Beauty Bias

In this week's edition of Newsweek, columnist Dahlia Lithwick discusses the "massive social problem" of "appearance bias." Her column begins:

"If you are anything like me, you left the theater after Sex and the City 2 and thought, there ought to be a law against a looks-based culture in which the only way for 40-year-old actresses to be compensated like 40-year-old actors is to have them look and dress like the teenage daughters of 40-year-old actors. You can't even look at Sarah Jessica Parker without longing to feed her croissants."

Well, I've never longed to feed SJP anything, but I'm on board for the rest of her claim. Ageism is alive and well at the movies. When Catherine Zeta Jones plays the love interest of an almost 70-year-old Sean Connery or Maggie Gyllenhall is paired with an aging Jeff Bridges, no one blinks an eye. But switch it around to an older woman/younger man scenario, and she's disparagingly referred to as a "cougar," and the relationship becomes the stuff of comedy.

But it's not simply ageism. My dissertation dealt with beauty theory, and I find it fascinating. There's no denying that humans (all ages, both genders) are drawn to beauty. I remember watching a segment of some news show in which they'd trained two kindergarten teachers--one very pretty, one not-so-attractive--to teach the same lesson in exactly the same way. After the two teachers taught, the reporter asked the children, "Which teacher is the best teacher?" The answer? You guessed it--the pretty one won out, every time. Psychologist Nancy Etcoff argues that beauty preference is biological--we can't help it. It represents health, the survival of our species,and even the survival of our own genes.

However, feminists like Naomi Wolf argue that it's more than a natural preference for facial symmetry, the proper layout of features, good proportion, and a straight profile. She sees beauty expectations as coercive, sexist power-plays, and historian Arthur Marwick warns that any beauty theory that leaves out the power of sexual desire is incomplete.

In Lithwick's Newsweek article, she talks about a new book by Deborah Rhode, a professor of law at Stanford, called The Beauty Bias, in which she "proposes a legal regime in which discrimination on the basis of looks is as serious as discrimination based on gender or race." Very interesting. But is that even possible? I've already ordered the book, so I'll give you an update on it after it comes in and I've read it. I'm pretty sure it'll move to the top of my to-read list.

Movie Day Book Club

This past Spring, a good friend and I started what we hope will be a new tradition for us--a monthly Movie Day. Actually, we could call it our Movie Day Book Club. We choose a book that we both want to read. Then, once a month, we go to Little Rock, discussing the book we read on the drive there and during a nice lunch. Then, we see a movie at Market Street and discuss it on the way home. (Sometime during the day, we usually manage to drop by a bookstore or two and visit Whole Foods.) You're jealous now, aren't you?

Part I:

This month's novel was Wally Lamb's The Hour I First Believed. We both had a love/hate relationship with the book. We thought it was well-written, loved the literary allusions, and liked the questions it raised. However, we found the novel somewhat depressing, the mixture of relatively current real-life events and fiction troubling at times, the PhD thesis interpolation interesting but distracting, and sometimes we just didn't like the main character very much. But overall we were pleased with our choice--lots to think about and to discuss. This next month, we're going to read Marilynne Robinson's Home.

Part II:

Independently, we check out the movie schedule before we go, and, so far, it's been kind of funny--we've each settled on the same movie before we even discuss it. Is this a great friendship, or what? This week we saw City Island. I won't spoil it for you, but I will say that it's a really good movie. It made me sad, but at the same time, I couldn't stop laughing. Out loud. The movie explores how hard it is to be real with the people we know and love best and how our actions are like stones thrown into a pond--they plunk down into our own lives, changing them forever, and they ripple out and touch the lives of our family and friends. Yet the film also affirms the power of love. It's not a depressing movie; it's a life-affirming one. Two thumbs up. Or maybe I should say four.

National Audiobook Month

June is National Audiobook Month.

To celebrate, the Get Caught Listening group over at audiobookcommunity.com will feature six free audiobook segments every Tuesday in June.

As part of NAM, The Audio Publishing Association is organizing an effort to get more than 100 authors to discuss audiobooks on their respective websites, Facebook pages, and Twitter. Look for those to appear throughout the month of June.

I use audible.com. For a small monthly fee, you get one download a month, and often they offer specials and discounted audiobooks.

Academic Freedom

A friend sent me this on FaceBook, and I thought it was worth posting here, especially since Lipscomb was the host of the Christian Scholars Conference that I enjoyed so much last week. This article talks about the freedom to discuss God and a Christian worldview, but the academic freedom at the Christian Scholar's Conference goes even beyond that--people are allowed to speak freely about their faith and/or doubt, to make assertions, to disagree with the status quo, to ask questions. In other words, they are allowed to be real, to admit that they are humans with limitations and may not have all the answers. And the audiences (at least those that I was a part of) were willing to listen, to entertain other points of view, to engage in respectful dialogues, whether or not they agreed. It's exhilarating and faith-building to be with people like that, especially when you're singing the hallelujah chorus.

Booking It--Long and Short

Which do you prefer? Short stories? Or full-length novels?

Nothing against short stories--I've read some really great ones, but I'm a lover of novels. The longer, the better. There's nothing like entering a tale and becoming completely immersed in the world the author has created. If a novel is really long and exceptionally well-written, sometimes it can be almost disorienting to finish it. I don't quite know what to do with myself for a while. It almost feels as if the story is so "true" it must be continuing somewhere, but I'm no longer allowed to be a part of it. Nerdy, I know.

Smoking as a Feminist Act?

1969 Virginia Slims Commercials

Friday Night Fun

The Tokens Show

A slice of Nashville. Where Bill Moyers meets Prairie Home Companionin a most exquisite intersection of faith, fine arts, and scholarship.

Doubt

Tonight, we get to see a presentation of John Patrick Shanley's play Doubt and afterwards participate in a group discussion led by the playwright himself.

John Patrick Shanley's DOUBT

At the Christian Scholars' Conference

It's 1964, St. Nicholas in the Bronx. A charismatic priest, Father Flynn, is trying to upend the schools' strict customs, which have long been fiercely guarded by Sister Aloysius Beauvier, the iron-gloved Principal who believes in the power of fear and discipline. The winds of political change are sweeping through the community, and indeed, the school has just accepted its first black student, Donald Miller. But when Sister James, a hopeful innocent, shares with Sister Aloysius her guilt-inducing suspicion that Father Flynn is paying too much personal attention to Donald, Sister Aloysius sets off on a personal crusade to unearth the truth and to expunge Flynn from the school. Now, without a shred of proof besides her moral certainty, Sister Aloysius locks into a battle of wills with Father Flynn which threatens to tear apart the community with irrevocable consequences.

Directed by Mike Fernandez, Chair of Lipscomb University's Theater Department

John Patrick Shanley's plays include Defiance, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Savage in Limbo, the dreamer examines his pillow, Beggars in the House of Poverty, Welcome to the Moon, Four Dogs and a Bone, Italian American Reconciliation, The Big Funk, Where's My Money, Dirty Story,Sailor's Song, and Romantic Poetry (a musical). His play Doubt was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2005 Tony Award for Best Play. In the arena of film, Mr. Shanley has had four spec screenplays produced: Five Corners, Moonstruck, The January Man, and Joe Versus the Volcano. Five Corners won the Special Jury Prize for its screenplay at the Barcelona Theatre Festival. For Moonstruck, Shanley received both the Academy Award and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay. He also did the film adaptations ofAlive and Congo, as well as Live From Baghdad for HBO. Mr. Shanley directs in both theatre and film. In 2009, Shanley's adaptation of DOUBT, which he directed, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film stars Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis, each of whom were nominated for Academy Awards for outstanding performance.

Pre-Conference Event

One of the really nice things about the Christian Scholars Conference, in addition to the well-known plenary speakers and the excellent cross-disciplinary panel presentations, is the entertaining and thought-provoking extra events. Here's tonights': (don't know why the picture's so dark--blame the CSC website)

BURMA VJ

Ward Hall, Lipscomb University

Wednesday, June 2 • 7 p.m.

Free and open to the public.

Interfaith panel discussion with Lipscomb faculty and leaders of the Nashville Buddhist community to follow.

BURMA VJ is the crowning film in Lipscomb's 2009-2010 HumanDocs social-justice documentary series, which included Garbage Dreams, Made in L.A.,The Age of Stupid, Greensboro: Closer to the Truth, and Freedom Riders. The aim of the series is to stimulate reflection about and encourage action around key issues such as economic inequality, workplace injustice, racism, and climate change – areas of particular concern given Lipscomb's roots in the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures and the ethical teachings of Jesus.

HumanDocs is a presentation of the School of the Humanities within the College of Arts and Sciences and the Lipscomb Center for International Peace and Justice, in cooperation with the Nashville Film Festival.

In addition to the public Pre-event featuring Burma VJ Wednesday night, the film screens Friday morning 8:45-10:15 during the Christian Scholars' Conference, followed by a 90-minute discussion, "Burma VJ: Documentary Film as Art, Truth-Telling, and Call to Faithful Action." For more information, visit csc.lipscomb.edu, "Paper and Panel Sessions."

My New Listen

This should make the six-hour drive to Nashville for the CSC a little more interesting:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

by Steig Larsson

Unabridged

Publisher: Books on Tape

Narrated by Simon Vance

Length: 16 hours 19 minutes

Publisher's Summary

A spellbinding amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue....

It's about the disappearance 40 years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden...and about her octogenarian uncle, determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder.

It's about Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently at the wrong end of a libel case, hired to get to the bottom of Harriet's disappearance...and about Lisbeth Salander, a 24-year-old, pierced and tattooed genius hacker possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age, who assists Blomkvist with the investigation.

This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, astonishing corruption in the highest echelons of Swedish industrialism - and an unexpected connection between themselves.