Lesbians on TV: More Than Meets the Eye-Candy

By | April 13, 2005

Last season, being a gay male was, as Carson on Queer Eye would put it, “the new black.” This season, it’s being a lesbian.

Previously relegated to the deepest recesses of a young male’s computer hard drive:(MyDocumentsschoolworkstufffiles
othinginhereseriouslystoplookinghappytime) or even in the more archaic location of underneath the mattress, lesbians are now seeing the light of day on television. From Britney and Madonna on MTV to your favorite primetime drama, it’s hard not to see something lesbian-related whenever you turn on the boob tube — forgive the pun. But is what we are seeing truly indicative of the acceptance of lesbians on television or merely a cheap spectacle for ratings?

A few years ago we saw a veritable “eruption” of programming featuring gay males: Queer Eye for the Straight Guy premiered, Will and Grace topped ratings, Queer as Folk shocked audiences, while Spongebob Squarepants … just confused. Fast forward to 2005 and we see a whole different story: Queer Eye’s and Will and Grace’s ratings have dropped, Queer as Folk, which includes gay men and women is on its last season, while Spongebob is … still confused and confusing.

With the homoeroticism of Wonder Woman, February sweeps saw a slew of lesbian appearances to save the day (a.k.a. boost ratings). To that end, networks have resorted to temporary and sometimes accidental romantic entanglements between female characters to attract viewers — mostly males the age range 0-100.

Not surprisingly, this tactic is working. The Marissa-Alex tryst on The O.C. helped bolster the show’s already excellent sophomore season ratings. Although their love affair was a great ratings twist in The O.C.’s tumultuous storyline, anyone who follows the show closely knew that Marissa was destined her to return to heterosexuality with Ryan, because that is where her lackluster acting isn’t as pronounced.

Also premiering in February, Queer Eye for the Straight Girl brought “jeujing” to the female gender. Instead of four gay males invading someone’s privacy, Bravo added a lesbian into the mix, Honey Labrador — insert your own joke here. Even NBC found it necessary to out Elizabeth Rohm’s character Serena Southerlyn on Law and Order, just mere seconds before leaving the show permanently. But perhaps the biggest sweeps shocker was the introduction of gay marriage in Springfield and the revelation of Aunt Patty’s homosexuality on The Simpsons. This brings up the topic of lesbian characters and actresses in Hollywood. Why must we assume that a woman, who isn’t married, barefoot and pregnant in a kitchen by the age of 30 — or at least hasn’t dated Colin Farrell — must be a closet lesbian? Case in point. Marcia Cross of Desperate Housewives was been rumored to be a lesbian, mostly due to the fact that she is near 40-years-old and yet to be married.

Sure, television has come a long way from its first lesbian kiss on L.A. Law, to various sitcom smooches on shows like Roseanne, Friends and Ellen to Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s cult favorite Willow-Tara romance.

Now, we have Showtime’s The L-Word, a mature, adult look at lesbians living in L.A. The show’s second season premiered last month to high praise. Although some say the show can go over-the-top with the realism of its sex scenes — hence its premium cable location — The L-Word at least tries to delve into the psyches of its eclectic cast of characters. Well-written and intriguing, The L-Word is on the completely opposite side of the lesbian curve than that of shows like The O.C., from totally ignoring the issue to basing an entire show on being a lesbian.

Unfortunately, we still have a long way to go. It’s not that we need more lesbians on television — though most guys wouldn’t mind the extra girl-on-girl action — instead, we need characters and story lines whose sexual preferences and acts aren’t the crux of the show.

Archived article by Ed “Chong” Kim
Sun Staff Writer

CCTJ Holds Fair Trade Event

By April 14, 2005

Cuban music set the tone at the carnival organized by the Cornell Coalition for Trade Justice (CCTJ) in the Memorial Room of the Straight yesterday afternoon. The event was planned in an effort to raise campus and community awareness of trade justice issues, and to oppose the passage of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). “Trade justice is an ongoing effort,” said Tina Lax ’05, president of CCTJ, as club members threw rice-filled balloons, danced around the room and perused the informational tables. The carnival sought to mobilize public support for a more equitable system of global trade, and served as a venue to circulate petitions. “Hopefully [the event] will get people to sign these really important petitions so that the government will start noticing that people do care about fair trade,” said club member Nina Fixell ’07 as she looked over the petitions. Next to the table of laptops set up for students to e-mail representatives to encourage them to stand against CAFTA when voting time rolls around this May, clever games were set up to encapsulate the vision of the carnival. A game named “Dump your Friends,” in which participants basically dump rice on their friends, was a “spectacle to show what’s happening in a lot of poor countries, that is, agricultural dumping,” Lax said. Agricultural dumping, Lax explained, is when “subsidized U.S. big company goods such as corn [are] dumped in places like Mexico for cheaper prices so that the Mexicans buy cheaper U.S. corn instead of Mexican corn.” Though seemingly good for the economy, it is actually an “unfair policy between industrialized and developing countries, reinforcing poverty instead of lifting it,” Lax said. Ben Adler ’06, a student who drifted into the carnival said about CAFTA and other unfair trade policies, “I think it’s a completely unsound economic system. It doesn’t fall into basic supply and demand and just artificially inflates the price.” CAFTA is a free trade agreement that promotes trade liberalization between the United States and five Central American countries: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. It is modeled after the older North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which involves the United States, Mexico and Canada. Its effects thus far are controversial, with some saying that it has brought economic growth and rising standards for the three countries, while others, like StopCAFTA.org say that NAFTA has been “a disaster for small farmers and working people with hundreds of thousands of jobs lost, family farms foreclose, and public interest laws overturned or challenged.” The Center for Trade Policies Studies website highlights CAFTA, including supporters that argue that CAFTA would reduce trade barriers between the involved countries and raise living standards in neighboring countries where the United States has a strong foreign policy interest. The supporters counter opposing views saying that CAFTA would “consolidate the economic, social, and political progress achieved in a region that was in turmoil in the 1980s but has now turned to democracy.” The Bush administration has made it clear that the completion of CAFTA is crucial in the advancement of Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), another free trade agreement that would encompass a total of 34 economies. The issues regarding FTAA are similar to those of CAFTA. The small-scale carnival was an effort of CCTJ to bring awareness of such trade policies and to encourage Cornellians to join the fight against CAFTA. By bringing in popular a cappella group Cayuga’s Waiters and offering an enlightening and entertaining time, CCTJ expanded on previous club actions, which include educational forums regarding the trade agreements and a crafts fair advocating fair trade. “Workers are faceless, nameless. We disconnect commodities from the people who’ve created them,” Lax said. So CCTJ and its efforts, like yesterday’s carnival, aim to repair that disconnection in order to mobilize Cornell students to understand and then take action on trade justice.Archived article by Anita Oh Sun Contributor
M.I.A.: Arular

By April 14, 2005

M.I.A.’s fantastic debut album Arular blisters with restless energy. But how did Maya Arulpragasam, the incredible 27-year old voice of London’s rising grime scene, ever go from exile to musician? It was hard enough to grow up in the aftermath of a bloody dispute of power during the mid-’80s in her native Sri Lanka. Raised in the South London projects after the battle became too oppressive, where her family was burglarized on a regular basis, life was better, but not by much. Arulpragasam’s mother worked for minimum wage, and eventually the family moved out of the Phipps Bridge projects into better housing. Her mother’s hard work paid off when Maya got the chance to realize her creativity, and she later graduated with a degree in film from Central St. Martins College of Arts and Design. While commissioned to make a documentary about the rock band Elastica’s tour, Arulpragasm managed to orient herself with the MC-505 Groovebox, which is a fool-proof, all-in-one drum set and synthesizer — an expressway to self-producing rough beats. The edge and flexibility of the Groovebox suited Maya’s personality well, and three years later we have the revolutionary debut album Arular, which appears under her assumed artistic personality, M.I.A. There’s a bit of experience behind tighter instrumentals from brilliant producers like Richard X and Anthony Whiting, but Arular is almost an entirely solo output. Even the artwork, a wallpaper of tanks, fists, peace symbols, loudspeakers and parachuting Blackhawk helicopters was designed by the same woman who wrote the lyrics, arranged the music and fights for “the people” as she lets us know in nearly every breath. M.I.A.’s lyrics, including the way she introduces herself on the first true song (she does pepper the album with meaningless, but still enjoyable skits), paint her as a revolutionary, a guerrilla and usually as an independent and dominant female, but they also portray her enigmatic personality. She first sees herself as a voice of proletariat radicals: “Pull up the people, pull up the poor/ slang tan/ that’s the M.I.A. thang/ I’ve got the bombs/ yeah, me got God/ And me got you/ Bang bang bang.” She compares growing up to a “guerrilla getting trained up,” or as a “freedom fighter in action.” As an involuntary citizen of a country not her own, M.I.A. makes constant references to her inner refugee. She identifies with the Palestinians, the Cherokee Indians and she “screams for the nation.” M.I.A. is the self-proclaimed leader of the People’s Will, and achieving their goals usually comes with a price tag of violence. Murder is reduced to a courageous act: “Semi-9 and snipered him/ On that wall they posted him/ They cornered him and then just murdered him/ He had his way, I’m bored of him/ I’m tired of him” she reflects without an ounce of regret. If she’s not angry at what obviously becomes the Establishment, sometimes in the form of masculinity, she’s playing to our lustful sides. It’s a bit confusing to hear M.I.A. switch without warning from assertive to innocent. “Let you be superior/ My stamina can take it/ You like me vulnerable,” she says in between songs about “clocking him.” The pattern of these lyrical changes becomes obvious after a few listens — if you bring men in with promises of submissiveness and sexuality, you then can pounce once they try to “check this girl.” She’s got us under her thumb, and isn’t afraid to push down — it’s all “for the sake of having fun.” Musically, M.I.A. is the prototype of an emerging genre, grime. Somewhere in between American crunk and Jamaican dancehall, grime combines elements that we mostly associate with cell phone rings. There are beeps, buzzes, high-pitched screams and an assortment of other rather atonal implements. Besides these staccatos, the only other production element is usually a super-electronic basic drum set, except the cymbals are muted, the high-hat is a constant nuisance and the bass sets an incredibly punched, heart-racing tempo. M.I.A. soothes some of the corners in grime’s roughness. They are often, however, tools to invoke images of her guerrilla anger. On “Bucky Done Gun” there are battle-crying bugles and the chorus uses a snare drum to sound like a popping machine gun. Sometimes effects are picked right out of old arcade games with firing shooters and B-52 bombers. “Bingo” has a melodically important steel drum, and other percussion including glockenspiels and bongos are used. One of the best reasons to listen to a grime voice like M.I.A.’s is simply the way she talks. The accent is thick with the bitterness of rough, outer London neighborhoods like Swansea and Bow. The dialect is a language all it’s own with words like “galang” and “wha-gawn” spliced into Jamaican half-rhymes and revolutionary buzzwords. M.I.A. has a tendency to scream or at least raise the pitch at the end of every line. In addition to raising hairs and heartbeats, this brutally forces her message home every time. This is clearly someone who has a lot to say. It’s gritty, funny, honest and inspiring — in other words, perfect.Archived article by Elliot SingerSun Staff Writer