From the trailer, I never would have guessed Tyler Perry’s Temptation was a veritable hotbed of sex (and STIs), race and gender politics in the worst way. This article comes with a massive spoiler alert, but it made me want to see the movie so much more, if only to be completely horrified by it. [Jezebel]
“Lena Dunham has perfected her ability to push her audience past their comfort zones by forcing them to relate to or identify with someone who they’d rather not relate to or identify with. When people react negatively to her work, I think that’s often what it is that they’re reacting against. Her artistic—yeah, I’m going to say it—genius is pushing the viewer from thinking Who would do that? to I’ve thought about that to I’ve done that.”
And I think that sums up the difference between season one of Girls, which was so unabashedly relatable, if not totally likeable, and season two, which stagnated more in the former realm of Dunham’s alleged “artistic genius”. [Jezebel]
Calling all Aussie (and NZ) Gala Darling fans: she’s bringing her Blogcademy brainchild down under. Wouldn’t you know it, the Melbourne workshop takes place when I just so happen to be in Gala’s hood: New York City!
New girl crush: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. That woman really knows what she’s talking about when it comes to feminism and women in the workplace. [Jezebel]
FOMO (fear of missing out) on YOLO (you only live once). I can totally relate to Mia’s predicament: at the moment I’m kind of experiencing a guilt or anxiety about not getting out and being social enough and doing things, but at the same time, as Mia writes, no matter how much you want to want to do something, you can’t force yourself to want to do it. So I’m taking solace in that fact. [MamaMia]
Gala Darling has some fab tips for getting inspired and your time organised as a blogger. For those of you who visit this site regularly, you’ll have noticed that I’ve been pretty slack with content over the past couple of months, and that’s because I’ve been so uninspired. Now, as I start to get back into the swing of things and I’ve made a concerted effort to get inspired and start thinking of blog and freelance ideas, I think The Scarlett Woman will start looking more like the blog you know and (hopefully!) love. Thanks, Gala!
So misogyny may be running wild in the real world, but on TV, girls are calling the shots. We’ve had a bevvy of shows with “girl/s” both in the title and the storylines this year, with 2 Broke Girls and New Girl carrying their success over from 2011. While a lot of the subject matter is problematic, both shows have women carrying the comedy. Which brings us to just plain Girls, which is the brainchild of actor, writer and director Lena Dunham. Girls is not without its problems, either, but its portrayal of young urban women is almost faultless. Rounding out the representation of leading ladies in 2012 we have Don’t Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23, Homeland, Revenge, The Mindy Project, Are You There, Chelsea?, Smash, GCB (farewell!), Scandal, Nurse Jackie, Veep, Emily Owens, M.D., Whitney, The Good Wife and Hart of Dixie.
“Call Me Maybe”.
Until “Gangnam Style” came along, the YouTube Zeitgeist was dominated by one runaway success: Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe”. Justin Bieber’s protégé came out of nowhere with the catchiest song of the year, which was subsequently covered by the guys from Harvard’s baseball team, Barack Obama and the Cookie Monster! Talk about diversity!
2012: Apocalypse Now.
2012 was the year of the apocalypse, with the 21st of December long determined by the Mayans (or Mayan conspiracy theorists) as the day the world ends. You know, until the 7th of December tried to steal its thunder as the apparent recalculated date. Apart from the natural disasters, warfare and massacres, the 21st passed without a nuclear bombing, ice age or attitudinal shift, putting rest to the apocalypse panic. Until the next rapture, anyway…
Shit ___ Say.
It started with a sexist albeit funny YouTube video of a guy in a wig quoting “Shit Girls [Apparently] Say”, which snowballed into “Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls”, “Shit New Yorkers Say”, “Shit Christians Say to Jews” and “Shit Nobody Says”. Cue offence.
Snow White.
Snow White was everywhere this year: Mirror Mirror, Snow White & the Hunstman, Once Upon a Time… Note: overexposure isn’t necessarily a good thing. In fact, I hated Mirror Mirror and Once Upon a Time, and Snow White & the Huntsman was such a snooze-fest I can barely remember what happened (not including Kristen Stewart’s affair with director Rupert Sanders).
50 Shades of Grey.
On the one hand, E.L. James’ 50 Shades of Grey has singlehandedly revived the flailing publishing industry, so that’s a good thing. But on the other, it has falsely lulled its legions of (mostly female) fans into a state of apparent sexual empowerment: it’s a book about sex targeted towards women, so that means we’re empowered and we don’t need feminism anymore, right?
The Macarena of the 21st century, Psy’s horse dance took the world by storm, being performed in conjunction with Mel B on The X Factor, with Hugh Jackman in his Wolverine gloves, on Glee and at many a wedding, 21st birthday and Christmas party.
Misogyny.
Misogyny has long been the focus of feminists, but the word and its meaning really reached fever pitch this year.
After Julia Gillard’s scathing Question Time takedown of Tony Abbott and his sexist ways, people everywhere were quick to voice their opinion on her courage and/or hypocrisy. At one end of the spectrum, it could be said that Gillard finally had enough of the insidious sexist bullshit so many women in the workforce face on a daily basis and decided to say something about it, while at the other, many argued that the Labor party were crying sexism in a bid to smooth over the Peter Slipper slip up.
“Her electric speech on misogyny in parliament went beyond the sordid political context to firmly press a button on the chest of any woman who has been patronised, sidelined, dismissed or abused. It crackled across oceans, and, astonishingly, her standing went up in the polls, defying political wisdom that no woman would benefit from publicly slamming sexism.”
The viral doco that had millions of people rushing to plaster their neighbourhood in “Kony 2012” posters on 20th of April to little effect (the campaign’s goal was to catch Joseph Kony by years end) illustrated our obsession with social media, armchair activism and supporting the “cool” charities, not the thousands of worthy charities out there who could actually use donations to help their cause, not to produce YouTube videos and work the press circuit.
I’m Not a Feminist, But…
While Tony Abbott is clamouring to call himself a feminist to gain electoral favour despite the abovementioned misogyny saga, it seems famous women can’t declare their anti-feminism fast enough.
First we had new mother and Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer jumping at the chance to shun feminism despite the fact that without it she wouldn’t be where she is today. My favourite anti-feminist campaigner Taylor Swift said she doesn’t think of herself as a feminist because she “was raised by parents who brought me up to think if you work as hard as guys, you can go far in life.” Um, Tay? That’s what feminism is, love.
The cronies from Sutherland Shire were all over our boxes, primarily on Channel Ten, this year. There was the widely panned Being Lara Bingle, the even worse Shire, and the quintessential Aussie drama set in the ’70s, Puberty Blues.
While these shows assisted in shedding a different light on the suburb now synonymous with race riots, it’s not necessarily a positive one, with The Shire being cancelled and Being Lara Bingle hanging in the balance.
Last week, arriving at a premiere for Les Miserables, Anne Hathaway was snapped exiting a car sans-panties, exposing to the world a hint of trimmed pubic hair and not much else.
From the way the blogosphere blew up, particularly one shamed-tinged article on MamaMia, you’d think the end of the world had arrived early. A sample:
“Do people really do this these days, not wear underwear? Do regular people do it or just celebrities? Did nobody learn ANYTHING from Britney Spears?”
To answer your accusations, yes, regular people don’t always wear underwear. I know this because I’m a normal person and I don’t always wear underwear. I’m a shocker for putting off underwear shopping, therefore I have less than ten pairs of undies on rotation and sometimes there’s just not a clean pair in sight. I wear tight running pants under which I don’t like wearing full-cut briefs because of the VPL and I figure, why waste a perfectly clean pair of skimpy undies on a 30-minute workout when I can just chuck my running pants in the washing machine when I’m finished working out? Better waiting for one item of clothing to dry than two.
I also have a penchant for wearing body-con dresses and pleather leggings when I go out, so sometimes I won’t wear underwear with these lest I ruin the streamlined effect I’m going for. And when I wear tights I figure they practically double as underwear anyway, so why bother. But the most important reason I don’t always wear underwear is because I don’t always want to, and that’s my choice. You would think a mainstream women’s website that serves up a healthy helping of feminism would be all over that…
Note that while Hathaway seems mortified and uncomfortable talking about the incident, she doesn’t make any apologies for choosing to go without panties, and she shouldn’t have to. She said, “I was getting out of the car and my dress was so tight that I didn’t realise it until I saw all the photographers’ flashes… It was devastating. They saw everything. I might as well have lifted up my skirt for them.”
Sure, it’s probably not the greatest feeling to have all and sundry seeing your business without your consent (which raises a whole ’nother issue about whether the photographer should have deleted the shot instead of publishing it, which I’m not going to go into here), but if our society didn’t have such a problem with the female anatomy and the shame associated with it what its owner sees fit, would we be acting so outraged with the whole situation? The fact that all that’s visible is a bikini line and a landing strip makes it that much more petty: it’s just a bit of pubic hair, not a porno.
Maya Newell, the girl who asked what effect changing the marriage act would have on the children of same-sex partners on this year’s final episode of Q&A, talks about what it’s like growing up with two mums. [Daily Life]
A recent altercation with a friend over something I wrote about them on this here blog has formed the basis for an “Ask Rachel” post. [Musings of an Inappropriate Woman]
The opinion piece in last Saturday’s Good Weekend by food critic AA Gill about how men think women should dress was one I skipped over—I don’t really need to read yet another article about what men think women should do. Lindy Alexander takes Gill to task for it, though, saving me from having to rummage through the newspaper stack in my pantry to retrieve said article and get all riled up about it. [Daily Life]
“‘The relationship you have with your child is certainly impactful. It’s one of the most important relationships you’ll have in your life,’ Valenti says. ‘But a good relationship doesn’t necessitate you losing your identity. In fact, most people would call that a bad relationship. A good relationship is supposed to make you the best version of yourself, happier and more active. So that’s what I’m aiming for.’”
“I’m uncomfortable saying ‘you can do this if you are ethnically Indian’ (even if you are culturally something else, like American), because then it gets into the very kind of essentialism that racism is made of. Like, is it OK for me to wear native Iraqi Arab garb, even though I have never set foot in Iraq, because my parents are from there? I don’t think so, but a lot of the arguments about this subject reduce it to a matter of ‘you can wear things from your personal heritage but no one else’s,’ which, again, is essentialist… [a]nd bordering on dangerous? Because then you get into people deciding if someone LOOKS ‘ethnic’ enough to wear ‘ethnic’ signifiers and you start trying to read skin colour…
“… As long as there’s black-people stuff and white-people stuff and Indian-people stuff, can we really talk about being seen as just PEOPLE?”
And not only that, but the “black vote” kept that n-word in office. And some people have no shame in taking their racist views to Twitter to lament this supposed fact. [Jezebel]
In the spirit of Halloween just passed and, you know, the persecution of women and minorities since the dawn of time, take this quiz to find out whether you would have been accused of witchcraft in ye olden times. [BBC History Magazine]
Mia Freedman’s News Ltd. column has been axed amid many other newspaper axings. She should have stayed at Fairfax, where they actually appreciate good journalism and authentic voices. Oh well, this means more of her at her namesake site, MamaMia! Yay!
“… I say the answer is more nudity in newspapers, not less. Put more boobs on Page 3, and add some cocks too. Show people of every size, shape, colour, gender and sexuality; let them speak in their own voice, and celebrate them all. That, rather than self-censorship of adult-oriented content, would be a progressive tabloid revolution worth fighting for.” [New Statesman]
While I don’t agree with most of her sentiments, Clem Bastow makes some interesting points about the inclusion of men in feminism. This was also a topic that came up during the abovementioned “who’s-a-feminist” debate with my friends. [Daily Life]
The Scarlett Woman 