Apple Pies, McDonalds, and Gender O’ My

Am I the only that finds it a bit ironic that the restaurant that has been criticized as the culinary culprit in the breakdown of the American family has returned to traditional gender roles in their advertisements? Or at least traditional gender expectations? Yes, McDonalds has been pointed out in the lineup as being many families' route, or rather escape, from having home-cooked meals around the dinner table as stable, nuclear family ought to be doing. I do not mean to single out McDonalds as if those who run the company orchestrated this phenomenon by themselves. But given the general ratchet effect that has taken effect in the number of activities we cram into a single, 24 hour period and changing expectations of members of society as whole, fast food restaurants in general have been seen as enablers of this decline. And when you're the biggest and baddest bully of them all, you tend to take the rap more so than the others.

So what is this post about? Well, my apple pie wrapper pictured above. The apple pie has been a staple and trademark American food since the days of our grandparents. You may recall the old saying, "As American as apple pie." Though mostly a white, middle class story, it did not stay within this demographic group alone. It was not only a gastronomic creation; it was a symbol of American domestic life for many years, both here and abroad. Many home economics books of yore typically employed different depictions of the apple pie on their covers while inside they outlined how women ought to fill their roles of wife, mother, and homebody. I took my favorite oldest niece (our running joke as I only have two nieces and she's the oldest. Get it? Good) to McDonald's for lunch when I was in Miami. We both got apple pies and I saw the wrapper. And I was like, wow. Seriously. "Mommy didn't have time." Really. Kind of pissed me off: I'm not lovin' it.

The kitchen, even in the advertisement for the quintessential fast food restaurant, remains the woman's domain. In fact, one may can interpret the reading as sanctioning women for bring to busy. Though some conservatives, as I say above, demonized these restaurants for allowing women to spend even less time at home, and especially in the kitchen, McDonalds and traditionalists seem to be of one mind. McDonald's has not gone as far as the old saying, "A woman's place is to be barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen," but the general picture, I argue, is still there.

As a practical matter, it takes time to bake an apple pie when you do it right. But, as this advertisement suggests, let's put a child and/or husband not having solely one on mommy.

This post is not meant to be particularly earth-shattering. Rather, it fits with my general thinking about how reified our thinking about gender roles and expectations are and how best are we to continue moving forward in contesting, blurring, and crossing these boundaries. Personally, I feel that there is still much work to be done. However, I know that this is preaching to the choir members who also serve on the usher board on alternative Sundays and volunteer for the Sheppard's care ministry (to use and extend that old adage). In commenting on my post "How Not So Far We've Come: (Still) "Doing Gender"" where I discuss the gendered picture on baby changing stations in bathrooms, one of our more insightful readers said that things will change only when men start to care. I partially agree with her. I think that things will change when both men and women no longer take pictures, phrases, or depictions like these for granted.

Monday's Musing: Race Makes Scripted Appearance Yet Again

Quick Point: Race makes Scripted, Ten Second Appearance (Yet Again)

Suffice it to say, Hollywood loves the Hood.

A few weeks ago a friend asked me to accompany her to see the film version of Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper. I had no idea what the movie was about so I checked out the trailer and then researched the book and its author a little bit. I said, sure, it's five dollars, “Why not?” So I go. And yes, like the other millions of people who saw the movie, the tears began to roll well before the movie got going. I was ready to say “job well done” until a short ten second segment came across the screen that immediately didn’t sit right with me but I wasn’t sure why.

I am speaking specifically about the new ending the directors gave to the movie. For those of you who have not seen the movie or read the book, read no further unless you don’t care that I ruin both. First, it must be said that even Picoult did not hold her tongue about the movie’s alternative ending. However, I believe her distaste for the ending came from a different place than my own. She disliked it because they changed which daughter dies. In the book, Kate, the sick daughter, lives because Anna, the younger daughter, gets into an accident where she is deemed brain-dead. Thus, the accident allows Kate access to Anna’s organs and the lifesaving medical procedures they could not do otherwise. In the movie, the family moves on but comes together to remember Kate by traveling as a family on her birthday. The mother returns to work as a lawyer, the son focuses on his art, and the father retires to work with inner-city youth. Picoult argued that it flattened the story and made it too neat of ending. I was troubled by something much more viral.

Race was not a factor in this film. Or rather, due to the racial composition of the family and their surroundings, race is invisible, unmarked, thus white. Sure there were issues of class and privilege—the mother was able to leave work as a semi-high powered lawyer to take care of Kate and the father worked as a fireman with some pull—but even this was not a factor in the movie. To be specific, my reaction did not come from the rescripting of Kate’s death, the son’s artistic rather than arsonist behavior, or the mother’s life post Kate’s death; it was the rescripting of the father’s. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why Brian, the stargazer, would all of a sudden volunteer with inner-city youth (shown as all black), the very few black bodies that you see in this movie besides the one nurse who herself plays the part of the stereotypical “black nurse.” Hollywood Strikes Again.

What are we to make of the fact that in their right to exercise artistic license with the movie, in their freedom to bring this book to “life” in a way they saw fit, they included poor, inner-city youth as the mechanism through which the father regains his life? I say it once more: Hollywood Strikes Again. I spoke about the scripting of race in movies with Pixar’s UP. Although this particular incident in My Sister’s Keeper was less than ten seconds of the total movie as compared to being the “major” minor character that Beta was, it stands as yet another example that the representation of African Americans in different mediums is so often conflated with class—and a specific class (read: lower class)—and place—this time, as with many times before it, the inner city. In other words, in an otherwise good (for its content) and homogenously white (for its cast and setting) movie, the dark birthmark of American race relations and images of racial groups, stands out the same way as it did on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Georgiana from the short story The Birthmark.

I do not believe that I am making a mountain out of ten second molehill. In their concerted and calculated actions to adapt a Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper, they casted dark bodies to fulfill that old familiar role of those in need to help, those in need of aid.