Wednesday, Oct 1, 2008 3:42 PM UTC
A new PBS documentary explores the dreaded "BRCA" gene mutation, which is leading more and more women to get preventive double mastectomies.
By Jessica Wakeman
Joanna Rudnick is well-educated, beautiful and funny; she’s also cursed with cancer’s legacy. She is carrying the potentially deadly BRCA gene mutation, which gives her chilling odds of breast or ovarian cancer during her lifetime. (It’s a diagnosis shared by actress Christina Applegate — who did have early-stage cancer in one breast — and “Gossip Girl” writer Jessica Queller, who recently wrote about the experience in her memoir, “Pretty Is What Changes.” Both those women chose to get prophylactic double mastectomies.)
BRCA stands for “breast cancer,” and the hereditary gene can be passed down by both males and females. Rudnick’s documentary film about her experience, “In the Family,” debuts tonight on PBS’ P.O.V. series. In it, she explains the passage of the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act, which prohibits health insurers from refusing to cover clients who have genetic mutations — a seemingly snooze-worthy topic made utterly compelling in Rudnick’s hands. She also explores how the patent system hinders research into gene mutations (did you even know genes can be patented? Scary, right?) and questions various policy aspects of women’s healthcare funding, including socioeconomic factors. The cost of the BRCA test is — gulp! — $3,000.
“I really think the idea of women taking control over healthcare and control over their bodies is a feminist statement,” says Rudnick, who raised half a million dollars on her own to fund the film. Indeed, “In the Family’s” strongest motif is the very nature of womanhood: Are you still feminine if doctors remove your breasts and ovaries? It’s something for viewers to think about, but it’s a question Rudnick faces every day. “After having children, I wouldn’t think twice about removing my ovaries,” she says. “I will do it and I will still be a woman.” Tragically, some of Rudnick’s subjects in the film don’t make it that far.
As a film, the documentary is best for those of hardy stock. I sobbed from beginning to end, along with everyone sitting near me at the screening. Yet I’m grateful I watched it: One of the first things I did the next day was call my mother and ask questions about my genetic inheritance.
Friday, Sep 26, 2008 9:48 PM UTC
Theaters refuse to screen "Hounddog," the Dakota Fanning rape film.
By Jessica Wakeman
God willing, this will be the first and last time in my journalism career that I begin a phone interview with the phrase, “I want to verify something I read in the National Enquirer with you.”
Unfortunately, the Enquirer had its story (sort of) right.
“Hounddog,” a coming-of-age film about an adolescent girl in the South during the ’50s (starring Dakota Fanning and Robin Wright Penn), will not be screened by the large movie theater chains — not quite 5,117 theaters like the Enquirer reports but enough to severely limit its release. The film has been quite controversial because of its portrayal of a sexual assault on Fanning’s character, a scene that is less than a minute long. Even during filming in North Carolina, the local conservative group of Concerned Women for America kicked up a fuss about the film’s content, and controversy dogged the film during its 2007 Sundance debut.
“The critics really killed us and Concerned Women for America put the nail in the coffin,” said the defeated-sounding writer/director, Deborah Kampmeier, at home Thursday morning. “We have lost all of our theaters.” “Hounddog” was supposed to roll out in 10 cities this week and 20 cities next week, but Kampmeier said her distributor has informed her that theater chains are backing off. As of now, the film will be screened this weekend at two small arthouse theaters: at the Roxy in Philadelphia and at Cinema Village in New York City.
Indeed, critics have pooh-poohed the film as a “minstrel show” of black characters or a “cliché” of the South, Kampmeier said. But after every screening, she says, she also hears from men and women who are touched by the film’s honest portrayal of a young girl’s burgeoning sexuality and her dampened spirit following a rape. She says she hopes word-of-mouth will keep “Hounddog” in art-house theaters, at least.
Friday, Sep 19, 2008 7:25 PM UTC
"Hounddog" director Deborah Kampmeier on female sexuality in Hollywood.
By Jessica Wakeman
You may not recognize the title “Hounddog,” but chances are you know about the “the Dakota Fanning rape movie,” which made headlines when it premiered at Sundance 2007 (and opens in NYC and Los Angeles today).
“Why do people even call this movie ‘the Dakota Fanning rape movie’?” says writer/director Deborah Kampmeier on the phone, sounding exasperated, days after a screening of the film in New York City. “Why does our society need to call it that, when that’s not what it is?”
Kampmeier isn’t being defensive; she’s being precise. The rape scene, during which only Fanning’s face and hand appear, is no more than a minute long, and it’s a subplot of the larger narrative.
So what is “Hounddog” about, really? It’s a touching and beautiful film about the tragedies that befall the broke but not broken in 1950s Alabama. It’s also a richly feminist film, one of the few movies in which a young woman’s burgeoning sexuality is not merely treated as titillation. Lewellen, played by Fanning, is coltish and charmingly immature — yet she’s bewitched by neighborhood boys’ genitals and rattles her grandma when she gyrates her pelvis to Elvis Presley on the radio.
Nevertheless, Concerned Women for America sees it differently. In a Sept. 12 press release, the CWA vowed to “halt distribution of the film” and called on its members to contact local theaters to ask them not to show the film, as well as to call the U.S. attorney general to complain.
But that’s just the latest bump: Kampmeier says it has been 12 years since she finished the script, and she struggled with financial backing for years. “Investors wanted the rape scene removed, and I would never take it out,” she says. “When we got Dakota attached to the film, my producers said we could get the money. But we got Dakota, and I [still] couldn’t get the money.” Funding woes twice halted production during filming in North Carolina. “I was raising money day by day, week by week,” she says. And then the press caught wind of the film.
“Once the controversy came out, which was a day before we finished shooting, it just snowballed into a nightmare,” she says. “It generated an enormous amount of [anxiety] inside my team — have we made a mistake? Should we have not done this film? There were petitions to have me arrested for child pornography; there were petitions to have [Dakota's] mother arrested. Talk about shame! What a brilliant performance, and she didn’t have a moment to celebrate. It became ‘you’re a bad girl, your mother’s a bad girl and I’m a bad woman.’”
That didn’t stop Kampmeier from finishing “Hounddog,” or another film that shows the face of sexual assault, her 2003 movie, “Virgin,” starring “Mad Men’s” Elisabeth Moss. “I think it’s scary for people to deal with female sexuality,” she says. “It is something our society doesn’t nurture, does not honor, in our daughters and our sisters. Female sexuality in our society is exploited, repressed and abused. I wonder why a girl like Lewellen is seen as asking for it when she’s innocently exploring her being and the power and creativity of her sexuality, which is her birthright.”
There is a lot of sex in our culture, yes, but it’s rarely sexy, far less honest. As Kampmeier says, “I often hear, ‘What about “Girls Gone Wild”? What about MTV?’ That’s not sexuality. That’s an acting out. That’s a desperate attempt to grab at something that’s not their sexuality.”
Friday, Aug 22, 2008 4:10 PM UTC
Slut-bashing never goes out of style in Hollywood. The latest victim: Sienna Miller.
By Jessica Wakeman
Here’s one thing that never goes out of style in Hollywood: slut-bashing.
After paparazzi snapped actor Balthazar Getty, a married man with four children, canoodling with actress Sienna Miller — surprise, surprise — Getty and his wife announced a separation. What came next was even less surprising: The gossip media began dragging the home-wrecking hussy through the mud by her hair.
For weeks, blogger Perez Hilton has been relentlessly denigrating the actress, heckling her online as “Sluttyienna” or “homewrecker,” with what looks like ejaculate dribbling out of her mouth and even calling her mother “Slutty Mom.” Then Thursday, Gawker reported that some vigilante slut-basher even spray-painted the word “slut” outside her apartment.
Getty’s not getting off scot-free, either: Perez has called him “Daddy With Dick for Brains” and “The Adulterer,” also writing “shame” over his face in pics. But somehow Getty mostly manages to keep his own last name in Perez posts while Miller is referred to just as “The Slut.”
None of this, of course, is any different from what happens in high schools, offices and elsewhere across the country every day. Broadsheet checked in with Leora Tanenbaum, author of “Slut!: Growing Up Female With a Bad Reputation,” who called the harassment of Miller “a classic case of the sexual double standard: Boys will be boys and girls will be sluts.” She wrote in an e-mail:
The striking thing, of course, is that Sienna Miller is called a “slut” even though the man she’s involved with is the one who has transgressed by being unfaithful to his wife. This incident exposes the most troubling aspect of the sexual double standard, which is that it often leads to violence, sexual or otherwise, against women. Her home was vandalized, a scary situation that serves as a warning: Next time, we might break into your home and hurt you.
Unfortunately, Miller’s not the only actress cursed with tabloid slut-bashing wrath: Jezebel’s “Missdemeanors” feature has dutifully chronicled other victims of Perez Hilton’s double-standard-filled, finger-wagging ways. Seems like it’s not going to let up, either (Britney, Christina, Miley). As long as we devour the gossip magazines and blogs, propping up the sexual double standard with slut-bashing will stay a pile-on sport.
Thursday, Jul 31, 2008 4:40 PM UTC
An entrepreneur offers a charming speech on how to launch a start-up and deal with all those money-grubbing whores.
By Jessica Wakeman
A video on Gawker Wednesday featured Web entrepreneur Charles Forman giving a talk at the Ignite tech conference on “how to date a celebrechaun with a founder fetish.”
What does that mean? Apparently, a celebrechaun is sort of the Internet version of a groupie, some kind of trophy girlfriend who only dates Web entrepreneurs. (Why “celebrechauns”? Are they little and green? Am I missing something?)
Forman’s talk is essentially about “how to launch your own start-up and deal with all the whores who are going to glom onto you and try to get your money.” And it’s disgusting. It’s like Frank Mackey’s “Seduce & Destroy” for techies. Some of the “funniest” lines?
“Your Alexa rank = her self-worth”
“[She] will blow your IT guy to get to you”
“Celebrechauns are self-absorbed, self-perpetuating, empty inside and 97 percent disappointment”
“Don’t pay for shit! Premium celebrechauns have their own trust funds”
“For fun: ask her to marry you … [they] never get the ring appraised, so keep it cheap”
“If you have a down round, she dumps you; if you get acquired, she marries you; if you go public, you can break up with her before she breaks up with you”
In a fitting finale, Forman’s ex-girlfriend — none other than Julia Allison, a “founder fetishist” in the video — runs onstage giggling after the presentation to give Forman a hug. Pardon me while I barf a little.
Thursday, Jul 24, 2008 4:45 PM UTC
Please don't let morning show co-host Sherri Shepherd become the public face of abortion.
By Jessica Wakeman
You’ve likely heard that Sherri Shepherd, co-host on ABC’s “The View,” was recently quoted in a black Christian publication, Precious Times, talking about her abortions:
I was in a very physically abusive relationship. I was sleeping with a lot of guys and had more abortions than I would like to count. I had very low self-esteem and just wanted to die. I felt if someone killed me, it wouldn’t make a difference.
After a relative uproar ensured, Wednesday Shepherd clarified her remarks about her abortions on the show, saying:
I like to inspire women who go through a lot of shame and guilt about having abortions that I, too, went through it myself. She didn’t print the entire quote, so all it said was I’ve had more abortions than I can count. What the full quote was was I had suffered from a lot of shame and guilt and I didn’t know how to forgive myself. And a wonderful woman at one of the women’s conferences that I speak at came to me and said, “Sherri, you know when you get to heaven, all your babies are going to be there saying, ‘Hi, mama,’” and it just freed me and I knew Jesus had forgiven me … I wasn’t being flippant about abortions, I wasn’t glamorizing [it]. I want people to know not everybody’s perfect.
That’s nice and all, but the shorter amount of time this “View” gabber has her name in the headlines next to the word “abortion,” perpetuating the idea that aborted fetuses are babies old enough to talk, the better. It’s a tactic of the religious right to frame fetuses, even ones only weeks old and thoroughly incapable of life outside the womb, as the “pre-born.” They’re given names, the ability to talk and to love, and the desire not to be aborted. I’m not saying Shepherd has been planted by makers of “The Silent Scream”; I’m saying her cavalier choice of words is irresponsible.
Shepherd is notorious for her dopey antiscience beliefs. She’s the country bumpkin of “The View,” who once earnestly claimed that she didn’t know if the world was flat and thought Jesus came before the use of the letters “B.C.” Something about this latest Sherri moment feels like another stunt serving to make all women who choose to terminate a pregnancy look bad.
Can’t a celebrity who’s a bit less willfully ignorant be the public face of abortion?
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