Hollywood

What a freaking week, huh?

• Boston is on lockdown. Stay safe, everyone. [NPR]

• Gabby Giffords served up a big heaping plate of fuck all y'all with this editorial in The New York Times about the failure of the Senate to serve the American people by passing "common-sense legislation" requiring expanded background checks for gun buyers. [New York Times]

• A new Tumblr called Boys Clubs highlights the organizations, panels, boards, presidencies, and other institutions where women don't exist for a bracing visual on what insitututional bias—whether conscious or not—looks like. [Boys Clubs]

• Top WNBA draft pick Brittney Griner has been in the news a ton lately, but not because she's gay. Autostraddle discusses her graceful, casual acknowledgment of her identity, and, well, we love this girl: "Don't worry about what other people are going to say, because they're always going to say something."  [Autostraddle]

• Vulture investigates a classic Hollywood gender dynamic with a series of snappy charts showing that as film's most bankable male stars age, the female costars with whom they're paired, well, don't. (Or as one famous lothario put it, "I get older—they stay the same age.") [Vulture]

• Speaking of movies, IndieWire's Women and Hollywood blog has a list of all the female-centric movies opening this summer. Get excited! [Women and Hollywood]

• Former Bitch blogger Michelle Dean looks at the long history of pervasive sexism levied at memoirs written by women. [The Cut]

• If you're a fan of Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, you'll want to know about her partnership with the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network. If you donate to RAINN this month (Sexual Assault and Prevention Awareness month), her publisher, MacMillan, will match your contribtution. [RAINN]

• Are we running out of female body parts around which to create consumer anxiety already? The apparent craze in the U.K. for nipple-darkening tattoos, or "tittoos," suggests yes. Greeeaaaat. [The Telegraph]

Have a great weekend, and join us in hoping for a blissfully uneventful coming week. Oh, and if we missed anything, let us know in the comments.

Vulture recently published its list of the 100 Most Valuable Hollywood Stars, calculated using an algorithm that combines eight data points. Since this is a numbers game that takes into account magazine covers, box office receipts, and studio value, it should come as no surprise that the list is stacked with white guys. Let's do the math, shall we?


Emma Stone is over this sausage fest.

Calling all Mad Men fans! Christina Hendricks, known to us all as Joan Holloway/Harris, is on the cover of next week's Hollywood Reporter.

Born in LA's Chinatown in 1905 to a family that ran a laundry service, Anna May Wong was Hollywood's first Chinese-American movie star.

If Hollywood gravitates toward a "sexy" disability for male characters, it would have to be blindness. I was recently mulling over how the big screen portrays men of color and with disabilities and realized that blind male characters in movies often aren’t dehumanized or marginalized. They’re downright hot.

The Straw Feminist trope is a deliberately created, exaggerated caricature of a feminist that is used to undermine and ridicule feminist movements.


Links and transcript after the jump!

Tropes vs. Women is a six-part video series by Feminist Frequency that explores the reoccurring stories, themes and representations of women in Hollywood films and TV shows.

The Mystical Pregnancy is a trope writers use to create drama and terror by invading, violating and exploiting women's reproductive capabilities. Often these female characters have their ovaries harvested by aliens or serve as human incubators for demon spawn. Sometimes they are carrying the Messiah and other times Satan himself.

Links and transcript after the jump!

Tropes vs. Women is a six-part video series by Feminist Frequency that explores the reoccurring stories, themes and representations of women in Hollywood films and TV shows.

The Evil Demon Seductress is a supernatural creature usually a demon, alien, robot, vampire etc. who is most often disguised as a sexy human female. She uses her sexuality and sexual wiles to manipulate, seduce, kill and often eat poor, hapless men by luring them into her evil web.

**Full video transcript is available at FeministFrequency.com

The Smurfette Principle was named two decades ago by Katha Pollitt, when she noticed that there were a disproportionate amount of male characters in programming aimed at young people. Even in adult programming, when women do appear in the primary cast of a television show or movie, they are usually alone in a group of men. Sadly, this trope has made its way into the 21st century.

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a cute, bubbly, young (usually white) woman who has recently entered the life of our brooding hero to teach him how to loosen up and enjoy life. While that might sound all well and good for the man, this trope leaves women as simply there to support the star on his journey of self discovery with no real life of her own.