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Marietta, OH

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Musings

The portrayal of the infertile woman in entertainment

June 25, 2020 by Margie Clayman Leave a Comment

Have you seen or heard a description of a woman or a girl that used the word “hysterical”? Perhaps you’ve used the word yourself when speaking to a toddler or…someone else. “God, this is no reason to get hysterical.”

We have the Greeks to thank for the word “hysteria.” Back then, it was thought that when a woman got too emotional it was because her uterus was wandering around, discontented. These Democratic deacons would put nicely scented spices around the woman’s private area to lure the uterus back to its place. And you wonder why women may have been discontented.

The female psyche continues to be an absolute mystery to men, and maybe even amongst women themselves. This is nowhere more apparent than in the portrayal of infertile women in television shows and movies.

The Root of All Evil

The pain and grief a woman experiences when she has a miscarriage or when she is diagnosed as unable to have a child is a red hot grief that most people strive to keep away from as much as possible. Part of this apparent taboo is the LONG history of barrenness, as it was once called, being treated as a sign that God was displeased with you. Professor of Religion Cynthia Chapman writes up a great summary here). While people often like to think that we have evolved over the last 3,000 odd years, our treatment of women who experience infertility in one way or another has hardly manifested in any better way.

Infertility Makes You Crazy

The history of infertile women being cast as absolute psychos in films and shows is surprisingly long. Check out this Refinery29 post for proof of that.

What got me thinking about this is a more recent viewing experience — Dead To Me. I don’t want to give away any spoilers as the show is still pretty new (I only just got to it through all of my pandemic TV binging). Let’s just say that a woman who has suffered several miscarriages is cast as being a character of sympathy KIND OF because she had that experience. It is an excuse for psychotic behavior. At the same time, the show seems to be trying to acknowledge that infertile women do not get the support they need. In an oddly placed dialogue, the character discusses her loss and says, “Oh, it’s nothing,” and it is the other character who corrects her and says, “No, I mean, I think you lost something real.”

In fact, women who miscarry are most often haunted by a sense of guilt and/or shame. The only person who might suffer more is the husband, because of course men are not allowed to express any feelings, especially sad ones. There still is a sentiment in this country that if you are not getting pregnant, you are doing something wrong. A woman on The Biggest Loser awhile back wanted to lose weight because her doctor told her she was too overweight to get pregnant. Women are told that they are too stressed. “As soon as you stop worrying about it it will happen.” Very seldom is there an acknowledgement from other women that this pain exists. By the way, women who do have children may feel guilty talking to a woman who has miscarried. “Does having my kids with me make it seem like I’m rubbing it in her face? Best to stay away.” This leaves the grieving woman alone and feeling isolated.

What can we do about it?

So how can we change up this whole conversation? Well, first, we need to stop looking at infertility as just a female problem. First of all, men can also be infertile, a condition derisively referred to at times as “shooting blanks.” We have to stop discounting male dreams about parenthood. They are just as valid.

Second, we have to stop shaming women and making them feel that if they can’t have children, they should go hide in a grief-stricken corner, away from all of the “regular” people. Yes, women who have miscarried or who have been diagnosed with infertility or who otherwise have experienced loss will grieve. Grief can take all forms, and it’s never comfortable. If grief was comfortable we wouldn’t dread it so much. We need instead to extend support to women. This needs to happen from the doctor offering the diagnosis to support groups to pharmacists to everyone else.

Finally, we have to stop ostracizing women who are suffering in our modes of entertainment. Is it easier to hate a female villain if she has infertility as her rationale? Is she less wholesome? What exactly is the message women are supposed to garner from this trend?

These kinds of messages are the subliminal messaging we are bombarded with every day. It is time to buck the trend and start over.

Image Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/185967312@N04/49203622652/in/ via Creative Commons

Filed Under: Musings

Why Luke Cage is a Symbol of White Privilege

October 9, 2016 by Margie Clayman Leave a Comment

screen-shot-2016-10-09-at-7-09-29-pmI have seen a few posts floating around about Luke Cage over the last couple of weeks. I’m on episode 10 myself, so I have a little ways to go. The posts I’ve seen have predominantly been shared by white folks, and the reasoning has been, essentially, that Luke Cage is SO BLACK. It’s awesome because there is a Black super hero and strong Black female characters and Black music and ahhhh it’s Black it’s soo good finally equal footing!

I’ve seen a few other posts decrying people who say that there are some racist undertones to the show. “People need to get over themselves” is how those posts tend to go.

When I was in college and grad school, I studied African American literature and history a LOT. I also read the works of Frantz Fanon, who dissected imperialistic powers and showed them for what they were. I read about “the white man’s burden.” I learned about signification, histotextuality, and all kinds of other tools Black Americans have used since they got to the US (sorry, were brought). Were I still a student today, I would write a thesis outlining everything that is wrong with the show Luke Cage. For now, though, I just have this blog site. Instead of doing a thesis, let me just raise a few points for you to consider.

“There aren’t any fathers anywhere”

Especially through the first 4 or 5 episodes, this line is repeated at least once per episode. Sometimes it’s repeated more than once. The line is used in reference to both Black families and Hispanic families. There is never any poking at this statement, so there is a wide open door for interpretation. The audience is led to think to themselves, “Ah, no fathers around because the streets have taken them all. They’re all probably in jail for drug dealing.”

Having recently read The New Jim Crow, this language is telling, misleading, and sad. If you are going to punch around at why so many minority men “aren’t around,” let’s really punch into it. Let’s talk about what “law and order” meant in the 1980s and 1990s. Let’s talk about the infrastructure of our justice system. To just repeat the line as the show does is a subliminal message. “We’re being very realistic here. It’s so sad that Black dads and Hispanic dads are such losers.”

Unacceptable.

The Wild Black Woman (Here there be spoilers)

This is a pretty big spoiler, so if you haven’t gotten to episode 8 yet, stop reading.

The scene where Alfre Woodard’s character, the council woman, kills her cousin brutally, suddenly, and viscously bugged me from the start, and I finally realized why (apart from the fact that plot-wise it was just stupid).

Ever since Blacks were first enslaved here in the US, Black women were treated as animals. In fact, this Clutch Magazine article from late 2015 about how Serena Williams has been treated shows that Black women STILL are treated like animals. This slightly older article talks about the propensity in white culture to refer to Black women as wild, exotic, or exciting.

To me, this scene of an out of control Black woman killing her own cousin simply fed into this racist idea that Black people, and maybe especially Black women, just can’t control those gosh darned feelings. They are animalistic, sub-human, primal.

This message is repeated to a lesser extent when Misty, a Black cop, gets physical with a witness and notes that she lost control. I can’t help but see this as the dominant culture saying, “Don’t worry, we know these folks are out of control. We’re validating your concerns.”

Police Violence is Confusing

I have been pondering this post for quite some time, but this last episode I watched, number 10, pushed me over the edge. I was going to go on and on about this, but this article from Vulture.com pretty much covers everything I was going to say.

I have felt uncomfortable watching this show almost from the start, because to me it feels like subtle race programming. One could even argue that having a bulletproof Black man lets whites fantasize about shooting a Black man over and over. After all, he doesn’t get hurt.

I think it’s sad that the show was written the way it was, with hammer you on the head dialogue about Black heritage just making everything more awkward. It COULD have been a great opportunity. Instead it just feels like more white privilege leaking through a predominantly Black cast.

Filed Under: Musings

Bucket List – 100 places I want to see

July 31, 2016 by Margie Clayman 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking for quite some time that there are just SO many places I want to see for myself, I can’t even think of an organized way in which to attack my wish list. Being a Virgo, I am left with the option of making a list and crossing things off. Maybe if you’ve been to some of these places you could offer me tips, or maybe this will inspire you to make your own list, which could be fun. I’m all about cross-referencing 🙂 Who knows, maybe we’ll even end up in a tour group together! Anyway, in no particular order:

  1. The Shiloh battlefield
  2. Atlanta – in general
  3. New Orleans, especially the Garden District
  4. Venice
  5. Savannah, Georgia
  6. Rome
  7. Paris
  8. Versailles
  9. Hampton Court in England
  10. Mark Twain’s House in Connecticut
  11. Gettysburg – I’ve been there before but the trip was short and marred by car problems
  12. Portland
  13. Seattle
  14. Salem, Massachusetts
  15. The Grand Canyon
  16. The Black Hills
  17. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s house in DeSmet, South Dakota
  18. Charleston, South Carolina
  19. Dublin
  20. Belfast
  21. Glasgow
  22. San Diego Comic Con, especially if Benedict Cumberbatch is gonna be there again
  23. New York City. I know, it’s crazy. I’ve never been there.
  24. Miami – my cousin lives there 🙂
  25. The White House – I’ve seen it from a distance but never got a tour
  26. New Salem, Illinois, where Lincoln “grew up”
  27. Vicksburg
  28. Santa Fe, New Mexico
  29. Albequerque, New Mexico (Maybe I’ll run into Saul Goodman)
  30. Alaska in general
  31. Puerto Rico to take up my friend Raúl’s invitation
  32. Harper’s Ferry
  33. Arlington Mansion (I should retour the cemetery as well. I was a kid the last time I was there)
  34. Andersonville Prison
  35. the James A. Garfield home
  36. Vienna (especially where Mozart lived)
  37. Van Gogh’s home (any of them)
  38. A Broadway play
  39. Stratford on Avon
  40. Hadrian’s Wall
  41. The Great Wall of China
  42. The Holocaust Museum
  43. Monticello
  44. Independence Hall (and Philly in general)
  45. Edison’s lab in New Jersey
  46. Where Emily Dickinson lived, if any of that is still around
  47. Memphis, Tennessee
  48. The Alamo
  49. Mexico City
  50. the hobbit village in New Zealand (amongst other sites)
  51. Sydney, Australia
  52. Ghana, to see my friends the Federwitz family
  53. Montreal
  54. The Galapagos Islands
  55. The Great Barrier Reef (while it still exists)
  56. The Charleston Tea Plantation (I love their tea)
  57. Yorkshire
  58. Cardiff, Wales so I can look for Doctor Who
  59. Barcelona
  60. Madrid
  61. Seville
  62. Salamanca
  63. The Rock of Gibraltar
  64. Morocco
  65. Cairo
  66. The Great Pyramid
  67. Athens and the Acropolis
  68. Buenos Aires
  69. Guatemala to visit my friend Nic Wirtz (boy would that shock him) 🙂
  70. SXSW – I would like to go some time. Just because.
  71. Los Angeles – I feel like I should see it. Ya know?
  72. Vancouver
  73. Yellowstone
  74. Mount Rushmore
  75. Ocean City, New Jersey – I want to see the hubub all of my friends are making about this place!
  76. Baltimore – I was only a kid when I was there and it was a very brief stay
  77. Tokyo – although I would want  a very experienced tour guide who could deal with my crowd aversion 🙂
  78. Jerusalem (if peace ever gets there)
  79. Amsterdam
  80. Odessa, Russia – ancestral home for at least part of my family
  81. the old Czarist palace, or whatever is left of those places
  82. Helsinki
  83. Zurich
  84. Ground Zero – I am not sure I will ever be able to gather up the strength to do this, but I feel I should
  85. Berlin
  86. Bombay
  87. Vatican City
  88. Nepal
  89. Lisbon
  90. Boulder, Colorado (and a trip to see the Vickery family)
  91. Kauai
  92. Costa Rica
  93.  Moscow
  94. the fjords of Norway
  95. Copenhagen
  96. Florence
  97. the painted caves – wherever those are in France
  98. the Anasazi ruins out west
  99. Old Faithful
  100. Switzerland, where my great grandfather came from

Boy, that 100 goes fast. I could go on forever 🙂

Now it’s your turn.

Filed Under: Musings

Letter, July 21, 2016

July 21, 2016 by Margie Clayman 1 Comment

Dear you,

I hope you’re feeling better today. I am feeling nostalgic this week. On Monday, the sky was that perfect summer blue and it was filled with big July puffy clouds. The locusts were singing, the trees are at the height of their greenness, and I was transported immediately back to my childhood and summer vacation. I wasted so much of my summer vacations, spending hours upon hours inside watching VH1 and MTV, which actually showed music videos at the time. That’s how old I am.

Of course, it’s hard to appreciate a vacation after it has been going for a couple of months, I suppose. Maybe you need the contrast between a hustle and bustle day versus one where the porch is the epicenter of your plan. Maybe we should go to school all year round and get summer vacation as adults. But then how would that work for teachers? Somebody figure this out for me.

I have not touched on the news of the day, which is that a Black care giver was shot in North Miami while he was lying on the ground with his hands up. The police officer was asked why he shot this man, who was completely unarmed, and his response was, “I don’t know.” I think it would be better to say, “I have racist programming in my head that I can’t overcome, and when I see a Black man my first instinct is to shoot.” Saying “I don’t know” makes it seem like you decided to destroy an ant hill or something. “I don’t know. I didn’t have anything else to do.”

It will be interesting to see how this one gets turned around. “By lying down I assumed he was taking an aggressive position.” Maybe.

Anyway, enough of that.

I hope you’re well. Let me know what you’re up to. Talk later.

~Margie

Filed Under: Musings

A Special #Tweetdiner to support one of our own

July 17, 2016 by Margie Clayman 1 Comment

Getitng his Fierce Mojo back!
Getitng his Fierce Mojo back!

The Twitter chat I co-founded called #Tweetdiner has never been quite like other chats. First of all, for some reason, most chats don’t incorporate digital food fights. Clearly they are the weird ones. #Tweetdiner never really had any particular topic, except on rare occasions. Rather, the chat has mostly been about friends getting together and chatting conversationally in real time. Last year we got together to remember our friend, Claudia Jackson, who passed away quite unexpectedly. This month, July 28th to be precise, I’d like to host a #Tweetdiner to help out our long-time diner family member, James Fierce.

The deal is this. James has been having a heckuva time over the last few years, but he refuses to be defeated. He wants to start his own importing and consulting business, but he needs a little bit of a boost to get that going. If you know James you’ve probably been supported by him in one way or another, so you know that he certainly merits a little help. James has started a GoFundMe campaign that explains all of the obstacles he has had to deal with along with where he is hoping to go next.

The goal of our chat will be two-fold. Well, actually three-fold. First, it’ll be a reunion, which is always fun. Second, we will strive to get James up and over his campaign goal over the course of the chat. And finally, per James’ request (and this shows how awesome he is) we’ll be talking about how men are impacted by depression and chronic illness. Men often feel pressure to stay quiet about these things, leaving them to either despair on their own or having no option but to pull their own selves up by the bootstraps.

The chat will run from 8-9 PM ET on Thursday, July 28th.

Spread the word, and I hope to see you there!

Filed Under: Musings

Six Years In, I’m Done with the Social Media Game

April 17, 2016 by Margie Clayman 3 Comments

10978521_10153029405155470_543493999890390159_nSix years ago today, I wrote my first blog post. It was not here. It was at a little Blogger site called The Real Mad Man. I had started tweeting a little beforehand.

My reasons for joining Twitter were pretty simple. I had been invited to talk about social media before a group of manufacturers at a small trade show. I knew the concepts behind social media for marketing, but I thought it was important to actually show that I knew what I was talking about. I feverishly tried to build a Twitter presence. Facebook wasn’t quite as important to marketers back in the day.

I realized pretty quickly that just trying to tweet was not really working. I needed something to share that gave me more than 140 characters to show my personality. Enter the blog site.

As time went on, over the next probably 7 years or so, I found myself, remarkably, climbing up the ladder amongst social media marketers. I found my blog posts getting shared by people who had written books and who had huge followings. I found myself on “best of” lists. I started to think about books to write so that I could go out on a speaking tour. When the great recession hit all of this seemed like it would be easier than clawing for business in the traditional way. With all of the support I was getting, it seemed like I could really do this. I became that person who humble bragged about getting mentioned by this or that person. I fiercely lamented decreases in any of my follower counts. How could anyone want to unfollow me? I was great!

Yeah. I started to get REAL cocky. I began to question myself. And I haven’t stopped.

The Social Media Marketing Corner – Is This Real Life?

A lot has changed about the social media marketing segment of the social media world over the last few years. There are people writing books today who are terrible writers. There are people writing about social good and how to be a hero to people when they treat people in abysmal fashion off the blog sites and social media platforms. Individual consultants have grouped together like amoeba to form consortiums of consultants, and they spend much of their time (so it seems to me) talking to each other online. It’s kind of like those disgusting dating or married couples who post to each other on Facebook all day. “I love you. No I love you more. I miss youuuu.” Like yuck, man.

In the old days (five years ago) people with big followings tended to show gratitude for kind words and interest in differing opinions. Today the good words are clearly expected, and even slightly differing opinions are dismissed. It is no wonder that so much of the social media marketing world consists now of talk about “influencers.” When you consider yourself an influencer, talking about how important you are works out pretty well.

No Longer Riding on the Merry-Go-Round

When I say I am leaving the social media game, I do not mean I am leaving social media. I just mean I am excusing myself from the  remarkably ugly world that social media marketers have created. Here is the reality for me. My clients are primarily B2B manufacturers. Do any of the leading social media marketers know what a plumb borehole is? Do they know the difference between a cylindrical floor machine brush and a rotary floor machine brush? Can they speak to lean manufacturing and what goes into getting ISO-certified? Maybe some of them, but overall, these folks are not remotely speaking the language that the manufacturers I know need to hear. Virtual reality is great, but let’s talk about not being able to attract the right kind of work force for the work that needs to be done. Let’s talk about China knock-offs and what lower oil & gas prices really mean for businesses in the industrial sector.

I don’t need to be on a “best of” list to be able to talk to my clients about marketing of any kind. I need to be able to talk to them in a way that shows I really understand where they’re coming from. The social media marketing world does not provide that context or that venue.

What I’ll Be Using Social Media for Now

I’m going to be using social media for two things moving forward. One is not new. I am going to be trying to reach out to companies that need help in today’s increasingly confusing marketing and business world. I’ll be running social media campaigns for some of my clients, too. And I will not be bowing to the gurus in that case either. Influencers for my clients would likely be names you would never recognize unless you’re in the marketing sector too.

But I am also going to be honing my presence for an important purpose. I am going to be striving to reach out to young people who are growing up small. Whether they have achondroplastic dwarfism or another kind like me, these kids are not provided with a whole lot of real life role models. Tyrion Lannister is great but may not be the best example to follow. I want to give young people someone to reach out to who has survived the humiliation and pain of bullying to reach the humiliation of the adult life while still living a fairly regular life. I want to show what kinds of obstacles they might face so they can prepare for them. I want to give parents ideas of how to support their kids.

When I was in high school, I had the opportunity to meet a city leader who was an achondroplastic dwarf – that means she was the kind of dwarf Peter Dinklage or the people on the TLC shows are. A bit before we were due to meet, she canceled. I was heartbroken. I finally had a chance to hear from someone who had found success – a person I could talk to, not just Danny DeVito. It felt like a real slap in the face.

I want to make up for that now. With the voice that I have online, I hope I can reach some kids who need that kind of understanding. Yes, you can make it, even though it’s hard sometimes.

So, that’s where I am on my sixth anniversary of starting to do online…things. As always, there are people who have been with me this whole time, and to them I owe a huge debt of gratitude. I hope I can continue to earn your support and friendship.

Filed Under: Musings

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