Search Results for: enough said

Rape Culture on ‘Downton Abbey’

Continually insisting that rapists can only be unfathomably monstrous Others and virtual strangers who physically brutalize their victims serves to hide who the real rapists are: brothers, sons, fathers, husbands, friends, and colleagues. Anna’s bruises serve to delegitimize the experiences of survivors who don’t bear a physical mark of the absence of their consent. We need a wider representation of the range of survivor experiences when it comes to rape and sexual assault so that we can begin to dismantle rape culture and develop a system that is capable of identifying rapists and that values the stories of survivors.

The Grumpy Feminist’s Guide to the 2014 Oscars

The 86th annual Academy Awards ceremony aired last night, and a billion viewers around the world struggled to stay awake. The show had a notably slow pace, with more time for introduction clips and acceptance speeches and less “Isn’t Hollywood Grand?” foofaraw (which, to be fair, a lot of people say they want. I happen to really like the foofaraw). Ellen DeGeneres’s hosting was more laid back than I am hosting an Oscar-watching party, and when I take a break to hand out pizza there’s still stuff to watch on screen. And ‘Gravity’ swept the technical awards, giving the overstuffed middle of the show a certain monotony.

If you fell asleep, never fear! I’ll recap for you the bullet points a feminist movie fan needs to know:

A Plea For More Roseannes and Norma Raes: Addressing The Lack of Working-Class Female Characters on American Screens

Working-class female protagonists remain rare, however. More often than not, working-class women play supporting roles as mothers, wives or lovers. Their characters are invariably underwritten or stereotypical.

‘Adult World’: Portrait of the Artist as a Self-Indulgent Brat

At 22, recent Syracuse grad Amy Anderson is sure she is already a great poet, like her hero, Sylvia Plath, the voice of her generation even. She’s going to be discovered any day now and everyone will realize, as an ‘artiste’ she shouldn’t need to worry about getting a job or paying rent or paying car insurance. She is sure the creation of her art should transcend all responsibility.
When success doesn’t immediately find her, she complains ad nauseam, that she did everything right: getting good grades, staying true to her art and refusing to get distracted by trivial things like parties and guys, so she deserves it more than anyone else. She doesn’t just want to be a successful famous poet (her father jokes that she will one day win a Pulitzer) but to be a wunderkind, a success before 23.

“I’ll Have the Car Drive Faster Over the Cliff” and Other Lessons from the 2014 Athena Film Festival

My entry point to this area is my interest in creating media that highlights women of color, queer people, its intersection, and other types of characters not often seen on screen. People who aren’t lawyers or in advertising. People who wear the same sweater more than once. People who don’t fit into prefab boxes. My conviction about the need for more diverse content won’t ever falter, but hearing truths from women working in the field is, unfortunately, a downer. While representation of women remains a glaring issue, it’s in the creation of stories and characters where we continue to see problems.

“Love,” Death, and Penises in ‘Stranger By The Lake’

“Mind if I get naked,” the main character of ‘Stranger By The Lake’ asks a fat, older shirtless man in the middle of a conversation. The two characters are at a nude men’s beach, so the question isn’t unexpected, but in a film which isn’t porn (and this film is not porn), male actors are rarely asked to be nude, and when they are, we most often see their backsides only. In non-porn films actresses are usually the ones with their clothes off, a situation that echoes the famous poster from the Guerrilla Girls which asks if women have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Women are still a tiny minority of film directors but naked women in films are plentiful, the stills forever appearing on websites where commenters can criticize every aspect, no matter how trivial, of the actresses’ bodies and debate whether the women are “hot or not.”

Diablo Cody’s ‘Paradise’: Manic Pixie and the Napkin of Sin

It probably says something about Diablo Cody’s directorial debut, ‘Paradise,’ that despite its creator’s celebrated career and feminist street-cred, it premiered and disappeared without me hearing a thing about it. And it’s easy to see why: ‘Paradise’ is cloying, tone-deaf and awkward, and such a perfect storm of awful and offensive that I’m kind of obsessed with figuring it out. How did Cody, who has written such memorable female characters fall so far off base with Lamb Mannerheim?

‘The Cherokee Word for Water’: The Wilma Mankiller Story

Wilma Pearl Mankiller became the first modern female Chief of the Cherokee Nation in 1985 after working with volunteers from the small rural community of Bell, Oklahoma to bring water to the town. ‘The Cherokee Word for Water’ is the story of this extraordinary woman and leader whose activism on behalf of her community continues to resonate across the Cherokee Nation today.

‘Battlestar Galactica’: The Show Where All of the Women Die

Taken in the larger scope of what’s available, it’s so rare to find a TV show with so many great parts for women – so many characters who are interesting and smart and competent and vital to the stories they live in – that it’s kind of a bummer when all of them die. That said, I do think there’s a case to be made for why this may not be a horrible choice.

‘True Romance’ or How Alabama Whitman Started the Fall of Damsels in Distress

On its surface, ‘True Romance’ comes off as yet another story about a guy who saves a girl from a horrible existence as a sex worker and he protects her forever and they live happily together forever and ever, the end. But, if you’ve ever seen it, you know that this is not the case. Alabama Whitman is a hero in her own right. She’s never apologetic about her sex life or her choices; they are what they are and she’s OK with it.

When I Say Go We Go: Popular Feminism and ‘Spice World’

Some people see the Spice Girls as champions of female empowerment, and others as mindless actors in a consumerist pantomime of feminism. Like most artifacts of pop culture feminism, the Spice Girls presented an image that was neither perfectly laudable nor perfectly awful and shaming – they gave us a sincere attempt at female empowerment that wasn’t entirely free from the culture they lived in.

Meet Samantha, the Manic Pixie Operating System in ‘Her’: A Review in Conversation

Bitch Flicks staff writers Amanda Rodriguez and Stephanie Rogers talk about the critically acclaimed Spike Jonze film ‘Her,’ sharing their thoughts while asking questions about its feminism and thematic choices.