My quick thoughts about Battlestar: Galactica, which I have just finished catching up on:

Good:
1. So many strong female roles! A female president (even if she usually defers to the Admiral in matters military); several female fighter pilots; a female commander (even if she is morally, ah, misguided, her gender is clearly not the issue), at least one female surgeon…
2. Deft handling of the abortion issue.
3. One of the lead roles is a Latino - in a sci fi show?! Hooray! (I honestly can’t think of another show where this is true. Not one.)
4. The entire question of “am I a real being, or just a construct, a machine?” - applicable to any number of groups over time and extremely well done.

Bad:
1. Everyone’s last name is whitewashed, “normalized” in a way. While I respect the idea that race is less important than what colony you come from in this world, it seems to me that one could just have easily used last names which “read” as certain ethnicities, cross ethnicities (so, call Laura Roslin - oh - Laura Ramos; call the Adamas the Adachis; etc.). Then again, maybe I just “read” names like Roslin, Adama, Tyrol, and Biers as white, and no one else does?
2. In any case, why give Edward James Olmos such a very white son - especially since his actual son is also in the series, but playing another character? I’m not saying that Jamie Bamber makes a bad Apollo, but I feel like there’s a certain amount of “in space there are only white people or otherwise people we will now pretend are white because hey it’s space” going on. Would it really be so weird to have two Latino male leads?
3. There are no happy, normal family relationships until season 3, and that relationship takes a very gendered slant (Cally stays home with the baby and frets about the child’s health, while Tyrol tries to press them both into working too hard). I realize that we’re at war, etc., etc., but since the BSG world is clearly much more gender-equal than ours, would it be too weird to show us a family that works in that context?

Ugly:
1. There are only two black men with speaking roles. One is a Cylon working to harvest the eggs of (white) human women for their crazy breeding schemes, and one is traitorous (having been tricked by the Cylons). This does not seem… uh… equitable. Black women get by a little better, since they have both Dualla and Elosha, but that’s not a lot of screen time either.

All in all I think that BSG does unusually well with gender issues and clearly is making an effort when it comes to race, there’s still a long row to hoe…

Revised version of something from my LiveJournal:

I’m a big feminist: it’s what I do. My boyfriend is a beer-drinking jock type. Since he and I have had such different experiences, we look at the world in very different ways, and we end up talking about stuff related to women and gender a lot. When you’re a smart, athletic, upper-middle class white guy, you’re not asked to think much about these things; when you’re a smart, socially inept, lower-middle class ex-stripper, you can’t help but think about them a lot. So the other day we were lying in bed talking about appearance and all that, and he said to me, “You know, you really don’t need to wear makeup.” And I started thinking about it, and I was like, what does that even mean? To need to wear makeup? Who needs to wear makeup? There’s a big disjunct here between semantic and propositional content: the words say that there is an actual imperative, a requirement that you wear it; that there is some sort of inexcusable absence if you don’t. The proposition, on the other hand, is taken to mean simply that you are unattractive without it.

What a ridiculous concept, that anyone should need to wear makeup. What a shock, to realize that there is in fact a tacit cultural mandate for women to be attractive. It makes me think of a blog that a friend of mine linked to a while back: it was some sort of fashion/clothing type journal, and in the linked entry, the author talked about how sometimes she wanted to make or buy clothes that she thought were really awesome, but that she knew didn’t make her look good. And she felt bad, like she was doing something wrong in not making the effort to be physically attractive. The money quote was “‘Pretty’ is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female.’” And I thought yeah, damned straight. But thinking about it, I realize that in a way, it is. It shouldn’t be, of course, and yet– on days I know I don’t look good, whether I’m exhausted or don’t feel like putting on makeup or just feeling ugly or fat, I make a deliberate effort to be inconspicuous; to wear bland clothes and call no attention to myself. And it’s not just that I don’t want my social group to see me looking bad: I feel the same way among strangers, people I know I’ll never see again. I feel like I should be pretty; I feel guilty for my failure to look better.

Thinking about it more, I wonder why things should be this way. There’s a biological element, yes: men, so they say, are visual creatures, so the laws of evolution or whatever mean that women want to look good for men. But I have never believed that biology is destiny, and I suspect that these days the social/cultural element has a lot more to do with it. Imagine all the money made in the fields of clothing, makeup, diet products, gyms, beauty magazines, cosmetic surgery, hair products and styling, razors, bath products, laser hair removal, spas, exercise videos… the list is endless. Now imagine the vast amount of time, energy and income women invest in looking good. It’s hard to avoid seeing that men are still more or less in power, and no doubt they’d like to stay there; as long as “women spend their lives trying to look good for men,” as CNN put it in a recent article (http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/02/14/love.science/index.html), they’re carrying a serious political handicap. Who was the feminist who said that it’s hard to save the world when you’re always hungry?

So, I have a confession to make: I like Tyra Banks.

Now, I don’t like the way she made her money, and I don’t like a lot of what she says on “America’s Next Top Model.” But I do like this video. She’s recently put on some weight (to reach the absolutely normal height and weight of 5′10″ and 160 pounds, probably size 9 or 10 jeans) and has come under a lot of fire for it — tabloids calling her fat and all. I quote her response to them:

To those who have something nasty to say about women who are built like me … women who have been picked on, women whose husbands put them down, women at work or girls at school – I have one thing to say to you: Kiss my fat ass!

Maybe her modeling has been partially responsible for little girls’ bad body image — but she’s got this one right.