WILL THIS FILM ANNOY A FEMINIST?

I really don’t know what to make of this film. I can’t even guess at the politics of its creators. This is one of those stories which will be interpreted quite differently depending on the existing politics of the audience. Sexist viewers will have their opinions unchallenged, if not confirmed.

On the other hand, for viewers who have their eyes open to the way adolescent boys can be inducted into a world of violence and some pretty darn dodgy ideas about women, and the ways in which real men protect them, this film offers insight without redemption.

The end of the movie suggests that nothing about this macho riverside subculture is about to change. The final scene definitely left me with an icky feeling, which is nevertheless probably true to life.

DOES IT PASS THE BECHDEL TEST?

Nowhere even close.

This is a film specifically about male adolescence, and about a boy (Ellis) trying to find an adult role model. He has two to choose from: The first is his father, disillusioned about love and woman after being left by his wife. The second is Mud, the religious nutter vagabond who is the opposite, unconditionally loving a woman who doesn’t feel the same way about him, and losing his freedom because of it.

AND IS IT ANY GOOD?

Despite everything, my husband liked this less than I did. His main problem is that this film is plotted in a particularly lazy way, relying far too much on coincidence. I tried to ignore the coincidental run-ins by telling myself that in a small town, everyone really does bump into each other all the time, and that in real life you are (not unreasonably) likely to happen to live across the river from a key character.

We both agreed that this film was far too long.

That said, there’s nothing wrong with the performances, and there’s something intriguing about the setting. At first I thought this was set in the 1980s or early 1990s, but we are eventually given enough information to realise this is set in modern times, yet there is a real retro feel about it, almost Huck Finn in nature.

Not only did Australians manage to elect a prime minister who doesn’t believe in anthropogenic climate change, but now we seem to be running a concentration camp for refugees. On top of that, this lucky country produced 22 year old Mat Carpenter who thought of a seriously great business idea: Ship glitter bombs to your enemies with a shitty note for $9.99.

He soon got so sick of his own stupid idea that he put his website up for sale. “Please stop buying this horrible glitter product”, he tweeted. “I’m sick of dealing with it.”

Little did he know that the glitter bomb idea came first from my six-year-old daughter, Christmas 2014. But the motivations came from a completely different place. After spending several hours chopping up tinsel and tipping the contents into homemade little paper packages, our 6 y/o lovingly transcribed names of each of her family onto the packages and presented them proudly as Christmas gifts.

“When you open it, you see a beautiful glittery rainbow come out,” she announced.

I suspect I’ll still be finding tinsel come next Christmas.

WILL THIS FILM ANNOY A FEMINIST?

If this film annoys, it’s probably because the audience needs a certain tolerance for liberal arts majors falling in love over books. I started off thinking I’d be annoyed for the usual reason: 35-year-old man falls in love with a 19-year-old young woman. In modern romantic dramas, the writer needs to come up with something, often contrived, to keep two romantic leads apart, for at least the length of a movie. So I thought that the obstacle, in this story, was going to be the 35 year old’s reservations about the 19 year old being too young for him. Then, of course, they’d realise they have a lot in common, cue Big Theme: Age Doesn’t Matter, kissy kiss, the end. Elizabeth Olsen’s character looked in serious danger of being a manic pixie dream girl for the leading man for a while there. She even has the name ‘Zibby’ which would fit the profile.

The great news is, this film doesn’t go like that.

DOES IT PASS THE BECHDEL TEST?

Well, no. This is a romantic drama from the close third person of the male lead (to use a novelistic analogy) and the audience follows the inner thoughts and life of a 35 year old man. This is about his journey from man-child into early middle age. Following on from that, the various female characters talk to him, not to each other about anything at all, let alone about something other than a man, so it definitely doesn’t pass the Bechdel test.

Asking myself if this film would work if the genders were flipped, I immediately thought of Young Adult, written by Diablo Cody. And now I’m trying to work out if that even passes the Bechdel test, because the confidant of the female lead in Young Adult was a man. If you watched Young Adult and were put off by the sociopathic personality of Mavis (Cameron Diaz), the male lead (Josh Radnor) in Liberal Arts is more likeable, but that’s mainly because the surrounding characters seem to love him inexplicably so. Maybe related: The guy who stars in it also directed it. Josh Radnor also seems to have written it, and I got to admit, I wondered if maybe this one had been written by a woman, so that’s a good sign. According to imdb, it’s a mainly male creation.

AND IS IT ANY GOOD?

I liked Elizabeth Olsen in Martha Marcy May Marlene, and that’s what prompted me to watch another of her films. I was pleasantly surprised by this one. I generally don’t enjoy films with posters like this, because saturated colours and full-body shots of a white couple (almost) holding hands so often means cheese. But actually, I would recommend this one if you’re okay with romantic dramas in general. A hearty thumbs up, as long as you can ignore a few annoying stock characters like the guru stoner guy and the disillusioned old academic. (And after that last sentence I realise, this film could have so easily passed the Bechdel test, for something truly groundbreaking genderwise.)

It may be that narrow input is much more efficient for second language acquisition. It may be much better if second language acquirers specialize early rather than late. This means reading several books by one author or about a single topic of interest.

— from The Case for Narrow Reading by Stephen Krashen

If you’re like me and you live with a young uber-fan of Frozen you will have noticed the huge success of that film and all the merchandising around it. You may in fact kick the cat if you overhear L*t It G* just one more time.

What you may not have noticed, if you’re anything like me, is that in 2012 — the year before the release of Pixar’s Frozen – Disney released a lesser-budget movie called Secret of the Wings.

Whereas Frozen scores 7.7 on IMDb, Secret of the Wings scores a solid 7.1 and is well worth checking out if you’re looking around for something like Frozen but not goddam Frozen again.

The similarities are many:

1. A story for children that focuses first and foremost on relationship building
2. The main relationship is between two sisters
3. The freezing landscape is the main enemy, with other characters working together against it.

This film isn’t my ideal production, but what is?

1. The characters range between looking like Barbies and looking like Bratz dolls. (In case you’re wondering how else females can possibly be animated, here.)
2. The All-Knowing sage-like characters are still mostly male, which means the girls take advice, as usual from, ahem, mansplainers. (Yes, I’m starting to hate that word and am probably using it too broadly, but it’s A Thing.)
3. The younger male characters are divided into what I shall call ‘hunks’ and ‘geeks’, similar to those on Brave (which was short on ‘hunks’) — a newish division in children’s stories which is kind of no better than dividing female characters into ‘pretty’ and ‘ugly’, Cinderella style.

Although the animation looks cheaper than that of Frozen, it’s still very high quality and, let’s face it, still better than anything we were seeing 15 years ago.

A huge positive from my point of view: The songs aren’t as catchy. In fact, they’re those pretty shitty songs that you hear on any made-for-TV movie marketed at little girls. The kind that might have been sung by a Taylor Swift robot. If I’d just watched Frozen I’d be annoyed at myself for busting out with Frozen lyrics.

While Secret of the Wings lacks a comical character in the vein of Olaf (though LOLed at The Keeper one time), and therefore probably doesn’t have quite the dual audience (age wise or gender-wise) that Frozen has achieved, Secret of the Wings is no better or worse in any other respect than Frozen, and my six year old daughter likes this one just as much. In fact, she wouldn’t quit pestering me until I’d watched it.

When the kid started asking for the next swag of presents on Boxing Day last year — after getting pretty much everything she had asked for in her Santa Sack* — I was reminded of this article:

It’s Official: My Kid Is Spoiled, Now How Do I Fix It?

Lifehacker recommends getting young kids to name three good things about their day.

And when I hear people moan about people taking photos of their food before eating it I fail to hop on board that particular bandwagon because I view the social sharing of food as a form of modern Grace in an otherwise graceless world. My feelings are echoed here:

No, I Won’t Apologize for Instagramming My Brunch: “Yes, I’m standing in this restaurant to get a good angle on my sandwich, but I am appreciating the hell out of that sandwich.”

Now please be enjoying this picture of my tea bag.

*The six year old did write a thank you letter to us, unprompted, for all the Santa presents. Which is a great reason not to carry on with the Santa charade for too long. It’s harder to be all that grateful when you believe there’s a man in the North Pole who has access to ALL the presents, and if you believe you’ve been Super Good All Year.

Oblique angle photo doesn’t do it justice.

When I opened the curtains this morning to let some light in I screamed a little bit. Six-year-old came running and screamed also. She soon changed her tune when I named him ‘Spiderman': “Ooh, can I have him in my room as a pet? No Daddy, don’t KILL him!’

Not that spider killing is a man’s job, but the fact is, man is taller than I am and has a higher reach.

For the record, we did have a discussion about how the creature might be removed without killing him. Ways of killing him inhumanely were tabled then discarded. This included sucking him up with the vacuum cleaner, which didn’t happen.

As we discussed this my husband clapped his hands together and successfully swatted a mosquito. The conversation moved back to the spider. The mosquito got barely a mention. It seems the life of a large creature is more valuable than the life of a small one.

‘Well, I’m not sleeping in here tonight with that thing,” I said.

‘Of course you can, Mum,’ said the six-year-old. ‘You already DID sleep in here with him last night and probably other nights before that, too.’ It was not the time to bombard me with logic.

I busied myself in the kitchen doing important kitchenly work while husband remained in the bedroom. He emerged some minutes later. ‘I didn’t hear a bang,’ I said. He was holding one of his work shoes. ‘That thing is bigger than the shoe,’ he muttered.

I won’t go into the sorry details but the huntsman was eventually killed via shoe and it did require my help. Any attempt to remove huntsmen alive usually results in loss of limb, which for a spider that runs after prey is tantamount to death anyhow, but a slow one.

‘That is the largest spider I have ever seen,’ Australian-born husband muttered, throwing its carcass to strangely uninterested chooks.

I think he’s maybe forgetting about its cousin out in the shed.

SORT OF RELATED: Australia had to ban an episode of Peppa Pig, because it was all about Peppa being scared of a little spider. Children were encouraged to not be afraid of spiders because ‘they’re little and can’t possibly hurt you’. On the contrary, these huntsmen are harmless to humans. It’s the little bastards you have to watch out for.

Now that my daughter is in Year One, proper homework has started. The kind where a parent has to be involved, because they don’t quite know how to do it themselves. Yesterday it took half an hour to do a page of arithmetic. The assigned reading book is now half covered in words and is 20 pages long. The days of ‘The cat sat on the mat now can I watch TV?’ are over. The bus days of getting home at 4:20 exhausted have only just begun.

One of this week’s tasks is to prepare for a morning talk. Until now our kid has talked about whatever came to mind at the time: Minecraft, new toothbrushes, dogs vomiting on carpet, chickens dying… Dog knows what other household secrets got blabbed. This week the six-year-olds have to take along a favourite piece of music and explain why it’s important to them. They can take instruments if they like. (So far no one has taken instruments and the teacher is apparently disappointed about this.)

Here is my daughter’s favourite song in the whole wide world:

I blame myself. I skipped The Wiggles and Hi-Five jingles because I can’t stand listening to them. My daughter’s music tastes — for now — tend to match my own. And I’m a fan of Larry McMurtry, so of course I’m a fan of cowboy culture.

Not the actual cowboy culture, mind. The fictionalised kind, most of which probably never happened. How much does the six-year-old really know about cowboys?

What do cowboys eat?

Meat. They kill cows and eat steaks.

What do cowboys do?

They ride around on horses and have fun.

But what’s their job?

I don’t know.

Can girls be cowboys?

Yes! Like that girl on that movie we watched, you know? (The original True Grit. She’s also seen Disney’s Little House On The Prairie, in which Laura is adamant she’s going to grow up to be a cowboy.)

My daughter has drawn a few pictures about life in the Wild West. The cowboys are sleeping in beds. They have wives and children and they sing happily around campfires. It’s just like camping!

Even with all this homework, I’m not sure my daughter’s reading is going to improve to the point where I can just hand her a copy of the Lonesome Dove series, so she can see for herself by Friday morning that no sane individual would ever actually want to be a cowboy, or a cowgirl for that matter.

Huffington Post publishes some crap, sure, but recently published a list of Books Women Think Men Should Read and I happen to have read a lot of them and it’s a pretty good list. It includes Delusions of Gender, which I regularly bring up if I can’t be assed, and I can never be assed. Because after all, there’s this thing called the Internet. I’m fed up justifying my position on this issue.

Conversation with middle-aged man at tennis just two days ago:

Him: “Teenage boys and girls do everything together these days,” he says. (I can’t remember the prior context.)

Me: “Not like the 90s, then.” (Inside, feeling rather glad that sex segregation is going the way of the dodo.)

Him: (I think misreading my tone) “Boys and girls aren’t allowed to be different these days, of course.”

Me: (After a suspicious pause) “Oh, I don’t know. I see neurosexism everywhere.”

Him: (After a pause and a side-eye) “Are you one of these people who think we shouldn’t recognise differences between males and females?”

Me: “No, I think we should recognise the differences, with the aim of moving past them.” (Secretly thinking I’d rather be discussing politics or religion.)

Him: “Hmm. So you’re telling me you think men and women are exactly the same?”

Me: (Fed up, wanting to play tennis) “There’s a book called Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine. I agree with pretty much everything in that book.”

Him: “I don’t think I’d like that book.”

Me: “But you haven’t read it.”

Him: “I haven’t got time to read that.”

It amazes me how many people form strong opinions without actually doing the heavy lifting of reading, processing and reflecting.

I wouldn’t call myself a fan of crime fiction. I have a grim fascination for true crime, so long as it’s done well, and if you curate your true crime well, you can achieve a fascinating insight into the human psyche, even if it doesn’t do much for your generalised misanthropy.

Related: Why Do We Love Grimdark TV? from Bitch Magazine

Since so much horribleness goes on in the real world, I’ve reached the age where I have no time for stories about men whose motivations are spurred by the torture and murder of women. I can enjoy a good crime series, but if the crime is going to be against women, I want to see a certain amount of female agency. Sometimes this agency comes from the victim/survivor herself; at other times the focus is on the women who work to solve the crimes.

If, like me, you would like to see some more feminist crime, here are three series for your consideration:

THE FALL (belfast)

A lot has been said about The Fall, which is what made me watch it in the first place.

See: You Should Be Watching The Fall, a Serial-Killer Show Like No Other from Wired

The Fall: The Most Feminist Show on Television from The Atlantic

This is a story comprising two short series, both available now on American Netflix. Gillian Anderson plays the SIO (Senior Investigation Officer) looking for a serial killer of women. From the start, the audience knows who the serial killer is. He is not the serial killer of the popular imagination. Gillian Anderson’s character has some great lines, which show she isn’t wearing the rose-tinted glasses; she knows sexism when she sees it and she calls it out. This is immensely satisfying. Needless to say, I really enjoyed it.

TOP OF THE LAKE (new zealand)

Are you a Jane Campion fan? This is like watching a mash-up of The Piano (scenery-wise), Once Were Warriors (plot-wise) and Twin Peaks (creepiness-wise).

I predicted the outcome by episode three, but I think you’re supposed to. You’re certainly given enough clues. As I said, I’m not a crime fan, so a lot of viewers will probably work it out before I did.

Unfortunately I’m from New Zealand and Australia and Elisabeth Moss doesn’t do a fantastic job of the accent. You’d think they could find some decent local actresses, wouldn’t you? Then again, Elisabeth Moss would introduce this series to an American audience, thereby expanding it many times over. I guess this is how it works.

What makes it feminist? The drama is focused on Elisabeth Moss’s character, oftentimes on her relationship with her mother. There is also a community of battered women — a sort of cult, lead by an aged Holly Hunter — so it definitely passes the Bechdel Test. There are times, though, when I feel the scenes at the commune are unnecessarily comic. (Monkey? Did it have to be a monkey?) But that seems to be the nature of TV that’s made in my home country. Even the darkest stories inject these comic scenes which, to me, often feel out of sync with the vibe.

This show features more diversity than seems usual, too.

Double X presenters (in particular June Thomas) wondered what on earth an Australian police officer was doing, seconded into the New Zealand police force to fight a New Zealand crime. I wonder the same thing, but I’m willing to put it aside for the sake of a story.

Looks like there might be a series two coming? Season one certainly doesn’t feel entirely wrapped up.

HAPPY VALLEY (YORKSHIRE VALLEYS)

The thing that makes this a standout for a feminist audience is:

1. The drama focuses around the female police officer just as much as it focuses on the life of the male criminals.

2. Whereas in The Fall, everyone rushes around Gillian Anderson’s character because she is senior and because she needs to be listened to (also refreshing) this show very accurately depicts some of the problems with being a female working in a mostly male environment. Part of this police officer’s problems stem from the fact that she used to be a detective, but took a demotion for family reasons (also relatable to many women), and is struggling to work under people who have vocational deficiencies.

3. The main confidante of Lancashire’s character is her sister. (Cue: Bechdel.)

4. The main character is far from perfect. (Watching a martyr would be unrelatable.)

I absolutely loved Season One of Happy Valley and can’t wait for Season Two.

Most news that comes out of Japan is of the ‘quirky’ kind, in which we’re encouraged to view Japan as some bizarre culture we couldn’t possibly understand. (Note that ‘quirky’ is a loaded, condescending word, as explained by Miranda July.) There’s a distinct othering that happens when Westerners write about Japan. It has always annoyed me a bit. It annoyed me when I taught Japanese at a high school in New Zealand, and the Japanese exchange students were forced to perform a Maori Haka on stage in front of the entire school, who laughed and laughed, but it wasn’t the good kind. The Haka is a uniquely NZ thing — an uncomfortable thing to do if you haven’t grown up with it — and about as antithetical to the Japanese culture as you can get. So I asked the principal to put a stop to it. The Japanese are very good at making fun of themselves, and a lot of what’s shared about Japan on foreign TV and on social media is The Japanese Making Fun Of Themselves, but we somehow think they’re taking things seriously and we laugh at them rather than alongside.

I can’t guarantee the following articles don’t do that, but as someone who will always be endlessly fascinated by the contradiction that is Japan, I’m always a sucker for think pieces about the country that I spent 10 years studying.

The Japan Story from NYT

Japanese Dialects: From familiar to unintelligible at Lingua Lift

Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex? from The Guardian. This was being talked about 15 years ago when I was living there. Who knows if it’s true.

Ladies’ Night: Circling the Bases on Okinawa from Kyoto Journal

The inventor of karaoke went on to invent a cockroach-killing machine, and now lives atop a mountain in Kobe.

Photos of Leisure Time In Japan from Feature Shoot

The Thing About Luck is a children’s book written by Cynthia Kadohata. The book follows 12-year-old Summer as she travels with her Japanese grandparents for a season of harvesting work in the Midwest.

An elderly Japanese woman really loves her cat. Here are some photos from Beautiful Decay.

Japan’s Black Face Problem from Vox. Is this kind of racism really all that different from the gender equivalent we accept here in Australia — the Dame Edna kind, in which men dress up as women to embody the most awful parts of imagined womanhood?

Business In Japan is a RNZ interview with an American professor of Japanese business. Some of the oldest businesses in the world can be found in Japan, but why are they now going under? tl;dr Temple building businesses are failing to adapt and the Japanese are no longer prepared to pay a premium for salted squid guts.

1. One of the most important essays in contemporary film theory: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey (1975), which has some weird Freudian stuff in it but is still relevant for the pretty standard dichotomy between the watched and the watchers.
2. Fashion As A Way Of Avoiding The Male Gaze from Merf. Thinking Is Hard
3. The Peeping Press: Understanding the Male Media Gaze from Jessica Valenti
4. The Omniscient Breasts: The Male Gaze Through Female Eyes by Kate Elliot
5. From the classroom to the boardroom, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And the beholder is always a man, from Soraya Chemaly
6. Opinion: Video games and Male Gaze – are we men or boys? from Gama Sutra
7. Six Reasons Female Nudity Can Be Powerful from Salon
8. Why Do Actresses Have To Do The Orgasm Face? from Daily Life

1. [Guest Post] Young Avengers #1: Sex and the Female Gaze from Bad Reputation
2. The Bachelor, Shirtless Men, And The Dawn Of The Female Gaze from GMP
3. “Hot Dudes Reading” Instagram Reverses The Male Gaze and Makes Print Books Sexy from Flavorwire
4. Hot Dudes With Dogs from BuzzFeed

I am currently a bit of an expert on Little Red Riding Hood — self-described — having just done a bunch of reading from the world’s experts, and making my way through Jack Zipes’ anthology of all the most famous versions throughout history.

I summarised the most interesting bits over at my other website. (Okay, yes, I have been two-timing you.)

Why would one want to know so much about Little Red Riding Hood? I hear you mutter, noting that my lawn could really do with a mow and my fridge definitely wants to be caressed with an antiseptic wipe or two. Well, I have been head down bums up illustrating a modern re-visioning I co-wrote with my friend Liz and now it’s done and here it is if you’d like to download the pdf (for free) on Scribd.

And why would anyone want to rewrite a tale which has been re-visioned and retold thousands of times before? I used to think the same thing about fairytale rewrites, but then I thought, Hey, THAT hasn’t been done before.

Maybe it has and I just never found it. Take a peep and decide for yourself.

Click through for the link at Scribd.

In which girl character and dog character have equal billing

Interestingly, Esquire calls this ‘the digital era’, under the idea that the use of computers has an integral impact on narrative. The medium is the message, and all that.

1. FASTER PACE

Steven DeNure, president and COO of DHX Media, was thrilled to acquire the rights to Gadget in 2012. But he worried the old Gadget wouldn’t appeal to its target audience of young children.

For starters, the pacing was painfully slow. Kids today are used to fast-moving commercials, quick cuts, and a thing called the Internet.

2. FEMALE CHARACTERS ARE STILL DEALING WITH A WORLD IN WHICH THEY’RE SO OFTEN RELEGATED TO SECONDARY ROLES UNDER BUMBLING MALE PROTAGONISTS

Gadget remains as clueless as ever, and Penny remains just as brainy.

This is related to what I call The Hermione Trope. We see it in movies such as Monster House, too, and ParaNorman, in which the bossy brainy girl saves the day, but completely behind the scenes. 35 years later, girls are still swots, boys are still adventurous etc. Boys see that they don’t need to be such swots to get on in the world — they’ll be the stars of the story because of their gender.

3. CHILD CHARACTERS ARE MORE FREQUENTLY SEXUALISED

“What we wanted to do was make Penny a little older,” says Chalopin, who estimates she was between 10 and 12 before and is now in her mid-teens. She also has a new love interest: Dr. Claw’s spiky-haired nephew, Talon. “He’s more of a kid of today,” Chalopin says.

4. ‘GOOD LOOKS’ ARE EVER MORE IMPORTANT, FOR BOTH BOY AND GIRL CHARACTERS

[Talon] makes a great counterpart to Penny with his good looks and his charm.

5. CHILD CHARACTERS MAKE USE OF MOBILE PHONES AND OTHER TECHNOLOGIES, WHICH CHANGES THE STORY

“Penny had a smartphone way before it existed,” Chalopin says, so that wouldn’t impress children today. To get around the problem, he created “holographic protection” for Brain and a computer that appears out of thin air when Penny needs it.

6. FOR FINANCIAL REASONS, CHILDREN’S CONTENT CAN’T JUST BE FOR CHILDREN

Financing remains an uphill battle. Much of what’s selected today, at least for content streaming services like Netflix, must not only reach a broad group of viewers but transcend countries and age groups as well. As Erik Barmack, Netflix’s vice president of global independent content, says, “The things we look for in general is if the shows transcend countries, have a new story to be told, or a new way of reimagining characters.” Gadget, he says, ticks off all three criteria.

This explains the increasingly sexualised teen characters over a pre-adolescent girl character.

- How Inspector Gadget Was Remade For A New Generation from Esquire

I have recently found myself in the most unlikely position: On the board of a local sports association. Anyone who knows my former real life glasses-wearing book-reading self would be surprised at the disconnect.

So I have come to sports late, in a sense. I had almost forgotten my child self, the child who did well in marathons but never actually won, who made it to inter-school athletics and the first eleven girls’ soccer team in high school and who consistently surprised P.E. teachers with both my negative attitude towards P.E. class and the ease at which I picked up certain sports.

Then I turned 14 and gave up sport for 20 years.

Giving up sport is pretty typical for teenage girls.

Instead of an amazing burst of power at adolescence, we start bleeding from our nether regions and any increase in strength is offset by the addition of several layers of fat in preparation for the creation of human life. I’m pretty sure that’s part of the reason why lots of teenage girls give up sport. Suddenly I could no longer do chin-ups. My lithe high-jumping pre-adolescent body would have looked ridiculous to onlookers, throwing itself over a pole, lying prostrate and disconcertingly vulnerable on a vinyl-covered mattress.

WE TREAT GIRL ATHLETES DIFFERENTLY AND MOSTLY DON’T EVEN NOTICE WE’RE DOING IT

About a month ago I was learning how to serve a tennis ball alongside a bunch of adolescent players — all boys apart from a girl — when the coach started the session by ‘teaching’ us how not to throw a ball:

“First thing to remember is, don’t throw like a girl.” (Points at a little boy.) “Now X, you throw like a girl. You’ve got to stop that.”

Seething on the inside, I pulled the coach up on his sexism. He then explained (mansplained) to me that boys and girls do indeed throw differently, because boys go out and climb trees and exercise their upper bodies, whereas girls sit inside and do crafts, and need to be taught how to throw.

This is otherwise an excellent local coach, who does a lot for the sporting community. But I have been unable to get through to him that despite his nurture over nature logic, teaching kids that girls throw badly is a classic case of sexism. Nor does he realise that he routinely calls the girls ‘Sweetheart’ and the boys ‘Champ’ or ‘Champion’. How nice it would be, to just once be called a champion! I had a primary school teacher who called me ‘Shortcake’ and I hated it. My mother had given him shortcake as a Christmas gift. I’m sure he wouldn’t have adopted the name of a pastry for me if I’d been of the male persuasion.

In this way:

GIRLS LEARN THAT WE’RE NOT QUITE AS WELCOME IN THE SPORTING ARENA

Yesterday I helped out at the tennis club open day. Throughout the morning, parents and their children dropped in to have a few hits of the ball with a variety of tennis rackets we hung on the fence to entice them in. “Look!” the little boys said to their parents, tugging at their sleeves. The little boys dashed onto the court, threw the ball, hit it badly, had fun anyway. So did the toddler girls. The older girls I played with stood at the gate and waited to be invited onto the court. (I actively solicited business.) I placed racquets in the girls’ hands and told several of them that girls tend to give up sport at adolescence, but promise me you won’t do the same. “Sorry!” they said, hitting the ball to me badly, but no more badly than the boys. And I remembered my own self, just a year ago, coming back to tennis as an adult, having to be gently reminded by the male president that I don’t actually have to say sorry for hitting the ball badly. Hell, I’ve since played with women who apologise for hitting it well.

Media Coverage

In New Zealand where I grew up, media coverage and general interest in sport is very high for men’s sport, but women’s sport hardly gets a look in. NZ is of course completely typical in the disparity. It’s possible that coverage of women’s sport is even decreasing in relation to men’s despite feminism:

There are so many ways in which the UCI could support the sport for women, but instead they have acted, regardless of their intent, in a way that has caused the sport to lose events. Gone are the women’s Milan San Remo, the Amstel Gold Race, Tour de L’Aude, Tour Midi Pyrenees, and Tour Castel de Leon. No HP tour in America. No Tours in Australia, New Zealand or Canada. Instead of a 2 week Tour de France we have nothing. Today, in January, the major race in the women’s calendar this year, the one from which I have the pink tee-shirt, has no organizer and no route.

– from Nicole Cooke’s retirement statement (cycling)

In NZ and Australia there is too much media coverage of sport in general. I’m arguing for less coverage of male sport rather than more coverage of women’s. The percentage of air time is disproportionate to how important sport actually is. (It’s not very important.) But as long as we’re all gawking at groin injuries, our eyes are averted from bigger social justice issues that Australia is facing right now. If we all directed as much attention to the asylum seekers as we do to sport, I’m sure enough voters would be horrified enough to do something about it.

Nevertheless:

sport is undeniably a significant part of Western culture

Sport is one of the major means by which values and attitudes are shaped in Western culture. Governments spend large amounts of money in the pursuit of national sporting success, successful sportsmen are idolized and imitated, and televised sport is avidly watched by millions. Those sporting activities which arouse the most passion are constructed as ritual re-enactments of the myth: ‘our’ team, or ‘our’ Olympic representatives go forth to do symbolic battle with their opponents. They are expected to be strong, brave and dedicated to the cause. They are expected to win. If they succeed they are awarded a glittering trophy and we welcome them home as national heroes. Significantly most of the sport which is widely promoted through the media is male sport. In a paper delivered at the University of Technology, Sydney, in 1995 Gay Mason argued that sport, in general, plays a central role in the development of masculinity and that ‘sporting discourse offers a prime site for the construction of ‘maleness’. According to Mason the images of male bodies engaged in sporting activities constitute one of the main ways in which the superiority of men becomes ‘naturalised’, and the media, in their reporting of sport, ‘conspire in naturalising hegemonic masculinity’. The notions of male physical strength, force, potency and skill constructed by sport are translated into social concepts of masculine authority and power.

– Deconstructing The Hero, Marjery Hourihan

We can’t be what we can’t see

“You know what, Dad? I’ll just become an umpire. There. I’ve figured it out!” He laughed, wished me good luck, and said “I’m not sure how well that would be received by a lot of the people who watch the games, Caitlin.”

– from Why aren’t there more women officials in sport? from Persephone.

AND WHEN WE DO SEE OURSELVES IN SPORT, IT’S NOT OUR SPORTING SKILLS THAT ARE THE MAIN INTEREST

Note the headless female body, even on the cover of a feminist novel by a feminist author

60% of girls have quit a sport because of the way they look, from Policy Mic. (How many have never started?)

Eugenie Bouchard Asked To Twirl by [Australian] Male Reporter from SBS

Sports Illustrated Loves Models. Female Athletes? Not So Much. From Jezebel

SPORT FOR GIRLS IS MORE HEAVILY SEXUALISED

…here in Sydney: a portrait photographer submits a range of photos for an exhibition about women’s sport. Her folio includes – among others – portraits of a surfer, a footballer, a basketball player, and a pole dancer, but the gallery decides to reject one of the portraits. [The pole dancing one.]

What do you think? Is pole-dancing a sport? Is it a ‘women’s sport’?

Is pole dancing a ‘women’s sport’? from Daily Life

Yes, pole-dancing is a sport in that it requires much physical prowess and fitness and dedication. But I note with interest that straight men are not taking it up in droves. Why not? Because pole dancing is for women, or because being sexually objectified is for women?

How do women and girls feel when they see sexualised or sporty images of female athletes? from BPS

LFL is Not a Sport! It Is Glorified Sexuality (I would amend that title to ‘Sporty-Fetish Porn’

The truth is, audiences are happy to watch girls playing sport. But audiences are not so happy to watch women playing sport. Teams of unaccessorised, sweaty women playing games at the top level is harder to market.

No, Female Athletes Don’t Have To Be Girly, Thank you, from GOOD

FURTHER LINKS

ESPN Cricket News, about India’s female elite cricketers

This is also from Jezebel, so take the title with a dose of irony

Sexism, LBGT and Sport from FTB

Is Women Playing in Men’s Leagues a step forward? from Daily Life See also: Girls and Sport by Chris Scanlon

The ugly truth is rules are different for girls in sport from The Age

President Obama Is A Big Fan Of Girls’ Sports, from Jezebel. (Notice they didn’t say ‘women’s sports’.)

One! Two! Three Strikes, You’re Outdating Yourselves With Your Views on Women and Sports! from Persephone Mag

The Ladies’ Guide To Football Promises To Tell You Dumb Broads What All The Man-Fuss is About from Jezebel

Women in Sports Week: Because Being Girly Doesn’t Mean Being Weak: ‘Bring It On‘ from Bitch Flicks

Sexism and blogging in the hockey media: Puck Daddy roundtable debate

HOW DOES this film RATE FOR INCLUSIVENESS?

As I was watching my thoughts were more about race. This story is set in the near future, when current children are about 60 years old. In that real world scenario, I am expecting the world to look a lot less white than this movie does. Sure, there is a black guy on the space ship but I’m pretty sure he gets way fewer lines of dialogue than the white characters. The odd Asian face pops up here and there. My own imagination has never stretched to a future in which white Americans will save the world. There is simply so much brain power outside America now, and other countries have more successful education systems.

The Bechdel Test

The Bechdel test was never really intended to be used as a barometer for a good feminist film and I’ve recently been noticing that many stories do pass the test but are still not all that great in regards to portrayal of women.

For the record, this film does pass the Bechdel test — two women do eventually talk to each other. Given that this is about 3 hours long, a couple of brief scenes doesn’t count for much. One of those was about a man. The other depicts two women who don’t like each other. So although Interstellar passes the Bechdel Test, some have made an amendment that ideally there are two women talking who don’t hate each other. Because everyone knows how ‘women are their own worst enemies’, right?

As for the gender breakdown:

There are 15 first-billed characters (counting as single the characters played by multiple actors). One of those characters is a robot and has a male voice, but I’ll take that number down to 13. Of those 13, 2 characters are female (played by two actresses each). So when you look at the raw numbers, this film is typical for Hollywood in its gender balance.

I’m not sure whether this is good news or not (I might just be used to the imbalance), but this cast felt like quite a balanced ensemble as I was watching. This is partly because the two main female characters have agency. Both are super smart and dedicated to their jobs and we don’t have any bullshit backstory in which they’re torn between their jobs and their families — in fact, that particular dilemma is reserved for the main male character, and that’s refreshing. In contrast, Sandra Bullock’s character in Gravity had a backstory which involved her family, I guess because it was thought a female astronaut without a sob story would not be sufficiently relatable for audiences who are used to women as caregivers. The women in this story do not have children that define them. This felt great.

That said, I am detecting that we’re in the age of The Hermione Trope, in which girl characters work behind the scenes as ‘secret protagonists’, working out complex problems for the male characters who get their hands dirty on the fictional battlefield, whatever form that might take. I’d thought it applied mainly to family movies but I may have to revise that.

The frustrating thing is that we’re still not seeing many movies in which the female is the plain ole ‘protagonist’. Don’t forget that this film could just as easily have been about a woman cast in McConaughey’s role, with the young swots being male. That’s just not a story Hollywood is prepared to gamble on yet. From Peggy Olsen, Claire Underwood and Kima Greggs to the girls in Paranorman and Monster House, significant female characters are still not the main characters even when they have the brains. Perhaps this smart under-dog dynamic is thought to be more interesting. Perhaps such relationships do appeal most to female viewers, for whom it’s a certain kind of satisfying to see a woman under-appreciated and then triumph, despite the patriarchal world in which she lives. I’m still waiting for more stories in which fictional worlds of the future depict a social milieu in which women have achieved full agency, not that which comes out of the shadows, behind that of a man.

AND IS IT ANY GOOD?

Pretty fantastic! This was one of those films which stays with you for several days. High concept stories are hard to pull off 100% but all loose ends were tied up. Viewers would benefit from seeing it more than once. Part of the ending did run to cheese in my opinion. Interstallar reminds me of Contact only it is more complex, more frightening, more exciting. I wasn’t bored at any stage, despite the length of 169 minutes.

I’m looking forward to watching this with my daughter when she’s old enough to understand what’s going on. Commonsense Media recommends the film for ages 12 and up.

Pair with the book The Never-ending Days of Being Dead by Marcus Chown for some mind-bending astro stuff presented in readable fashion.

Now, I am not generally given over to excitement, but Neutral Milk Hotel sort of changed my life. They released this absolutely fantastic album called In the Aeroplane Over the Sea in 1998 and haven’t been heard from since, purportedly because their lead singer lives in a cave in New Zealand.

– from Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan

How is your country generally depicted in fiction, by writers outside your country?

New Zealand, not surprisingly, is the stock country for ‘a place really, really far away.’ Most recently I noticed in Last Tango In Halifax, a relative who came from New Zealand to England had made a REALLY big effort to be at a wedding celebration, and therefore his very presence was amazing.

New Zealand sometimes even gets a mention in American fiction. Even in Breaking Bad! In this case, New Zealand is the stock country that ‘no one knows anything about':

Jane Margolis: Do you know what this is? [refers to a bag full of money]
Jesse Pinkman: It’s a whole lot of cheddar.
Jane Margolis: This is freedom. This is saying, “I can go anywhere I want. I can be anybody.” What do you want to be? Where do you want to go? South America? Europe? Australia?
Jesse Pinkman: Is New Zealand part of Australia?
Jane Margolis: New Zealand is New Zealand.
Jesse Pinkman: Right on. New Zealand. That’s where they made “Lord of the Rings”. I say we just move there, yo. I mean, you can do your art. Right? Like, you can paint the local castles and shit. And I can be a bush pilot.

– from Breaking Bad, penultimate episode of season 2

Ask an Australian and they will tell you that New Zealand is nothing but sheep. Sort of like Tasmania, but a different country. New Zealanders are also good at rugby, but not cricket.

Lord of the Rings allowed marketers of tourism to sell New Zealand as a really beautiful place, almost other-worldly. The Hobbit has probably turned it into ‘takes really long to get there and is actually pretty boring.’

What is New Zealand really like?

Here’s an article from a European whose version of New Zealand — from books introduced by his Kiwi girlfriend– turned out to be quite different from the New Zealand he met when he eventually visited the country.

A guy walks into a bar, slips a pill into a woman’s drink. But it’s okay you see, because he’s set up cameras. Surprise! This is a public service announcement. “I wouldn’t drink that if I were you,” he tells the women when their gaze reorientates to their drinks. “I just slipped a pill into your beverage. I’m doing this to show how easy it is to get date raped.”

The women are sobered. This guy offers to buy them another drink. The first woman feels so bad about leaving her drink unattended that she says he doesn’t have to.

What would you do if a guy performed this trick on you in a bar? Would  you feel bad? Guilty? Like you’d only just avoided disaster? For averting your eyes for a moment, or for trusting that your male companion is going to keep an eye on your drink for you?

I am so sick of this kind of public service announcement. Another recent example is Australian women being told to keep out of public parks. I kind of don’t even want to share this video, because the main thing it does is reassure potential and existing drink spikers how easy it is to do.

What is the take home message? That women should keep our eyes on our drinks the entire time? If this video is at all useful, it’s because it shows just how impossible it is to foil a person with terrible intentions. This little experiment also shows that:

• Women are prone to feeling guilty no matter what a random guy in a bar does to them.
• Women are still being told to ‘take responsibility’, once again, for avoiding their own rapes.

If one person wants to spike another person’s drink, the drinker might well keep their gaze on their sip-hole all evening, staring at it like a madperson, or they might not drink at all, or they might not go to bars, ever, because we all know how much less likely it is to get raped (and murdered) in one’s own home.

If that guy had slipped a pill into my drink to illustrate a point, I like to think I would have told him to fuck the fuck off.

Where are the public service announcements by young men encouraging basic human empathy in their potential rapists? A video outlining what it’s like to suffer from PTSD, or from unwanted pregnancy, for instance?

If you have an iPad and/or a Mac and an offbeat sense of humour you may be interested in downloading Diary of a Goth Girl, an illustrated short story for YA.

I wrote it in 2009, it was published in 2010 by a small British publisher, went out of print pretty much as soon as it went in, I asked for the rights back, and finally in 2015, here it is. Illustrated with doodles and with the setting changed from an inner-city English area to outback Australia, because let’s face it, Australian goths are even more ironic than English goths, with their garb and our climate.

In the meantime, Chris Riddell published the first of his wildly successful Goth Girl series in 2013, won the Kate Greenaway award, the Costa Book Award and was recently named children’s laureate, and no I’m not jealous in the slightest!

Haha. Well done Mr Riddell, you are my hero.