Categotry Archives: (un)popular entertainment

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Protest Against Ticked Off You-Know-Whats With Knives

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, cis-o-rama, don't get your panties in a bunch, hipster irony must die, Humorless Tranny™, i get around, takin' it to the streets!, we don't put the "T" in LGB

So if you are going to be in New York tomorrow, and you care to protest the shameful exploitation of both trans women and some of the most brutal murders of trans people, you might want to run down and help us protest the Tribeca Film Festival’s decision to screen Ticked Off…Disparaging-Word-For-Trans-People…With Knives.

Here are the details of the protest, from its Facebook page:

“Protest/rally Against Tribeca’s Decision to Premiere Transphobic Film “Ticked Off Trannies With Knives”

What: A protest/rally demanding that Tribeca Film Festival remove the transphobic film “Ticked Off Trannies With Knives (TOTWK)”. Melissa Sklarz- Director of New York Trans Rights Organization, celebrities, elected officials & LGBT activists will be speaking. A candle light vigil for trans victims of hate crimes will also be held.

When/Where: Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 6:30-8:00pm @ Tribeca Cinemas @ 54 Varick Street, NYC

Why: The movie makes light of violence and rape against trans women, exploits the high-profile murder of teenager Angie Zapata, includes the pejorative term “trannies” in its title, inaccurately depicts trans women’s identities as drag queen “performers” and “caricatures” and misrepresents the lives of an extremely disenfranchised group who suffer violence at alarming rates.

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David Brooks: What Price Happiness? (Hint: Ladies, Keep Your Man!)

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, double bound, i heart oppression, internuts, kyriarchy, media tool kit, privilege stories, the patriarchy: you can't live with it....that is all

I haven’t played kick the can–where can means the New York Times–for a while, mostly because it’s too easy: the stolid Grey Lady’s inability to cover issues beyond it’s narrow frame of all the news white, middle-class, male America finds worthy to think about is a cliche at this point. I mean, for goodness sake, their lead writer on women’s rights is a dude! (Not to knock Nick Kristoff–keep up the good work!–but still.)

Truth be told, I only scan the headlines and drop in to read Krugman and Rich when they’re up. I don’t usually bother to read the rest of the columnists, and certainly not perpetual anal-cranial inversion artist Ross Douthat or David “Bobo” Brooks, master of somehow finding the tone your clueless, warm-n-fuzzy conservative uncle might strike–somewhere between concern trolling and reminding you that if you just wore lipstick more often, you’d find a nice fella.

But every now and then, I drop in on what he says, either because I’ve been referred there or because for some reason the headline writer is earning her or his pay this week by getting me to read something I ordinarily wouldn’t. Take today’s headline: The Bullock Trade. (It actually is “The Sandra Bullock Trade,” but it was truncated in the little upper-righthand corner area the Times puts it’s op-ed links.) Now, I was intrigued, both by the possibility that Brooks was branching out–bullocks could mean anything from modern Hindu religion to the sacrifices of the ancient Minoans–or by seeing what behavior by Ms. Bullock Brooks was disapproving of.

Because I’ve read him before, and I knew that there was no way he’d be in favor of her doing anything except marrying a Republican Senator.

But whoo boy, was this a piece of work:

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In Unexpected Delights

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, cis-o-rama, gender oh eff me, i get around, kyriarchy, let's hear it for the ladies, teh tranz

Hey, the takedown of that London Times article I did over at Tiger Beatdown got included in the 13th Carnival of Feminists! Drop by to read the other stuff, you know it’s good!

And in other unexpected pleasures, I haven’t been flayed to pieces in the comments section at the Guardian. And Julie Bindel replied to me! And I replied back! Wow!

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Baron Cohen: Glorious Privileges For Amusement Of Elites

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, hipster irony must die, media tool kit, Outrage

I can’t say that I’m a Sacha Baron Cohen fan. (Now, Simon Baron-Cohen, I can totes get behind.) My niece liked his song in Madagascar, I’ve probably seen Ali G a few times, and other than that I’ve been pretty much indifferent to him.

But that hasn’t been much of an option of late, thanks to this:

A lot of people–led by Liss over at Shakesville–have talked about the, oh, FAIL risk inherent about using homophobic humor to expose…homophobia. Hell, even the New York Times–not my usual stop for cutting-edge progressivism–says as much in a well-balanced review by A.O. Scott:

The film demonstrates, at a fairly high level of conceptual sophistication, that lampooning homophobia has become an acceptable, almost unavoidable form of homophobic humor, or at least a way of licensing gags that would otherwise be out of bounds. An early sequence that graphically shows Brüno and his lover exerting themselves in various positions and with the assistance of, among other things, a Champagne bottle, a fire extinguisher and a specially modified exercise machine, derives its humor less from the extremity of their practices than from the assumption that sex between men is inherently weird, gross and comical. The same sequence with a man and a woman — or for that matter, two women — would play, most likely on the Internet rather than in the multiplex, as inventive, moderately kinky pornography rather than as icky, gasp-inducing farce.

Exactly.

However, here at The Second Awakening, we don’t just do analysis: we do analysis of privilege! (It says so somewhere in the mission statement, which I think The Grey Mouser is using as a pillow right now.) So what can we say about the privilege used, abused, hidden, and sickeningly visible in Baron Cohen’s work? And is that the reason why no matter what, you always feel vaguely icky watching it?

To answer the last first: Yes. Yes it is.

The thing is, both Borat and Bruno1 are humor for privileged people. They let you, the privileged person, laugh at other people who aren’t as privileged as you. To make it funny, of course, we use multiple axes of privilege: so Borat spent a lot of time lampooning white people of different educational or cultural backgrounds. (Most egregiously, the Romanian villagers who provided the backdrop for the movie’s early scenes.)

The way that both these movies mitigate any privilege guilt you might have about laughing at other people (please, please tell me you have privilege guilt for laughing–not everybody does) is by selling you the ultimate privilege: you’re in on it. Unlike the hapless buffoons of the movie’s universe, you get the joke. You know all along that Borat isn’t really a Kazakh journalist, that Bruno isn’t really a gay fashionista–that Baron Cohen is using these guises to draw people out of their shell and show their true colors. Which are inevitably ugly or laughable. As A.O. Scott says,

They — Americans just like you but of course nothing like you — were exposed as bigots either for being outraged at the things Borat did or for politely agreeing with his misogynistic, anti-Semitic or otherwise objectionable statements. Any twinge of guilt you might have felt on behalf of the actual glorious nation of Kazakhstan was quickly soothed by the spectacle of American intolerance and idiocy that “Borat” purported to expose.

That’s not to say that this isn’t a time honored technique (Jonathan Swift, for example, used it to great effect.) But I have to feel that there’s a fundamental difference in, say, attacking the powerful by pointing out they were essentially eating the children of the Irish by oppressing them into starvation, and getting a laugh out of a few ordinary citizens who aren’t hip that they’re being lampooned.

I mean, it’s not like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia (my personal fave) or anti-religious bigotry needs much encouragement to come out; nor is it likely that using a horrid charicature of gayness to draw people into overt homophobia is going to do much to alleviate homophobia. Instead, it’s more oppression masquerading as liberation; a joke for those “good” enough to be in on it, a joke on everyone else.

‘Cause not having privilege is hysterical. For them who have it.

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1. I refuse to use the idiotic umlauts; that’s not how you spell the name in German. And you don’t spell “Borat” that way in Cyrillic, which is odd given that the DVD box actually spelled out the English title in Cyrillic characters. Yes, I am a hopeless pedant; you knew that already.

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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.

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You’ve Come a Long Way. Maybe.

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, politicians have penise (or should), tv (not trans)

I’ll confess to being a person who watches “24”, though if it makes you feel better, I feel dirty inside afterward. The constant nail-biting suspense of the first few seasons has long since been replaced by torture porn–every week the question is how is Jack going to hurt somebody today?

Still I watch it, probably for the fascinating train-wreck of issues it presents more than for any pure entertainment. I’ll say this about Kiefer Sutherland, he has made Jack become tighter and tighter wound–he’s made Jack become more and more unpleasant to be around, which I hope is his commentary on the right-wingism of the series as a whole. But what about that rightism? Is it truly balanced by presenting black and female presidents, by the way it almost always sides against hawkish characters? By the fact that in the show’s mythology, the Nixonian president actually got arrested?

I don’t know; but such questions are the spice to the messy massala this show has become.

This season we were treated to another first in the mythology: having anticipated by eight years the first black president (and who knows? maybe helped that along), we have the first female president, played by the marvelous Cherry Jones. (I saw her in the original production of “Doubt” and she was awesome.) Her President Allison Taylor is the rare example of the show supporting a hawkish foreign-policy choice–she consistently overrules her cabinet and generals to push for an invasion of the mythical African country of “Sangala,” a sort of Senegal-meets-Côte d’Ivroie-with-some-Liberia-sauce. Of course, her hawkishness is of a different kind: she’s motivated by a humanitarian (dare I say liberal) desire to overthrow a vile dictatorship.

I won’t get into the ridiculous plot of the season–it’s filled with the usual multiple McGuffins, twists, turns, and absurdities (an attack on the White House? Really?) Instead, I want to point out how a show with a female president still ends up in Sexistville.

First, there’s Jack’s daughter Kim. She’s long been a target for the show’s critics, and once again she doesn’t disappoint here: her main purpose in the plot is to serve as a way of controlling Jack by stalking and threatening her. And yeah, she gets a token moment where she rescues a valuable laptop, but this isn’t the most empowered character even for this show.

Then there is Olivia Taylor, the President’s daughter. A savvy political operative, she forces out her mother’s chief of staff and organizes a hit on the man who conspired to kill her brother. (Of course, doing that results in a major freakout on her part and sends her crying to the man who arranged the details of the hit.) Not bad, I guess–empowered to do evil is still empowerment.

But wait, there’s more. The kick in the teeth for Olivia also manages to catch our first female president–who has hung tough the whole show, ordering attacks on foreign countries, authorizing black ops against terrorists, reaming out subordinates for their failures. When Olivia’s role in the assassination is discovered, President Taylor decides to prosecute her. Cause, you know, that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re sworn to protect the constitution. (President Obama–I know you’re reading this–take note!) The First Gentleman (gotta love that, actually) then comes down hard on Madame President–noting that the job has now cost them both their children (not to mention his own shooting) and just lays a complete guilt trip on her that has her practically weeping in the arms of her restored chief of staff–her marriage destroyed, one child dead, another soon to be a felon.

Thanks, guys. But to be fair, the message that a woman who pursues power will lose all human contact (most certainly because she is perverting her natural role as a nurturer, provider, and handservant) isn’t something you hear all the time; I must have seen only, oh, ten or twelve examples of it. Today. Before noon.

Finally, there’s one nice little bid of absurdist misogyny: when Tony Almeida, the rogue former government agent and colleague of Jack’s, confronts the slimy leader of the cabal that (unbelievably) has authored almost all the mayhem of the show’s seven seasons, he tells him the reason he is going to kill him: it’s not just because this guy arranged the death of Tony’s wife–it’s because she was pregnant! With his son! (At which point he begins screaming, “you killed my son!”) ‘Cause, you know, it’s kinda gay to be that worked up just over a woman, even if she was the love of your life and helped you escape from the shadow world of counter-terrorism. But an unborn son! Now that’s a manly reason for revenge!

So there you have it: torture works, women should rise no higher than the vice-presidency, and only a Y-chromosome can justify a four-year revenge trip. Actually, that last one might be true.

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Triple Threats

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, douchebaggery, rape is hy-larious, teh tranz

The News From WOUTR, all Outrage, all the Time:

I have Saturday Night Live on. This is mostly nostalgia, though I’m not quite sure what for; I started watching the show during the Dana Carvey/Phil Hartmann/Jon Lovitz years, which were not exactly a great epoch in the history of television comedy. If I have nostalgia, it is from watching the “Best of” shows that Nick at Nite showed in the very early years of its existence, which were culled from the work of the original cast.

But in any case, I’m home on a Saturday (outrage intereferes with your social life, and my boyfriend is located in a different timezone anyway) and awake in the early morning, so I have SNL on.

Not that long ago, “Weekend Update” had Tina Fey and Amy Poehler and was a bright spot on the show; now both have moved on to greener pastures, and we’re left with Seth Myers’ minor-league douchebaggery, which isn’t particularly outrage-inducing–or rather, it seems to be hard to pick out against the normal background noise of douchebaggery on television.

The guest this week is Tracy Morgan, returning to his old haunts. I was never a particular fan of his, so perhaps it’s odd that I’m dedicating the first real post of the blog to him.

Right in a row, there were three separate sketches:

  • A parody of “Big Love,” the show about traditionalist Mormons. Morgan played what looked to be a trans prostitute, picked up by the clueless paterfamilias to be the newest wife. (The character, played by morgan in a horridly bad blond wig, is seen shaving with an electric razor; which is so stupid–I mean, everybody knows you can’t get a close shave with one of those things! The Mach 3 is the pre-electro transpeeps’ best friend.) The closing credits for the spoof: “Yeah. It’s a dude.”
  • A fake commercial for a pill that would keep men from getting sexually aroused in inappropriate situations, like picking up your high-school aged niece and her cheerleader friends. I’m…not sure what to say, except, gross–the other example is a Santa worried about a stray erection costing him his job.
  • A short film where two guys go to a party and make disparaging comments about the people there–but here’s the catch!–their comments are shown to be literally true; so “look at those Jokers” cuts to three guys dressed as the Joker. You get the idea. One of the guys is described as a serial rapist; the cut is to a guy busily humping a box of cereal. Hy-larious! (To be totally fair, the bit ends with one of the guys saying, “look at those two douchebags” and the image is the two of them looking into a mirror.)

So: trans-shaming; a reminder that men! always get boners! whenever they look at anything female!; and a nice little dollop of rape humor. All right!

Yes, this is pretty much how this blog is going to go.

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