I am a feminist
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008I have never written that down before. Inspired by this and this (do add your name).
Archive for the ‘Female thinking’ Category
I’m afraid you’re going to have to be satisfied with the vote right now
Saturday, April 19th, 2008Dina Merrill and Glenn Ford in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1963).
Boo who
Friday, April 4th, 2008Sigh. I have mentioned before that if I was the mother of a girl my blood would boil and erupt through the roof every time I went to the cinema to see a children’s film (or even just when I read about them). This may only be a slight exaggeration. The latest outrage is Horton Hears a Who at which Peter Sagal of NPR eloquently and, may I add, movingly expresses his dismay at the subplot involving 96 girls and one boy.
Have the clowns who made this movie ever met a daughter? Have they dated one? If they did, did they meet the daughter’s father? Did they then ask that daughter’s father if there was anything more dramatic, interesting, arresting, and moving to him than his relationship with his daughter? Did they ask him if he might find that a close relationship with said daughter might be something he would care about? What do they imagine that we do — sit around, and watch our daughters grow and change and suffer and fail and triumph — and idly wish for something more INTERESTING?
This comes after the male bees in Bee Story and the diminishing of the girl’s role in The Water Horse in favour of the boy’s role (in the Dick King Smith original, as far as I can tell, she is the main character). I’ve just done some research on The Water Horse and I am struck by the lack of indignation on this issue. I was also struck by the fact that no-one seemed to care that Princess Fiona was the rightful heir in Shrek the Third.
Well, I do.
Clarkson!
Friday, January 18th, 2008I just might do more of these suggestions. Link via The f-word.
What is up with The Guardian?
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008The Guardian’s blogging editorial policy seems determined to be as divisive as possible regarding gender. The Guardian used to be one of my quick links but recently I removed it because I was fed up with being sucked into a Comment is Free blog full of mutual hatred just because I was looking for some news to read. I still have their arts blogs feeds set up in Netvibes because they are interesting. However, this piece by John Sutherland is mind-bogglingly stupid. He asks whether women can write about war by going on about joysticks and shrivelling balls when he hears a woman’s voice coming from a cockpit and, without irony, uses an article by Pat Buchanan to illustrate a point. (Hang on, maybe, the whole thing is ironic! And maybe it’s meant to be funny!) It is painful to read because of sentences like this
Can a class of writer so institutionally and historically disengaged from a subject write a classic (or even a good) novel on it?
and
Why, with all those “women’s subjects” at her disposal, did Kennedy venture into this most exclusive of manly enclaves?
I shall certainly read Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? and Is Heathcliff a Murderer? in a different light now.
But still, a good thing has come out of it - I actually quite fancy reading Day by AL Kennedy now.
PS Even it is written in humour this type of article is all over The Guardian these days and they are serious.
Ice Princess and The Golden Compass
Saturday, January 5th, 2008Ice Princess
We only watched this because Michelle “Dawnie” Trachtenberg was in it and Joan Cusack and Claire from Heroes and we stayed to the end. Now the title is clearly cynical, its plot is preposterous (Casey is far too old to improve so much as a skater) and it is mostly formulaic and clichéd. However, if I was the mother of a ten year girl I would be more than happy for her to watch this and not have her and my intelligence insulted because when it wasn’t clichéd it was quite refreshing. Casey and her friend are geeks but they don’t wear glasses and the friend isn’t plump. Small things but just how often does our heroine remove her glasses and suddenly she’s beautiful (and able to see)? The seemingly shallow Gen wants to give up skating because, yes, she wants to party and be “normal” but also because she wants to do well enough in her studies to go to college. Not a classic but it was a thoroughly engaging 90 minutes or so,
I must add that Adam happily watched this film and seriously he and his friends totally undermine the insulting notion that boys will only watch male protagonists. He has also seen The Golden Compass twice.
The Golden Compass
Here is a film that I desperately wanted to like but I must class it as a failure because it did not have the courage to stick with the original storyline. I don’t have a problem with Nicole Kidman not being dark-haired or young because she captured the essence of Mrs Coulter’s charming malevolence but I do have a problem with sequences of events proceeding out of order leading to a talky ending rather than an intriguing one.
I don’t really have much else to insightfully add except I was intrigued by a pair of reviews by Stephanie Zacharek of Salon of The Golden Compass and the spectacularly bland The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and wonder why she choose to bitch about Nicole Kidman (”She swans about like a drag queen in training.”) and compare that comment with her take on Tilda Swinton as the White Witch (”There’s no silly swanning around for this deep-freeze diva”).
The important thing is that she is raven-haired.
Thursday, December 20th, 2007The wife of the new Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, was profiled on the BBC News website. She’s a lawyer but clearly what was as important was to mention the colour of her hair. And this truly bizarre paragraph,
By keeping her own name, rather than taking her husband’s, Ms Gonzalez Durantez seems to be following in the footsteps of Tony Blair’s wife Cherie, who used the moniker Booth whenever she was working,
makes me cringe. Moniker implies pseudonym and I don’t think that Cherie Booth using the name she was given at birth (you know, her real name) can under any definition be pseudonymous. Also, it betrays ignorance of culture because according to Wikipedia: “In Spain, a woman does not ever change her official surnames when she marries.” (awkward phrasing but you get the idea). And, of course, she would have definitely changed her name if the wife of the Labour leader had changed hers…
“Qatif girl”
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007if you live in the UK please sign this petition asking the Prime Minister to condemn the sentence passed against a rape victim in Saudi Arabia.
Equality Now has some action points you can take no matter where you live. I did e-mail both the Foreign Secretary and the Saudi Ambassador to the UK but, I’m sure coincidently, both messages bounced! Maybe they have filters for the word rape.
Spam
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007I guess this isn’t very clever of me but it’s just occurred to me that all spammers presume that you are male.