The premise is deceptively simple: A group of girlfriends reunite on a Maine camping trip for the first time in years. They come across three military men, long-ago acquaintances from school, and the groups merge for a lakeshore party. Alcohol is imbibed, and one of the girls heads off to the woods with one of the men.
"The world opens its arms to a pretty girl," says the father of the lazy beautiful Cloey, the main character of dreamy new film City Baby. It's true—the world does offer plenty of opportunities to Cloey (played by Cora Benesh, who co-wrote the film with director David Morgan) but the sometimes-model rolls her eyes at all of them, preferring to drink PBR down by the river and feel sorry for herself.
City Baby is a loving portrait of an obnoxious culture.
This week’s episode of the cartoon Adventure Time (titled “The Suitor”) revolved around a young man named Braco courting our favorite science fanatic, Princess Bubblegum. By the end of the episode, Braco has been thoroughly rejected. In an environment where the endgame of most princess stories is love and marriage, this rejection, though not surprising (what with Braco being a guest character and Adventure Time being awesome), indicates Adventure Time's larger rejection of the toxic princess narrative that is worthy of attention.
Welcome to the latest installment of Ms. Opinionated, in which readers have questions about the pesky day-to-day choices we all face, and I give advice about how to make ones that (hopefully) best reflect our shared commitment to feminist values—as well as advice on what to do when they don't.
Dear Ms. Opinionated,
I am an outspoken feminist, my best friend from high school is decidedly not. Like, as in "living with her ultra-conservative, religious family until she marries because a young woman shouldn't be on her own not a feminist."
• Amy Pascal, the chief of Sony studios, gave a fantastic interview to Forbes's Dorothy Pomerantz. Indiewire's Women in Hollywood blog has some of the most trenchant excerpts, including this one, on female characters in film: "They can be villains, they can be protagonists, I don't care but their movements, their actions what they do in the plot has to actually matter." [Women in Hollywood]
When I first picked up Nalo Hopkinson's The Chaos last summer, I thought, "Finally! A book with a young woman of color as the protagonist!" Of course, I've since learned that there are other dystopic novels with girls of color, but this hasn't ended my love forThe Chaos even after a second (and third) reading.
The Chaos isn't actually set in a dystopia. It's more of a post-apocalyptic world in which Toronto transforms from its usual racist, misogynist, able-ist normalcy to utter chaos, complete with hoodie-wearing sasquatches, escalators that ask questions about quantum physics, and Baba Yaga and her flying house.
• Prime-time TV is more gender-balanced than current films—according to a massive analysis, 39 percent of prime-time TV characters are women, while we make up only 28 percent of film characters. [Sociologial Images]
• Are you following what's going on with #FBRape? The campaign launched earlier this week to get companies to stop running ads next to Facebook content that promotes violence against women has had a couple companies respond and no word from several others. [Women, Action, and Media]
This past week, the news broke that New York City began to instruct its police officers this winter that to make sure they act accordingly to legality of women going topless in public. It’s easy to dismiss this law with a punch line, but the truth is that instructing all of New York’s police force to leave topless women alone is groundbreaking and part of a long running movement lead by women who have fought for topless equality.
For almost fifty years, the disempowered and the marginalized and the outcasts have held up Star Trek as a show that said, “This is what we can aspire to: a humanity that has evolved beyond inequality and oppression”. The show presents a vision of Earth that has moved beyond racism and classism, beyond ableism and sexism and homophobia. As a life-long Trekkie, it is tempting to agree with this reputation. Me and Star Trek, hand in hand, running through fields of wildflowers on a soft-focus sunny day while I gaze upon them longingly. Oh Star Trek! So progressive! So feminist!
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