Pikes Peak Lavender Film Fest

Today marks the 10th annual Pikes Peak Lavender Film Fest, a three-day screening of LGBT films in Colorado Springs. The festival is the longest-running event of its kind in Colorado, which is a testament to the tenacity of the gay and lesbian community in Colorado Springs. El Paso County, the state's most conservative region, is where Amendment 2 originated in 1992. The state law, which was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, sought to prohibit ordinances protecting gays and lesbians against discrimination.

This year's Lavender Film Fest includes an intriguing line up of movies, including "Lucha" by Maria Breaux. The film details the love story of two women caught in the violence of the Salvadoran insurgency in 1982. The movie won the best short film Audience Award at the San Francisco gay and lesbian film fest. Check out the rest of the lineup and purchase tickets online here. -Naomi

Domestic violence and healthcare

Wow. I thought that considering a c-section or pregnancy as a preexisting condition when it comes to qualifying for health insurance was draconian enough, but according to the Huffington Post, "It turns out that in eight states, plus the District of Columbia, getting beaten up by your spouse is a pre-existing condition." The Huffington Post reports that "in 1995, the Boston Globe found that Nationwide, Allstate, State Farm, Aetna, Metropolitan Life, The Equitable Companies, First Colony Life, The Prudential and the Principal Financial Group had all either canceled or denied coverage to women who had been beaten."

This is a dark side of the healthcare coverage conversation that is easily overlooked, but shouldn't be ignored. The good news is that states are beginning to dictate that insurance companies must provide coverage for victims of domestic violence, specifically that "evidence of insurability (including conditions arising out of acts of domestic violence)" cannot be used to deny coverage. This is the first necessary step in the right direction. -Sara

Improved rights for gay employees

While the gay rights movement has focused its national efforts in recent years on marriage rights, some elemental legal protections against discrimination still fall short by not including the GLBT community. Notably, in 29 states it is legal to fire employees for being gay.

A New York Times editorial this week lauded proposed bills "in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, modeled on existing civil rights laws that cover race, religion and sex. Unlike some past bills, these include gender identity, protecting transgender people from discrimination." This type of progress is necessary to protect GLBT individuals.

Feminism can easily get caught up in focusing on private and individual achievements, a type of real grass roots activism that focuses on person-to-person education. But the need for policy change is significant, and its absence can be overwhelming. The editorial says that "federal law has lagged behind the reality of American life" when it comes to non-discrimination and the gay community, but federal law also has a great power to pull America forward. Federal policy that supports feminist principles may follow what many individuals already know or already practice, but law achieves more than just symbolic support. In this case, it would guarantee the rights for individuals who are currently unjustly excluded from basic legal protections. -Sara

Tucker Max brings his misogyny to the big screen

Tucker Max, the 33-year-old party boy who chronicled his drunken sexual exploits in his 2006 book "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell," has produced a movie with the same name that will be released later this month. IHTSBIH tells the true story of Max's trip to a "legendary" strip club with his buddies Dan (an engaged sensitive guy) and Drew (a misanthropic woman-hater). What ensues, according the film's trailer, is alcohol-fueled misogynistic mayhem. Max has sex with several women, including, to his smug satisfaction, a dwarf, Dan is unwittingly drawn into the debauchery, fielding calls from his angry fiancee along the way, and Drew remains moody and aloof in spite of repeated entreaties from a stripper. But this is Hollywood, after all, and we're treated to a feel-good ending when the degeneracy subsides.

IHTSBIH is an undeniably sexist film. Max adopted an image from his personal web site, a photograph of himself next to a blond woman with her face blocked out by the words "Your Face Here," for the movie posters. The film's horrendously over-the-top web site features a rotating set of IHTSBIH facts, which include nonsensical statements like "Bros Before Hos: Unless she's deaf." and "The best thing about fat girls is heart disease." Max has come under serious criticism from feminist organizations at campuses where he has screened his film. At Ohio State University, Women and Allies Rising in Resistance condemned Max for promoting a rape culture with his scenes of intoxicated sex, to which Max replied in the New York Times, "It’s like they’re accusing me of a crime, but not really." 

The list of Max's transgressions goes on and on and on. And while Max himself is a disturbing character, what's just as scary is the public rationalization of his movie. On the film's site, Max includes quotes from various "haters," bloggers and journalists who have critiqued his work. Most of them disparage the film for being overly raunchy, but they also have a "what do you expect?" attitude. This is Tucker Max, after all, a man who has built his career on filth. "If anything, Max simply affirmed what is suggested in every word of his writing: He is an asshole, albeit a self-aware one," writes Ryan Arnold in the Collegiate Times.

Yes, Max is quick to cop to his impropriety, writing on his personal site that he is known to "ignore the consequences of [his] actions" and "sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead." This self-knowledge permeates the film and his writing. But the fact that Max holds no illusions about his moral rectitude does nothing to justify his behavior. Unlike other raunchy productions that seek to shine a critical light on gross behavior (think Beavis and Butt-Head, for instance), Max's IHTSBIH is a glorification, rather than a critique of the bad boy lifestyle. The fact that Max is totally and completely aware of it should have us questioning rather than condoning his work.
-Naomi

Caster Semenya's trauma

Caster Semenya, the runner whose sex has been questioned as a result of her rapidly improved times, is reported to be in trauma counseling following findings that she is a hermaphrodite. Her gender and sex controversy has become a public event, and although Semenya was raised as a girl and identifies as a women, her biological sex has become all the rage.

As addressed on The Lady Finger last month, athletics rely on strict female/male categories that don't leave room for ambiguity. Semenya, though, may not fit neatly into either category even after the test results are all returned, serving as a painful reminder for those with ambiguous genders that we live in a world oriented sharply along the gender binary.

Her gender identity as a woman is clear, although tests have indicated that Semenya has no ovaries and has internal testes. The presence or absence of anatomy does not provide an entire picture though, and as writer Peggy Orenstein points out, "Identity is not simply a sum of our parts." After a double masectomy, is a woman still a woman? The close associations we tend to draw between physiology and gender become especially traumatic when they threaten to deny the gender identities of those, like most of us, for whom gender is a part of one's more general identity. For Semenya, it also threatens her career. -Sara