bluewavedruid:
http://www.care2.com/rewards/

I've been reading articles on the Care2 site for a while. I just discovered they have a points system for doing things on the site that can be "redeemed" for purchased for causes. Basically if you log in, sign some petitions, send some e-cards, comment on articles, etc you accrue points and then you redeem the points for things like off=setting carbon emissions, sending micro-loans, providing clean water etc.

The way I look at it, I'm on that site looking at the articles anyway, so why not, eh?

bluewavedruid:
I love So You Think You Can Dance. I mean LOVE it. Love, love, love, love, love. Let me count the ways. In no particular order they are:

First of all, dance has always been the “poor cousin” of the entertainment and art businesses. Sadly, it just doesn’t rake in the bucks. Dance is a career that is fraught with way more problems than any other art form. Injury, low pay, short career span... the list goes on.

Dancers are more prone to injury, and to injuries that are career-ending. Yes, musicians and actors do get injured all the time. But I can’t think of a case of a musician or actor being so badly injured that their career was over for good because of it. Hell, Rick Allen lost an arm and he’s STILL a drummer. A dancer’s career is on the chopping block with every step they take, literally. You never know when the next break, sprain or dislocation could determine the last day you dance.

I read recently where the top ballerinas in Canada are only making around $30,000 a year, and everyone else in the company makes a hell of a lot less. That’s not much. Not when you consider that to get to that point you’ve got to be a principal dancer and you’re at the end of your career span. Keep in mind, retiring from ballet you’re still probably 2 and half decades away from drawing Canada Pension too.

So yeah, not a career you get into unless you NEED to dance like you need to breathe.

So the first reason I love SYTYCD is because it is finally elevating dance, in all genres, closer to the levels of music and acting. The money will never be near what actors earn and what musicians used to make on album sales. But hey, dancers have never been in it for the money anyway. What matters is that people are actually watching, and enjoying it too! People are turning on their TVs twice a week to watch dancers do the job of dancing. They’re not back-up dancers for a singer. They’re not selling the latest gum or pants from the Gap. They’re dancing, for dancing’s sake.

As a TV show, the mode of delivery is brilliant. The reason dance doesn’t make a lot of money is because, until now, there’s never been a mass product to sell. With dance (and theatre too) you get one show in one theatre at one time – not like selling several million records. There’s no dance equivalent of Rumours or Thriller. Movies on the silver screen can be played in a million theatres at the same time... more money for the single product! So having SYTYCD on TV is a huge step up from a business angle.

So the second reason I love SYTYCD is because of the trickle-down respect it’s giving to all dancers, choreographers and dance teachers.

One of the great things about this show is that they show the clips of how much hard work goes into preparing for the 2 or 3 minute piece you’re about to see. I LOVE that. Working class people respect hard work. The fact that dancers make it look easy was always a bit of a detriment – people couldn’t understand why dancers were praised for “just jumping and twirling around a bit”. But now the “average Joe” can see how much work it is.

The cuts to arts funding in the schools has made this attitude more prevalent in recent years – we have a whole generation of people who think the performing arts is super-easy because they’ve never been made to try it themselves. It’s quite a shame that a TV show is doing more to educate the general public about the arts and careers in the arts than our schools do. All I can say is Thank the Gods shows like SYTYCD are doing a good job of it (American Idol, btw, is not... but that’s a story for another time).

Also SYTYCD is doing a great service to various genres of dance. It is teaching the audience about different styles, and because the dancers, judges, choreographers and host all respect each style equally, the audience is learning that too. I LOVE that. They make no distinction in importance or value between, for example, hip hop and ballroom.

In the first couple of seasons the distinction was there. In fact in the first season they pretty much only wanted ballroom people. Eventually people trained in other genres have proven their versatility and adaptability and have since garnered the respect of the judges. I also think that as the judges themselves became more conversant in the technicalities of each genre they relaxed their previous distinctions. In the early seasons for example, Mary was the ballroom expert, Mia the contemporary expert, Shane the hip hop expert, etc. Now they are all capable of critiquing all styles.

SYTYCD is now to the point where the distinction between *“upper” and “lower” forms of dance has disappeared. This point alone may be this show’s single most important contribution to culture. Fifty years from now when people look back at significant shifts in the public thinking about differences among peoples, this show will be credited to that because it has broken down and removed the classist and ethnic distinctions of value among dance forms and dancers. For a street dance developed by poor, inner-city Black youth and a highly regulated competitive form developed by the wealthy “White” world to be held in the same regard is, quite frankly, something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. The old distinctions do not exist on this show.

As someone known primarily as a belly dancer, this is huge for me. As someone who has trained, performed and taught a variety of styles, I have personally experienced this distinction between “upper” and “lower” class styles. And I’ll thank you to note that the distinction is generally NOT among dancers!! Of course dancers know better, because most dancers train across multiple styles. The good ones always cross-train, period! I grew up doing tap, jazz and ballet and all three were equally weighted. I grew up with the mindset that all styles are equally respectable. Some are harder work than others, but in and of themselves, one is not intrinsically better than another.

*By “upper” and “lower” I mean the following:
Upper includes all styles of dance that have formal training programs, exams and competitions. They have standardized terminology with little variation between styles within the genre (i.e Russian ballet and Italian ballet still use the original French terminology). They also have various governing bodies (national and international). These are forms that require professional training credentials in order to teach the formal syllabus. These include ballet, jazz, tap, contemporary, all forms of ballroom and certain ethnic folk dances such as highland and step.

By lower I mean those styles that are not organized, do not have formal training, exams and competitions. These are primarily ethnic folk dance forms, and some professional “showcase” forms like belly dance (esp cabaret style), burlesque, “exotic” dancing, hip hop, crumping etc. In other words, forms that evolved as a folk dance specific to a geographical area and have become forms of performance and amateur or professional entertainment, i.e. hip hop dance began in the streets by Black inner city youth but is now in every music video. These forms can be taught formally (not necessarily learned at your mother’s knee any more) but there’s no such thing as a formal syllabus or standardized terminology.

Until recently these two differences have been used to distinguish the validity of a style.
The formal training of an “upper” style meant that it was of a higher value than the “lower” styles. That is because the lower styles were something anyone could learn, usually within the context of one’s own ethnicity, with no formal training. Also in Western thinking, we expect anyone who puts themselves forward as a teacher to have formal credentials to do so because we expect that of most training forms. Many’s a new student is disappointed and suspicious of me to learn that I don’t have a certificate or license authorizing me to teach belly dance. The upper forms have that authority.

As a further note to that, some styles cross the upper and lower divide. Highland, for example, is a distinctly ethnic form, but it is highly organized, training is extensive and the exams and competitions are a big undertaking. It is almost never done recreationally and even those dancers who do it for cultural demonstration purposes are top competitors too.
Also, most forms can be done formally or informally, regardless of the upper-lower divide. Although it is harder to find recreational classes for adults, they do exist even in ballet and tap. Obviously most people taking belly dance and ballroom are doing it recreationally for the social and fitness aspects.

To be Continued...

bluewavedruid:
Being both a feminist and a fitness instructor is not so easy some days. *le sigh*

There’s several issues I was about to tackle when I started writing this. I’ve scrapped a lot of that because it was getting too long and un-focused. If I ever have the time and money to go do the master's degree in Women's Studies at MSVU, this will SO be my master's thesis. Like, totally.

Those of you who had a TV in the 80’s and are either female or had female children at the time will have a short stroll down memory with this little video clip:



This ad along with my work in my office job is what has started me off about thinking about how we sell fitness to females, and how that can be problematic. I had actually forgotten about these ads and the products themselves until someone posted a clip on one of the feminist websites I go to. These ads are popping up all over the place lately, as are a lot of feminist questions about the fitness industry (generally thought to be evil and sexist) and how we operate. So this is quite a jumping-off point for more of the stuff I’ve been thinking about.

Here’s the first question, because it relates specifically to the GISG products and ads.
1. Is it appropriate to be selling aerobics and fitness toys to young girls?

There’s two opposing camps around this question:
Yes, because there’s a childhood obesity problem in our society, and besides this is the kind of exercise girls and women like to do
VS
No, because stuff like this causes girls to have eating disorders and it is sexist stereotyping, and because children should exercise by playing, not by “working out”

Ok, seems like the “No” side is winning, at least in terms of the number of arguments against this sort of ad and product. They’re certainly trucking out the usual feminist arguments on such issues. But I have to settle myself squarely on the “Yes” side of this argument.

I say “Yes” because from what I can see, having been in schools, working with girls and women in Guiding and just being out in the general public, the rates of obesity are higher than the rates of anorexia and bulimia. To put it extremely bluntly, there’s a hell of a lot more fat people than there are under-weight people. That goes for all age-ranges, by the way. For children, and girls especially, it’s getting worse all the time.

Personally, I think the epidemic of childhood obesity is due more to the poor quality of the food we have access to than to a lack of access to opportunities for activity. When it comes to adults I think there are other factors in play, although food quality is still a big one. That’s a whole other post though, one with a much more economic bent. Anywhoo…

I have a few problems with the statements on the “No” side of the argument. First of all, like I said, I don’t think the number of girls starving and purging is higher than the number who eat normally and over-eat. If it was there’d be a lot more under-weight girls and women walking around. I’m not saying that girls and women with anorexia and bulimia are not a grave concern – they absolutely are. We need to be working on solutions for those women (and more often lately, men) too.

Further to that, we need to understand that disordered eating is not limited to anorexia and bulimia. Over-eating is a form of disordered eating as well. It’s just the far other side of the spectrum. While I feel the majority of the increase in obesity is due to poor quality of food, I also believe a certain percentage of that population is indeed over-eating. In other words, the new percentage of obese people is due more to food quality and economic factors. Those who would be obese with even the most perfect food quality are so due to over-eating and under-moving.

There’s another issue of disorder that affects all of this too. That is, disordered perspective on size.

Often people think that us horrible skinny bitches in the aerobics classes are all anorexic or bulimic. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The fact is, most people finding success in the gyms and fitness classes are in the range of normal sizes. I think the problem is that weight is so out of control for so many people these days that many of us rarely see a normal sized person any more. Someone who’s at an appropriately healthy weight is so rare now, we think she’s abnormally skinny.

I know this partly because of personal experience. I’m roughly the same size I was 15 years ago. At that time, I was considered “curvy” or “chunky” or “thick”. Not big enough to be fat, but certainly nowhere near skinny. I was noticeably larger than the majority of girls my age at the time. Nowadays a lot of people think I’m abnormally skinny. I’m certainly not. For one thing, I have too much muscle now to be skinny. Plus my body fat percentage is somewhere up around 30%. I’m certainly not in the same ball-park as the 5’10”, 120lb , 7% body fat runway models.

But hey, who is? Other runway models, that’s who. They’re the only ones with bodies like that. That’s why they become runway models. Sadly, we see their faces and bodies in all kinds of magazines, billboards and TV ads, so we’re tricked into thinking there’s more of them in society than there really is.

The other problem with the “No” side of the argument against the GISG is the whole argument about children should play, not work. First of all, that’s not accurate. I’m not advocating child labour here, but children do work, and they do need to work. We send children to school to do school work. Their play (sport, arts, etc) is work as well. Just because they aren’t paid for it doesn’t mean they don’t work at it.

There’s also an underlying assumption there that all fitness is work. Sorry, but it’s not. It is for some people, but those are the people who resent having to work out (or work in any form), and see it as a chore or a punishment.

Sure, it’s work for me in the sense that it’s how I make my paycheque. So I admit, I have more reason than most to love doing fitness classes. The thing is, those who do classes all the time actually do it for 2 main reasons. One is they have a ball doing it, and the second is they need it to feel better. It is NOT work. For a lot of us it is play, and in most cases, the only kind of play we can allow ourselves in the run of a day or week.

There is a play-work dichotomy here. Too many people believe that adults work, children play – end of discussion! That’s not the way it should be. There needs to be a balance for all ages. Besides, you can’t appreciate one if you don’t have at least a little bit of the other. For many adults, play of any kind seems forbidden, since it would be childish. For women in business this is especially true, because women have often been seen as children in the “old boys club” type of environments. So in these cases, a bit of play under the name of work is a useful thing to have.

That being said…

I realize that maybe we in the fitness industry need to come up with a better phrase than “work-out”. We’re using the word “work” when far too many people (and I think it’s more so for women) have painfully negative associations with that word. Then again, maybe we need to change the nature of other forms of work, so that people don’t always associate work with “bad’. Like I said above, it’s seen as a chore or a punishment. I find this belief really prevalent among older women too who, I think, deep down resent having to work in any capacity because they come from a time when work was a man’s role. As someone who enjoys my work I can’t relate to that. Even when I had jobs I hated, I stilled loved being a person who works. M’eh, one more thing to add to the list of why I’m not a normal woman. This is something I’ll have to add to the list of things to blog about separately, I guess.

Anyway, what we have here is three things that are dis-ordered: eating, perception of body size, and relationships to work.

Was Get In Shape Girl ok when it first came out in the 80’s? Ehhh, no, not really. This was the time before the current levels of childhood obesity (although it was starting… thank you Cola Wars!). The toys aimed at girls at the time were almost entirely based on getting girls to mimic adult womens' behaviours. They still are largely, but some toy makers are getting better (thank you Dora the Explorer!!). So the whole concept behind the Get In Shape Girl product line was to “be just like Mommy” and since aerobics was the hottest trend at the time, there was a good chance that’s what Mommy was doing. And since Mommy was a skinny bitch who only cared about her appearance… ugh, you see the direction that goes. Keep in mind too that the mommies of the age group of girl GISG was aimed at we’re ego-driven and consumerism-driven Baby Boomers. So it makes sense that this was marketed that way.

There's also the issue (and I'll tackle this in another post later) of this being the type of exercise girls and women tend to like... or are at least conditioned to like... Like I said, another post later. BUT, I did have one of these sets back then, and wanted it not because Ma was into exercise (she totally wasn't) but because I was tired of being called fat all the time and this was the only thing that appealed to me. It appealed to me then, and still does today, because it is so much like dance.

So, does that make Get In Shape Girl ok today? Yes, if a child really wants to try it out, and is not being forced or coerced by crazy parents. We don’t have fitness classes for kids for a number of reasons (the work-play split being one of them), so this is a reasonable alternative. There’s the added bonus of it being available in rural areas that don’t have access to family fitness facilities or programs or safe walking areas. Having grown up in that little rat-hole of a town, I strongly feel that this is no small point. Finally, if it is presented as something for kids, in a kid-friendly way, hopefully they will see this CAN be play and not work, and not resent exercise for the rest of their lives.

And hopefully they’ll learn not to be afraid of us skinny bitches too.