One look at this modern hostess' silhouette and you can just about guess the kind of thing she keeps in that refrigerator.
You'd know it must be stocked with the lighter, less filling foods that make up the diet of the world's most attractive people today.
That's how they keep those slender waistlines. How they stay so younger-looking year after year. Why they feel so good, so fit for all the activities, all the fun modern living has to offer.
And it is to suit their modern taste that today's Pepsi-Cola is reduced in calories. Never heavy, never too sweet, it refreshes without filling.
Have a Pepsi, the modern, the light refreshment.
This ad creates a weird "us and them" vibe. Like we're looking into a world of young, thin, "modern", glamorous people who have cats and consider Pepsi food.
Fox Reality Channel tosses convention out the window with its groundbreaking new, one-hour, 10-episode original series, Househusbands of Hollywood, premiering Saturday, August 15th at 9p/8c. Cooking, cleaning, child rearing and the dynamics between real couples has never been this entertaining.
Five Hollywood men defy traditional marital roles by staying home to run the household while their wives head to work. It’s a new family arrangement. Fox Reality Channel follows these men as they struggle to juggle day-to-day household duties while managing their egos.
What's interesting to me is that, despite the cultural perception that housewives (especially wealthy celebrity housewives) have it easy and do nothing but shop and socialize, it seems that this show is going to focus on ways these househusbands have it rough. You know, because housework and childcare must be such drudgery for men with fragile egos! How will they ever manage the psychological damage of doing degrading women's work?
Some of the marketing imagery on the show's website is even more intriguing. Take, for example, their "Househusband Survival Kit", which attempts to masculinize housework by associating it with shooting guns, driving sports cars, and playing Mr. Fix-It:
So, what do you think? Even despite the spotlight on "role reversals", is there any chance this show won't be a steaming pile of sexism? Does anyone even get the Fox Reality channel?
Lauredhel's post about the feminist implications in favorite film of all time has just made my whole summer. Maybe my whole year:
The key metaphor that I’m seeing is that Bowie’s Goblin King is the Patriarchy, with his pants and his shiny dream-balls and his minions and his illusions and his fortified castle and his fake-benevolence and his threats. At the climax, when directly confronted by the King, Sarah need only completely reject his power over her in order to be free. Perhaps this could be seen as a fault in the metaphor, a failure to interrogate to other systems forcibly holding women in their place. However, Sarah only gets to that point by enduring a series of hardships and difficulties, including misdirection, betrayal, poisoning, incarceration, and other physical and magical threats.
(...)
When Sarah declares “you have no power over me!”, the metaphor is complete. She is talking about the dominance structures of society, about the entire edifice of patriarchy, and its weight of expectations and exploitation and false promises and threats.
In this fantasy world, Sarah speaks truth to power, and liberates herself in the process. She declares the patriarchy a very real fiction, a shared fantasy, maintained by a multitude of people with a variety of investments and interests.
Of course, in real life, things are not so easy as saying it makes it so – but Sarah didn’t actually have it that easy. The patriarchy is maintained by systems of dominance and duress, just as the castle beyond the Goblin City was almost impossible for Sarah to reach, and both her friends and her enemies attempted to slow her progress and turn her away from the final confrontation.
Go read the whole thing, bask in the clips, take in Lauredhel's thoughts, and join the debate in the comments section.
So, in seems that nobody in the feminist blogosphere is excited about this movie, so I don't think I need to try to warn anyone about it at this point. But Miranda at Women's Glib posted an excerpt of its hilariously scathing New York Times review, and something about the film struck me as especially ominous:
Katherine Heigl plays Abby, a producer for a ratings-challenged Sacramento morning television show, the kind that specializes in empty smiles, cooking tips and weather updates. She’s single and therefore, in the moral economy of modern Hollywood, unhappy. Her life goes into a tailspin when her boss hires a professional ape, Mike (Gerard Butler), who delivers loutish maxims on camera about the sexes that basically all boil down to this: Men have penises, and women should accommodate them any which way they can, preferably in push-up bras and remote-controlled vibrating panties.
…Ms. Heigl doesn’t do perky all that persuasively, but she does keep her smile and relative dignity even in scenes in which Abby is forced to play the fool, which is often, as when she’s hanging upside down from a tree in her skivvies. She even survives the scene that finds Abby writhing spasmodically during a dinner with her corporate masters, because, well, she’s wearing those pulsating panties, the boy at the next table has the remote, and there’s nothing funnier (or, really, scarier) than the spectacle of female pleasure.
Uhh, did you catch that? I haven't seen this film or this scene, and I realize that everyone with an interest in denying sexism in all its forms goes completely apeshit and whines when a feminist dares to criticize a film before she's seen the whole thing, but the description of the scenario in the review that I put in bold just does not sit well with me. Because, except in the extremely unlikely event that Heigl's character donned these vibrating panties, specifically gave the remote to the guy controlling them and said, "Please use this remote control as much as you want during my dinner with my work associates, and here's my safe word in case I decide at any point that I want you to stop", this scenario describes a sexual assault. And sexual assault is not funny.
Call me a humorless feminist, but I don't feel like going to a theater to see a film where the audience is cracking up at someone's sexual assault.
This "game" at Comic-Con has everything. Not only does it offer "a sinful night with two hot girls", but the promotional poster features a woman's disembodied clavicles and cleavage.
I'm sure the straight women and gay men at Comic-Con will be lining up to participate, and I'm sure the women offered up as prizes are so looking forward to whatever sleazeball ends up winning.
Not ever having been a cheerleader in middle school or high school, I don't relate to this one as personally as some of the other anti-feminist things from my younger days, but I was reminded recently by an old episode of Freaks and Geeks that, before every big football or basketball game, the cheerleaders at my school always showed up early on game-days in order to decorate the lockers of the (always male) players. And I always thought that kind of sucked for them.
Now, I realize that many people believe that cheerleaders exist for the sole purpose of feeding school spirit and boosting (always male) team morale, but everyone knows that cheerleading has evolved to the point that it's much more than that, and the teams usually compete in their own capacities in an environment completely separate from boys' sports. Even though cheerleading culture may not be something I can identify with personally, I understand that most cheerleaders don't do what they do just to make football players and their fans happy. (As a former marching band kid who hated football but liked competing against other bands, it's a feeling I can get behind.)
So why was it necessary for the girls in cheerleading to get up an hour earlier to come to school and adorn the lockers of players they may or may not have personally liked very much with crepe paper, balloons, and glittery nametags?
I'm not sure if this activity was required by the cheerleading coaches or if it had just become enough of a tradition that it was a social requirement, but I really do wonder how many of the players actually cared that it was done or if any of them ever saved and scrapbooked their glittery basketball-shaped nametags. I also never saw any football players decorating a cheerleader's locker the school day before a big competition. I'm just sayin'.
Does anyone know if this practice is still in place in schools?
Ever notice how gadgets can have the word "boy" or "man" right in the name and they're still considered universal, but we all know that if they had been given more feminine names, no self-respecting boy would ever use them? A few too many of my favorite pastimes as a kid involved such masculine-named devices.
There was the Nintendo Gameboy:
The Sony Walkman:
It's CD-playing follower, the Sony Discman:
And the ultimate tape-recording experience, the Tiger Electronics Talkboy:
Okay, okay. So, I never actually owned or used a Talkboy. But I'm sure I wanted one, since I found Macaulay Culkin's use of it in Home Alone 2 so ingenious and clever, and since I so vividly remember this commercial for it:
The Hollywood gossip-hounds are all over the new promotional materials for the upcoming film Iron Man 2, which feature pictures of Scarlett Johansen and not Gwenyth Paltrow, even though Paltrow was in the first film and Johansen is a new addition in the sequel. And we all know that the media loves a catfight:
Caption reads: "Limelight: Sexy Scarlett is the sequel's female focus instead of Gwenyth
Don't you just love the juxtaposition of the two screen shots? As if Gwenyth has been caught steaming over Scarlett getting all the attention? Here's how they describe the conflict:
A source said: ‘Gwyneth was afraid she’d be upstaged by Scarlett and not being in the campaign was the final straw.
'She is furious she’s been left out.’
Gwyneth, 36, now plans to boycott a promotion in San Diego later this month.
‘She’s heading to New York instead, she’s so angry,’ added the source.
A spokesman for Gwyneth said: ‘She was not at all upset.'
(Entertainment "News" Rule #294: When there are two competing sides to a story, always go with the jucier one.)
But that's not even the end of the Scarlett-drama for the week! Adfreak reports that Johansen's new gig as the spokesmodel for the fashion label Mango is being framed as a way for her to exact revenge on Penelope Cruz for getting an Oscar nomination for Vicky Christina Barcelona. Pictured below are examples of both actresses' work for the label. Frankly, I don't know how they could even have a catfight when they're so busy lying there all passive-like:
Well, this is one of the most sexist pieces of "journalism" I've seen in a while:
Comic-Con. It's not just for nerdy guys anymore.
And it's not all just about the influx of squealing "Twilight" girls, either. This summer's event, taking place July 23-26 in the San Diego Convention Center, could shape up to be a smorgasbord for female fandemonium. (We say "could" because the official rundown of panels and events won't be officially released until next month.) But we've got a pretty good idea of what eager girls can expect (aside from one heck of a line for the "New Moon" session). Other vampires will be in their midst ("True Blood" and CW's upcoming "Vampire Diaries") but also kick-ass TV heroines ("Dollhouse" and "Chuck"), the muscle behind "G.I. Joe" (Channing Tatum, anyone?), perhaps a return visit from Robert Downey Jr. (hawking "Iron Man 2") and, if we're lucky, Brad Pitt himself (for "Inglourious Basterds").
Following this intro is a slide show of 22 reasons for "eager girls" to attend, ALL of which are based on movies and films featuring various Hollywood stars and include captions about how much the ladies will love throwing themselves at the shows' hunky male actors or looking up to their favorite "girl power" heroines. Because there certainly couldn't be any women who actually attend because they like comic books, graphic novels, anime, manga, games, classic animation, fantasy, or sci-fi. The only reason for ladies to go is to get a glimpse of Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp.
And don't even get me started on the slide show's captions! Here are a couple of my favorites, but you really should go read them all and have a good laugh at what they authors really think about women:
'Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time' Women will be rushing the stage, offering to do star Jake Gyllenhaal's laundry on those washboard abs that he acquired for the film, since he spends much of it fighting, shirtless or both. Jake, we don't want to know how to quit you.
'The Wolfman' Vampire-lovers have it all wrong. Werewolves can keep you warm, sympathize with your monthly curse, sniff out where you lost your keys and not thirst for your sweet, sweet blood. Bonus: Benicio del Toro's natural wolf-y looks won't even require hair and makeup for the panel.
Those witchy women of Eastwick Get your female empowerment right here. John Updike's novel about three women who find their lives turned upside down and mysterious personal powers unleashed when a devlish man moves to town, gets the network series treatment courtesy of ABC. Plus, you know the wardrobe of Rebecca Romijn, Sara Rue and Lindsay Price is going to give those "Desperate" housefraus a run for their money.
-A middle-aged male character who feels incredibly conflicted about dating a woman half his age, gets really embarrassed when his friends see them together, and finally ends the relationship so that he can go back to feeling like a mature man, only this time with more confidence than before.
-A male character who gets spied on by a mostly unseen female character as he showers and dresses, while the viewers at home learn about the ever-present "female gaze".
-A female character who is so enraged by her boyfriend's rape that she buys a gun and goes after the perpetrator, only to be stopped by her concerned friends just before she does anything she might regret.
-A male character who is so obsessed with becoming Prom King that he sabotages the top contender by spreading rumors about how many girls he's slept with.
* Economists at Davos this year speculated that the presence of more women on Wall Street might have averted the downturn.
* Ernst & Young rounded up studies that show that women can make the difference between economic success and failure in the developing world, between good and bad decision-making in the industrialized world, and between profit and loss in the corporate world. Their conclusion: American companies would do well with more senior women.
* Organizations such as Columbia University, McKinsey & Co., Goldman Sachs, and Pepperdine University, have done research that document a clear relationship between women in senior management and corporate financial success.
* Pepperdine found that the Fortune 500 firms with the best records of putting women at the top were 18 to 69 percent more profitable than the median companies in their industries.
* Catalyst, a research firm focused on women and business, found that Fortune 500 companies with three or more women in senior management positions score higher on top measures of organizational excellence. In addition, companies with three or more women on their boards outperformed the competition on all measures by at least 40 percent.
So, these are the stats. The “why” is less straightforward. Do companies that have female executives fare better on the bottom line because they pay those women less than their male counterparts? That wouldn’t explain long-term success.
Maybe it has more to do with diversity, and the effect that comes from having (and considering) varying points of view before making decisions. According to the piece in The Washington Post, testosterone can make men more prone to competition and risk-taking. Women, on the other hand, seem to be wired for collaboration, caution, and long-term results. In fact, an economist at the University of Michigan, Scott Page, uses mathematical models to demonstrate that a diverse group will solve a complicated business problem better than a homogeneous group. So, maybe it’s not that women make better leaders. Maybe it’s that women and men make better leaders together.
With the exception of the focus on biological bases for differences in male and female work habits, this is pretty promising news. Maybe the gender gap will start to close if companies realize a diverse staff can improve their bottom line.
When I was a kid, I had a taped-from-TV copy of the 1987 Disney special "Totally Minnie", in which the guy from Revenge of the Nerds is transformed from a geek into a hip, cool guy with the help of Minnie Mouse and Suzanne Somers. The show was obviously just an excuse to play a series of montages of love-related clips from Disney films and cartoons to jazzy 80s music, but I absolutely adored it. I watched it countless times, and I think I may have even owned the soundtrack on cassette. When I re-watched it on YouTube, I noticed some interesting things.
Enough things for a highlight reel and a play by play.
First, we have Minnie Mouse instructing Revenge of the Nerds guy not to be "nasty", followed by a three-minute montage of Minnie Mouse and other female Disney characters being chased, groped, tied up, locked up, and otherwise victimized:
And, in case you were wondering, the final clip of Minnie fighting back by no means makes up for the rest of it.
Then, we get a lesson in the importance of (heterosexual) dating, love, and romance:
Lessons learned: 1. Talking to girls about science is totally not romantic. Duh! 2. No doesn't always mean no. Girls may physically resist, yell "stop", or even run away, but everyone knows they're just playing coy (see Donald and Daisy at 1:41 and Mickey and Minnie immediately after). 3. The "Twitterpated" scene from Bambi = Male Gaze 101 4. Women hold great sexual power over men and can completely paralyze them with one kiss (or just by batting their eyelashes).
THEN, it's onto the segment about jealousy, where we get to see a catfight between Wendy and Tinkerbell, and Captain Hook informs us that "a jealous female can be tricked into anything". We also learn that, when women are angry, their yelling is high-pitched and completely unintelligible. (Poor Donald!)
The most progressive scene of all is when they depart completely from the show's purpose to feature a musical number in which a gay male singer is in love with a straight female mouse. (I should note that this part made my five-year-old self fall head over heels in love with Elton John.):
But when the fun is over, it's time to remind little girls to express themselves through fashion and that they can "buy the blues away" by shopping:
Best line in the song: Don't need money now. Charge it! Wrap it! Send it! Bag it! Shoppin'!
It seems we have Disney to thank for teaching my generation how to accumulate credit card debt.
But, mostly, thanks go to Disney for amassing such a huge legacy of animated sexist cliches and for making a TV special aimed at young girls to showcase them all in one place.
I'm so sick of seeing the same stories play out in the same ways over and over without ever switching up the genders in any way.
I am simply DYING to see:
-A male character who smolders with jealousy of one of his male friends and begins to dress like him, gets his hair cut like him, and eventually tries to kill him.
-A male character who is seduced by one of his female college professors and actually feels threatened and victimized by it.
-A female character who gets trapped in an elevator with a pregnant woman, freaks out, helps deliver the baby, and is commended for her heroic act.
I felt insulted once when I was out on a first (and last) date with a guy who scoffed at my love for video games and told me that he bet I only really liked Tetris, since all girls like puzzle games. Even though I do love games like Tetris (and Dr. Mario and Snood and Puzzle League, and Puzzle Quest), the idea of this stereotype really got under my skin, and when I saw this video on YouTube sometime last year, it only fueled my anger:
Pretty vile, huh? My guess is that he's probably just been beaten at Tetris by too many girls (his Mom included) and needed to patch up his pride. But it still makes me sad, since the same guy also made these kickassMegaman vids with lyrics that Dan and I sing all the time.
I'm already a regular reader of Susie Bright's blog (the home of gems like this), but I've been meaning to write about how much I love the new feature on Jezebel where Susie and her daughter respond to readers' questions about sex.
[Susie:] Take, for example, their response to a reader who's feeling nervous about using found objects (like her hairbrush) as sex toys:
Now back to the nitty-gritty of your question: The only criteria to judge an impromptu sex toy, is to make sure it's perfectly smooth, with no sharp edges or seams. Vaginally, it can be any shape you like, since your vag is a cul-de-sac. But if you ever want to use something for anal penetration, you need to make sure it has a flange (flared base). In that case, you hairbrush is fine for that, too.
If you want to use your "found dildo" more than once, just make sure it's washable, non-porous. If it would survive a spin in the dishwasher, it's a good candidate. Your hairbrush is probably hard plastic, which is ideal.
Where's all your apprehension coming from, after your fun? Honestly, how many times do people stomp into your bedroom and demand to use your hairbrush?
Aretha: Like never. Listen, Kate: If you don't want people to use your brush, JUST SAY NO. No one going to press you about it.
Susie: I can't imagine anyone putting you on the spot: "I bet you‘ve been masturbating with your comb and that's why you won't lend it to me!"
Next time one of my friends won't lend me something, I'm totally going to accuse them of masturbating with it.
Have you heard of the new MTV series Is She Really Going Out With Him? It's the "hilarious and compelling docu-format show that aims to tear down the mystery behind pop culture's latest unexplainable phenomenon: beautiful and innocent young sweethearts who fall for self-absorbed, overly-tanned, tattoo covered douchebags."
When a man falls for a bitchy but good looking woman, they don’t say men like bitchy women. They say men like cute women.
When a woman falls for a good looking asshole, they don’t say women like attractive guys. They say women like assholes.
Double standard much?
(Yes, I’ve been known to find good looking assholes attractive. No, I’ve never liked an ugly asshole.)
Women, being the sexual creatures we are, are susceptible, just like men, to sex appeal, and sometimes liable to focus on that to the exclusion of all other characteristics. When we like “bad boys” they’re not just any bad boys – they’re sexy motherfuckers.
But men are threatened by women’s sexual agency and women applying to them the same shallow standard by which they often judge us, so they pretend women don’t care about looks. They also want to paint women as irrational, which is the only way to explain why women fall for jerks. Never mind that the jerks are sometimes sexy. We’ll just pretend women don’t know what is in their own best interests.
Perfectly said. This double standard, perfectly illustrated by this new show, just feeds into the ridiculous notion that women are clueless about who to date and that Nice Guys can't win.
I've called out the big film blog SlashFilm before for their sexist and male-centered reporting before, but I've been surprised how, lately, they've been taking baby steps in the direction of calling attention to issues of race, gender, and sexuality in movies. Even though they tend to not take a strong stance on calling out oppression, I think it's great that they aren't totally ignoring issues that affect people other than straight, white men.
Their commenters, however, are a different story. When SlashFilm posted today about how top earning actresses make way less money than top earning actors, their readers came out in droves to dismiss the possibility of sexism in some interesting (and sometimes comical) ways. Some examples:
Its not that Hollywood is sexist, there are probably only a few people in the world that would rather watch this list of actresses do their job opposed to the highest paying actors list, and this, of course, is with the exception of Cate Blanchett and Kate Winslet (Meryl Streep is a great actress, but the movies she picks aren't the type that ask for big paydays). None of these women were in any blockbuster movies, or movies with huge budgets last year (unlike the men on the highest paid actors list), with the exception of Jolie, who is, coincidentally, the highest paid actress. When these women start doing the same jobs as the highest paid men then you can throw a fit that Hollywood is 'sexist.' Johny Depp rightfully deserves to be paid more than any woman on this list. Although I do not think that Mike Meyer's should be on the highest paid actors list I would rather watch him DO ANYTHING than sit through a Sarah Jessica Parker, Cameron Diaz, Sandra Bullock, Reese Witherspoon, Drew Barrymore, Renee Zellweger, or Halle Berry Movie (they all have their one or two could movies, but look at what they are making now!), and be honest, would you?
I feel like there are far less quality actresses than actors in Hollywood. When Julia Roberts was making decent films, she was topping both sexes with few exceptions. It is such a majority of films that have males for the lead roles and more male dependent in films that they will get paid more for a long time. It is easier to find a decent actress than a great male lead.
Here is a question, what actors and actresses would be on a top 100 list? How many males vs. females would be on the list? Not many females bring much to a film outside of sex appeal... and that is the choice of the actress. Transformers 2 films Fox bent over too many times, and how many lines does she have in the film? Female leads are rare, giving Jolie a couple but none of which are great films by any standard. If Jolie wanted double pay to match some of the male actors, she wouldn't be cast.
I think Slashfilm is on a political tyraid just for the hell of it.
And that's just from the first 15 or so. I'm sure plenty more will be rolling in.
I applaud SlashFilm for taking on this issue at all when they have such neanderthal readers, but if you prefer to get your film news in a friendlier space, I suggest Women & Hollywood and Bitch Flicks.
Posts
