Deconstructing "Today"

Gotta love it. This morning, in a running feature about "momtrepreneurs" (the media's oh-so-clever name for female business owners who happen to have children), NBC illustrated the segment with a Wizard of Oz clip in which Dorothy recites what NBC apparently thinks is every woman's mantra: "There's no place like home, there's no place like home."

I am not making this up.

NBC producers used Dorothy—yes, the fictional, fickle girl who fails to embrace her God-given passivity, has big ideas about running away into the big bad world, and is reminded via fantasy that she should damn well be content with what she has at home instead of harboring these grand illusions—to illustrate today's working woman.

The person they profiled as part of their stay-at-home series? The former editor-in-chief of Essence magazine, Monique Greenwood, who opened a B&B and restaurant in Brooklyn while still at the magazine and now owns five inns around the country. A real homebody, that one!

This segment is a perfect example of how the mainstream media will shoehorn any woman's experience into a preconstructed, unexamined narrative that delivers gender prescriptions while claiming to report the facts.

At times, the producers' script directly contradicted the subject's own words. Let's examine:

Meredith Viera: "For one woman, the tug between a full-time job and spending time at home just became too stressful."

Monique Greenwood: "I absolutely loved my job at the magazine."

Me: Owning and operating five B&Bs isn't a full-time job?

Meredith Viera: "Making beds and scrambling eggs weren't always on her list of favorite things to do, but as the full-time [Me: A-ha!] owner of five bed-and-breakfast inns around the country, now they are part of her daily reality."

Monique Greenwood: "I've been able to combine my personal passions with my work. What was my part-time hobby is now my full-time career."

Me: Wow, that's amazing that she cooks and cleans at five B&Bs around the country every day. Does Glinda the good witch help her with that?

Sound bite from Greenwood's daughter: Yeah, it's great. I get to see my mom more.

Meredith Viera: Yes! Yes! That's all we're saying. Monique can be a good mom now, whereas she couldn't before, with that other career. Now that she's only a business owner—excuse me, momtrepreneur—she can nurture other people, which is what women are best at, anyway.

Ask yourself this: If Greenwood were a man, would the story have been told the same way? That he really struggled to work and have a family, and that his decision to become a business owner was all about spending more time at home?

No. If Greenwood were a man, the narrative would have said he wanted freedom, he wanted to be his own boss, so he changed careers—which is all Greenwood did. She didn't leave the high-powered workforce to stay at home—she changed careers. So report it that way.

(See a New York Times article about Greenwood, the editor, here, in which the reporter managed to address the rising competition among magazines marketed primarily to black women without imagining a catfight between Greenwood and Oprah. Way to go, NYT! The article also discusses Greenwood's investment in the old building in Brooklyn that became her first B&B.)

Truth and consequences

Robert Niles at Online Journalism Review has a good post here. Here's some of what he says:

The Internet has returned us to life in a small frontier town, where everyone knows everyone else's business.

Want to stay out of trouble? Then watch what you say in public. Watch what you say around people you believe to be your friends. Instead of unleashing your id 24/7, communicate with intent instead. [...]

Cut a kid a break for something stupid on Facebook, then teach your own kids, students and young colleagues how better to conduct themselves online.

There is no off or on the record anymore. It's all gonna end up there.

This is something I struggle with. I have accepted that I need to have an online presence professionally (and personally, too -- I have relatives all over who want to know what my little boy is up to, and the only way to do that, really, is online), but it's hard for me to give up the little moat of privacy I have constructed around my life. Information that, as a kid, I was taught never to ask someone (money, politics, religion) is now available online. And it will always be available online.

It will be harder for people who commit crimes or simple mistakes to escape their past. Take those girls who maliciously beat another girl unconscious and put it on You Tube, for instance. They might as well go to prison for a very long time -- who would hire them after that?

How can we convince our kids and students they need to be extra-cautious in the virtual world? The "future consequences" argument is always a hard one to sell to young people. Any ideas?

This, in today's "Your 2 Cents' Worth" in the D.M. Register:

Wanted: Good home for pre-menopausal wife. Crabby, know-it-all disposition. Gets along well with kids. Still cooks and cleans and very well maintained, a suburban beauty. Will consider return in five to seven years.
—Pleasant Hill man

This, perhaps, in tomorrow's paper:

Wanted: Reality check for prehistoric husband. Bigoted, obnoxious disposition. Gets along well with no one. Has a retro sense of entitlement and never leaves his recliner, a suburban sloth. No returns.
—Every woman you know

One can hope.

Spring ... finally

Will this work? I dunno. Here's my little video experiment. Music is "Heavenly Day" by Patty Griffin.