I’m gonna kill Bill!

As a member of the female of the species, I am always looking for new interesting, complex and meaningful female characters in literature, film, and music who don’t piss me off.  Many times women tend to be (1) damsel in distress, (2) female sidekick, (3) sex object/pretty backdrop, (4) gender quota fodder, and/or (5) all the above, also known as Angelina Jolie.

But every now and then you get just a good, fun wacked out character who just couldn’t be anything other than a woman, and makes me want to take up a martial art. And dye my hair blonde.

Kill Bill is a horrible movie, I mean, make no mistake. It is ridiculously convoluted, the characters are caricatures, the plot is winding and the dialogue is doofy. It’s violent, foul-mouthed, comically overdone. And I love every second of it.

Quentin Tarantino knows that there is a large portion of movie-goers like me who appreciate lunacy and self-aggrandizing storytelling. And the Q man has a profound love for these things, and Uma Thurman’s feet. Not to mention the kind of respect needed to give female characters their room for complexity and gravity.

All this to say, every time I’m channel surfing and Kill Bill (vol 1 or 2 and especially both in order) is on, I am totally sucked in. Even though I own it and have seen it a dozen times.

Which brings me to another point – all the other movies that I own personally tend to be male-centric. All 3 Blades, all 3 Matrix, all 3 Lord of the Rings, all 3 Star Wars… and Chronicles of Riddick/Pitch Black, and ummm Sense and Sensibility. (Yeah. Ok. That last one was a gift.) I still cry every time Whistler dies in Blade. Which incidentally happens again in the third one. Gotta love scifi. I also have things like Fight Club and Boondock Saints and the Fifth Element. I need to go buy things like Bridget Jones’ Diary and Bridget Jones’ whatever-the-sequel-was-called, and something with Kate Hudson in it. Oh and maybe throw in a Susan Sarandon flick for good measure. Somewhere inside there’s a girly girl screaming to get out. She’s taking her sweet time to get out here, cuz shes doing her nails or something…

i am woman, hear me meep

The passing of the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act raises some questions for me about discrimination. The obvious one is around gender and the specific requirements of a job. And the less obvious one is about statute of limitations which I’m not sure I understand in the first place. (And I always wanna say “statue” of limitations like it’s a big woman with a funky crown on her head.)

Read the specifics here http://www.nwlc.org/fairpay/ or on my beloved Wikipedia here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilly_Ledbetter_Fair_Pay_Act

I remember hearing from a friend of mine that while taking the local firefighter test, he found out that female recruits had a different set of standard requirements. For example, they had to lift a full 20 lbs less than their male counterparts, and their fat ratio could be higher. (Well he called it the “fat ratio” and I don’t know what the actual term was.)

I had said that I thought the “fat ratio” was fair enough because it is a scientific FACT that women carry more fat and it would be discrimination to not take that into consideration. Besides, I’ve seen plenty of chubby male firefighters in my day, haven’t you?

But the lifting and running requirements got me thinking. On one hand, my initial reaction was that I wouldn’t want a chick firefighter to have to lift me out of a burning building. But otoh, I thought well what IS the requirement any way and is it fair to say that the X number of pounds a woman can lift is still more than enough in an emergency? Maybe the requirement is still 150 where the male requirement is 170. either way, you should be ok in a pinch, plus you got all that adrenaline working for you.

The larger question that my friend and many of us still wrestle with is the elephant in the room: can a woman really do everything a man can do? Not to mention better?

There are cases like Ledbetter where it seems obvious at first blush. Same position, same level, same number of years, and she is making noticeably less. She got lower evaluations but upon further investigation there was no real cause for that. Her merit increases should have been on par with her counterparts; a percentage is a percentage is a percentage.

As a woman, of course I have this gut instinct that tells me I could do whatever i want, but I don’t want to do certain jobs and I leave the men to it. The point though is that if I take the job and I do the same task, I should be paid the same amount. Right?

And that’s where it gets tricky. Salary has always been this flimsy number, taking into account experience and skills and seniority and so forth. As a recruiter you think how high a number do I need to throw out there to keep this candidate interested and still make our budget? How much is this person really worth?

I know way too many people who pick up a paycheck for sitting at a desk and playing the seemingly endless Mafia Wars app on Myspace. They could tell you what they “really” do for a living and what it says in their job descriptions, but now ask them how much work they did today. Real honest work. About 15 minutes? Including printing up a TPS report cover? What really is work and how do you price it?

The fact of the matter is that many times bosses and potential bosses have all these factors floating around in their heads. And the reason for Acts such as the Ledbetter one is to prevent these bosses from considering factors that are biased and based on preconceived and misconceived notions. I mean, are jobs intrinsically gender-based and where did we come up with such generalizations? To me, it is actually sad we need to state these things in writing and pass into law, but such is the state of um things.

I’d like someone (maybe someone with a law degree) to explain the statute thing. I do understand in criminal cases when the collection of evidence to satisfy burden of proof is limited by the amount of time that has passed since the criminal act itself. Or at least I think I heard that on Law and Order SVU.

Several years ago, past the statute I’m sure, I did actually have a potential supervisor ask me if I planned on getting pregnant any time soon. I realized I could have probably pressed charges but then again, he still offered me the job. I didn’t take it obviously, because I most likely would have killed him with a stapler at some point and that dumb@#! was not worth prison time.

And apparently, there IS a statue …

girls girls girls

I’ve been inundated with “girly” things the past 5 days watching my friends’ kids since Friday. I have seen more pink crap than I have in my entire life I think, not to mention been slowly tortured with lame movies and seemingly endless listenings to High School Musical, part 1, 2 AND 3, which apparently all have the same plot. I have never wondered what it felt like to be a pig roasted on a turning spit, but I have now felt it.

I grew up with older brothers, and not that I was a tomboy, but I had a certain appreciation for male ummm things. I liked that my brothers were very different from each other too – one was totally into sports and the other into history and reading and they were both into music. They were NOT into making bead bracelets and figuring out for the zillionth time if you were going to live in a mansion, an apartment, a shack or a house and married to boys named Noel or Taylor. (No offense to any boys currently reading this with those names)

But it occurs to me that it’s so hard to raise girls. It’s hard to raise kids, sure. It’s just very awkward raising girls for me personally, and to know what to say and when.

We were walking by a Victoria’s Secret store with the mannequins in their little bras and panties. The girls made faces and giggled and the younger one said, that’s so gross. I asked why is it gross? She said, “I mean come on, no one wants to see that. (then whispering) I mean there are BOYS around.” I laughed, well yes. I did a quick think-through exercise of what to say and then said something like “Well, first of all, a woman’s body is NEVER gross, and there are lots of people who want to see them. However, you’re right that maybe they shouldn’t be flaunting bras and panties in everyone’s faces because those things are private and what you wear under your clothes is no one’s business.” This opened the floodgate though, when the older one said, “Sometimes girls wear their bras like tops.” I said, “That’s true. And I think people can wear whatever they want to, and we don’t have the right to look down on them or be mean to them or judge them. But we don’t have to dress like them either. You dress the way you are comfortable and you treat others the way you want to be treated, right?” Of course they both said “right” like good little girls. And then we started talking about how to dress appropriately and if you should cover all the naughty bits and what makes them naughty in the first place and why can’t boys just keep their eyes to themselves any way.

I got to thinking about how I had a million other things to say about everything, but thankfully the younger one changed the subject.  Their mom is back in town now and she can field the tough questions. Like when we were watching a show about dog training and they showed a family with a problem dog. The family was headed by a lesbian couple. The younger girl asked me if they were married and i said, uhhh where do they live? She said I think they said Boston. I said, probably, and she asked why that mattered. I said I don’t know, ask California. She laughed but she had no idea why. I didn’t go into it. That’s definitely a conversation for Mom.