Posts by Emma Hart
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From memory, that 'piece' appeared to have been written in response to this, and the idea that a man was being honoured for his work towards equality.
(The meat of the speech starts about two minutes in. The point where I always start crying is about 6:30)
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assuming that the one I've read is the same one that you're talking about - is this the one that concludes that Mr. Whedon almost certainly beats his wife?
Yes. At least, it better be, because if there are two I might cry.
And also that said wife is a gender traitor who has sold out for money and fame.
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Is that at all like Giovanni's link to the 'The Wire is actually totally racist, y'all' blog entry?
Yes. But longer ago, and I am still angry about it.
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But I suspect firefly isn't the kind of thing the Bechdel test is aimed at. More like this abomination (FWIW, the most offensive film I've ever seen that didn't involve violence.)
Oh, Alec Baldwin's been in some shit...
And yes. I think the test itself is useful overall, for demonstrating a particular point, and still so many action movies and romantic comedies fail it (or the reverse Bechdel test, which I don't think SATC2 would pass?)
But then you see "Firefly must be sexist because it doesn't pass the Bechdel test". (Please, don't make me link to the famous Joss Whedon is a Sexist Arsehole essay, please.)
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I would say that if you said your idea of feminism was to be completely submissive to men, take a lot of shit from them, clean up after them, do lots of work for them, play punching bag when they're drunk, and thank them for it all, then I'd say you're either not a feminist, or you're a bad one.
Ben, I find it interesting (note: not snark, I genuinely find it interesting) that this list is entirely 'things one does', not 'things one thinks'. So... how far down that list do I have to go? I'm thinking here of the flatmate who told me off for doing my partner's laundry. And thank you Kyle for saving me the keystrokes of bringing up TPE.
Surprisingly rarely passed. Firefly - written by someone who talks a lot about advancing feminism and the importance of strong female characters - rarely passes it.
Which I think to me indicates a flaw in the Bechdel test - though it's of course never claimed to be a comprehensive standard. That is, it gives no weight to the content of the man-woman conversations. I think it assumes, in a very Harry Met Sally way that friendship conversations are same-sex, and boy-girl conversations are romantic. So in Firefly, I would think most of Zoe's conversations are with Mal, not Wash, and about missions, not lurrrrve. Kaylee has conversations about engines, but because they're with men they don't count? (Gah, I feel like I'm not explaining my problem here very well. Perhaps I can psychically communicate it to someone else who can do a better job.)
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this is a toddler post with multiple YouTube clips and it's the one you didn't get cold feet about. So as far as my hopes go, falling off your bike is optional.
I'd have thought you'd be most upset about the cunning and villainous way you were forced to read it against your will.
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Possibly more than slightly tangential, but today this post from one of my favourite blogs has been going round and round in my head, sparking a lot of 'yeah, maybe, I dunno, maybe'.
(The blog is called "Let Them Eat Pro-SM Feminist Safe Spaces", but Trinity doesn't identify as a feminist - though she would certainly come within some definitions. The 'safe' is 'safe from a particular thread of feminist thought which sees kink as inherently misogynist'. They're not knocking on her door, no, yet she's still felt it necessary to make a safe space.)
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More generally how valid is identifying yourself as a practicioner of a philosophy? As opposed to seeing how your actions affect others?
Are those two things mutually exclusive? I mean, I'm fairly label-averse all round (except for all those stereotypical things I can't quite find that I've been saying about "feminists" and what they're like), but I find it difficult to believe that, say, strongly identifying as a feminist necessarily prevents someone from assessing their own actions.
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Because, not unlike other ideologies, it is meaningless without lived experience.
See, what happens when you buy into this wholesale is the extremely frustrating conversations I had with feminists at university - the place where I stopped calling myself a feminist, and which might be relevant to Jolisa's question if I thought I could answer that without getting really angry. The most remarkable of these conversations took place in the letters section of Canta and if I knew I'd have to prove my creds I might have kept it.
But basically, this consisted of being told that I only believed what I did because I'd obviously had a terribly sheltered upbringing, and if I'd just had 'experience X', then I'd understand. As I obviously hadn't, there was no way I could, so I should shut up.
Thing is, I had. But I was hardly going to bring that up in public with a stranger just to win an argument.
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Can someone explain why the idea of 'false consciousness' is such a big joke these days? I don't get it.
Well I think at least round here, it's been badly enough argued to be associated with two things
- false dichotomy - it's shoes OR political activism, you can't have both
- psychic powers - the ability to determine a person's motivation for doing something either without asking them, or while ignoring the answer they give you.