movies

Over the past year, Academy Award-nominated documentary The Invisible War has shone a spotlight on the issue of sexual assault in the military. Politicians and civilians alike are talking about this problem more than ever. While progress is slow, it seems the military will make some change. I spoke with Coast Guard veteran and rape survivor Kori Cioca, one of the film’s main subjects, to see what she thinks about the film, her experiences in the military, and her life since the documentary’s release. 

When I was 12, I was in an abstinence-only sex-ed program where I learned that I should only have sex with someone to whom I was married. Then, in high school, some of my friends and I decided that premarital sex might be okay as long as it was with someone we were really, really in love with.

Now, most of my friends have decided to simply have sex with whomever they choose. But I haven’t.

As any of you who have been following this blog know, we’ve devoted quite a bit of brain power to figuring out where the idea that women aren’t funny comes from.

“Daddy, you taught me how to blind a man with my thumbs, build a bomb with the contents of a kitchen cabinet,” says the 12-year-old girl. “I’ve shot people, choked people, even drowned a motherfucker.”

This quote gives you a good idea of the life of Hit-Girl, the tween vigilante star of veteran graphic novelist Mark Millar’s new book, Kick-Ass 2 Prelude: Hit-Girl. 

There are two types of cowgirl narratives: Ones with plucky girls whose horses are a symbolic extension of their inner strength (see: Brave, National Velvet) and ones where girls feel unsure in the world and connect with horses who are also healing from some kind of trauma. We talk a lot about how horses help girls with wild hearts, but how is healing a horse like healing a woman? 

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.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars in his directorial debut, Don Jon, which centers on the life of a "porn addict" Jersey guido named Jon Martello.Though plenty of people will likely flock to a film that centers on two sexy stars and a porn addiction, Don Jon attempts to deconstruct the ways in which rigid notions of masculinity and femininity are damaging.

It's not that Silver Linings Playbook fails at what it's trying to do, exactly. It's easy to see why the film racked up Oscar nominations, including a Best Actress nod for Jennifer Lawrence. But a movie that includes mental illness, family function and dysfunction, football, romance, and sparkly dance costumes is biting off a bit more than it can chew. 

Over the last two months, I’ve written more than 20,000 words (!) about male primary caregivers in popular culture. I hope I’ve illustrated that while the rise in non-stereotypical portrayals of men is in some ways a step forward, it’s also often just another means by which the mainstream media reinforces gender norms — often at women’s expense.

When I started this series, I thought the increase in narratives about single and stay-at-home fathers reflected a genuine sociological phenomenon, because more men than women lost jobs in the recession and became stay-at-home dads as a result. However, I soon discovered that while the number of men who take care of their kids full-time has doubled over the last 12 years, it’s still just 176,000 people, or 0.8% of the population, according to Philip N. Cohen’s interrogation of the stats. (This rises when dads who work part-time are included, but only to 2.8%.) Plus, men are returning to work more quickly than women, making this much-discussed "trend" little more than a blip. What’s more, as Bryce Calvert pointed out in her Forbes column, it was only ever a partial victory considering that being a stay-at-home parent wasn’t a choice for many of these men, just as it isn’t a choice for many women.