What was so great about Beyonce’s SuperBowl performance, anyway? In fact, the article could be titled, “What’s so good about Beyonce, period?” Don’t get me wrong, she’s an incredible performer with an amazing voice and I love pretty well all of her songs, but she does push a pretty conservative message (“Independent Women” really just want to “Cater 2 U” and “Put a Ring On It”) and is blandly uncontroversial. Her most scandalous moments are the rumoured fake baby bump and lip synching at the Inauguration. What do you think? Is Beyonce a positive black female role model, another pop star pandering to the patriarchy or do you just not care that much about her? [TheVine]
“Kids aren’t gonna stop rubbing themselves, each other, and tetherball poles, so what’s the point of making it a scary, bad thing? Besides, this isn’t really about sex, so let’s not make it about sex. It’s learning about our bodies and the bodies of other kids, and doing things that feel good.
“You have to wonder how a big hubbub over truly normal shit can affect a kid in the long run. Will they eventually develop a sex-negative attitude? Will developing a happy, healthy sexuality be more difficult for them? As many of us know, childhood scars run deep.” [Jezebel]
Iron Man 3 is just the latest in a long line of films (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Last Airbender, The Lone Ranger, and Snow White & the Huntsman when it comes to able-bodied actors playing the seven dwarves) to use a white actor portraying a character of colour. [Kotaku]
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.
In what was revealed to be a Mini Cooper romp between Kristen Stewart and her Snow White & the Huntsman director with over fifty photos as proof of the affair (according to Famous, at least. Have you seen the photos? They look completely staged for someone as notoriously private and publicity-shunning as Stewart. Rupert Sanders even seems to be looking at the camera in several shots.), I’m puzzled as to why Stewart felt the need to issue a public apology about something so intimately private.
I’ve never been cheated on nor been a cheater, but I imagine it’s an intense situation to find yourself in. Should your dirty deeds come out, there’d be a lot of apology-making and trust-proving to be had between all parties, assuming it was a “momentary indiscretion”, as Stewart claims her dalliance with Sanders was. But those parties do not include the masses, no matter how public your persona may be. You should be groveling to your partner if you want to make amends and perhaps even seeking out the other party’s other party, but really, Kristen has no obligation to do so: Sanders was just as attached as Stewart, if not more so, with a wife and two children. He’s responsible for the trust he breaks within his own family, not his mistress. That Stewart had to apologise for the “hurt and embarrassment I’ve cause to… everyone this has affected” is accepting a blame that is not hers and, quite frankly, out of character for her.
The Kristen Stewart we know and mostly hate is one who doesn’t give a fuck and blatantly says so in interviews and whose attitude at events and towards the paparazzi demonstrates this. For her to have been in a relationship with Robert Pattinson for the past three and a half years means she obviously cares about him, but no matter how sorry she is, publicly apologising for a private transgression is not something I can see her doing willingly: chances are her Twilight bosses demanded she do so at the risk of tainting the final instalment of the movies that made her and, arguably, her relationship.
The Kristen Stewart I know (y’know, cos reading gossip magazines and snippets of some interviews she’s done makes me the authority on her personal life) and kinda like would have flipped the bird at press releases stating her “hurt” and “embarrassment” at what transpired, and I think the few fans she still has would love her more for it. Let’s face it, she didn’t really have that many to begin with for whom a public admission of guilt is going to make much difference.
Checkmate, Pro-Choicers, the latest in anti-abortion internet trolling. Good for a hate-read, not so good for logic. Ahh, pro-lifers, you odd little things.
“Molesting any child is reprehensible, but taking advantage of a 4-year-old who has no awareness of what’s going on and no ability to fight back seems particularly deranged.”
I don’t disagree, but murder is a bit rich. Read the issue discussed further at Jezebel. [TIME]
Hey Christian Girl, for all your Ryan Gosling and associated conventionally-attractive-to-straight-women meme needs, with a religious edge.
The Scarlett Woman 