Monthly Archives: June 2009

by

Don’t Scream

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, media tool kit, rape is hy-larious

Good morning, ducks! Let me ask you–do you like to see women in stark screaming terror and in fear of imminent death? Or at least simulations of such? Well, the New York Daily News does! Today they put up a gallery of “screaming starlets” from nineteen separate horror movies! It’s one stop shopping for all your terror porn!

As a film buff, I’ve watched my fair share of horror films. The vast majority boil down to either stalker or torture porn, of course, with tons of women in various stages of undress being voyeuristically hunted down. Even if the trend lately is towards making the woman the hero, letting her ultimately triumph (for example, the American remake of The Ring or the original Halloween), you can be sure that she’ll first go through a degradation that no male hero would be forced to undergo. This is true of even the best of the bunch, such as the Scream franchise, which featured a woman hero who was easily the most capable character in all the films, or the solid-B movie The Descent, which at least featured a main cast of women who did things (like whitewater rafting, caving, and fending off cannibalistic subhuman cave dwellers), even if it did find room for the death of a child, a murderous catfight, and the heroine killing a mother and child–your basic smorgasbord of Hollywood misogyny.

I’m really baffled by why the News thought this was a good idea, though of course not surprised. We do live, as Liss McEwan put it yesterday, “in a rape-soaked culture” so I guess putting images of anguished women shrieking in terror on your web site is just giving the public what it wants.

Besides, it’s not like you can have photographs of naked women in your newspaper. I mean, this is America.

by

Fine Feathered Foul?

Categories: all about me, mailbag

Hello, du…hmm. I nearly used the common English word for a member of the family anatidae. Which, it seems, would be wrong, at least according to Anonymous:

Here’s the deal: gay men call people ducks; women do not. Consider it part of the process to remove that word from your vocabulary. Please.

Now, I got defensive when I first read this, but then I thought: hey, maybe Anonymous has a point; I mean, I’ve gotten all sorts of good advice from anonymous folks before, from “Duck!” (oops) to “suck my…”–well maybe that last wasn’t such good advice. But you get the picture.

As I said in my response, I do all kinds of things on this blog I don’t do in regular life, from talking about my vagina to using complex analogies about the kyriarchy. (I do, however, bore folks with feminist analyses of French peri-impressionism.) I’ll confess to adopting Winged Water Fowl as a greeting as part of the quasi-folksy style I affect in the lighter posts hereabouts. At the very least, I figured I might be remembered as that “crazy lady who calls everyone Mallards.”

But I’d hate to slow my process; I’m not sure what that means, but it sure sounds bad! Seeing as it’s a slow day here at TSA (I spent most of it writing a proposal for a–I hope–largish client), I thought I would put it out there for you, du…er, wigeons: should I stop using That Word and call everybody something serious, like Fellow Denizens of the Feminist and Transfeminist blogospheres? I leave it to you!

Unless you consider it a wild goose chase.

1 2 3