I’m absolutely down for defending the first-class status of genre fiction that boldly goes where no or few stories have gone before. But if you think that working science fiction and fantasy relieves you of your obligations to coherent plotting and character behavior, or if it’s an engine to deliver free naked ladies, then you can stay in your mom’s basement, and off my bandwagon.Alyssa Rosenberg, in Damon Lindelof’s Blithe Treatment Of ‘Star Trek’ Sexism And Why Genre Fiction Gets No Respect (via themarysue)
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.Bill Watterson (via mikekarnell)
(via wilwheaton)
Arwa Abouon was born May 3rd 1982 in Tripoli, Libya, to Amazigh roots from both her mother and father’s side of the family.
A native of North Africa; Amazigh means Free People. She received a BFA with distinction, majoring in Design from Concordia University in 2007.
Through her lighthearted photographs to graphic interventions, she questions her own place within a so-called Western culture on the one hand and an upbringing in a Muslim household on the other.
(via africaisdonesuffering)
Photos of South African women protesting in the streets against the Apartheid government.
1980s.
Read more about the critical roles women played during the anti-Apartheid struggle.
(via africaisdonesuffering)
I’m not saying that my Mom and I had the BEST RELATIONSHIP EVAH. We didn’t. Two people that are practically the same never really do. But, as I look back on my life, I realize that my Mom did the absolute best that she could with what she was given, and although I was a good girl, I wasn’t the easiest girl to mother. I don’t like tooting my own horn, but I’m smart. My mother is too, don’t ever let her tell you any different, but just in a different kind of way. When I was wanting her to tell me the secrets of calculus, she was wanting me to learn how to cook. Now, as I have my own children, I realize that it was an issue of her not knowing how to deal with me, how to come to my level of thinking. I often struggle with having to do this with my own children; when I have to slow down my thinking process and find some sort of common ground in order to get my point across. And, the only way that I know how to do this is because of Star Trek.
I bet when you asked for these testimonials you weren’t expecting to get an answer that says that I am a better mother because of Star Trek. It isn’t just that, though. Star Trek, specifically the friendship between Spock and Captain Kirk taught me that just because I was intelligent and thought in ways that no one else around me did, it didn’t mean that I couldn’t have a meaningful relationship with the people around me.
Darkened Prose: A Letter to William Shatner
This is lovely.
(via wilwheaton)
(via themarysue)
According to Dr. Coles, typical “crack baby” symptoms (tremors, low birth weight, seizures) are more indicative of prematurity than of drug exposure. She argues that cocaine was only part of a larger problem, not its sole cause, so targeting cocaine and cocaine alone wasn’t helpful. Alcohol use during pregnancy, for instance, is much more severe and damaging to the unborn — not to mention far more ubiquitous. Coles’ findings were ignored, however, because they didn’t fit into cultural stereotypes and failed to feed the media narrative.Good News: 1980s ‘Crack Babies’ Epidemic Was Hugely Overblown
Antonia (trailer)*
A bold Brazilian melodrama that moves to the rhythm of the streets, “Antonia” traces a year in the lives of four young women who form a rap group and fend off tragedy. Tired of singing backup to male rap stars, Preta (Negra Li), Lena (Cindy), Barbarah (Leilah Moreno) and Mayah (Quelynah) — all successful musicians in real life — rehearse their own music and acquire an agent. But when the group falls prey to brutal violence, internal jealousies and an unplanned pregnancy, the girls learn that escape from poverty will require more than fierce rhymes. The third feature in a trilogy by Tata Amaral, “Antonia” pulses with color and movement. Filmed in the São Paulo suburb of Vila Brasilândia, the movie has an earthy realism underscored by naturalistic performances and a restless camera. Maximizing her nonprofessional cast of Brazilian hip-hop performers, the director fills the soundtrack with a vibrant blend of R&B, soul and rap. When the group sings an a cappella version of “Killing Me Softly,” you may forget to breathe. via
*also on Netflix
(via racialicious)
Francis Alys - Fabiola (2008)
“The story of St. Fabiola, a 4th-century Roman aristocrat from the Fabia family who is supposed to have been an early Mother Teresa, became popular in the late 19th century, and an 1885 portrait of her by a French academician (which is now lost) has since been endlessly copied around the world.
Appearing on postcards, posters and religious trinkets, Fabiola has been a beloved subject for countless painters, most of them amateurs. The portrait’s format is almost always the same: Fabiola is seen in profile facing left, her head covered by a rich red veil.
Mr. Alys, who was born in Belgium in 1959 and moved to Mexico City in 1990, began collecting Fabiola paintings—as the genre is called—about 15 years ago, buying them at thrift shops, flea markets and antiques stores primarily in Mexico and Europe. He has previously shown his collection three times, when it was much smaller; the current presentation includes more than 300 works.”
Fascinating
(via dynamoe)
Today Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization behind Sesame Street, announced a multi-year partnership with Teaching Strategies, the educational company that publishes The Creative Curriculum and Teaching Strategies GOLD.
Learn more at http://sesameworkshop.org/school
(via wilwheaton)
The Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media … did a content analysis of 11,927 speaking characters in “family films” (G, PG, and PG-13) and prime-time and children’s TV shows (see it here). They looked at the presence of female and male characters and the jobs those characters were doing. In almost every instance, women had greater visibility, and better jobs, on prime-time TV than they did in either movies or children’s shows.TV vs the Movies: Which Does Better by Women? » Sociological Images
More charts of recurring Arrested Development jokes!
I often tell people that I’m the biggest self-aware misogynist I know.
I was writing a scene last night between a woman general and the man she helped put on the throne. I started writing in some romantic tension, and realized how lazy that was. There are other kinds of tension.
I made a passing reference to sexual slavery, which I had to cut. I nearly had him use a gendered slur against her. I growled at the screen. He wanted to help save her child… no. Her brother? Ok. She was going to betray him. OK. He had some wives who died… ug. No. Close advisors? Friends? Maybe somebody just… left him?
Even writing about societies where there is very little sexual violence, or no sexual violence against women, I find myself writing in the same tired tropes and motivations. “Well, this is a bad guy, and I need something traumatic to happen to this heroine, so I’ll have him rape her.” That was an actual thing I did in the first draft of my first book, which features a violent society where women outnumber men 25-1. Because, of course, it’s What You Do.
I actually watched a TV show recently that was supposedly about this traumatic experience a young girl went through, but was, in fact, simply tossed in so that the two male characters in the show could fight over it, and argue about which of them was at fault because of what happened to her. It was the most flagrant erasure of a female character and her experiences that I’d seen in some time. She’s literally in the room with them while they fight about it, revealing all these character things about them while she sort of fades into the background.
We forget what the story’s about. We erase women in our stories who, in our own lives, are powerful, forthright, intelligent, terrifying people. Women stab and maim and kill and lead and manage and own and run. We know that. We experience it every day. We see it.
But this is our narrative: two men fighting loudly in a room, and a woman snuffling in a corner.
This is a really interesting article about the way media, fiction and narratives repeated in society shape the way we see and assume reality to be, specifically (in this case) about how narratives about women being victims, or supporting men, but not being fighters or soldiers create the idea that women never did that, and it’s only a modern new thing that we think they could, when in fact that’s not true at all.
Also, specifically relevant to this blog are the parts about how that affects us when we create stories ourselves, and can end up adding to this narrative consciously and subconsciously. It’s the same with how women are depicted in illustrated fiction. I honestly don’t think a lot of the boobs and butt poses, or women in bikini armor, are drawn by people consciously thinking sexist thoughts, I think they’re just doing What You Do. This is a female character, this is just the pose we’re used to seeing women in. We don’t think twice about drawing her like that, because it’s just how we’ve become conditioned to seeing women pose in the medium. Same with stuff like this. It’s how we’re used to seeing female armor, and when we think “female warrior”, our imagination just instinctively runs in the direction of what we’re used to seeing. It’s just What You Do with female armor, and female characters, and female poses.
Since starting Escher Girls, I’ve gotten quite a lot of mail from people telling me that they never realized just how often they put their female characters in boobs and butt poses, or gave them bikini armor, just because that’s how they saw women drawn in video games and comics and never thought twice about it. It’s just what seemed “right” to them, and that they’re now a lot more conscious of it and try to have more variety in the way they depict women, and often in ways that make more sense to the story. :)
I think it’s just important to catch ourselves sometimes and think are we creating something because this fits what we’re doing, and this makes sense, or are we just doing What You Do? (This applies to all sorts of tropes and stereotypes too.)
Whaddupp!!
Ainee is the FIRST Hijabi to be featured in Seventeen magazine.
She’s working “with Gucci, Beyonce for her campaign, Chime for Change and Seventeen Magazine to unite and strengthen the voices speaking out for girls and women around the world”.
My hero!
(via faineemae)
Why is Alice Eve in her underwear, gratuitously and unnecessarily, without any real effort made as to why in God’s name she would undress in that circumstance? Well there’s a very good answer for that. But I’m not telling you what it is. Because… uh… MYSTERY?
Sounds like a joke, but no. Apparently “mystery” is an accepted excuse for treating women like things.
Damon Lindelof Responds To Criticism Star Trek Female Characters | The Mary Sue
