Pop culture made me a feminist. As a suburban girl in the early 90s, I picked up my beliefs about equality from some books at the library and a copy of Cyndi Lauper’s “She’s So Unusal.” After no one at my elementary school opted to join my "Gender Equality Club," I looked back to pop culture to find others of my kind—and I found the most feminists were on network TV.
Pepper Potts (Gwenyth Paltrow) and a conveniently sexy fire in Iron Man 3.
Shane Black’s Iron Man 3 has rolled into theaters and conquered box office receipts. After the alien attack on New York during The Avengers, Tony Stark is not doing well. While suffering from insomnia and anxiety attacks, an Asian-played-by-white-guy terrorist named the Mandarin has stepped up to inflict damage on American civilians.
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,
The kind of break-up described in your last column is thankfully in my rearview mirror, but now I face a whole other problem: everyone keeps telling me to "get back out there" but I'm not sure I even remember, let alone ever knew, how! My ex and I were together practically since college, he asked me out and things just went from there. But now it's like... I'm not 22 anymore, I'm almost 30, I'm not as cute as I used to be and I feel like any guy I would want to go out with could totally do better.
Here in the blog series Reverse Cowgirl, we’ve looked at everything from women warriors to advertising aimed at horse-loving girls, each getting at this baseline question: what is it about girls and horses? Now, as it’s time to hit the trail (sorry, had to), what can we come away with?
Watching Baz Luhrmann’s new film The Great Gatsby feels like chugging an entire bottle of cheap champagne: A giddy, fantastic, sugar rush soon turns to a morose headache.
I spent last week in Seoul, the modern cultural hub of South Korea, where international sensation Psy first made his mark. It's a crowded city plastered with images of celebrities on buses, billboards, storefronts, giant windows, and any other usable space. As I traversed the city, one thing that struck me was how uniform all their faces were: big eyes, white skin, raised nose bridges.
As the modeling industry here is accused of conforming to a white, northern European look as the standard of beauty, South Korea seems to be chasing a different ideal: a generic Caucasian look.
The book's society, seen through the eyes of young main character June Canto, is a clear critique of class and race dynamics that exist today. As in our real world culture today, the people at the top of The Summer Prince's society refuse to recognize the oppression that exists their literally pyramid-shaped city.
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