Feminism – Pam Troy

I stopped in at Old Wives Tales on Valencia this afternoon . Got Mom a belated Mother’s Day gift of Alterhorn earrings, and a pair for myself. It’s a feminist gift shop that offers a fairly even selection of the lovely and the hideous. Female torsos decorate the walls along with spider web glass clocks and Kathe Kollwitz posters.

Old Wives Tales, which closed in 1996, was an important feminist bookstore, run as a non-profit collective by 1988. When we went to eat at We Be Sushi or pick up something at Lucca’s Ravioli, I always walked down the street to either go into Old Wives Tales or peer through its window. I remember it being staffed mainly by dauntingly intelligent and handsome lesbians.

Now it’s just a ghost — or rather, a smaller ghost of that host of phantoms that make up the larger ghost of Valencia Street in the ’80s.

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At last I have seen it, Barbie, the counter-intuitive feminist movie everyone’s been talking about.

I grew up playing, not only with Barbies, but with Francies, Staceys. Tammys, Peppers, Pee-Wees, Liddle-Kiddles, Dolly Darlings, a Bride Doll (“It’s such fun to play/With a bride doll that moves/Aa-aand throws her bouquet!”), a hollow-eyed Keane-inspired revenant called “Little Miss No-Name,” and a Skipper whose breasts popped out if you raised one of her arms. There were also a couple of male “action figures” my sister and I kidnapped from our brothers’ room — a GI Joe and a rubber astronaut.

So a movie about Barbie and where Barbies lived appealed to me. It’s a hilarious comedy, I was told, a groundbreaking feminist satire!

So I saw it and was enormously entertained. Great sets, well sung and choreographed production numbers, funny lines, Rhea Pearlman…

As for its feminism — Meh.

Maybe it’s hoping for too much, but I would love to see a movie where women — even plastic women — get what they want by saying “no” to guys and sticking to it rather than batting their eyes, giggling, and using their “feminine wiles.”

Women just saying “no” to men and prevailing is, I guess, too disturbing to depict.

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Pam Troy

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Tag: Feminism