Leslie Knope – feminist, inspiration and future President of the USA

I just read an essay called The Ontology of Performance (to help my sister with a presentation) in which there was a lot of talk about speaking men and silent women and the problems of how women tell their side of history.

It was dense. On the other hand, here’s Amy Poehler as Leslie Knope in my favourite new silly American sitcom, Parks and Recreation – about the Parks department of Pawnee, a standard American town. If you wished the funny women got more screen time in The American Office, watch this.

In this clip, Leslie is pretending that she accidentally shot Ron Swanson, her boss, on a hunting trip. In thirty seconds, she captures a lot of what’s wrong with how men view most women.

In another episode, Leslie pays for a stripper to give her co-worker Tom Haverford a lapdance and tries to convince the stripper to choose another career path at the same time. And elsewhere, she cannot believe that Ron’s ex-wife Tammy would rather be Cleopatra – and manipulate men for her own personal gain – than Eleanor Roosevelt, one of Leslie’s heroes.

Women aren’t going to get on board with championing their own equality if everything written/ produced about it makes our heads hurt or is created by annoying warts’n'all female personalities. That said, Leslie is really desperate for a date/ relationship in most of the episodes I’ve watched – more honest than aspirational.

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Andrej Pejic: A wolf in sheep’s clothing

Image by Sabine Villiard (Photo France March 2011)

The young Serbian-Australian, Andrej Pejic, has been causing a stir on the fashion scene for a while now. We are all fascinated by how he looks just like a beautiful slip of a flat-chested girl, the ultimate conclusion of a society obsessed with androgyny.

Something about it all disturbs me, though. Before you jump to any conclusions, I just want to prefix what I’m about to say with the qualification that I’m not making a comment about Transgendered people in general or anyone’s lifestyle choices. What disturbs me about a man modelling women’s clothes is, simply put, this: haven’t women been trapped and pressured into eating disorders and body image issues by society for long enough by skinny female models? Isn’t this just moving the attainability of our ideals of beauty just another dangerously distant step too far?

On the one hand, this does not seem like an original point, and I feel like it must have been said time and time again before now, but on the other, the fashion industry seems strangely quiet on this fact at the moment. It’s as if mentioning it might make you look overly conservative and anti-progressive. But is it really that wrong to suggest that designers should be designing for women’s bodies, that they should be celebrating and not repressing femininity? Male misogyny at the heart of the fashion industry is no new thing. After all, Cecil Beaton called the stunningly curvaceous Elizabeth Taylor a ‘great thick revolting mass of femininity’, a heinous insult spat out in disgust at the feet of all woman kind.

I should come clean about something here: at 5 foot 10″ or thereabouts I have always had a rather ‘boyish’ build, and rather than feeling pressured into losing weight growing up, I’ve wished again and again I could gain it and have a more feminine body. It horrifies me that so many of my female friends feel dissatisfied with their beautiful curves. In the Andrej Pejic debate, people have suggested that it’s a good thing for a man to model women’s clothes instead of emaciated-looking women. Perhaps this ideal is just so unattainable that women will finally give up on trying to look like models, they say. This argument seems utterly stupid to me. When we see Andrej Pejic in women’s clothing, it does not matter whether or not we know that he’s a man. We see a stunningly beautiful, other-worldly woman, and we – whether consciously or subconsciously – aspire to that ideal. Perhaps I should just calm down and accept the inherent disconnect between reality and the catwalk, I hear you say. Okay, fine – but try telling that to a woman whose life has been dogged by eating disorders. Seen in this light, there’s an intense glow of irony in the flash of those bulbs at the end of the runway.

Do you think I’m over-reacting? Let me know your thoughts, below.

How do you plan on changing the world? A speech every woman should hear

Admittedly, I’m a bit slow on the uptake with this one, since it was delivered in May, but Sheryl Sandberg’s speech is essentially listening if you ask me. Watch it below.

Addressing the graduating class of New York’s Barnard college, Facebook COO Sandberg focuses on gender equality, and the lack thereof, which she calls ‘this generation’s central moral problem.’ She urges the all female class that in order to close the gender gap, particularly in the workplace, they’re going to have to be ambitious and believe in themselves. Hardly groundbreaking advice, but some of the studies she quotes from are astonishing e.g. evidence that women will attribute their success to external factors but men will believe it’s because, basically, they’re awesome. She also answers the question I posed back in April, do girls really run the world? You’ll never guess – it turns out they don’t. Yes, it’s a little bit cheesy at times, but ultimately this is an incredibly inspirational speech that every woman (and man for that matter) should hear.

Do girls really run the world Beyonce?

I must have watched Beyonce’s new single ‘Run the World (Girls)’ on YouTube about 20 times this week. Visually, it’s faultless, but am I the only person who think the supposedly empowering lyrics are actually anything but?

If you haven’t yet seen Beyonce’s performance of new single ‘Run the World (Girls)’ at last weeks 2011 Billboard Music Awards then I’d do so quick smart, because it’s brilliant. She interacts with virtual drum sticks, globes and a flock of birds via a huge screen behind her, brings out an army of scantily clad backing dancers and does a mesmerising jerky shoulder dance that I’ve been trying to emulate without success. You can watch a ten-minute version below, preceded by a rather unnecessary show reel of sycophantic comments from the likes of Stevie Wonder, Lady Gaga and Michelle Obama. The music video for the single is great too – more girl armies, more shoulder dancing and a killer Alexander McQueen dress. Watch it here.

However, I’ve got a bit of a problem with the song, or more specifically, the lyrical content. You see, Beyonce asks the rhetorical question ‘who run[s] the world?’ and gives the answer ‘girls.’ OK, so far, so empowering. But later lyrics belie the supposed feminist message. ‘My persuasion can build a nation…you’ll do anything for me,’ claims Beyonce. So it seems that what she’s really saying is not that girls actually run the world, but they control the men that do, using their feminine wiles. Which is hardly the stance of an independent woman is it now?

Don’t get me wrong, I realise it’s just a pop song, not a political manifesto, but if you’re going to write a song called declaring that girls are ‘taking over the world,’ it seems a bit disingenuous to suggest that they’re only doing it by influencing men. Why can’t girls build their own nations?