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I was over at the Fox News website–digging around for something to disagree with– when I had one of those “I hate when they’re right about something” moments.  Of course, it wasn’t about anything happening in DC or the world,  but a shared hatred of the pornification of young girls by megastars and megacorporations.

The latest pornified 8 year old is none other than Myley Cyrus’s little sister, Noah, and her Disney “Hanna Montana” star pal, Emily Grace Reaves.  It seems Emily recently launched a line for Oh La La Coutour, the Emily Grace line, that is lingerie for the little ones.

According to the official press release announcing the line in September, the designs feature “versatile styles that can be worn with sweet ballerina slippers, casual sneakers or paired with lace stockings and boots for more of a rock and roll look.”

Okay, I suppose “rock and roll style” might involve animal prints and corsets… for eight year olds.  But take a look at these images from the line:

Is that a pole in the background?  Are there ANY parents involved in any decisions made in these kids’ families- including Ms. Miley there, who as you might recall did pose almost topless for Vanity Fair at aged 15.  But 15 is a sexual age. It’s supposed to be anyway, even if crazy religious groups would like 15-year-old girls to pledge eternal virginity and wear “promise rings” from their fathers.

Eight is NOT.  I’m not going to impose on any sexualized being’s “right” or “choice” to dress like a sex worker and call it fashion, despite having serious doubts that such fashion is “liberating.”  But as 3rd Wave Feminism has been telling us, there’s something “liberating” about embracing one’s inner lap dancer.

And I supposed to be fair to the mostly middle-class white women who think “pole dancing” is both fashion and a great exercise class (as opposed to the primarily poor and disproportionately of color women who do it for a living), engaging in their own pornification can provide some resistance to the “sexual innocence” and “purity of white womanhood” so near and dear to the racial hierarchies of America.

But seriously – is there anyone who believes there is anything resistant or liberating about turning little girls into “female chauvinist pigs”?  Does anyone other than the Cyrus family and Disney and all the rest of the megastars and megacorporations making a profit off of the pornification of 2nd graders think this is a good idea?

I have to  believe that when Fox News and I both think that the pornification of 2nd grade girls is a bad idea, then most of America will not be buying these slutty little numbers for their 8-year-old girls.

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The first Tea Party Convention is taking place in Nashville, TN.  Last night Sarah Palin gave a speech and it was a bomb.  Not the way her speeches are usually bombs- in that spectacularly stupid but folksy populist way that brought her to national attention in the first place.

No, just a bomb.  Not funny; not biting; not even interesting.

An article on the Atlantic website called Palin’s speech a possible mistake for her and the movement.   The convention has been criticized for being elitist, expensive, and for-profit and

Palin’s appearance has driven some of that criticism. She’s rumored to be getting $100,000 for her keynote.

We’re getting massive grassroots input that they’re unhappy with what she’s doing right now,” said Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the group Tea Party Patriots, a national grassroots coordinating group with state and local chapters, which seeks to communicate with smaller independent groups across the nation.

According to an op-ed that Palin wrote for USA Today, she went to the Tea Party because after thinking “long and hard” about it, she wanted to go not to financially benefit (she insists any fees will go right back to the “cause”), but because she shares the Tea Party’s

limited government, common sense and personal responsibility. This movement is truly a grassroots, organic effort. It’s not a top-down organization; it’s a ground-up call to action that already has both political parties rethinking the way they do business.”

That “common sense” word is one Palin uttered several times during her speech.  The Tea Party is built upon it.  Common sense is, as cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz told us decades ago,  a way to make sure your point of view cannot be challenged because it’s “obvious” to all who are “sane.”

Knowing that rain wets and that one ought to come in out of it, or that fire burns and one ought not to play with it…are conflated into comprising one large realm of the given and undeniable, a catalog of in-the-grain-of-nature realities so peremptory as to force themselves upon any mind sufficiently unclouded to receive them. Yet this is clearly not so. No one, or no one functioning very well, doubts that rain wets; but there may be some people around who question the proposition that one ought to come in out of it, holding that it is good for one’s character to brave the elements—hatlessness is next to godliness. And the attractions of playing with fire often, with some people usually, override the full recognition of the pain that will result. Religion rests its case on revelation, science on method, ideology on moral passion; but common sense rests its on the assertion that it is not a case at all, just life in a nutshell. The world is its authority.

Common sense is what passes as “obvious,” but in fact is obviously to the benefit of those who own it.  The common sense of the Tea Party is that white, straight, rural Americans ought to be benefiting from the system.  And Palin wants to exploit that common sense to break up the GOP elites up as well as attract many of the white, rural, straight Dems to her side.  It was common sense that during the Q and A session, a chant rose up for President Palin.

Run, Palin, Run.”

Given her audience and her goals, I suppose it was also just good “common sense” for Palin to show up with that horrible hair? Palin’s hair is no longer a sexy, secretarial up-do, but a long, curled up at the ends, big, highly hair-sprayed poof .

Oh how I used to swoon at Palin’s ‘do.  It made her look trendy and bookish and even smart.  It made me want to grow my hair out and look just like her.   It made me sometimes even listen to what she had to say.

But Palin’s appearance at the Tea Party extravaganza yesterday was undermined by her hair. Instead of her usual ability to make even the elites stop and listen to her nonsensical “common sense,” she spoke only to her base, the radical conservative white activists who make up the Tea Party movement.

And quite honestly the white, rural base is not really in charge in this country anymore.

Sarah, please listen to common sense. We know you want to be a hairetic and lead the way.  But the Tea Party movement  just isn’t big enough or important enough to be changing your hair for.  The best way to get your brand of common sense to dominate is to get rid of that ridiculous, Tea Party- inspired hairdo.

A Haitian court has now officially charged the ten (white, Christian) Americans who tried to take 33 Haitian children to the Dominican Republic last week with child abduction.  The group of Christian missionaries from Idaho say they were just trying to help orphans.  Of course, the orphans in question all seem to have had parents and the parents were told their children were being taken to a school to be educated.  Ah, the twists and turns of the White Man’s Burden.

When Rudyard Kipling wrote the poem, “The White Man’s Burden” in 1899 it was in response to the American colonial invasion of the Phillippines after the Spanish American War.

Take up the White Man’s burden…Send forth the best ye breed…Your new-caught, sullen peoples,Half-devil and half-child…To veil the threat of terror  Take up the White Man’s burden- The savage wars of peace–Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease; silent, sullen peoples…Shall weigh your gods and you.

Kipling seems to have truly believed in the White Man’s burden, as do the members of the Idaho group who came to save the children from their “half devil, half child” ways.  Of course, the Imperialism of America and England has always been layered with the Imperialism of a militant and nationalist Christian Evangelical movement.

The leaders of the American group, New Life Children’s Refuge, 
Laura Silsby and 
Charisa Coulter, are members of Central Valley Baptist church in Idaho.  Atlhough New Life Children’s Refuge never quite got their website up and running, the Central Valley Baptist church website as well as other Christian websites give some insight into what the hell these white people were doing taking children out Haiti and lying to their parents about the fact that they were going to be adopted to American “Christian” families.

New Life Children’s Refuge is a non‐profit Christian ministry dedicated to rescuing, loving and
caring for orphaned, abandoned and impoverished Haitian and Dominican children,
demonstrating God’s love and helping each child find healing, hope, joy and new life in Christ.
We will strive to also equip each child with a solid education and vocational skills as well as
opportunities for adoption into a loving Christian family.

Note that it says “impoverished” children as well as orphaned and abandoned children.  Already the plot thickens.  Apparently poverty in and of itself is reason to “save” these children by placing them into a “Christian family.”

From the Church website, we learn that it is a Christian obligation to go forth in the world and convert others to their Evangelical beliefs.

It is the duty and privilege of every follower of Christ and of every church of the Lord Jesus Christ to endeavor to make disciples of all nations.  The Lord Jesus Christ has commanded the preaching of the gospel to all nations. It is the duty of every child of God to seek constantly to win the lost to Christ by verbal witness undergirded by a Christian lifestyle, and by other methods in harmony with the gospel of Christ.

I’m not sure whether kidnapping is in harmony with the gospel of Christ, but according to the church’s website, a family is clearly defined as the marriage between one man and one woman with children (adoptive or biological) and a wife who willingly submits to her husband as leader, protector, and teacher.

Ah, the white man’s burden, being carried out by white men and women in Haiti.  Over a century after the birth of the American Empire, as Kipling warned, the burden of whiteness continues to weigh on us all.

Image by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³ via Flickr

Sitting in Paris this week, talking to a colleague who is researching religion, class, and education here, he mentions the latest attempt by the French government to ban the burqa.   The newest law would ban full veils that cover face (not all head scarves) in ALL public spaces- including hospitals, public transit, schools.  This in a country with Europe’s largest Muslim population.

What are they going to do?” he asks.  ”Chase women down the street to give them a fine?  And if they slip into private space, how will they know which one had the audacity to appear in public?  They won’t be able to know which one it was, will they?  That’s the point of the veil.”

The image of a French police officer chasing after a woman in a burqa and arriving in a private space, a kitchen perhaps, filled with women in burqas is part Inspector Clouseau and part Orwellian fashion police.

We’ll just have to all wear burqas,” I suggest.  ”In solidarity.”

My friend thinks this is a good idea anyway.  After all, race, gender, and most other markers of difference would disappear if we all went around in our own little capsules of black cloth.  Of course, it is impractical and would destroy the fashion industry so central to French, well, at least Parisian, life.

And so the clash of fashion fundamentalisms in France continues.

Yesterday a man was denied citizenship in France because his wife wore a burqa.  Last week, a parliament report on the burqa recommended that the traditional garb be banned in all public spaces.

According to a report in the Christian Science Monitor, the report will provide ammunition for the burqa ban, as well as President Nicolas Sarkhozy’s use of the burqa to stir up populist anti-Muslim sentiment.

The “burqa debate” in France rose nearly overnight like a pelting summer storm when Mr. Sarkozy last July targeted the burqa as an affront to human and civil rights in a modern secular society – though the debate is widely seen here as a proxy for discussing latent fears and concerns about integrating Muslims, mostly former immigrants, who now number 5 million. The number of burqa wearers, however, is estimated by French police as numbering between 1,400 and 2,000.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy insists that such religious garb has no place in secular France and that it’s oppressive to women.  It seems rather ironic that a man married to former supermodel and the much younger Carla Bruni is worried about what is oppressive to women.  (Of course, it was even more ironic and deadly when Dubbya decided he needed to “liberate” women in Afghanistan from the burqa).

After all, Paris is a space of the daily humiliation of women in the form of stiletto heels and bodily starvation.  Paris, like the rest of the world, is awash in cosmetically enhanced bodies, faces unrecognizable because they no longer move and no longer look like the women they once were or could have been.  Not to mention disguised boobs, and stomachs, and even vaginas.

Of course, underneath some burqas are cosmetically enhanced bodies as well.  As I found out while doing research for my book on cosmetic surgery, cosmetic procedures are increasing throughout the Muslim world too, even in countries where the burqa is more or less mandatory in public.

As a cosmetic surgeon from a Gulf state told me, he used to only see women for nose jobs because it was considered unIslamic to show a male doctor your body for reasons of vanity as opposed to illness.  Now, however, he sees more and more (fully veiled) women for boob jobs and lipo.  It is a trend he himself sees as fully Islamic since God is beautiful and therefore we must love beauty.

The point is that the burqa and boob jobs and Blahniks are all symbolic sites of gender oppression and the physical manifestation of patriarchy.  They are also sites of women’s power- the power to seduce the president of France or the power to seduce a plastic surgeon in Paris or Tehran, not to mention the power to gain political power, for instance.  Beauty is a complicated and highly politicized field.  There is no “clean” or “good” beauty- whether it’s produced in consumer capitalism or patriarchal religions or some mixture of both.

What there are are symbolic struggles and victories.  Fashions and fascisms.  In Paris, the burqa may well end up serving all of these masters.

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What if history really does repeat itself?  What if we are doomed to make all of the mistakes of our predecessors and never learn a single lesson?  What if rather than being progressive or at least additive, history and humans just circle in on themselves?  It certainly seems that way.  Afghanistan as Vietnam.   Obama as Clinton.  The collapse of Empires and economies.

This sense of “what’s old is new again” is all over the place in a new Christian movement that is a reassertion of white masculinity and machismo.  This “new” movement is one we’ve seen before: Muscular Christianity.

The 2nd wave of Muscular Christianity began with the Promise Keepers, that men-only movement that rallied in football stadiums in the 1990s so they could cry and hug and promise to go home and take their rightful place as head of the household.  To wear the pants and make sure that women did not.

We saw it this month in the Super Bowl advertising controversy, where a political ad condemning a woman’s right to an abortion was accepted by CBS, but a purely commercial ad for a gay dating site was rejected.

The “new” Muscular Christianity is also rearing its macho head in churches and gyms around the country as “combat” sports are used to make church a more manly, less feminized space.  Instead of recommending football or weight lifting, the way the first Muscular Christianity did, this one offers mixed martial arts and beating each other into submission as the way to Christ.

According to an article in the New York Times, churches like Xtreme Ministries (”Where Feet, Fist and Faith Collide”) near Nashville combine training in mixed martial arts with evangelical Christianity to make church manly again.

Recruitment efforts at the churches, which are predominantly white, involve fight night television viewing parties and lecture series that use ultimate fighting to explain how Christ fought for what he believed in. Other ministers go further, hosting or participating in live events.

The goal, these pastors say, is to inject some machismo into their ministries — and into the image of Jesus — in the hope of making Christianity more appealing. “Compassion and love — we agree with all that stuff, too,” said Brandon Beals, 37, the lead pastor at Canyon Creek Church outside of Seattle. “But what led me to find Christ was that Jesus was a fighter.”

Son of Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, Ryan Dobson, made the sissification of Christian boys clear by pointing out that

The man should be the overall leader of the household. We’ve raised a generation of little boys.”

I’ve seen this marriage of martial arts, machismo and God in my own sport, taekwondo.  My own association was torn apart when one of the master instructors became an Evangelical Christian and started to use his gym as a way to convert people to his beliefs.  I once went to one of his Christian workouts, to see what it was like.  There’s nothing like having the Gospel shouted at you as you spar, doing push ups for not saying you accept Jesus Christ into your heart as your own personal savior, and generally mixing faith and fighting to make me think that if there is a God then S/He should smite the hell out of these people.

But alas, there seems no God willing to punish Christians for using combat sports to reinvigorate an insecure and white masculinity.  Black evangelical churches have chosen not to participate in the “kicking for Christ” craze and, like the original Muscular Christianity, the 2nd wave of macho godly men is about fears that white men have been feminized by our economy and culture.  Facing growing economic insecurity, the increase in women’s educational levels and salary potential, and, lets face it, the fact that American culture just doesn’t consider straight white Christian guys very sexy, many of them are drawn into the promise of the Promise Keepers (or the new Dockers ads for that matter).  The promise goes something like this:

Wear the pants.  Be a man.  Act macho.  Show that you’re physically tough and willing to beat the shit out of anyone who tries to take your power.  Then all the rest- the structural collapse of white masculinity, the economic and military collapse of America, the environmental collapse of the world, uppity women and racial others- can all be beaten back into submission so that once again you can rule the world.

Sadly for these boys, it just ain’t going to work.  Structural problems cannot be solved by getting in the ring.  I should know.  I have been doing combat sports for 15 years and although I love to beat the crap out of people, it’s just not going to change my position in the wider world.  And white men fighting in the ring to re-secure the privilege of their religion, race, and gender in the world is never going to work, If for no other reason than a lot of us are much better fighters than they’ll ever be.