When I checked Marie Lu's Legendout of the library, I hoped that the main girl character (June) would be Asian. After all, Lu herself is Chinese, born in China and influenced, as a young child, by the 1989 Tiananmen Square student protests. From the age of five, she lived in the U.S. and, unless she lived in an alternate U.S., probably also didn't see herself reflected in the books on her library and school shelves. So wouldn't she use this opportunity to add one more Asian girl to YA litdom?
Good morning! Ready to start your weekend off right with a big bowl of healthy links from around the web?
• Tyler Perry's new movie, Temptation, looks to be a moralizing mess. But it's also dangerously cavalier about rape, according to Carolyn Edgar, who posits that the movie's larger message about "fallen" women getting what they deserve makes it even trickier to discuss the issue. [Carolyn Edgar]
Today saw not one, but two politicians toss offhand comments about appearances at women involved in politics. One of those men is the chair of a South Carolina county’s Republican Party, which, well, no surprise. But the other is President Barack Obama. Obama! Step it up.
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'm *the* liberal, lesbian, feminist living in a small town in Pennsylvania.
Our Popaganda relaunch kicks off with a bang: This episode digs into issues of monogamy. We tend to take monogamy for granted as a goal of relationships, but that's in part because it's an idea that been carefully constructed and policed throughout history. On this 20-minute episode, author of Sex and Punishment Eric Berkowitz explains the strange legal history of monogamy, writer Alex Borinsky discusses the role of monogamy as a political tool in the same-sex marriage debate, and sex educator Tristan Taormino dishes on the logistics of open relationships. Tune in!
The story of racehorse Secretariat has been told many times, many ways. In 2010 Disney released their own star-studded telling of the horse’s rise to glory with the help of his determined owner, Penny Chenery (played by Diane Lane). Everyone knows this film as a story about a horse's Triple Crown win. But really, it's as much a story about Chenery’s struggle with challenging gender norms both personally and professionally. The horse Secretariat was her means to achieving success in a sexist industry.
Welcome to Family Drama! For the next eight weeks, we’ll be guest blogging on Bitch about the portrayals of families on TV and in movies. We’ll delve into what makes fictional families functional (or not), different types of familial arrangements in media, relationships between family members, and a ton of other issues.
Our background is that we're siblings whose family has often been defined as "dysfunctional." This label is a simple umbrella term that covers the myriad problems of abuses, rotating caregivers, and ever-present instability we've faced. When we were young, no one ever dissected or defined that term for us. As adults, we've had to unpack it for ourselves.
Television and magazine audiences are well aware that the beautiful female faces we are enhanced with a slew of cosmetics. What audiences don't seem to take into account is is that the men's faces are also dolled up—the guys just often don’t talk about it or sign ad deals with Revlon.
This creates the impression—that's both incorrect and damaging—that male celebrities and models don't undergo the rigorous beauty routines of their female colleagues. How utterly false.
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