Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Margot’s bitching about girls in movies being outnumbered and sexualized. Again.
You know, there’s something interesting going on here. Feminism has been effectively split in half, for quite some time now, going all the way back to the beginning…of the current wave, anyway, in the 1960’s. Consider the two mindsets at work:
Mindset 1:
Stimulus: Girl being sexualized. Woman strutting around in skimpy clothes or something.
Response: Right on. Her father wouldn’t like it and her husband might not like it, but who cares. And if it fills any mens’ heads with lascivious thoughts, then that is their problem.
Mindset 2:
Stimulus: The same.
Response: She’s wrong and she should stop. She is setting the movement back <n> years. Why, this could fill mens’ heads with lascivious thoughts, and you know, they cannot be responsible for their actions.
Now, what’s interesting here is that you can’t split Mindset 1 and Mindset 2 along an axis of paleo- and neo-; both combine cultural sentiments both old and new. Since one says a person in a certain role is absolutely right and the other one says that same person is absolutely wrong, they are fundamentally incompatible with each other. And yet they are both feminism.
In fact, if anything it is Mindset 1 that came first. The miniskirts and the go-go boots and the big hair and the hot pants; sometime during the 1970’s things flipped around to, hey, men appreciate these fashion statements and the liberated woman should never do anything a man might appreciate. And ever since then, the hemlines have been going up and down like a yo-yo, all in the name of feminism.
Irony is, Mindset 2 these days seems dominant; any accentuation of the gender divide is ipso facto contrary to the feminist movement, which seems intent on making our society essentially gender-less. But Mindset 2 also bears a close resemblance to Sharia law.
Can a movement really be all about womens’ “liberation” when it would be perfectly cool with sticking them all in burkhas?
Dunno. But, to the subject at hand, which is women in movies and comic books acting like men…this is all rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, it seems to me. If it doesn’t sell tickets and issues, then it isn’t going to stick around — period. And no, no comic books are going to go flying off the shelves because the woman is doing manly things and manly stunts, with manly biceps and manly quads.
But it cuts both ways, too. Suppose the movie or the comic book has a time bomb that can only be dismantled by someone who knows something about computers. Very popular plot device. Well, it turns out you can be sexy & athletic, or you can be computer-literate — pick only one of those two — unless you’re a chick. Chicks can do both. It’s called a geek girl and yes, it can sell movie tickets like nobody’s business. Dudes can’t do this. So yes, the gender roles are different, they always will be, but you see it does balance out.
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Were you astonished by Pepper Potts ability to run Tony Stark’s company?
- TMI | 09/05/2012 @ 14:49.