All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But…I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.

— Éowyn, The Two Towers

Dang it, why couldn’t he have created more characters like her? she whined rhetorically.

Peter Jackson was a smart man to expand the roles of Éowyn, Arwen, and Galadriel. These days it’s most often mom who takes the kids to the movies, and if she’s going to give three hours of her life to one, she wants to see the women in it do more than soothe the Alpha male’s weary brow. Though soothing this particular brow definitely has its own appeal.

On the one hand, our “sex ed” classes for teens are mostly about why they shouldn’t have it; we hold “purity balls” (snicker) for girls ‘n their daddies; we suspend girls from school for taking birth control; we fund programs that remind both sexes that the burden of abstinence falls squarely on the girls’ narrow shoulders.

On the other (very busy) hand, for prepubescent and tweens, we have playdates at the spa, padded bras, thongs, high heels,¹ stripper pole toys,  and most recently, stripper pole-as-photo-opp. For teens we have sexting, t-shirts that say stuff like “who needs a brain when you have these” and sport the bunny logo, and yet more stripper poles.

Then when our girls are all grown up and can legally do what we’ve been encouraging them to do-don’t-do for so many years, we slut-shame the shit out of them (and make money off of it).

Interestingly, the only people who seem to be doing anything rational in response to this are the girls themselves, with girlcotts and lawsuits and the like.

Excellent practice to prepare them, the future Sisters of St. Hillary the Dontfuckwithme, for world domination.

or, The Madonna-Whore Complex: the Emotionally Retarded Man’s Guide to Understanding Women.

[tags]slut-shaming, misogyny, pop culture[/tags]

1. I didn’t believe this one until I saw with my very own eyes a 4-year-old in high-heeled mules in Target!

I would never have guessed how big an impression the original television series made on my brain.² True, it was probably due more to sheer repetition than personal preference – if you had a t.v. in the 70′s you couldn’t miss the ST reruns that ran every two hours. But for  me the show was just OK, something to watch until Little House or The Bionic Woman came on.

How could I have known that Spock was making such quiet in-roads in my heart that I’d get a tear in my eye when a really old Leonard Nimoy showed up on screen thirty years later?

What I like most about the movie is that they managed to pay homage to the original show and characters without either pandering or mocking. The actors have uncanny resemblances to the characters yet don’t resort to doing impressions.  They managed to pull off the classic lines (“Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a scientist!” and “I’m givin’ her all she’s got, Captin!”) without sounding campy.  They even replicated camera angles and postures – stuff I didn’t even realize was iconic until I felt the squee! of recognition.

And best of all, they used all the original sound effects – the bwong!s, bwip!s and chirpy noises that made the USS Enterprise so far out. Oh, except for the chshhhhhh-chah of the double-doors, but maybe that was the unintentional sound of cardboard sliding across concrete in the original.

All the actors did a great job, especially Zachary Quinto as Spock, who pretty much steals the show.  Loved my Brit-crush Simon Pegg as Scotty – not enough screen time for him.  My one WTF: Winona Ryder as Amanda Grayson, Spock’s mother? Not that she did a bad job – I just didn’t recognize her at all.

Very few complaints over all.  I have to say I felt the villain was a big yawn. I like my bloodthirsty bad guys to have a little personality. This one had tattoos. Where’s Ricardo Montalban when you need him?

Only other complaint is (you guessed it): How is it that with all the amazing discoveries humans have apparently made in the far distant future, the fact that miniskirts are impractical for work is NOT one of them?

And I don’t mind a little gratuititty as long as it’s equal opportunity exploitation – so if we’re going to see Uhura in her underwear, I’d better see Kirk drop trou next time.

Uppity out.

——————————————

Update: Five minutes after I posted this, I remembered that Kirk did drop trou in the movie. Maybe I wouldn’t have forgotten if it had been Spock.

1. Yes, I know there is much debate among hard-core Trekkies about whether the film is or is not a prequel, reboot, or what have you. Blah blah blah. Seriously. Geez.
2. I guess I should have gotten a clue when a few weeks ago, before I even knew the new Star Trek movie was coming out, I had a dream that Dr. House could do the Vulcan paralysis shoulder-pinch.

As a social worker in Poland, Sendler smuggled 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto, and although she was tortured for three months – with Gestapo officers crushing her legs in a vice and smashing her bones with hammers – she refused to divulge their whereabouts. Having buried their names in jars, after the war Sendler used the information to help the children track down surviving relatives.

She was relatively unknown until three kids from Kansas researched her as part of a history project in 1999.  Not to diss Schindler in any way, but why, until then, was he a chapter heading and she a footnote?

Anyway, Anna Paquin is going to play Sendler in the movie.  I hope it’s historically accurate, though part of me is secretly hoping to see her go full-tilt Rogue on some Nazis.

Let’s  just say I’ll believe it’s feminist when I see it.

As has been proven time and again, Hollywood and feminism are oil and water.  What could an industry that essentially puts women out to pasture once they turn 45 possibly know about feminism?

If it works, it could be really great. I can’t help dreading, however, that it will be just another arena used to mock and distort. I guess we’ll see, won’t we?

[tags]Women’s Studies, feminism, Hollywood[/tags]

I feel I must apologize to Rib Readers for the ongoing radio silence.  But trust me, you wouldn’t want to read most of what is going through my head these days. Not that it’s particularly awful – it’s just that all of my thoughts seem disjointed and random and incomplete. They hop-skip from one to the other like bunnies.

Take for instance just this second. As I was writing and thinking about bunnies, I skipped immediately to my new obsession with Hugh Laurie and his House tv show.  I know, I know, I’m always four or five years behind since I don’t have cable. Anyway, I’ve been in love with Dr. House since the very first episode. This is a rather scary indictment of my taste in men these days. This character is, after all, the epitome of everything I detest in doctors: arrogant, smug, disdainful, only interested in intellectual challenges not alleviating suffering. Of course I sense, as the viewer is supposed to, that beneath the surface is a character arc screaming to get out… I guess that’s why I’m addicted. I want to see Dr. House redeem himself, evolve. But why I care so much is the mystery. I suspect it has to do with something all New Agey, like the fact that House is a mirror for my own dark side. Live vicariously through the cantankerous Dr. House who gets to get away with it and be funny and brilliant to boot!

Anyway, I could go on and on because that’s how my mind is working these days. Whenever I think about writing a blog post, a sense of overwhelm comes over me, like it would take hours to shape my thoughts into anything the least bit readable.

I often feel these days like an alien who accidentally landed on the wrong planet.  I’m looking around with a certain detatched bewilderment. Like, who are these creatures? What exactly is going on here?  I’m making it to work every day just barely on time (sometimes not on time).  I’m getting my work done, but again, just barely, convinced most of the time I won’t.  It takes me three hours to write two paragraphs in my book.  Some days, when I take my daily walk to the park, I feel like I could just keep walking, walk and walk forever.

But there are lots of other double-standards that are just as insidious, if not quite as damaging. One of them is “A woman can dress like a man if she really wants to, but God help the man who dresses like a woman.”

As an old sage once put it:

Girls can wear jeans
And cut their hair short
Wear shirts and boots
Cause it’s ok to be a boy
But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading
Cause you think that being a girl is degrading
But secretly you’d love to know what it’s like, wouldn’t you
What it feels like for a girl

Well, Madge, men have been trying to find out for a while now a la eyeliner and platform shoes… and now they have “mantyhose” – pantyhose for men from e-mancipate.net.  In patterns and colors, even.¹

Interestingly, in its advertisements, mantyhose are always justified in practical (and therefore, it is assumed, manly) terms.  They’re warm! the makers say defensively. Putting aside that lie for the moment, note that that same rationalization has generally not been applied to women’s hose.

At least in the “old days” (like up through the 1980′s) women were supposed to wear hose in the workplace and to all events requiring “nice” clothes, like weddings.  Bare legs were quite frowned upon – but not because they were worried about us getting cold.

Women’s bare leg skin meant that only the thin cloth of her underpants lay between her hoohah and the whole world.  And that was simply not acceptable.

I am all for abolishing antiquated ideas about “gender-appropriate” anything, including clothing which is the least of our worries.  But I don’t get mantyhose.

Not because I don’t think men should degrade themselves by wearing traditional women’s clothes. I simply don’t understand why anyone would want to wear something that makes you feel like a sausage.

But if they want to experience the itch and confinement of pantyhose, more power to them. I have a bunch they can have, no charge.

[tags]mantyhose, sexual double-standards[/tags]

1. Forgive me if this is old news to you; guess I’ve been under a rock.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-6A1sH9p_Y[/youtube]

Oh, you can laugh it up now, but he wasn’t a superstar back then for nothing! He was the tall, dark, naughty-but-nice “rebel with a heart of gold” for a generation. And he could start up mechanical devices just by whacking them – how many heartthrobs of today can say that, huh?

Anyway, don’t forget to vote – for happy days to come.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yB5CLV18NBw[/youtube]

[tags]Ron Howard, Henry Winkler, the Fonz, Barack Obama[/tags]

[tags]advertising, hilarity[/tags]