A Singularity

“The center for disease control says that men’s violence against women is at epidemic proportions, is the number one health concern for women in this country and abroad.”

“I need you[men & women] on board. I need you with me. I need you working with me and me working with you on how we raise our sons and teach them to be men — that it’s okay to not be dominating, that it’s okay to have feelings and emotions, that it’s okay to promote equality, that it’s okay to have women who are just friends and that’s it, that it’s okay to be whole, that my liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman.”

Happy New Year

Source

Extremely well explained points from a thirteen year old girl regarding some of the sexism women still receive today. Watching this video reminded me of a sitcom I was watching last night where the “walk of shame” was used as a comedic bit. As it happened in this show, the gender roles were reversed and it was the woman making fun of the man for coming home late wearing the same clothing and the context was different so it is actually a bad example, but the fact that I can say “walk of shame” and you likely thought I meant a woman, means that this kind of prejudice still exists.

Regardless of your gender, as long as you are human, willing, and able how much you want to have sex and how much sex you have is you and your partner’s business.

Movie Bob delves into a reason why feminism takes issue with modern popular video games.

Video Source

I admit while I knew about the problem of the portrayal of women in video games, the specific why is never something I’ve tried to analyze, making this video something of an eye opener. I also more or less agree with Bob that feminism seems to have a significant and rather undeserved stigma among male gamers. Hopefully the above video let you understand the female perspective a bit better.

If you go look, you can find the original source of this image, which was a comparison between this set of female character sand those of the female characters that are seen on prime time television dramas and comedies that are not specifically related to speculative fiction. Arguments aside about whether medical mystery shows are speculative fiction or not, I think it was something of an unfair comparison, as we can find well rounded female characters in those types of shows just like we can find flat, sex and relationship obsessed female characters in science fiction shows.

I would like to see a factual study done, that does a genre comparison of female characters in speculative fiction over traditional drama and fiction, just to see where it does fall but in the mean time lets simply celebrate how awesome science fiction and fantasy is from a gender equality perspective (chainmail bikinis aside).

I stumbled upon this video I felt like sharing.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTlmho_RovY&feature=player_embedded)

The speaker is Jean Killbourn and she has been talking about the subjects regarding the image of women in mass media for years. It seems to be a topic that is “well-known” but has no traction when it comes to people wanting to solve it which is understandable. It is both an issue that is hard to see, easy to ignore, and has so many roots in our society that simple and easy fixes can’t work.

It is not like we can make laws outlawing the digital manipulation of people for advertising purposes. It is a nearly impossible to enforce such a law and could be easily abused, not to mention first amended right issues. Other solutions might be education and counter-advertising but these are just small pushes at trying to effect a change on a societal level.

But every change begins somewhere. So education it is. Hence my sharing of the video above. Do you agree or disagree with anything she said? Can you think of personal experiences related to use of over-idealized female images in advertising? Or do you think the effects are being overblown?

I’m not sure what I am supposed to tell you here. There has been a lot of talk about the movie Sucker Punch. I’ve heard glowing reviews from friends, bitter numbers from critics, and helter skelter from the internet. All of this was second-hand. I didn’t even really elicit these snatches of commentary before going to see the film but here is what I can say.

I very much enjoyed it.

With that out-of-the-way let me provide some context and clarity as to why everybody is so confused and sharply divided about this film. It’s marketing department pulled a fast one on us. They showed us the glitter, the special effects, we all went ‘oooh’, then gave us a teaser of what the premise was: hot women in an insane asylum and we let our imaginations run wild.

And honestly we did exactly what the marketers thought we would. We assumed a pretty but light action flick with fetishistic costumes. Instead what we got was a film that explored from a female perspective the struggle for freedom of choice in one’s life under an inherently overwhelming force.

(continue reading…)

I haven’t reviewed The Social Network, not because I didn’t like it. I consider it a movie on par with Scott Pilgrim, and we all have seen how much I blogged about Scott Pilgrim, and definitely a better movie, in a certain way, than Inception.

As some of you may know, both films, Scott Pilgrim and The Social Network, are sometimes poked at for having primarily misogynist views of women through out the film. Aaron Sorkin, the writer for The Social Network, has supposedly commented on the his film’s misogyny via a blogpost which I will share in the following link.

Aaron Sorkin responds to a commenter in my blog on kenlevine.blogspot.com

I can’t verify if this was indeed Aaron Sorkin, but the blog writer believes so.

Sp having read it, I wonder if similar points could not be made for Scott Pilgrim. Although realizing that Scott Pilgrim is a completely fictional world. And unlike what Aaron constantly tries to reassure us, the manga it is based off of portrays women in a very realistic light, rather than a mostly negative or non-human perception. So I am not so sure but perhaps a little bit? In Scott Pilgrim we have two main characters, Scott, who gives us our primary vision of the world, and Ramona, who is explained to be somewhat soul searching, throughout the film, as we discover her past through her “evil”-ex’s that Scott has to fight, which is why she is portrayed as being hesitant throughout the film, well except for in her sexuality.

I guess it comes down to the old point of: When do we allow for misogyny themes/view points in fictional and semi-fictional worlds and when do we not?

What do you guys think?