Earlier this year, we wrote about Crankytown’s unique period-themed website and its short film festival, Crankyfest.
Crankytown is an interactive site about periods that features videos, stories and poems, created by Canadian actresses Liane Balaban, Vanessa Matsui, and Jenna Wright. Crankytown partnered with Playback Digital Company of the Year, iThentic, to launch Crankyfest, a contest for videos about periods.
Co-founders of Crankytown, from left, Vanessa Matsui, Jenna Wright and Liane Balaban.
Earlier this year, we wrote about Crankytown’s unique period-themed website and its short film festival, Crankyfest.
Crankytown is an interactive site about periods that features videos, stories and poems, created by Canadian actresses Liane Balaban, Vanessa Matsui, and Jenna Wright. Crankytown partnered with Playback Digital Company of the Year, iThentic, to launch Crankyfest, a contest for videos about periods.
“First seduced me with its distinctive animation style and tender message of love and compassion… a girl’s dream come true!” said juror Jane Grenier from Conde Nast/Teen Vogue.
Still from Laura Maxwell’s First, the Crankyfest winner.
Crankyfest has started a new cycle, and the deadline for submissions is March 3, 2014. See http://www.crankyfest.com/ for more details.
Winners will be chosen by celebrity jury Jay Baruchel (This Is The End), Denis Villeneuve (Oscar-nominated director of Incendies) Anna Silk (Lost Girl), Kevin Pollack (Usual Suspects) and Amanda Brugel (Seed).
Jay Baruchel Participates in Fundraising Campaign for Femme Kits
Crankytown released a video starring Jay Baruchel (Tropic Thunder, Million Dollar Baby) in honour of the UN’s International Day of the Girl Child (Oct. 11) to highlight the fact that their agenda for 2013 doesn’t address girls’ access to menstrual products in developing countries.
Often girls are unable to attend school in developing countries because they do not have a means of managing their period. Addressing the issue of menstruation directly reduces rates of absenteeism among school girls. Unfortunately, this issue was not on the International Day of the Girl Child’s agenda for 2013.
So on Oct. 11, Crankytown and Your Box Club released an animated recounting of Baruchel’s early experiences with periods and puberty. Baruchel reflects on his family’s reaction to discussions of menstruation and his sisters growth into womanhood. The goal of the video, which was directed by Jenna Wright and produced by Ithentic.ca, is to help de-stigmatize conversations about periods and bring awareness to the issue of menstruation in developing countries.
“Menstruation is still a taboo topic. Our goal is to de-stigmatize periods because girls who are confident about their bodies are confident in their lives,” explains Crankytown co-founder Vanessa Matsui.
Crankytown and YourBoxClub.com partnered with Femme International, a Toronto-based NGO that provides girls in Kenya’s slums with a hygienic care kit, or Femme Kit, which contains a menstrual cup, an innovative and sustainable product that can be re-used for 10 years, giving young women the means to remain in school when they are menstruating.
According to Femme International’s home page, “Providing sanitary supplies to Kenyan schoolgirls reduces absenteeism by 75%, from 4.9 days to 1.2 days per month.”
Through this collaborative fundraiser, they were able to donate three Femme Kits.
For more information, to watch, compete, or donate, visit:
Masters of Sex is the most compelling period drama I’ve seen in quite some time, and trust me, I watch a lot of period pieces. I will admit that sometimes the stiffness of the dialogue and the character interaction can get a bit dry – the audience understands that social conventions were different in the past, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone was robotic round-the-clock. I feel the writers have a tendency to use era authenticity as a cop-out for lack of emotional depth or creativity. Though it’s only been four episodes, Masters of Sex boldly rips the buttons off of the post-World War II stereotype of prudishness and conservatism. Below are just a few of the reasons why you should give the show a try, if you haven’t already.
Masters of Sex is the most compelling period drama I’ve seen in quite some time, and trust me, I watch a lot of period pieces. I will admit that sometimes the stiffness of the dialogue and the character interaction can get a bit dry – the audience understands that social conventions were different in the past, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone was robotic round-the-clock. I feel the writers have a tendency to use era authenticity as a cop-out for lack of emotional depth or creativity. Though it’s only been four episodes, Masters of Sex boldly rips the buttons off of the post-World War II stereotype of prudishness and conservatism. Below are just a few of the reasons why you should give the show a try, if you haven’t already.
1. The show is based on real people.
Bill Masters and Virginia Johnson: fiction vs. reality.
William Masters and Virginia Johnson were a gynecologist and sexologist respectively who pioneered the first study of human sexual response. Their collaboration and the controversy of their subject matter is the basis of the show, which is in turn an adaptation of Master’s biography. Masters and Johnson were later married for 20 years and then divorced. This may or may not be a spoiler for their TV counterparts (played by Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan), judging by the rising belligerent sexual tension established between them. Not to mention they are responsible for much of our common sexual knowledge today.
2. Female sexuality literally takes center stage.
The women are a bit skeptical of Bill’s contraption.
Masters initially becomes curious about women in his study because he cannot fathom how or why a woman would fake an orgasm. He enlists the help of Betty (Annaleigh Ashford), a prostitute, who convinces the other women in her brothel to take part in the research. His primary goal is to delineate the stages of an orgasm, so he and Johnson spend a lot of time watching women masturbate. Admittedly, you should probably watch this show alone because to the unaware observer, it looks a hell of a lot like softcore porn. Also, there is some kind of giant glass dildo that’s similar to a space probe with a camera to observe physiological changes. Talk about invasive.
Joking aside, there are deeper dynamics at play here. Their time spent at the brothel gives the relatively affluent Masters and Johnson a gritty glimpse at working-class life in the struggle for survival. The myth of the ideal 1950s woman as an innocent, almost Victorian vessel of purity also starts to unravel as more and more women of all backgrounds begin to join the study and seem to know exactly what to do when prompted, albeit not without a little embarrassment.
It’s true that Masters solicits women partially because he thinks that no men would be interested in going solo for the study. However, the women turn out to be a gold mine of scientific revelations and sexual understanding.
3. Queer characters are humanized and perceived as equals worthy of respect.
Betty doesn’t have time for your nonsense.
Really, if one more period piece hides behind the excuse of the era and cultural context to get away with another tired “masochistic gay, cue violins” plot I’m going to scream. Luckily for me, the instances of queerness that we do see are pretty bad ass, confident people. Betty happens to be a lesbian, a frank, self-admitted detail that Bill finds perplexing when she asks for the run-of-the-mill Playboy magazines to masturbate to. (Johnson quickly put an end to his grumbling by countering, “Isn’t an orgasm an orgasm?”) Betty even has a lover, although we never see her on screen. She develops a friendship with Johnson and particularly Masters, who both go out of their way to express concern that she isn’t being true to herself or her lover when she starts to contemplate marrying a man for financial stability.
Masters reacts with predictable uneasiness when Betty recruits gay male prostitutes to participate in his study without his knowledge. To his credit, he still doesn’t outright refuse when two of the men offer to “put on a show” for him. He throws a hissy fit about only having data from deviants after his study is repeatedly denied funding, but ultimately rallies to the defense of the everyday men who visit the hustlers, proving that male homosexuality isn’t as deranged as 1950s masculinity would like to believe.
4. The characters are realistically flawed without creating a black-and-white morality.
Libby tries to connect with Bill.
Bill Masters’ Achilles’ heel is that he’s married to his job and his job is all about sex, which naturally deflates his domestic life and his passion for his wife, Libby (Caitlin FitzGerald). Libby has the air of a fresh-faced Betty Draper before the bitterness and alcoholism took its toll. The main source of strain on their marriage is their struggle with infertility. They genuinely try to make the other happy, although Libby is definitely the stereotypical flower of a trophy wife withering under her husband’s lack of communication and emotional availability. She may appear to be a bauble of a woman, but she’s sensitive and perceptive. You aren’t exactly rooting for Bill to stray from her.
Johnson is a single mother of two who holds her head high despite being twice divorced. She doesn’t shy away from casual sex and she has no tolerance for that whiny friendzoned bullshit. She contemplates Masters’ preposition that they should sleep together “for the study.” On one hand, you want them to sleep together to act on their chemistry, but on the other, you hope Virginia is levelheaded and ethical enough to value her budding friendship with Libby over an exploratory one night stand that would lead to the most cliché collapse of bonds between women.
The narrative consistently confuses you since you find yourself supporting potentially bad decisions on the characters’ behalf because you understand their perspective. Sympathy and empathy with flaws in mind – the cornerstone of strong characterization!
5. Masters of Sex isn’t Mad Men…and that’s a good thing.
The Masters cast.
Due to the similarity of the time period, some have drawn comparisons between Masters of Sex and Mad Men. Yes, the style is drool-worthy and good ol’ boys club mentality is in full effect, but the comparisons should end there. There are a few formulaic echoes: the hard working introvert stuck in a dead end marriage partners up with the secretary to discover some deeper philosophy about the human experience via their collaboration. However, Masters of Sex isn’t afraid to display the chaos bubbling beneath the surface of the prim and proper pressures that society presents. Instead of having to hyper analyze every single glance or deadpan line of dialogue for hidden meaning, the characters wear their intentions on their sleeves. They’re lost and determined and uncertain and arrogant all at the same time. It’s glorious.
Masters of Sex is a breath of fresh air for the genre. Each episode is a relished, slow drag on a cigarette.
In 1978, Gloria Steinhem’s “If Men Could Menstruate” appeared in Ms. She says, answering the question of what would happen if suddenly women stopped menstruating and men began:
“The answer is clear – menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event…”
Steinhem launches into a satirical list of the many ways in which “men”-struation would be lifted up and honored, and how women would be lesser-than for not bleeding monthly.
Of course, this isn’t reality, and Steinhem is brilliantly pointing out how menstruation has often been used to subjugate women and it’s certainly, at the very least, supposed to be a mark of shame and disgust.
We frequently talk about how women’s stories are women’s stories, and men’s stories are universal. The truth is, women go through some serious shit in their lifetimes.
The pain of periods, pregnancy, childbirth–these experiences are wholly female and contain within them the same caliber of physical pain and emotional anguish that have propelled masculine stories on the page and on the screen.
These stories, however, have long gone untold.
Three Canadian women–actresses Liane Balaban and Vanessa Matsui and artist Jenna Wright–created the website Crankytown in 2010, which serves as a portal to “sensitively and intelligently demystify menstruation for teens and tweens,” and encouraging discussion about periods in general.
They recently announced that they are accepting submissions for Crankyfest, an online video festival and contest for shorts about menstruation (see http://crankytown.net/crankyfest.html for submission guidelines). Money raised will go to Huru International, which provides “period packs” (reusable pads, soap and underwear) to girls in need in Nairobi.
I look forward to watching submissions and seeing how periods are turned into stories (even if they are under three minutes). I must admit that I hope they’re not all lighthearted and humorous, because the experience–which is humorous at times–can also be painful and full of conflicting emotions, depending on where a woman is in her life. Their goal is for people to stop treating “menstruation” and “periods” like dirty words.
Balaban said:
“It’s an exciting time for women in the world right now – and Crankyfest is part of the wave of men and women saying ‘enough.’ Enough objectification. Enough violence. Enough of this limited portrayal of the female experience in mass media. Women are people, and they have stories. And there happen to be a ton of incredible ones about periods. Now with Crankytown and Crankyfest, there is a designated place to share those experiences, and your vision as a filmmaker.”
Her optimism is incredibly refreshing, and while we’ve seen a veritable “war on women” in regard to legislation and rhetoric surrounding reproductive choice, I’ve always had some sense of glee that over and over, many a “gray-faced man with a two-dollar haircut” (as Tina Fey called them) kept spouting off pseudo-science about women’s bodies. Their utter ignorance at how women’s bodies work opened up a national dialogue about issues surrounding women, rape, reproduction and abortion. I can’t help but believe the news last week that more Americans support the Roe v. Wade decision than polls have ever reported before is related to the fact that the veil was lifted on many lawmakers’ backward mythology about women’s bodies and women’s roles.
So back to periods. If this shroud of mystery was lifted from women’s universal stories (and struggles), imagine the possibilities for Hollywood (and then, for society). Period scenes aren’t non-existent–various lists and montages have been collected online, and Lauren Rosewarne, PhD, published the book Periods in Pop Culture: Menstruation in Film and Television, which examines those scenes and messages. It should come as no surprise that Hollywood hasn’t done a great job with authentic portrayals of menstruation.
Steinhem ends her essay by claiming,
“In fact, if men could menstruate, the power justifications could probably go on forever.
If we let them.”
Here’s to filmmakers who will step up, claim women’s stories and give them power.
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Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.
Jezebel wrote a brief piece about this film way back in December 2010, but I’m only just now running across it. I’ve been experimenting with Instead Softcups recently because my friends keep talking about how much they like them. I kind of like them too. Woo!
Vanessa Meyer’s master’s thesis is a short film, titled Cup U. It is fifteen minutes of women — who are not, in her words, “granola eating hippies” — discussing menstrual cups.
