Michaele L. Ferguson
University of Colorado
By blurring the lines between entertainment and political advocacy, Orange is the New Black expresses a novel and risky form of mass political consciousness-raising. It simultaneously educates, outrages, and diverts its audience. In so doing, it has tremendous potential to generate empathy for the poor and the incarcerated among the complacent American middle-class, but it also risks undermining critique of our justice system through its use of melodrama and marketing. Whatever its ultimate impact on our culture, it is worth understanding how Orange simultaneously operates as entertainment and political incitement.
I contend that Orange engages in a kind of consciousness-raising through entertainment that is indirectly political. It focuses on stories about individuals, peppered with brief discussions of political issues: along the way the viewer is educated in questions about sentencing and prison justice, but the show does not make these issues the overt object of the action. It raises consciousness in a subtle fashion, without just telling us what to believe.
Precisely because its politics are so subtle, Orange has the radical potential to illuminate how our justice system works and the ways in which women prisoners are particularly disadvantaged within it. Yet this potential to raise awareness and even to mobilize viewers to take action is simultaneously undermined in four ways.
1) The Netflix series deploys melodrama in a way that keeps the storytelling light and satisfies viewers’ desire for justice, but may also keep viewers from reflecting on the actual injustices of the prison system. Consider this in contrast to what we see in a series like The Wire. Where The Wire is primarily dark and aims at portraying realistic characters and situations, Orange often exaggerates scenarios in a way that seems designed to satisfy viewers’ desires for some kind of justice in a prison world that is (in reality) unrelentingly unjust. The Wire’s deployment of the tragic form, I believe, makes it very difficult for viewers to treat it as mere entertainment, and to disengage from the political questions it brings to the forefront. The use of melodramatic forms in Orange, however, while perhaps it makes the show easier for a broader audience to enjoy, may also risk obscuring the real injustices of the prison system that the show serves to highlight.
Orange couches consciousness-raising in the more entertaining and palatable forms of hot lesbian prison sex, humor, and melodramatic justice in which bad people ultimately suffer for their misdeeds. While based on a memoir, the Netflix series takes creative license with reality in ways that may obscure or at least deflect serious attention from the injustices of the prison system.
2) My second worry about the potential effectiveness of Orange’s political consciousness-raising has to do with how Netflix blurs the lines between entertainment, marketing and political advocacy. When political advocacy is presented as marketing for entertainment, I worry that audiences may experience this either as confusing (i.e., they may not experience the political issues as issues), or as a turn-off (i.e., they may see the advocacy as self-interested rather than the result of more noble motivations).
For example, consider the “paid op-ed” that Netflix produced for The New York Times around the time Season 2 was released. Entitled “Women Inmates: Why the Male Model Doesn’t Work,” this op-ed presents a visually appealing graphic representation of the status of women in the American prison system, interspersed with video and audio interviews with women who are serving or have served time. It is an incredible act of political pedagogy: it educates readers about the specific issues faced by women in the justice system; it raises awareness about many of the injustices faced by women both leading up to, in, and after prison; and it offers a solution in the form of the Hawaii Women’s Community Correctional Center, which treats women prisoners as in need of sanctuary and a place to heal during their time in incarceration. At the very end, it provides some links to “additional resources,” including to some activist and service organizations addressing women prisoners in particular.
I find this ad intriguing because of how it blurs the lines between politics and marketing. Netflix may benefit reputationally from being seen as a corporation that is not merely making money from the show, but is advocating for the kind of women the show portrays. But I think the blurring of the lines here raises questions of motive that are difficult to dismiss. Is the Netflix leadership truly in favor of prison reform (in which case, why does this appear to be the only such effort at consciousness-raising sponsored by Netflix)? Does it hurt the cause of justice reform to have it associated with a media company that is profiting off of a fictional and melodramatic portrayal of the issues? Or does it help to have the corporate money to reach a broader audience with the political message?
3) Either way, neither the series nor the op-eds provides us with a viable model of what political action to change the system would look like. The op-ed references the women’s prison in Hawaii as a role model for other prisons, yet it does not give readers any sense of how this model could be taken up elsewhere. The resources listed at the end of the op-ed give readers a chance to learn more about the topics mentioned and to find ways to take action, but the organizations listed are lumped together with no additional information to distinguish between them, or to explain why they were included. There is no suggested political action to take, and no information given to encourage readers to find out more about the organizations listed. It is unclear how a reader would even get to more information about the Hawaii prison, the one that is upheld as a role model for reform.
Matters are even worse in the series itself. Those who have political convictions about justice are mocked in Season 2 with its hunger strike. The hunger strikers cannot agree on a meaningful platform, and ultimately their conviction weakens in the face of a mediocre pizza. Sister Ingalls encourages them to leave the movement saying, “Go ahead, girls. Take a break from your values” (Season 2, Episode 11: "Take a Break from Your Values"). The hunger strike serves primarily as comic relief – no one takes it seriously, least of all the prison staff.
So even as the marketing and the series urge us to see the injustices of the system, they offer no clear path to create change. In a culture in which the general population is largely depoliticized, and which often treats political activism as futile, self-aggrandizing, or naïve, this is an opportunity missed. What’s more, the deployment of consciousness-raising as a form of marketing reinforces the cynical view that political actors have hidden agendas.
4) Finally, because Netflix has chosen to release an entire season all at once, annually, the show enjoys only a brief media spotlight. Women in prison get a big boost of attention in June, which subsides by the end of July when many viewers have finished binge-watching. This limits the impact that Netflix’s advertising campaign, and news articles about the show can have in terms of raising awareness and keeping the issue of prison justice in the forefront of media attention. Except for the occasional award show or guest appearance on a talk show, there is no real occasion to bring up Orange in the media until we are approaching the release of the next season. The spotlight on prison reform is intermittent, as a consequence. Again, I worry that this means that sustained attention on reform is unlikely to result from the show.
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Michaele L. Ferguson
University of Colorado
The other day, a colleague drew my attention to a blog post at xojane.com, “I’m the Duke University Porn Star and for the First Time I’m Telling the Story in My Words.” The author, writing under the name Belle Knox, is paying her way through college by performing in pornographic films. Yet recently, she was outed on campus by a Duke fraternity member, and ever since has been subject to online slut-shaming. She reports, “I was called a ‘slut who needs to learn the consequences of her actions,’ a ‘huge fucking whore,’ and, perhaps the most offensive, ‘a little girl who does not understand her actions.’” Reading this, it is hard not to feel outrage on her behalf.
Yet what I find intriguing about her blog post is how clearly it manifests a certain kind of pro-sex argument that strongarms the reader into endorsing – and even celebrating – Knox’s decision to be a porn actress. This is what I call the choice feminism honey trap. The honey trap makes it seem as if validating – and even celebrating – the author’s choices is the only possible feminist position one could take. This is a manipulative argument – but one whose ability to coerce the reader relies upon our accepting certain premises about feminism, sex, and liberation that we quite simply do not have to accept.
The choice feminism honey trap has two stages. First, it presents some outrageously misogynistic and/or paternalistic view that feminists are likely to agree is deeply problematic. In Knox’s case, she invokes the slut-shaming from her male peers. The vicious and personal attacks on Knox are – I think most of us would agree – reprehensible, to say the least. This generates sympathy with the author: she has done nothing to deserve this misogynistic abuse. Indeed, this abuse is why she is speaking out in response: to draw attention to “the abuses we inflict on sex workers.”
Cue the second stage of the honey trap, in which the feminist explains that she does not deserve misogyny and paternalism because she is a liberated woman who makes her own free choices. In this spirit, Knox offers a defense of her work in pornography in terms of her first-person experience of porn as liberating. “For me, shooting pornography brings me unimaginable joy. … I can say definitively that I have never felt more empowered or happy doing anything else. In a world where women are so often robbed of their choice, I am completely in control of my sexuality.” Knox is choosing freely to do this kind of work, and she gets to work in an environment characterized by acceptance and celebration of her sexuality – completely at odds with the culture of slut-shaming.
Suddenly, we’re trapped like flies on honey. We’ve agreed that the frat boy harassment is reprehensible: shaming women for being sexual is bad. But now suddenly we find that we also have to endorse Knox’s participation in porn, because to do anything less would be to join forces with the frat boys, to condescendingly tell her that she isn’t empowered, in control, and free to make her own choices. Knox deftly cuts off several classic avenues of critique. She tells us she is aware that other women are abused in the porn industry, but she isn’t – so we can’t assume that she is the victim of coercive producers. She tells us this is her free choice, so now we are just being paternalistic if we start to question whether she is in denial about some childhood trauma that led her into porn. She may star in rough sex films, but she’s engaging in these sex acts consensually, so it is “a horrifying accusation” to suggest that her work perpetuates rape fantasies. And don’t forget: she’s the victim here – so we have to stand with her, just as she is standing with other sex workers against abuse, or else we are standing with her abusers.
By accepting Knox’s frame, we are rendered incapable of offering any critique of pornography. The porn industry can’t be all bad, if it is possible for a high-achieving, ambitious, and sexually liberated woman like Belle Knox to freely choose to participate in it. We’ve come a long way since Catharine MacKinnon!
What has happened here is that pornography has been reframed entirely in terms of individual choice. This is choice feminism applied to sex work: if a woman chooses to engage in porn, then we should all validate that choice. Her choice is even to be celebrated: look how liberated she is from sexual shame! Suddenly, any critique of porn is rendered ineffectual because to criticize porn is to criticize Belle Knox and her choices. That would place us on the side of the frat boys, and we certainly don’t want to be in their company!
But what if we were to reject the choice feminist framing altogether? What if we were to shift the question of pornography to be a question not about individual choice, but about the manufacture and commodification of sexual desire?
If we could do this, we could start to ask a variety of questions, questions that are not reducible to the chosenness or shamefulness of one woman’s participation in making pornography:
How does viewing porn affect desire? Does it shape desire, or does it merely reflect desire? Does the act of viewing pornography cultivate exploration of desire on one’s own terms? Is there a monolithic “porn industry” that manufactures norms of desire? Or are there porn industries that through their competition create a free marketplace of desire for the consumer to explore? (These are the kinds of questions provoked by both Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture and Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman.)
Does porn liberate us from shame and other constraints on our desire? Or does it give us an ideological sense of liberation, while surreptitiously directing and shaping our desire in particular ways? Are there kinds of porn that are more or less liberating? Or have we confused arousal with desire, and desire with liberation?
What are we to make of the alleged phenomenon of porn addiction? Is it possible to become addicted to pornography? Does porn alter the structure of the brains of those who view it? How might porn addiction be impacting the lives of the partners and children of those who suffer from it? Does the ubiquity of porn contribute to a culture of instant gratification, and undermine our capacity for sexual intimacy with others?
By moving towards a choice feminist orientation born of fear of sexual shaming, feminists have largely abdicated the critique of porn to the conservative right. Those feminists who critique porn are often condemned by other feminists as anti-sex.
But there’s another kind of critique possible that is pro-sex. By asking “how does porn – its material production, its normativity, its wide availability, and its ubiquity in pop culture – affect our desires and our capacity for intimacy?” feminists can offer a critique of porn without falling into the honey trap.
The issue isn’t whether Belle Knox is participating in porn of her own free will. Trying to figure out whether she is accurately reporting a subjective experience of empowerment, or whether she is victim of false consciousness, is an absurd – and indeed, intrusive and offensive – task. The issue isn’t whether porn is liberating for her. The issue is: is porn liberating for us?
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Michaele Ferguson
University of Colorado
Since Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In was first published, reviewers have criticized her privileged perspective on women’s leadership, her uncritical embrace of capitalism, and her victim-blaming. Without disagreeing with these critics, I take a different tack and examine the view of feminist politics expressed in her book. Lean In is symptomatic of a particular moment in American feminism: one in which the perceived need to validate all women inhibits feminists’ capacity to lead politically. Many feminists like Sandberg are caught in a therapeutic model of politics, which leads them to water down their controversial claims out of fear that an assertive, feminist call for change might be offensive or hurtful to some women.
Sandberg sees conflict between women as a problem to be overcome; in particular, she is concerned about the “mommy wars” waged between stay-at-home moms and working moms. She calls instead for a “lasting peace”:
We all want the same thing: to feel comfortable with our choices and to feel validated by those around us. So let’s start by validating one another. Mothers who work outside the home should regard mothers who work inside the home as real workers. And mothers who work inside the home should be equally respectful of those choosing another option. (168)
When women judge one another, they end up feeling bad about themselves. Sandberg confesses, “Stay-at-home mothers can make me feel guilty and, at times, intimidate me. There are moments when I feel like they are judging me, and I imagine there are moments when they feel like I am judging them.” (167) These bad feelings undermine political solidarity among women; “guilt and insecurity make us second-guess ourselves and, in turn, resent one another.” (167) If could we just validate one another’s choices, then we would not have the bad feelings that divide us today.
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Behind Sandberg’s call for universal validation of women’s choices is a view of women as natural political allies. Yet in practice, women fight one another. Sandberg laments how women criticized Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision to continue to work through a very short maternity leave. She decries Betty Friedan’s refusal to work with Gloria Steinem. (162) Quoting Madeleine Albright, she warns, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” (164) But all this conflict between women is basically unnecessary, or so Sandberg hopes, because women do not radically disagree. “We should strive to resolve our differences quickly,” she writes optimistically, “and when we disagree, stay focused on our shared goals. This is not a plea for less debate, but for more constructive debate.” (162) While Sandberg briefly wonders whether her expectation of female unity derives from sexist assumptions that women are naturally helpful and collaborative (165), she does not seriously explore the notion that women might radically disagree, that sharing an identity might not translate into sharing any particular goals.
Sandberg’s nonjudgmental feminism is nothing new. She is expressing a view of feminist politics that is widely accepted in mainstream American feminism: what I call a therapeutic view of feminist politics. Dominant approaches to therapy and self-help in recent decades have stressed the importance of validation: validating oneself improves self-esteem; by contrast, judging oneself harms self-esteem. This idea has been transposed by feminist writers and activists into the view that feminist politics should eschew judgment and validate all women. Judgment causes divisions among feminists, whereas validation makes it safe for us to come together. Feminist politics should make us all feel included and feel good about ourselves.
Yet Sandberg is especially intriguing because she cannot entirely suppress the urge to engage in political judgment. In particular, she is very comfortable passing judgment on men. Sandberg encourages readers to openly judge men who do not participate in childcare:
My brother, David, once told me about a colleague who bragged about playing soccer the afternoon that his child was first born. To David’s credit, instead of nodding and smiling, he spoke up and explained that he didn’t think that was either cool or impressive. This opinion needs to be voiced loudly and repeatedly on soccer fields, in workplaces, and in homes. (112)
She frequently praises men who are stay-at-home dads, and urges us all “to encourage men to lean into their families.” (113) This could be a simple case of gender equity: just as she wants to encourage women to lean in at work, she wants to encourage men to lean in at home. But there is still a double-standard here: she validates the choice of women to be stay-at-home-moms, but refuses to validate the choice of those same women’s male partners to devote themselves to their careers.
In these moments Sandberg evinces a very different orientation to politics. She is not restrained by a fear of offending those men whose behavior she judges. She is not worried about whether they will feel guilt about their behavior, or insecurity about not measuring up to her standards. In these moments she writes as if feminism is supposed to pass judgment, as if it is supposed to make people uncomfortable by challenging their views, as if it is supposed to persuade us to change our behavior, rather than simply validate each of us as we already are. She writes knowing that not everyone will agree with her, confident in asserting her views in the face of expected disagreement. In these moments, Sandberg leans in to feminist politics.
Politics is not therapy, nor should it be made to be. In politics, we make partial claims on behalf of our points of view. We will necessarily exclude someone, because our claims do not aim at satisfying everyone. There are winners and losers in politics. We aim at passing judgment, at persuading others to change their views, values, and ideologies. Politics is not about accepting everyone’s life choices as equally valid; it is about pushing for a vision of how one would like things to be. Moreover, politics is not an activity in which it is appropriate for all participants to feel affirmed by others. Politics is necessarily uncomfortable and challenging. We make compromises, we work with people we do not agree with or approve of, we lose, and we fail.
Lean In expresses the tension between the therapeutic and the political, between the desire to validate and the need to judge. The book is supposed to be a call for women to lean in to leadership at work, and yet she undermines this very call by validating women who choose not to do so. Fearful of offending the women she believes are her natural allies, she waters down her message about leadership by telling us it is okay if we do not want to lean in, that this is an equally valid choice. The result is a book about leadership that does not lead, a call for women to be assertive that does not assert itself.
While Sandberg analyzes many barriers to women leaning in to leadership, the one she fails to analyze is the one to which she herself succumbs: the people-pleasing desire to validate all women. Feminists should reject the therapeutic model of politics, which undermines our capacity to engage forcefully in politics. Instead, we could take inspiration from the moments when Sandberg’s capacity for political judgment surfaces. We need to make judgments and take stands with the awareness that we will cause offense, that not everyone will agree with us, that we will have to work at persuading others because we cannot assume natural agreement by virtue of sharing an identity. The lesson Sandberg gives us is this: feminists do not need to lean in to leadership at work so much as we need to lean in to politics.
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Michaele Ferguson
University of Colorado
Mitt Romney’s infelicitous phrase “binders full of women” has dominated coverage of the second Presidential Debate over the past few days at the cost of a deeper exploration of how both he and Barack Obama are framing so-called “women’s issues” to appeal to female voters. Romney and Obama use feminist rhetoric to appeal to women while also occluding the possibility of a more radical analysis of the issues they claim are important.
The way that Romney appeals to women voters is by arguing that the true women’s issues in the current election are economic issues. In the debate, he recited statistics that the “Women for Mitt” segment of his campaign has been pushing for months now: that more women have lost their jobs than men since Obama assumed the presidency, and that 3.5 million more women are living in poverty now than in 2008. His supporters argue that it is Obama, not Republicans, who is truly waging a war on women by not having turned around the economy fast enough.
This technique – expressing support for women’s issues by arguing that some other issue is the real women’s issue – has been a favorite among Republicans at least back to the “W is for Women” Bush/Cheney campaign of 2000. The logic of this rhetorical technique is to claim that if women care about an issue, it is by definition a women’s issue. Obama borrowed this approach in 2008, claiming on his campaign website that everything from national security to education to Medicare to the economy was a women’s issue.
Interestingly, on Tuesday night Obama flipped the logic of this rhetorical technique on its head. In response to a question about gender pay equity, he said, “This is not just a women’s issue, this is a family issue, this is a middle-class issue, and that’s why we’ve got to fight for it.” He repeated this rhetoric when speaking of contraception: “These are not just women’s issues. These are family issues. These are economic issues.” Women’s issues matter not only because they impact women, but because they impact the entire society.
Back in the spring, Obama gave us a preview of this rhetorical shift in his recorded message to supporters of Planned Parenthood. In that speech, he argued that “women are not an interest group.” Supporting women’s access to affordable health care and contraception is not about serving a special interest, it is about supporting our families and our community as a whole. Women, he explains, are “mothers and daughters and sisters and wives. They’re half of this country.” We should support Planned Parenthood because it benefits all of us, not just women.
Romney and Obama are both walking a very fine line in their appeals to women voters in this campaign: they want to address women specifically (or at least those demographics of women that are likely to support their campaigns), yet they cannot alienate male voters. As a consequence of this balancing act both candidates obscure the structures that cause the gender inequities they say they want to redress.
Romney and his supporters frequently mention that women have been disproportionately affected by the economic downturn since Obama took office, and yet they never talk about why this is so. More women than men have been laid off since the start of 2009, yet this is because job losses over the past four years have been primarily in the public sector, where women are more likely to have been employed. Romney cannot explain why women have lost more jobs under Obama, because that would require recognizing that the cuts in local and state government that his Republican base champions have been primarily to blame. Similarly, he cannot talk about why women are more likely to be in poverty because that would require examining the gendered division of labor, the causes of the gendered wage gap, and the lack of quality, affordable child care – let alone contraceptive care. Romney’s support for economic issues as a women’s issue, therefore, is only ever expressed in general terms.
This strategy, moreover, gives him a way to address women without alienating the white men he needs to win the election: if women’s issues can be reduced to economic issues, then he helps women by fixing the economy – which is also how he proposes to help men. As he said at the debate, ”I’m going to help women in America get good work by getting a stronger economy and by supporting women in the workforce.” He doesn’t specify what he would do to support women in the workforce as President (although he suggests it might have to do with those binders), and so he appeals to women without promising them any special treatment that might alienate his white male base.
Obama, by contrast, noted that women in the workforce face discrimination, but it is a peculiar kind of discrimination: it oppresses women, but does not create any corresponding male privilege. He said, “One of the things that makes us grow as an economy is when everybody participates and women are getting the same fair deal as men are.” Men are getting a fair deal in the workplace. The men who surpassed the glass ceiling that kept his grandmother limited to the vice-presidency of a local bank deserved the promotions they were given. It is just that she did not deserve to be held back. Here, we can see Obama making his own version of the tradeoff that Romney has to make: he wants to appeal to women by talking about issues he thinks they care about, and yet he does not want men to think he is blaming them for discriminating against women, or claiming that they do not deserve their higher positions and higher wages.
Both candidates get caught in an odd dance between appealing to women while trying not to alienate men because they treat “women’s issues” as important primarily as a way to get women’s votes. It is no wonder that Obama had no evidence to demonstrate how he has opposed gendered discrimination since he signed the Lilly Ledbetter Act when he first took office. For all his talk, his actions suggest that women’s issues matter only when women’s votes are on the line.
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