My Problem With “The Help”

I started reading The Help for a few reasons: because it was sitting in the living room when I came home for the summer, because Emma Stone is in the upcoming movie adaption, and (more importantly) because I had noticed quite a bit of criticism being written and linked to regarding The Help on some of my favorite blogs. I don’t like reading pop-culture critiques without an understanding of the source material if I can help it (as evidenced by the fact that I plowed through all four Twilight novels a few years ago), so I read the novel.

The Help is a well executed book from a marketing standpoint. It is nicely paced, wonderfully dramatic, and it features a classic (but always satisfying) struggle of good vs. evil. If we lived in a nice little whitewashed vacuum where this was just a good story, where real women’s lives were not being used as fictional fodder, where the privilege that the fictional white characters possessed never really existed and didn’t still exist… if that was the world that this novel was published in, then this one “guilty pleasure” book wouldn’t be such a big deal.

We don’t live in that world.

There are plenty of things about this book that are just plain offensive. Most glaring, to me at least, is the very affected “accent” that Minny and Aibileen’s sections of the book are written in, while Skeeter’s parts are devoid of even a hint of a southern accent. This sets the two main black characters in this novel off as “other” from the very beginning, which is off-putting. Additionally, Aibileen’s comparison of her own skin color to a cockroach (among many other comments the character makes against her own skin color) is appalling. As are the historical errors in terms of incorporating Medgar Ever’s death into the novel (claiming he was bludgeoned to death, rather than shot) which just show a lack of respect for the topic she was writing about.  The stereotypes – from absentee or abusive black men to sassy or saintly black women don’t help anyone either. I could go on, but these points and many others were already made beautifully here.

Still, the book is quick and easy to read. The conclusion of the book provides a nice, neat, ending sure to make any white person who finds themselves identifying with Skeeter feel good. I can understand why so many people were quick to jump to this books defense because, quite frankly, I’d feel quite a bit better if I could be one of them. 

It would be much easier, much less uncomfortable to close my eyes to the privilege of constantly seeing a variety characters who look like me in the media, enough that I am sure to identify with one… a privilege  that allows me to decide whether or not to be unsettled by another stereotypically written black character because I’m not being discriminated against and, thus, that punched-in-the-stomach feeling that goes with subtle discrimination is missing.

It would be much easier to ignore the privilege of being considered “default” in my whiteness, of knowing that people will not assume that I hold my opinions simply because of the color of my skin. A privilege that comes with knowing I have a much better chance of having my words taken seriously by the mainstream media, especially when talking about marginalized groups, than an actual member of that group.

I would be so easy to indignantly insist that I deserve to be listened to because I work hard on my blog posts (which I do), ignoring the fact that plenty of less-privileged people also worked damn hard on their writing, writing that is often ignored because it lacks “mainstream appeal” meaning, it is not white enough to be lifted up by mainstream feminist blogs.

But I can’t, because that is what The Help is. A whitewashed, declawed version of history that simultaneously manages to condemn racism and absolve the white people who let it continue or who do “enough” to help the cause, by offering up Skeeter as the “good” anti-racist white woman we can all identify with.

READ THE REST AT PERSEPHONE MAGAZINE!

Other Great Related Pieces:

A Critical Review of The Help

(This is one of my favorite posts from the entire blog dedicated to analyzing this novel.)

Writing Race

Who’s Allowed to Tell the Tale? (And Which Tales Should They Tell?)

Feminism, In My Rugrats?!

Through the magic of Netflix for the Nintendo Wii T and I rediscovered the joy of the Rugrats today… and in the handful of episodes we choose at random, we overturned a surprising amount of formerly-missed feminist messages. On one hand, I am not surprised (watching old kid-stuff as an adult almost always reveals subtle points that once went over my head); on the other hand I am honestly amazed at just how feminist this show was. Take two of the episodes we watched:

In the Clan of the Duck episode Phil and Chuckie decide that it is not fair that only girls can wear dresses (especially since Phil’s mom gets to wear pants!) So Phil and Chuckie thrown on Lil’s skirts, have a blast, and then pass out… only to awaken at the International Food Festival taking place at the park where they are mistaken as girls by a couple of toddlers, offered candy, and then chased when their true sex is revealed (by the fact that Chuckie has on blue underwear.)  Not only does this question the idea of a gender binary, it also teaches tolerance for people who break that binary since the angry boys who chase after Phil and Chuckie are eventually defeated by a group of Scottish babies who are all wearing kilts (skirts)! As a child I found this episode amusing but, beyond that I can also remember feeling very angry for Chuckie and Phil and Tommy over the fact that they were not allowed to wear skirts. I’m not saying that this show made me a feminist or anything… but I do believe it planted some serious seeds.

(Not to mention this episode also contains a one-liner from Lil’s mom that made me crack up as an adult: when asked what she and Lil were doing at their Mommy & Me ‘Female Empowerment’ class that day she responded with, “jumping, tumbling, and a ‘Lets take the Senate’ Sing-Along!”)

Even more impressive in my opinion is Angelica’s Last Stand where Susie helps the babies to revolt against Angelica’s tyrannical rule as the lemonade “boss.” My mind was just blown when Susie told the babies that they had to choose a leader to go speak with Angelica, and then refused to allow them to elect her because she said, “it has to be one of you.” This is a concept that goes beyond feminism-101 (obviously, since plenty of of activists don’t get it) but its something that has made innate sense to me since I started calling myself an activist… the revolution has to come from the group of people in questions. Allies can play an important role (like Susie did, when she helped the babies to organize a protest) but the true power of any revolution comes from voices that were once silenced being free to speak out. I can’t help but wonder if the seeds for this understanding came from moments like this, slipped discreetly into my childhood television.

True Life: Weight Loss Is More Important Than Health

Last night I watched the new episode of True Life [I’m Addicted to Food] on MTV… and my mind was just blown in a very bad way. Alisha, the first woman featured on the show, sees a therapist who put her on DIET PILLS (the Alli Diet) while treating her for a food addiction.

Now, I totally get the logic behind the diet part since she needs to learn how to scale back her consumption as a part of getting control over her addiction… but diet pills? How the fuck is that healthy!? (Here’s a clue: its not. Its not healthy, nor is there a reason why it needs to be a part of her recovery.)

Here's some more information for you... that 50% claim? Not the least bit true according to actual studies. Keep reading to find out even more!

Alli: Health Risks

“In 2009, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) received reports of serious liver injury in people using orlistat and began a safety review. At this time, no definite association has been established between orlistat and the risk of liver injury. However, if you take Alli be sure to contact your doctor if you experience signs and symptoms, such as weakness or fatigue, fever, jaundice, or brown urine, which could indicate liver injury.”

“Alli is taken with fat-containing meals, up to three times a day. Because of how Alli works, it’s recommended that you eat no more than 15 grams of fat with each meal. Eating greater amounts of fat can cause unwanted effects, such as urgent bowel movements, diarrhea and gas with oily spotting.”

“Alli can help you lose weight, but the weight loss likely won’t be great — perhaps just a few pounds more than you would lose with diet and exercise alone. […] Alli could conceivably result in an average of 3 to 5 pounds lost in a year in addition to the approximately 8 pounds you could expect to lose from diet and exercise alone.”

Source: Mayo Clinic

This directly contrasts with the second woman’s therapist, who tried to send her to Overeaters Anonymous and then eventually got her into an outpatient rehab program where they talked about her emotions and the reasons why she eats from both a mental standpoint and a physical standpoint (how the substances she takes in – mostly glucose – trigger her brain to crave more food.) They also gave this woman a diet plan, but it seemed to be one that focused on getting healthy rather than losing weight (as evidenced by the detailed explanations of why she needed to cut out certain foods and the lack of an unnecessary diet pill.)

Now I know we don’t see the whole picture for either of these women, so I don’t feel comfortable extrapolating more… maybe Alisha got a lot of emotional support as well and I just missed it, but I still wanted to put this up here as just another piece of evidence of America’s obsession with weight-loss above all else. In this scenario we see someone who is supposed to be looking after someone’s physical and mental health put her on a diet geared towards “easy” weight loss (that actually doesn’t work significantly better than a pill-less diet plan) as opposed to delving into the issues related to her food addiction… an addiction that she acknowledges and describes on her own.

Luckily Alisha seems to understand this, and has made it her focus instead of the diet…

“I’m not really on the Alli diet anymore but I take the lessons that the system taught me and continue to apply them to my decisions–any time I need help, it’s always there for me. I don’t keep up on my weight as much as I used to because it just adds stress, but when I have it checked it goes either way: no consistent weight loss or gain, and I’m okay with that. I still want so badly to kick my addiction and that will be my focus. So as long as I’m an addict, that will be the concern–not my weight.”

(Source: MTV Blog)

Even if Alli was a magic pill, and this woman wound up skinny in days (the wrap-up at the end lets us know that she lost two pants sizes!) unless she got mental health support, along with the magic-pill, she’d still be addicted to food and, thus, would still be needing help. The thought that thin = healthy is not foolproof and needs to be challenged in our cultures ASAP because this is what happens when it isn’t.

Baby, It’s Cold Outside

With the blizzard in New Jersey stranding me in my home, today seemed like the perfect day to do a post on the song Baby Its Cold Outside and guilty pleasures in general. I think I have listened to the Glee version of this song (and watched the clip from the episode) at least 60 times since the episode premiered. For the first week or so most of my listening was done in secret, in my dorm room; even though we were playing holiday music at work I just didn’t think this song was appropriate for the Women’s Center due to it’s (for lack of a better word) rape-y themes. Eventually I decided I needed to do a blog post about the song and ask myself: how could I reconcile loving a song SO MUCH when it had such  a creepy undertone?

I started researching the blog post and things went in a totally different direction, once I found this post from Persephone magazine:

“The song sets up a story where the woman has dropped by her beau’s house on a cold winter night. They talk in the first verse about how long she’s going to stay. She has ‘another drink’ and stays longer, and then later in the evening it’s implied that she’s going to sleep over.

If we look at the text of the song, the woman gives plenty of indication that she wants to stay the night. At the time period the song was written (1944), ‘good girls’, especially young, unmarried girls, did not spend the night at a man’s house unsupervised. The tension in the song comes from her own desire to stay and society’s expectations that she’ll go. We see this in the organization of the song – from stopping by for a visit, to deciding to push the line by staying longer, to wanting to spend the entire night, which is really pushing the bounds of acceptability. Her beau in his repeated refrain ‘baby, it’s cold outside’ is offering her the excuses she needs to stay without guilt.

Let’s look at the lines. As she’s talking about leaving, she never says she doesn’t want to stay. Her words are all based around other people’s expectations of her – her mother will worry, her father will be pacing the floor, the neighbors will talk, her sister will be suspicious of her excuses and her brother will be furious, and my favorite line that I think is incredibly revealing, “My maiden aunt’s mind is vicious.” Vicious about what? Sex. Unmarried, non-good girl having, sex.

[…]

The song, which is a back and forth, closes with the two voices in harmony. This is important – they’ve come together. They’re happy. They’re in agreement. The music has a wonderfully dramatic upswell and ends on a high note – both literally and figuratively.”

So now I’m not sure how I feel. On one hand I am glad for this explanation. I liked it so much that I shared it with pretty much everyone at work, and played the song quite a few times as part of our Holiday relaxation atmosphere. Honestly, I  want to just embrace it so I can listen to the song (over and over) without guilt, and just move on with my life.

On the other hand, even if I can totally rationalize away any creep-factor inherent in this song, I am still disturbed by the fact that, even if I didn’t have this explanation, I would be listening to the song.

Which brings me to Glee, and the idea of guilty pleasures in general. Try as I might I just can’t rationalize Glee away anymore… with each episode the show seems to get more and more offensive and  yet, I still love it. Why? I have no idea.

In a way I feel like my relationship with Glee mirrors Baby Its Cold Outside: I protest because Mr. Shuester gets creepier each week, the show’s treatment of it’s not-conventionally-beautiful female characters sucks more and more each week (the pity-kiss between Shue and Bieste was an all time low), the show’s treatment of disability issues and racism is ridiculously hackneyed and bad… and so on and so forth.

Yet, I continue to make excuse for the show. But, maybe they’re just overblowing the stereotypes to make a point? But maybe the way they handled the bullying situation with Kurt is a sign that things will get better… even though that wasn’t very well done either. But Coach Bieste is such an awesome character, maybe they will start treating her right next episode! But at least they have a more diverse cast than most shows. But baby, its cold outside.

I know I should stop watching but I just don’t want to... and here I am. I’ve written critiques of Glee… so have many bloggers. I discuss it often with my feminist friends. I hate it so much,  but I also love it so much. So, what now? I have no clue.

Let me know what you think in the comments! What are your guilty pleasures? How do you know when its time to just quit something? Is there anything redeeming about Glee? Lets talk!