Last month, a 26-year-old woman known only on her site as Eva began posting video blogs about the way people treat her. Her reactions are displayed in the writing that accompanies the videos, there is barely any dialogue to the videos and rarely is Eva herself shown in them. Eva has Cerebral Palsy, she cannot speak and she gets around in a power wheelchair. Mounted to her wheelchair is a video camera, which says is always recording, that captures some rather disappointing interactions that she has with people who either ignore her entirely or patronize her to the point of frustration. While her reactions are not always evident in the videos themselves, the paragraphs she writes get her point across loud and clear.
It’s the well-worn, short-yet-storied line that’s become nearly cliché: "I’m not a feminist, but…"—one that’s now some kind of standard midpoint in our culture’s endless wrangling about the F word. Now "I’m not a feminist, but…" is being re-examined via comics in the forthcoming anthology The Big Feminist BUT, edited by Suzanne Kleid, Joan Reilly, and Shannon O’Leary. The anthology, which has a website, features comic artists’ takes on what the editors call the "contradictory ‘post-feminist’ playing field" we’re (apparently) living in today.
Page Turner interviewed O’Leary to learn just what it is about that big but that irks her and her co-editors, whether she thinks we really are living in a "post-feminist" playground, her picks of the best comics for comic-obsessed feminists, and (yes, it exists) sexism in the comics world. Read on for more!
While I’m personally in no way rattled by the acquisition/merger, I do think that it provides some opportunities to discuss gender, entertainment and marketing.
Marvel has over 70 years of history, and Disney will have access to over 5,000 characters (though the ones that have been mentioned most in the past week are the most profitable: Spider-Man, Iron Man, and the X-Men. Hmmmmm . … what could be missing here?)
The deal has included lots of business speak about "brands," "vertical integration," "long-term growth," "value creation," and my favorite, "synergy," (mostly because it reminds me of 30 Rock’s Jack Donaghy telling Liz Lemon to "never badmouth synergy"). There certainly will be many opportunities for profit, but I’m interested in how y’all respond to the fact that one of Disney’s major motivating factors has been securing a young male demographic.
As if gay marriage weren't sweet enough already, Ben & Jerry's and Freedom to Marry have teamed up to present us with Hubby Hubby, a renamed version of their popular peanut butter & pretzel-y ice cream. Check it out:
In which I ponder the pleasures and perils of having sex with your ex. Does familiarity--or a breakup--breed contempt? Or are your exes a valuable resource in what my friends and I call women's "anti-celibacy campaign?"
I’m vegan. I think cruelty to animals is unnecessary and unjust. I don’t eat animals. I don’t wear them. And I don’t kill them for sport. However, Ella Es el Matador isn’t a film about animal rights, and treating it as such does it an enormous injustice. I don’t believe in prioritizing a conversation about cruelty enacted on bulls over one about cruelty enacted on women while discussing a beautiful and melancholy film exploring the world of bullfighting through the eyes of female matadors—so I won't.
Newsweek has a piece on their website right now entitled, "How To Get A Raise: Stop Being Good" by Jessica Bennett. In it Bennett reviews a new book, Rachel Simmons' The Curse of the Good Girl which is about how raising girls to be "good" can actually be, well, bad when it comes to their careers. The book sounds pretty great, though not necessarily surprising. (Guess what? Women are socialized to be too nice to be taken seriously in the workplace!) Still, it's nice that Newsweek is addressing these issues for the not-necessarily-feminist set.
However, a lot was missing from the article, and a lot was there that frankly shouldn't have been. For example, as a photo essay accompaniment to the piece, Newsweek gives us "11 Powerful Women That Make Men (and Other Women) Squirm". While writing about the problems of the "psychological glass ceiling" that keeps many women from feeling confident in the workplace, isn't Newsweek perpetuating that same shit by basically calling women like Hilary Clinton, Martha Stewart, and Anna Wintour (and yes, they are all white women except for Yoko Ono) terrifying?
For at least the last thirty years (and probably more) my mom has been a faithful viewer of The Young and the Restless. For several years in there I was too - my earliest memories involve eating the peel from her apple while watching the show. Without fail, my mother has taped every episode, even if she's watching it live, in case she is called away. Great woe awaited the daughter of hers who accidentally interfered with its taping on the VCR every once in awhile - though always the result of a mistake my mother acted as if I had deliberately planned the ruin of her day. Vacations are organized with an eye to how my mother will get to catch up on her show. Nowadays I'll only see glimpses of it when I'm home, and not much has changed: Victor is still endlessly remarrying and divorcing Nikki, Jack Abbott still has an abundance of sandy blond hair, and there is always, always, a rhinestone somewhere in the frame.
I'll admit that despite all the wooden acting, the stilted dialogue, the unbelievable marriages and remarriages and devil possession plots, I did, for a while, succumb to the hypnotic power of the soap opera. There is something reassuring about them, the same people there every day, without fail, missing only a few major holidays a year, never changing and always predictable. And I can see, very well, that they broke up the monotony of housewivery for many women. Moreover, soap operas have occasionally displayed a penchant for progressivism: most recently, they've been introducing gay and lesbian characters with little judgment, and more than a little reverence.
Doris Walker worked throughout her life protecting and defending leftist causes and activists. She participated as an activist and legal counsel throughout almost every major America progressive social movement in the twentieth century, from denouncing Jim Crow laws and McCarthyism, to being a labor lawyer and labor organizer, to helping to successfully acquit Angela Davis, and even challenging the Bush Administration's invasion of Afghanistan in Iraq.
In which I ponder the pleasures and perils of having sex with your ex. Does familiarity--or a breakup--breed contempt? Or are your exes a valuable resource in what my friends and I call women's "anti-celibacy campaign?"
For at least the last thirty years (and probably more) my mom has been a faithful viewer of The Young and the Restless. For several years in there I was too - my earliest memories involve eating the peel from her apple while watching the show. Without fail, my mother has taped every episode, even if she's watching it live, in case she is called away. Great woe awaited the daughter of hers who accidentally interfered with its taping on the VCR every once in awhile - though always the result of a mistake my mother acted as if I had deliberately planned the ruin of her day. Vacations are organized with an eye to how my mother will get to catch up on her show. Nowadays I'll only see glimpses of it when I'm home, and not much has changed: Victor is still endlessly remarrying and divorcing Nikki, Jack Abbott still has an abundance of sandy blond hair, and there is always, always, a rhinestone somewhere in the frame.
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