally beat their wives; we have the vote; we still have the right to contraception and abortion, though how long this will last in the current social climate is questionable. We are unshackled and can both drive and take public transportation. Hot damn! Life is good for the ladies. The African American population, too. Compared to what's gone on in the past, they've never had it better, man. So why, oh why, must they still complain? Why must women? Have I wielded the ham-fist of irony heavily enough, or should I take another swing?

Another Plastic.com reader offered superlative reasoning on gender-based pay inequity. Women's careers, he suggested, will forever be blighted by menstruation-related absenteeism. This is why they call it "the Curse." Yet another was simply befuddled by women's insistence on shooting for high-paying jobs: "Women have complete monopolies over many career paths (like nurses and secretaries) that men often need not apply for," he pondered. "Yet they still feel pressure to compete with men on salaries and management jobs etc." Indeed, why shoot for CEO when you can be a secretary? Why go to medical school when you can be a nurse? Why try to earn a decent salary when you can live inches above the poverty line? Why am I asking so many rhetorical questions? Is it because, according to yet another study, women talk more than men, making rhetoric my predetermined weapon of choice? I leave the answers to you, gentle readers. I'm grabbing a ride back into the city, where the future awaits.