Working Working Working

Only not right now.

This portion of a post from healingmirth got me thinking about career women in media these days.
"...but I'm not sure I can handle another hour of the.... and the hardworking "hilariously" uptight woman who's been ripped from her planned and promising career path without any explanation. I have a sinking feeling that in the second half her tragic past will be revealed as the reason she threw herself into her work, and that she just needs someone to heal her heart."

This reminded me of a comment I left on a postabout the upcoming film Morning Glory, which also looks like it features a young career woman who will lose it all and find that she needs to get out of her office to fulfill her life and/or find that an unexpected problem that distracts her from work contains more meaning to her than her career.*

I keep getting this feeling like all these movies don't want women to succeed. These career women so often seem to find that they are unhappy in their jobs, or that something unexpected will happen that will make their happy jobs disappear or force them to leave it.**

Your job is probably not going to be the most rewarding part of your life. For some people, it is, and that's a wonderful opportunity to have in your life. But much more often, even a good job is challenging and difficult and will have parts that you really hate. So the fact that these career women are shown as finding their jobs less than fulfilling is not a bad message- it's realistic to a point, and the message is not bad. But the fact that the message seems to be sent so much more often using a female character, (with whom presumably, women in RL are more able to relate, and men in RL may have problems relating) suggests that this is something women need to hear more. If women worked more often out of the home than men, or if there were a prevailing stereotype of woman as the provider, then this message would be a great thing to target at women- progressive and thoughtful, even.

But that's not the case. There are more men with full time work than women. In most companies, there are more men in higher positions than there are women in higher positions. But, regardless of numbers, the normative gender roles show women's careers as less important than men's. Women in film cannot find fulfillment in their jobs, because they are supposed to be fulfilled by other, more feminine things. And TV and movies are showing that in these characters, and that, frankly, bugs the hell out of me.

Because I am currently living a life that is about the kind of scholar I want to be, and yes, that is my job. It's also my calling, and the most intellectually satisfying thing that's happening in my life. I have made is explicit with my Significant Other that school comes first, and he agrees, because he is doing the same thing. And if something came along and disrupted that part of my life, I would not "move on." I would come back, brandishing my fists, and get back to doing my job, because it's a big honking important thing in my life.


Footnotes-
* I posted at the time that overall, the idea that you need to get a life beyond your highpowered career, is itself not bad, but I notice it being played a lot with female character and not so much with male, and the discrepancy bothers me.
** Am I the only one who sees this as a pregnancy metaphor? Suddenly and unexpectedly having to leave your present life behind because of some gigantic change that you don't really expect and don't have much time to prepare for? That sounds like your birth control failed.

Things that my break has shown me...

Experiments in Delinkification, by Nicholas Carr
The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It's also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank. What's good about a link - its propulsive force - is also what's bad about it.


This article is thoughtful and fairly convincing. My last post actually suffered from link-distraction in just putting the damned thing together- I had to go find links to the post where I responded, and so I took about five minutes out of writing to hunt it down from all the email notifications I get from LJ and find the post. So, I am considering, briefly, adding all the links I would normally pepper throughout a post in a footnote-y section at the end. It would certainly streamline the process.


Puppeteer extraordinaire Liam Hurley (of The Royal City Band) conceived, directed and produced this mesmerizing vision set to Josh Ritter's song "The Curse."
Videography and editing by Marie Le Claire. Puppeteering by Liam Hurley and Kevin White. Production Assistant was MacKenzie Pause.

This video was haunting and a little bit creepy, but the story the song is telling is itself a bit creepy, so there's no damage done to the song by the video.

There are several shots where the two characters are dancing alone in a dark room, and I thought that was a wonderful way of showing the ambiguous nature of their relationship as it changes through time. In a way, they are still together in that first moment when they fell in love- that doesn't change because the moment in which it happened is past and cannot be altered. But at the same time, as their relationship grows more distant as the woman grows older, the darkness that surrounds them is a difficult contrast to their present relationship- the darkness seems to threaten them both, and their dance together seems a small act of defiance that's preordained to fall apart (since we, the viewers, have already seen that it has fallen apart.)

In way, it makes me think of a recent Something Positive comic, in which the Vanessa is worried about whether Davan, her boyfriend and the main character, is looking at their relationship as long-term. They don't promise anything but the fact that they love each other in the moment and that that love is valuable.
I'm kind of feeling like I'm in a similar stage with my own personal life, where I'm feeling like the relationship I'm in may well be on its way to being "long-term" but I don't know what that means and how long it's going to last. And even if I were promised that things would last forever, that's a really hard promise to make- I'm not sure I could trust it, because people fall out of love all the time, and it's not entirely under your control. The best I can get is "I love you now," and to be quite honest, that's a lot more than I thought I might ever get. By an act of will, I am making it be enough.


LINKS
Experiments in Delinkification

Josh Ritter's "The Curse" set to puppets

Something Positive: May 23, 2010