Pixar’s Cars and Ableist Language from Womanist Musings:
We do not live in Orwell’s 1984, and there are plenty of words that we can use to insult someone without being ableist. Is it really so hard to call someone a jackass instead of moron? There is a cost to the continual usage of these words in a negative fashion, and it is paid by the disabled community, whereas; choosing to stop using ableist words in one’s speech causes no harm at all. Do we really need to know why something is offensive? Isn’t it enough that someone has said these words hurt, would you please stop using them, without twisting like a pretzel to tell them all the reasons why they are wrong to be offended?
Sucker Punch (review): Fuk Yeah from Flick Filosopher:
Theres this totally hot little blonde babe who is suppose to be all underage and shit even though the actress who plays her Emily Browning is like 23 or whatever. And shes about to get raped by her ugly ass fat fuk of a stepfather this is PG13 and WTF is that all about I want to sucker puch Snyder for not doing this right and hard R so we dont get to see that but thats def whats gonna happen till Baby Doll tries to shoot his ass. Oh and hes gonna try to rape her little sister too and we dont get to see that either but at least you can think about it. Yeah her name is fukkin Baby Doll thats what they call her in the asylm for the mentally insane her stepfather throws her in as opposed to the physically insane which is what all these chicks in the asylum are anyway insanely hot LOL. No fat chicks and no ugly chicks in hottie hospital!
Teaching Boys Feminism from Gender Across Borders:
With every example of women, girls, queer folks, and people of color facing discrimination, marginalization, and violence, boys awaken. White male boys begin to realize the male privilege they have enjoyed in a culture that valorizes powerful white men while boys of color gain language to describe their painful experiences of racism and classism. And each year, without fail, regardless of racial identity or socioeconomic class, the boys—both straight and gay—express their fear of being called a “fag.”
Feminist Portrait Project Blog Carnival! from Bitch Magazine:
In 1971, Ms. Magazine wrote of “the click! of recognition, that parenthesis of truth around a little thing that completes the puzzle of reality in women’s minds—the moment that brings a gleam to our eyes and means the revolution has begun.” Forty years later, for better or worse, those clicks are still going off. Only today, the trigger is sometimes feminism itself.
Older women unhappy over their portrayal in films, survey shows from The Guardian:
Older women want to see more of their sexual desire depicted in film, a survey has suggested, while black and gay people would like to see less of a focus on theirs.Sixty-one percent of women between the ages of 50 and 75 questioned for a UK Film Council survey of 4,315 people said women of their age were portrayed on the big screen as not having sexual needs or desires. Half said they were comfortable with older women being seen as attractive to younger men. Seven in 10 also felt that their group was generally under-represented in films and that younger women were glamorised.
James Franco Being Assaulted By Nude Women (NSFW) from BuzzFeed:
A still from the upcoming short film that James Franco is making with Harmony Korine, which apparently has something to do with naked women wearing bandana masks. The film is called “Rebel” and who the hell even knows.
‘Sucker Punch’ and the Decline of Strong Woman Action Heroines from The Atlantic:
By my count, there are at least five attempted rapes in Sucker Punch. When its female characters aren’t fending off rapists, theyʼre being lobotomized, stabbed, imprisoned, sold, shot in the head, forced to strip, or blown up on trains in outer space. Sucker Punch has been pitched as a girl-power epic, but it feels like watching a little boy tear the heads off his sister’s Barbies. After dressing them up in their sexiest outfits and making them fight GI Joe, of course.
Sexism is so yesterday from StampOutSexism.org:
When you’re watching TV and you see an ad like Hoover’s “Floormate Challenge,” does your blood boil? Mine does. Why? Because Hoover–in its infinite, sexist wisdom–thinks it’s okay to “ask ordinary women” to clean their floors using their favorite method, and then re-do the floor using the Hoover product. Um…WOMEN? Why did they only ask women to do this? Why didn’t they ask PEOPLE to clean their floors? Men and women. Because Hoover–at least during my multi-decade long lifetime–has yet to advertise in a non-sexist manner.
Tina Fey’s Tough Girl Feminism from Slate:
Part of what makes Fey’s good jokes into insightful commentaries is the way they draw on and expose an argument’s emotional or psychological underpinnings. In response to men who claim that women are not funny, as Christopher Hitchens notoriously argued in Vanity Fair, Fey writes, “My hat goes off to them. It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.” Her buoyant, manic humor is sometimes the best way to expose and pin down the sheer absurdity of our current sexual politics. She has, for instance, a riff on frequently asked questions about 30 Rock: “Q: Has Tracy Morgan ever French kissed an NBC executive? A: Yes, but only at an official NBC event, and only against her will.”
Clicks on a Keyboard: Dungeons, Dragons, and Trans-Feminism from The Border House:
Being a transgender woman means one has a ‘special’ relationship with gender and with womanhood in particular. For many of us, part of our self-discovery necessarily involves a dawning of pride and acceptance of one’s own gender. I grew up surrounded by media images and socialisation that told me femininity and womanhood were inferior, weaker, undesirable, and should be either avoided or pitied. As a young trans girl trying to find her place in the gendered sun this naturally screwed with my head in many deeply unpleasant ways and fed self-hate in a rather dramatic way. I came out as a feminist when I was 15 because my father’s abuse of my mother put the lie to the notion that sexism was a thing of the past; but that did not click away my own self-loathing and fears regarding acceptance of my gender.
Who Does She Think She Is? from the official film web site:
In a half-changed world, women often feel they need to choose: mothering or working? Your children’s well-being or your own? Who Does She Think She Is?, a documentary by Academy Award winning filmmaker Pamela Tanner Boll, features five fierce women who refuse to choose. Through their lives, we explore some of the most problematic intersections of our time: mothering and creativity, partnering and independence, economics and art. The film invites us to consider both ancient legacies of women worshipped as cultural muses and more modern times where most people can’t even name a handful of female artists.
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