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Written By a Woman About Women and Not "Chick-Lit" — How Can It Be?!

I don’t have much time to write (deadlines loom!) but just want to point you all to a most excellent book I read over the weekend, Janelle Brown’s All We Ever Wanted Was Everything. It’s a biting, point-on satire on the order of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections; it’s also what the TV show Desperate Housewives could have been had the originator been allowed to keep his satirical vision, had network television not ridiculously cheesified it, made it into the antithesis of its potential.

AWEWWE is about a Silicon Alley family coming unglued, ironically in the wake of a financial windfall from skyrocketing stock. The patriarch decides his wildly successful IPO makes for the perfect time to abscond with his mistress, who happens to be his wife’s good friend. Matriarch Janice, a prototypical upper middle-class suburban housewife, gave up career and grad school to be a homemaker, raise the family in the highest style her husband’s salary could afford, only to become by turns the pity and laughingstock of her suffocatingly stuffy gated community. Left career- and husband-less at 49, she has nothing, and it’s heartbreaking to watch her drugged up in her bedroom poring over old copies of Parisian gossip mags in an attempt to regain her youth. After college, she was all set to go on postgraduate study abroad, a dream stifled by her first pregnancy.

The youngest daughter, 14-year-old Lizzie, hopelessly overweight, turns to promiscuity to try to reverse the tide of her unpopularity at school. Middle daughter Margaret is the character I personally felt the strongest for — perhaps she is the one whose life most resonated with me. At 29, with several degrees she’s the opposite educationally of her mother, yet she finds herself completely suffocated with debt after trying to make a go of a serious writing career. Problem is she put all her efforts into founding a literary post-modern feminist magazine, which doesn’t do so well, particularly in L.A. So angering to watch her screenwriter and music video-producer friends throw money around the table of a posh restaurant like confetti, while Margaret struggles to come up with her third of the friend’s birthday meal — $350.

This is what you get in these lovely United States for doing well in school, for remaining true to your ideals, for being a good housewife and mother and giving up your career for an unplanned pregnancy, for trying to lose weight and become popular.

Of course it’s not entirely dark. Through crisis the women (all so different) do come to understand each other, or at least try to. My only problem with the book is that the father seems a little too one-dimensional. Satire or not, I think all characters have to have some semblance of believability, of sympathy, even if we strongly dislike them.

Interesting thing though, I was glancing at the customer reviews on Facebook and Amazon and people seemed pretty bewildered, didn’t seem to get that it was a satire. Customer reviews were sharply at odds with those by professional critics. I scrolled down to see that the booksellers were likening AWEWWE mainly to books by Jane Green, Jennifer Weiner, Lauren Weisberger — authors of a genre that has come to be known over the past decade or so as “chick lit,” a term many female writers find demeaning (Weiner doesn’t; I’ve heard her speak on the issue). The biggest problem I find with the term is that, unlike its male counterpart, “lad lit” (think Nick Hornby and progeny), it’s become ludicrously overbroad, has come to apply to anything written by a woman whose main characters are women.

I found this book through The Elegant Variation, whose input I’ve come to trust, and when I saw who’d edited it — Julie Grau — I knew from other books she’s done I’d likely be happy with this one. But when I went searching for it at Barnes & Noble, I found it shelved with “beach reading,” along with the other aforesaid books. I don’t think I would have picked it up if I hadn’t seen it on Mr. E’s blog, and after finding it where I did in the bookstore I questioned whether I wanted to buy it until I saw the editor. If a book is classified a certain way, people expect a certain thing. With “chick lit” I guess they expect a light romantic comedy with pretty, happy people whose crises are slight and common enough that many readers can wholly relate without trying very hard. AWEWWE is a dark satire, much more akin to, as I said, The Corrections, or to Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm or Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land. No wonder people were shocked. But then again, maybe it’s not such a bad thing to “trick” young people into reading literature…

Anyway, here’s an apropos interview Ms. Brown gave to Jezebel.

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Kenn Duncan Exhibit at NYPL

There’s a very good exhibit right now at the New York Public Library’s Performing Arts branch of photographer Kenn Duncan’s work. Duncan (1928-1986) was a dancer and champion roller skater in the fifties and became a photographer in the seventies. As a dance photographer, he worked for Dance Magazine and After Dark (a 70s NY weekly apparently covering theater and dance), and later photographed celebrities for various national mags including Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, Time, and Life.

He published several collections in book form, many of nudes, mainly with male dancers as subjects. Many of those are included here, likely the reason for the big viewer discretion sign posted on the gallery door. Most of the dancers in that collection I didn’t know, except for Sir Anthony Dowell and Ivan Nagy, but there’s one of a man named Eivind Harum, who kept reminding me of David Hallberg (whom I had to banish from my thoughts for the time being); actor Sal Mineo (from Rebel Without a Cause) is also included in that section. There are some highly creative poses — some poking fun (I think) at beefcake, others very artful.

There are also sections on dancers, dance companies, and choreographers — including photos of a young Twyla Tharp (who I think looks her absolute best right now — I definitely wanna age like her), the Alvin Ailey company in its youth (which looked very different than today — lots of excellent afros, and mainly white female dancers, interestingly), the Houston Ballet, and of course all the greats — Carmen de Lavallade, Baryshnikov, Nureyev, Gelsey Kirkland, Suzanne Farrell and Paul Mejia, Natalia Makarova, Peter Martins, Alexander Godunov, Cynthia Gregory, etc. etc. I also spotted a dance belted Lar Lubovitch jeteing artfully over a sash.

Included in the celebrity section are a young, doe-eyed Dianne Keaton, Bette Midler, Maxwell Caufield (remember him, from Grease II was it?), Morgan Fairchild and her then male-cohort in a series of rather hilarious (now anyway) sexed-up poses for some Tarzan and Jane-like TV series they must have been doing, Eartha Kitt, Angela Lansbury, and a very young and almost frightfully innocent-looking Christopher Walken.

Duncan also did some Broadway photos (Hair, The Wiz, Equus, etc.), and some of those are up, as well as several of his fashion ones — mainly a Gucci spread — one of the most fun parts of the exhibit, the 70s being what they were! The ambient music is most evocative (sometimes comically) as well.

It’s a great trip through recent history that ends up making you think about what it is that makes a piece of art either timeless, period, or dated.

The exhibit, at Lincoln Center’s Library For the Performing Arts, continues through October 25th and of course it’s free.

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Closing Out the Summer With Some Cool Downtown Dance

I can’t believe it’s already Labor Day weekend. Whoa. Where did the summer go??

Here are some pictures I took of the Downtown Dance Festival last Sunday in Battery Park. When it ended a brief wave of sadness swept over me. This festival kind of marks the end of summer. I feel like I was just returning from the Caribbean deeply annoyed that it was still in the 50s here…

Anyway, the first company on was Figures in Flight, which is a Modern dance school for kids.

One very cool thing about this school / company, as Artistic Director Susan Slotnick spoke about, is that they also teach Modern dance to men in prison. One of Ms. Slotnick’s former students who was just released from Woodburne Correctional Facility was there. The crowd went nuts with applause for him. Made the longtime former public defender in me very happy. I know there are many prison literacy programs, but haven’t heard of a dance program until now.

 

 

The kids of Figures in Flight. Slotnick said one thing she does is try to teach kids nonviolence through dance, teaching them choreography addressing or acting / dancing out issues they may be experiencing, like bullying at school. You could see some of that in the choreography. I met someone in an acting class I took years ago who taught drama therapy to mental patients at Bellevue Hospital here in NY. He basically helped patients learn to act out their problems, to use creativity to solve them rather than internalizing or using violence toward themselves and others. I can see Slotnick doing the same thing with dance and I love it.

 

 

Next on was Battleworks Dance Company, which presented Robert Battle’s energetic, mad fun Ella, set to Ella Fitzgerald and danced by Marlena Wolfe.

 

 

 

 

And Wolfe ends her frenzied fit of a solo by collapsing backwards, completely out of breath! This is the first time I’ve seen Battleworks at this festival. So cool to see what you normally only view in a large, distancing theater just feet before you.

Axis Danz’s Mermaids.

 

Dancewave’s Kids Company, whom I’d never heard of, did an excellent dance — a combination of African, Modern, and Samba. It was mesmerizing. One of my favorites of the day. And man can those dancers MOVE.

 

isadoraNOW presented Isadora Duncan’s lovely Southern Roses.

 

This was an interesting company, called Undertoe Dance Project. They combined Tap with Modern, having two dancers representing each style dancing onstage at the same time. Don’t think I’ve seen that done before. It worked.

 

 

On last ending the festival, was Battery Dance Company, headed by Jonathan Hollander, the festival’s organizer. They performed his lyrical, beatific Where There’s Smoke.

 

Very pretty, very spiritual.

 

At the end, the Battery Dance Company dancers invited audience members onstage to learn some of their just-performed choreography.

 

exhibiting, as Hollander announced, that dance is for everyone…

Also, here are some more pictures I took of Hostile Takeover by Richard Move’s MoveOpolis! which was performed as part of the Sitelines series of downtown site-specific works, which I briefly mentioned earlier.

 

They held the performance at five different Financial District-area locations. The one I saw was at the Jeff Koons sculpture in the small park at 7 World Trade Center.

 

The dancer, dressed as you can see in a red lacey negligee, red ballet-like diaphanous chiffon skirt, long lacey gloves, patent leather red stilettos, and a clear plastic Butoh mask and platinum blonde wig, moved in extreme slow Butoh-style motion making various poses — some sexy, some more balletic (arms held wreath-like over head, toe pointed forward in tendu). She was very unbalanced on the heels — at several points went to do a low arabesque and couldn’t lift her back leg very high or it seemed like she’d clearly fall — and I couldn’t tell if it was because she was moving so slowly, if she wasn’t used to dancing in heels (so, not a Latin dancer 🙂 ), or if she was faking it, only pretending nearly to fall so as to question the beauty and/or stability of a certain kind of hyper-femininity.

After a series of poses in front of the Koons statue — and beside a small plastic red teddy bear propped up before a red umbrella and holding a little bright blue Jeff Koons ‘sculpturette’ — the dancer turned toward the large sculpture. It’s funny but at this point I noticed how sexual that sculpture is, with the little orifice in the middle surrounded by the three others, and then the stamen-like arm shooting up to the side. It’s like an industrial Georgia O’Keefe figure.

 

 

She approached the little teddy bear, seemed to delight over his little toy, seemed to ask him if she could hold his “baby-doll.”

 

She did a little dance with the small Koons dog/doll…

 

… then took him to his larger cousin, and eventually placed him in its middle orifice.

The whole thing took nearly an hour, the movement was so slow. It was weirdly poetic, and rather entrancing, not only catching but holding the attention of many passersby. I wish I could have made it to some of the other locations because I liked the performance but thought it would have been more of a “Hostile Takeover” had this hyper-sexy, hyper-‘feminine’, hyper-artful, hyper-slow-moving dancer been in the midst of all the crazed besuited Wall Street dudes. This little park was not only already arty but kind of removed from the hustle and bustle. Could have better illustrated the contrast between art and commerce, calm and fast-paced, perhaps masculine and feminine (the program describes the performance as a “glamorous collision of sexual desire with masculinity and femininity and real and imagined worlds”; I’d perhaps question the essentialist nature of words like ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’).

Anyway, there’s one more Sitelines performance, in early/mid September. And then that’s it. Summer dance season in NY is officially over.

Happy Labor Day everyone!

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DWTS Fall 2008 Season Contestants

1) Grammy winner Lance Bass;

2) TV Chef Rocco DiSpirito;

3) Olympic Gold Medalist (just crowned) Misty May Treanor;

4) Gold medalist sprinter Maurice Green;

5) Broadway star and singer Toni Braxton;

6) Reality TV star Kim Kardashian (who seems to have just injured her foot);

7) Hannah Montana star (and youngest ever to be on the show; will be paired with Julianne Hough) Cody Linley;

8) * Actress (fabulous, I might add, and excellent comedian, and the oldest star ever on the show) Cloris Leachman;

9) Actor Ted McGinley (to be paired with new dancer Inna Brayer);

10) “Everything woman” (whatever that means) Brooke Burke;

11) Supposedly more raucous than Adam Carolla, Comedian Jeffrey Ross (who will be paired with Edyta Sliwinska);

12) Footballer Warren Sapp (paired with Kym Johnson, whom the annoyingly ingratiating Good Morning America host kept pronouncing “gorgeous, gorgeous”); and

13) (first time contestants number over 12 btw), the most famous actress in all of daytime, Susan Lucci. After making a big deal of her numerous unsuccessful Emmy nominations, said annoying GMA host pronounced being accepted to DWTS “better than any award.” Yeah, okay…

Anyway, it appears DWTS producers have tried to cover every demographic base conceivable: young Hannah Montana guy should appeal to the teenagers, while Leachman and Lucci older women (though Leachman really should appeal to EVERYONE — for people who may not know her, the woman quite simply rocks). And with the football and Olympic stars they’ve got the sports fans covered. Braxton appeals to Broadway lovers, the reality TV stars to the twenty-something crowd. And, in an attempt at creating nostalgic continuity, McGinley should remind viewers of Steve Guttenberg and Ross, the lovely Carolla.

Best thing about the Good Morning America broadcast by far: the mention of Maks Chmerkovskiy’s return. At least the silly TV talking heads haven’t forgotten the pro dancers make this show.

The new season begins September 22nd, the day after the Emmys in which host Tom Bergeron is apparently nominated for an award in the newly-created category of reality TV show host.

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Jill Johnson’s "The Copier" at Cedar Lake

 

So, my review of The Copier: I arrived a bit early last Wednesday evening, walked into Cedar Lake’s giant warehouse-like space, where they had a “stage” constructed of two large mats arranged in a T-shape, surrounded by a few box-like stools and three long, rectangular riser-like boxes for spectators to sit on. There wasn’t anywhere near enough seating, which was fine since the audience wasn’t actually supposed to sit, although I did. Found I had the perfect view of the whole seated right at the top of the T. I didn’t really see how my view could have been that different had I walked about.

 

Anyway, I really had an ideal space:a few minutes after I arrived, an air shaft above me began blowing strips of shredded paper down our way. It was like snow. The girl sitting next to me, who I initially thought was a performer here although I’m pretty sure in retrospect I was wrong, took off her shoes and began playing with the shredder copy. The dancers came out and began warming up, as nature sounds played over the speakers — mainly the sounds of chirping birds. The girl next to me imitated the dancers, stretching and pointing her toes herself, even getting off the sitting block to roll around in the hay-like mounds of paper. I nearly gave her seat away thinking she was eventually going to take to the stage.

 

(my favorite dancer in the company, Jon Bond, is center in my little abstract photo above, and lying on the floor warming up in the picture above that)

Soon, the ticket-takers called for all spectators to come in and find a viewing space and shortly thereafter the large garage doors slammed down, darkening the place, creating a rather eerie effect. Bars of light began to shine one at a time on the sides of the stage, looking initially like the heating rods of a just-lit oven.

 

All dancers lay down at various spots on the stage as the music turned more mechanical: cell phone rings, landline buzzes, cars honking. The dancers then rose and moved about in units. A dancer would begin a phrase, an expression, another would join him, in imitation, another would join, and so on. Eventually, one from the group would break free and pursue individual movement, followed by the others, the group disbanding, making the stage would look a bit cacophonous.

 

At one point, one person began walking toward the edge of the T, another followed, yet another, and another, until all dancers walked toward that side of the stage, exhibiting herd mentality. Once at the edge of the stage, dancers looked back and forth, this way and that, trying to figure out why their randomly-seeming designated “leader” had led them there, as there was clearly nothing to see. They began making their way back to center, again pursuing individual movement, eventually meeting up with one another, forming groups, one beginning a movement phrase, it catching on, a whole square of dancers moving in unison.

At another attention-catching moment, an entire bar on the loft’s exposed ceiling would move across the T part of the stage, carrying with it a horizontal series of lights, As all other lights were turned off and the one bar made it’s way across the top of the loft, it lit the stage just like a copier machine. At first the dancers looked confused and frightened, like they were within the machine itself, not knowing how to escape. Many dancers walked offstage, leaving a few who stayed on the T mat looking, by turns up at the light bar, and at the movement of shadow it made across the stage. By trying to walk away from the shadow, they ended up moving in a line, pretty much in unison, captured by the light rod, its movement across the ceiling completely dictating theirs on the stage. Little captured humans. You imagined if a giant hand pulled off the ceiling like a copier’s cover, the paper copy would bear the exact imprints the human bodies made trying to run from the light.

Following this, the other dancers took the stage again, some now running its length, both horizontally and vertically. At times a dancer would interact with the spectators by, for example, sitting next to us on the block, or parting a couple of standing viewers, to make their way through the crowd. Evan and Philip describe this as well.

More dancing solitary, then in unison, followed. The music turned more melodious, and dancers would dance in twos and threes. At times a dancer would emulate the actions of his or her partners, at times, the dancer originating the actions would reach out and grab the “emulator’s” hand, caressing it, drawing it to him, brushing it against his face, stopping all imitation, achieving human connection. But just for a fleeting moment.

I also noticed that at least one dancer, my favorite Jon Bond, had a coiled black telephone cord snaking down his back, connected by the neckline of his shirt and the waist of his pants. At times he looked entangled, his movements writhing on the floor, flexed feet, contorted center, so awkward.

In the end, a single female dancer, the mesmerizing Acacia Schachte, is left onstage alone, making soft, feathery shapes with her arms, to the equally soft, mellifluous sounds of a solitary piano.

Choreographer Jill Johnson has said that with the piece she seeks to ask what is “the impact of our culture of repetition and routine and what happens when we break from it … Now that we can create perfect duplicates of photographs, music, livestock, do we put a greater value on things that are organic and made by hand, or do we prefer the perfection of a seamless copy?” To me, she posed these questions beautifully. While the idea that unthinking imitation may lead to herd mentality is a bit of a cliche, the light bar going across the ceiling with the dancers running from, struggling to make their own imprint yet dictated by that all-encompassing machine, was strikingly original, as were the attempts to begin new movement patterns, run from the group, strike out on one’s own, violently grab the hand of a fellow dancer doing as you are and caress it. Not only are creativity and originality lost by mindless replication and repetition, so is what it means to be human.

Here is Claudia La Rocco’s NYTimes review.

Did anyone else get a chance to see it? I mean besides the people who wrote about it?

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Strand Downtown Sale

 

For New Yorkers who don’t know, the Strand downtown — Fulton Street location — lost its lease and is moving out. They’re having a 50% off sale through, according to Galley Cat, the end of September. Above are some of my purchases — spent about three hours there and would have bought a lot more if the Joan Acocella and Balanchine hadn’t been so blasted heavy. I could barely carry my double bag-full home!

I bought The Dud Avocado because I remembered Terry Teachout had posted about it (and saw he’s written this edition’s intro.), and the White Swan, Black Swan looked interesting. It’s a collection of short stories written by dancer turned fiction writer, Adrienne Sharp.

There isn’t a whole lot left, but in the Dance section there are a couple more old-ish hardcover copies of the Balanchine for $7.50 apiece, an unused-looking copy of the newish Lincoln Kirstein bio for $9.00, and a bunch of huge photo books, some for as low as $2.50. The section doesn’t have its own label (what else is new?) but is within Opera and Classical Music.

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… And The "Hostile Takeover" is Complete

 

Just researching a bit on Japanese Butoh before I write more about this intriguing site-specific work of performance art that took place as part of the Sitelines series. Fun thing about writing about dance — at least to me — is learning about so many different dance / art forms.

 

And write-up of Cedar Lake’s The Copier coming in a sec. I just want to think a bit more about it first. Overall I liked it, and definitely recommend it. It’s good for discussion. It’s only showing through the 23rd though so act fast if you plan to go.

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Waterboard Thrill Ride

Sorry for the posting hiatus! It’s been a long time since I’ve gone half a week without blogging… There’s just nothing much going on in New York right now, and I’m trying to get a couple of writing projects done before the fall is officially underway.

Anyway, this post is about a piece of installation art that I didn’t actually get to see, but just read about via Claudia’s latest Culturist post. Apparently, artist Steve Powers had a small exhibit, called Waterboard Thrill Ride, out on the Coney Island boardwalk, among all the amusement rides and hot dog and cotton candy stalls. Like a peep show, you put a dollar into a slot and peeked through a small window covered with bars to see a couple of hooded “interrogator” robots perform waterboard torture to a robot dressed in orange prisoner garb, in imitation of a Guantanamo Bay detainee. The interrogators pour water onto the prisoner’s head for a number of seconds while his body convulses and he yells out things like, “I think I’m dying.” On the outer wall of the exhibit is a cartoon of Sponge Bob having water poured onto his head saying, “it don’t Gitmo better.” Powers said he created the installation in part to make people aware of the controversial form of torture currently used by our military. The writer of this NYTimes article went out to Coney Island on the day the installation premiered and describes onlooker response.

Most annoying thing to me is that it only seemed to be up — by design not because of public response — for one week, from August 6-15. On the 15th, apparently Powers and a couple of lawyer friends subjected themselves to waterboard torture conducted by actual trained officers, in front of the exhibit. This is just the kind of thing I would love to have seen — both in terms of the art itself, how it makes its presentation, how it questions, how it fits within its surroundings — particularly these surroundings — and how the public reacts. It’s now moved to the Park Avenue Armory on the upper east-side, a private museum and collection of antiques that you need an appointment to visit. Seems kind of ridiculous to have a public art exhibit in a private collection, but apparently it is to be part of a larger exhibition at the Armory called Democracy in America, sponsored by the public art fund Creative Time, which will take place September 21-27. Go here for deets. Unfortunately, I likely won’t be in town that week. So, looks like I’m going to miss out. But if anyone goes, or if anyone saw it on Coney Island, please give your thoughts!

How I managed to miss the exhibit while it was here is another issue, for which I’m royally pissed at myself. I have GOT to stop relying on blogs and websites for all my info; I must return to good old fashion newspapers and magazines… And I mean hard copy. You don’t always see everything on the website; you’ve got to make sure you click on every heading, every subheading, every little box. It’s just not the same as flipping through actual, physical pages.

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It’s Cedar Lake Time Again

 

Next week, Wednesday through Saturday, August 20-23, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet will present its next work, The Copier, an installation piece by Jill Johnson. I have high hopes for this one, as Johnson is a protege of William Forsythe, one of contemporary dance’s most forward-looking, innovative, thought-provoking masters (imho of course), and former dancer with his company, Frankfurt Ballet.

The dance, the final of Cedar Lake’s installation projects, is intended, in Johnson’s words, to examine “the impact of our culture of repetition and routine and what happens when we break from it… Now that we can create perfect duplicates of photographs, music, even livestock,” she asks, “do we put a greater value on things that are organic and made by hand, or do we prefer the perfection of a seamless copy?”

Yesterday, the company invited bloggers to a rehearsal where I took these pictures.

 

Bottom one is of Johnson herself talking to the dancers; sorry so blurry — I didn’t want to disturb anyone with my flash.

Since it wasn’t a full dress rehearsal, but dancers practicing on their own and being coached by Johnson in groups one at a time, it was hard to get a sense of how it will look when performed, but we’ll see next week.

Evan (Dancing Perfectly Free) attended several practice sessions and blogged about them here, here, and here. There’s also an interesting back and forth between her and Doug Fox of Great Dance on the meaning and forms of audience participation in such an installation. Here’s Doug’s post, and here’s Evan’s response.

To receive a blog-reader discount to next week’s performances, visit Smartix and use code “BLOGCP”.

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Well Wishes to Liu Yan

One of China’s most revered classical dancers was seriously injured during rehearsals for Olympics opening night ceremonies when she leaped onto a floorboard that collapsed. She’s currently in the hospital unable to feel anything below her chest and is told she may never walk again. Here’s the Times article. (via Jolene)

On a side note, the NYTimes website can be rather ridiculous at times. They seem to have a policy that their writers are supposed to link only to articles within the Times’ own site. So, when this writer, David Barboza, tells you Liu Yan has become very popular on YouTube, you click on his (or his editor’s) link thinking you’re going to be led to a YouTube clip of her performing. But what do you get instead: a completely irrelevant article from the Times’ Business archive on the YouTube phenomenon. Why even link if it has nothing to do with the issue? I’m pretty sure everyone knows what YouTube is by now.

Anyway, since I’m a blogger and can link to websites other than my own, here, here, and here are some YouTube clips I found of her performing. And she’s listed as the main soloist in this beautiful piece. There are many more. Hopefully she’ll recover.

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The Olympics, Men's Versus Women's Gymnastics, Sexism, Age, Athleticism, Country Bias, Etc. Etc.

There’s a really good discussion going on over at Claudia La Rocco’s The Culturist about the Olympic coverage — people are even likening it to porn!

I couldn’t help get off on a tangent about male versus female gymnastics. During the last Olympics I remember going out to dinner with a group of my feminist friends and they were bemoaning how women’s sports are taken so unseriously by the public, giving as an example the prominence of the ‘silly’ ‘girl-child’ sport of female gymnastics over the more ‘real’ sports of women’s softball, etc. — the team sports. I thought the criticism was so unfair given how incredibly hard those gymnasts work, and I couldn’t understand how anyone couldn’t be in absolute awe of them as they did those impossible-looking tumbling passes and balance beam maneouvers and flying-through-the-air vaults. On the other hand, I’d played girls softball when I was young and felt there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do that the women players were doing without practice. So, why were they privileging team sports — so popular in men’s athletics — over individual sports, which women tend toward?

These friends were all lawyers and feminist legal scholars and I thought it was in large part my love of ballet and dance that made me at odds with them over this, so when I read Claudia (NYTimes dance critic, if you don’t know her) liken the female gymnasts to Jean Benet Ramsey, I thought, oh no!

After watching the women’s gymnastics last night in comparison to the men’s the night before, I did see a difference. The men do tend to be older (20-25), the women younger (16-20). And of course for anyone who watched last night, there seems to be a controversy over the actual ages of the Chinese female gymnasts. The cut-off age is 16 in the Olympic year (so you can be 15 now as long as you turn 16 by December 31, 2008), but no younger, and Bela Karolyi, among others, is questioning that some of those Chinese girls are that old. They did look quite young, but Asians are generally smaller-boned than Caucasians, and, as commenter Meg on Claudia’s blog pointed out, intense athletic training can delay the onset of puberty.

Of course the issue with the delayed onset of puberty caused by intense athletic training (which I hadn’t thought of) is an issue in itself. I’d think that’d be the case with any sport though, including Ballet. Maybe that’s one reason why ballerinas tend to be so thin, and not anorexia… And of course you don’t want to discourage female athleticism; wouldn’t that be sexist if you didn’t say the same for males? Does intense athleticism delay puberty for males though?…

And why favor female athletes so young anyway? Because they’re smaller and won’t go out of bounds on the tumbling passes? Because smaller bodies can tumble higher and get around those uneven bars at more astounding speeds, without fear of hitting the floor? Because as Karolyi said last night, youth doesn’t have as much fear of failure? Why isn’t all this the same for the men then?

The Chinese girls did seem to have more makeup on than the Americans, and they did seem to be jutting their hips and pelvises out and making poses on the floor that we might deem too sexy for their young-looking ages. But Jolene pointed out that that may be a cultural bias, and I agree. I went to an African dance performance with a Ballet friend the other night and she couldn’t stop laughing embarrasingly at the hip and pelvic movement; she’d never seen African before and didn’t know what to make of it, other than laugh at it and feel embarrassment for the dancers. Maybe their style just isn’t something we’re used to. Jolene also pointed out that the makeup seems to be an American thing, and I agree. I rarely see Asian women wearing that harsh bright aqua eyeshadow, yet that was a real fashion statement here in prior decades. They know they’re on TV, the Olympics are heavily dominated by the American press, and they’re trying to be like us. Ironically, it’s backfiring.

Finally, we’re also hearing all these stories about how awful the Chinese are to their children — forcing them into the sport, making them stay away from their families when the little girls really just want to come home, in comparison to the American stories, where the families always insist they’ve let their children decide how much dedication they wanted to give to their sport. Let’s just keep in mind that we’re hearing this all from the perspective of the American press. They assume we’ll feel better about ourselves, about our losing gold medals to the Chinese if we believe our society is so much more just. Not that I don’t believe in being critical at all of other governments; I didn’t have time to write about it, but I attended a reading organized by the PEN American Center of works by imprisoned Chinese dissident writers on the night before the Olympics began. But let’s just remember that our press exercises its own form of propaganda.

Okay, I’m done blabbering! Have a look at Claudia’s post and the responses.