Once upon a time, the film projector was the teaching tool of the future. Schools all over the country purchased the temperamental, whirring machines, prompting a flood of educational shorts that offered instruction on everything from personal hygiene to sandwich making.
Kino International has just released the best of the bunch on two DVDs, titled “How to Be a Man” (1949-1970) and “How to Be a Woman“ (1948-1982), and many are as cringe-worthy as you might expect. In the hilariously hyperbolic cautionary tale “Car Theft,” two teens go from stealing a hat to stealing a car to running over a toddler in about 11 minutes. In “Girls Are Better Than Ever,” a nutritional video sponsored by the Milk Council, a voice-over describes a young, healthy-looking blond woman who is “worth looking at.” In “Dance, Little Children,” which explores a small Midwestern town’s syphilis outbreak, a narrator whose creepy intensity wouldn’t be out of place in a horror film asks, “Who is to blame if young people respond to what an anxiety-ridden world seems to be telling them?” as the camera zooms in on the posterior of a girl dancing the jitterbug.
But a surprising number of the featured shorts stand the test of time. “Fears of Children,” in which a 5-year-old boy is coddled by his mother and pressured by his father, ought to be required viewing for every parent. “Improve Your Personality,” despite its egregious name, explains how we can change the way people affect us by improving our own understanding and empathy.
As Skip Elsheimer, the man responsible for archiving these films (and whose online collection of vintage television commercials will make your day), explains in a couple of fascinating interviews on the discs, “[These films] seem conservative … but they’re talking about very forward-thinking things. They realized … the parents are not responsibly teaching the kids about these issues.”
Viewed this way, these educational shorts are more than a campy throwback to a time when sex ed videos featured silhouettes of women with bobs and men in fedoras. They are historical documents, insights into the fears and hopes of earlier generations. “Let’s Make a Sandwich” isn’t just a film about how to make an open-faced tuna melt; it’s an illustration of the belief that a woman who couldn’t make a sandwich in 1950 would never find a husband. Now that’s educational.
Tommy Wallach's work has appeared in McSweeney's, Tin House, and The Huffington Post. His occasionally updated blog can be found at http://www.tommywallach.com.
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She’s one of the most famous women in the world: an ageless, husky-throated mother and television star. And now, Marge Simpson joins the ranks of Cindy Crawford, Pamela Anderson and Jenny McCarthy — by appearing in Playboy.
To mark the 20th anniversary of “The Simpsons,” the doyenne of Springfield USA appears nude and strategically posed on a bunny-shaped chair for the cover of the November issue, which hits newsstands next week. For the story, provocatively titled “The Devil in Marge Simpson,” the former Marge Bouvier opens up about her life and family, and, we’re promised, poses in sexy lingerie. The trailblazing MILF is the first cartoon character to snag the Playboy cover.
An iconoclast in the guise of a traditional housewife, Simpson has always steadfastly defied conventional expectations. As the wife of nuclear plant worker Homer J. Simpson and mother to three high-maintenance children, she fulfills the traditional domestic role of chief cook and bottle washer. But she has also been a cop and a pretzel entrepreneur, is active at her children’s school and local government, and, like Jack White and Anna Wintour, retains a fiercely independent personal style, resisting trends and favoring her trademark green wardrobe and blue bouffant.
She’s also abundantly comfortable in her sexuality. Despite the demands of her hectic schedule and the challenges of being in a long-term relationship with a man who has a crayon in his brain, she retains a healthy attitude toward her erotic life and makes sex a priority. The fact that she’d decide to flaunt some of that yellow flesh in the pages of Playboy is an unsurprising move from a woman who’s traveled the world, gone on the lam from the law, and been a competitive bodybuilder.
So while dlisted.com was quick today to put down Marge for her pictorial, dismissing it as “ho shit,” she herself is probably laughing it off. A churchgoer and member of her town’s Citizens’ Committee on Moral Hygiene, Mrs. Simpson has never conflated being a good person with being a prude. And in a year that’s featured Kim Kardashian, Lisa Rinna and Heidi Montag on the cover of Playboy, the smart, adventurous and very funny Marge is the most appealing — and downright real — woman to grace the magazine in a hell of a long time.
In a strange twist to this week’s David Letterman extortionist plot, feminists were accused of not being humorless enough (!) due to the minimal outrage the scandal provoked among women. Of course, we were also accused of being too humorless, when we expressed disgust at a high school in Texas that printed T-shirts depicting a woman having sex with two horses. But it wasn’t all bad: Here at Broadsheet, we also noted that an ad run by a Las Vegas restaurant was taken to task by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas campus newspaper, demonstrating that young feminists are indeed out there. Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, a shocking new law mandates that women must disclose a host of personal information about their abortions for display on a public website. And in Egypt, officials banned a kit that would allow women to fake their virginity.
Maybe we got a little too distracted by this nine-year-old’s creepy remake of Britney Spears’ “Toxic,” because here are some articles we missed:
ESPN has Body Issues
Celebrating the beauty of the athletic form, ESPN Magazine released its Body Issue today, which will run six different covers, each featuring a different athlete. Serena Williams posed completely naked on one version, and her healthy figure is a refreshing departure from the stick-thin models that usually grace magazine covers. Other women featured in the issue’s covers include martial artist Gina Carano and triathlete Sarah Reinertsen.
Ellen Page pregnant … with HBO comedy!
“Whip It” alum and “Juno” smart-aleck Ellen Page is slated to write a new comedy about three hipsters relocating from Williamsburg, Brooklyn to its LA equivalent, Silver Lake, in pursuit of their shared dream to become artists. Page will also be executive producing the project along with friends Alia Shawkat (“Arrested Development”) and Sean Tillmann, and potentially starring in it as characters that sound reminiscent of the disenchanted youth portrayed in another HBO hipster ode, “Bored to Death.” Assuming “honest to blog” will never be uttered, we look forward to seeing how the show turns out.
Take this expensive, luxury wedding dress and shove it
On Tuesday, “The Today Show” aired a segment devoted to brides’ stories of how they destroyed their costly wedding dresses post-ceremony. At both Double X and Jezebel, writers took issue with the practice, comparing it to an article in British Marie Claire that highlighted the fact that many women, specifically refugees in Uganda, are happy to even receive a special dress for their wedding day. Whether you think the tearing of the dress is an act of self-expression or a symbol of selfish American consumerism, there are no doubt less wasteful ways to shake off the shackles of traditional weddings.
Where are all the female astronauts?
An article in Wired this week explores the history of the female astronaut, citing newly released medical studies as a testament to the fact that women astronauts in the 1950′s were “just as cool and tough” as the men sent to the moon. In 1959, Randy Lovelace founded the Women in Space program, which trained 19 female astronauts — 13 of whom graduated from the program, boasting a success rate higher than the men’s. The program was eventually discontinued in 1961, with officials citing concerns about menstruation and pilot inexperience as excuses to not send the women into space. As such, we had to wait until 1995 for the first female-piloted mission, but as the article states, “Collins was the first woman to become a space pilot, but not the first woman who deserved to.”
House rules: Sexual orientation included in hate crimes law, finally
On Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a motion that would define attacks fueled by gender or sexual orientation as hate crimes. Attached to a must-pass defense bill and already supported by President Obama, the legislation will be voted on in the Senate next week. It’s a motion worth celebrating, but one that is undoubtedly long overdue.
If it’s difficult to look trim standing at the bar in Spanx and heels, imagine how hard it is to pull off a bikini while running in slow motion. Nicole Eggert spent years on “Baywatch” ensuring that both the coastline and the high-cut one-piece were safe.
Since her days as Roberta “Summer” Quinn, Eggert put on some weight, and in the grand tradition of tabloids, was recently criticized for it. But in a new tradition — thanks to celebrities like Tyra Banks, Kelly Clarkson and Jennifer Love Hewitt — she shot back. Eggert took to the beach armed with a red two-piece and the comedy website FunnyOrDie.com.
The video (below) shows two notably doughy guys attempting to pull off the hot lifeguard-CPR plot that has entertained male psyches from “The Sandlot” onward. Eggert jogs toward the boys as the camera zooms in on every trans fat and neglected ab workout. The result? The boys ditch their plan — see, cause she’s not hot anymore — and the audience gets an eyeful of an actress who isn’t nearly as obese as the closeups try to make her appear.
“Is this because I’m fat?” she asks the guys as they wave her away. But then, they’re seized by cramps and call her back. Watching as they float face-down, she delivers the punch line: “Call me fat!” and leaves them to their doom.
The video would seem — well, if not terribly witty, then at least a nice dose of female empowerment, a move that simultaneously strikes a blow toward the tyranny of the paparrazi and places Eggert back in the public eye on her own terms. But news that Eggert has signed on for the latest season of VH1′s “Celebrity Fit Club,” in the company of other “celebrities,” their egos and their love handles, makes the video feel a little less awesome and a little more like a publicity stunt. When Eggert was a size 2, she was fading into obscurity. In our weight-obsessed, tabloid-guzzling society, is it possible that the path to a comeback is paved with jelly donuts? Hard to say. But hey, if tabloids are going to make their bones off women who have the temerity to gain a few extra pounds — shouldn’t women profit, too?
Where are the young feminists when you need them? After reading Jezebel’s coverage of a T-shirt so offensive it made me do a spit-take, I really had to wonder. For those who haven’t been following, here’s a brief summary: At Houston Memorial High in Texas, it’s traditional for seniors to sell a sexually explicit “underground” shirt in anticipation of the big football game against their rival, Stratford. And while I don’t imagine previous years’ offerings would make my heart glow with joy, this year’s model really takes the cake. It depicts — get ready for this — a woman having sex with two horses. And guess what else? Not only has no group of students risen up to oppose the shirts, but a gaggle of Memorial High students (male and female) actually responded to Jezebel’s post by accusing the bloggers of being — what else? — humorless feminists. Because, hey, who doesn’t find graphic depictions of bestiality hilarious?
To be totally honest, I can empathize with the Memorial High kids. I went to a high school with a similar T-shirt tradition (although ours left a lot more to the imagination), and while I wouldn’t have been caught dead in one of them, I wasn’t exactly organizing a movement against them, either. In the war zone that is high school, you’ve got to choose your battles.
Still, in light of the Memorial High T-shirt saga, it was comforting to receive a tip from a reader who spotted some campus feminism in action. It seems that the Burger Grind, a restaurant and bar in Las Vegas, has a great new marketing scheme. They’ve taken a hot, naked lady (you can call her “Juicy Lucy”) and partitioned her up into sections (“rump,” “rib”) like a cow on its way to the slaughter. (Check her out here — and also note the classy whip-crack sound that welcomes you to the joint’s website.) The slogan? ”After a hard day, unwind with something tender.”
After University of Nevada, Las Vegas campus newspaper The Rebel Yell published the offensive Burger Grind ad, graduate student Anthony Guy Patricia contributed an op-ed denouncing the decision to run it. As Patricia rightly points out, the ad “connotes that women are nothing more than ‘tender’ things for men to eat after said men have had ‘a hard day’ and need to ‘unwind.’” (Personally, I think it works on another level, too: Might the Burger Grind folks be comparing the comfort of their sandwiches to the nurturing arms of, say, a sex worker?) He concludes:
While Las Vegas may well be a city in which women are exploited in all sorts of ways for the amusement, titillation and the kicks of men in our patriarchal and misogynistic society, the university is no place for such demeaning, degrading and disgusting portrayals of human beings as featured in the ad for The Burger Grind Bar & Lounge.
While Patricia, whose piece ran earlier this week, doesn’t seem to have gotten a public response from The Rebel Yell yet, his op-ed has created conversation. A spirited (and generally civil) debate has developed in the over 100 comments the piece received. Other local publications have picked up the story, too. (The funniest response so far comes from the progressive Las Vegas Gleaner blog, which says the ad “is guaranteed to appeal to customers, provided the restaurant’s target market is psychotic women-hating serial killers who eat their victims’ body parts.”) And meanwhile, another student has organized a Burger Grind boycott.
Of course, misogyny in Vegas is even less surprising than teenage boys’ penchant for degrading sexual humor. But that’s also what makes the response from UNLV students so encouragin. It turns out young feminism is alive and well — and living in Las Vegas, of all places.
David Letterman as he tells his story during a taping of his late-night show Thursday Oct. 1, 2009
As bloggers continue to feed at the trough that is the David Letterman sex scandal, a questionhasarisen: Where’s the feminist outrage? After all, the man admitted to sleeping with female employees of the “Late Show” — subordinates, presumably — who may have been pressured or unfairly rewarded for their after-hours work, the argument goes. Why aren’t we calling on CBS to give him the ax? Where are the rants about male privilege and sexual harassment in the workplace? For the most part, our inquisitors are conservatives who suspect another instance of liberal hypocrisy is at play — remember, we did give the comedian a pass on Sarah Palin and her brood — but it’s a fair question.
The most obvious answer is that we’ve been too wrapped up in the other scandal of the moment, a case of child rape, to debate sex between two consenting adults. That really can’t be emphasized enough — because while there may be gray areas when it comes to sex in the workplace, child rape is a black-and-white matter, regardless of what certain Hollywood “liberals” claim. But, sure, let’s take a break from that world of extremes.
As far as we know, Letterman’s affairs with staffers were consensual. Workplace canoodling happens all the time, and so are young women frequently drawn to male superiors. Many find power imbalances to be very sexy — and more power (or less, as it were) to ‘em. There is nothing inherently wrong about a sexual relationship between two adults who are at different points in their careers. It would be awfully patronizing to suggest that women aren’t capable of meaningfully consenting to sex with a workplace superior. That isn’t to say I don’t pass personal judgment on Letterman for sleeping with young women who were from the sounds of it at the starts of their careers — oh, judgment abounds, believe me! But is it illegal, is it sexual harassment?
Well, Letterman’s production company doesn’t ban manager-employee relationships. It’s possible that an employee agreed to sex without actually wanting to for fear of losing her job or missing an opportunity to quickly advance her career. It’s also possible that other employees who did not have dalliances with the boss were passed up for promotions or other perks. Legal analyst Lisa Bloom explains on CBS’ “Early Show Saturday Edition”: “Somebody can come forward and say, ‘The boss was sleeping with other employees, they got favors and advantages that I didn’t get.’ They got to appear on the show, perhaps, for example. Got additional payments for that.” (On that note, Gawker reports that Letterman paid former assistant Stephanie Birkitt’s way through law school.)
If all of those hypotheticals are true, then the “Late Show” has a legitimate claim of sexual harassment on its hands. The truth, though, is that we don’t know who made the first move, if any of these employees felt pressured into sex or whether his lovers were professionally rewarded for their amorous overtime. We aren’t even totally clear on which employees were involved! We simply don’t know much of anything about these office affairs, except that they happened and that they were a royally bad idea. So, perhaps the final answer to the question posed by innumerable bloggers is that feminists don’t yet know enough about Letterman’s affairs to be outraged.
David Letterman as he tells his story during a taping of his late-night show Thursday Oct. 1, 2009 
