As promised yesterday, the good news from Season 2 of Heroes: Monica Dawson. Monica is a black teenager (Micah’s cousin) living with her family in New Orleans. I don’t recall that the show specifies the exact ways that Hurricane Katrina affected this family, but among them is that Monica has become the primary breadwinner. She’s put her college dreams on hold and is working full [...]
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Purtek
Last season, I wrote about how Heroes, an awesome show in so many respects, could stand to work on its portrayal of women in big ways. I had heard they were paying some attention to the common criticism of gender imbalance and they’ve responded this season by adding some female characters. They’ve made one major improvement that I’ll talk about in a post tomorrow, but [...]
It’s not easy for me to write this post, because it’s far more personal than we usually get on this site, but the saying “the personal is political” is a lot more than just words. A study was recently published that concluded that feminists have healthier heterosexual relationships than non-feminists. This has been linked on many of the big feminist blogs—most have commented that they [...]
A couple of weeks ago, on this thread, I mentioned that men are constantly portrayed as competing for women in a way that makes the woman essentially irrelevant. We use game metaphors to describe the system, but the winner and loser–the agents of participation–are always just the men. The women, I said, are the ball, the object you score with. How I Met Your Mother [...]
Having watched the first couple of episodes of Chuck, for the most part, I’m pretty impressed. It’s a fun show, with a neat concept–the basic premise of it is that a supremely regular guy, a somewhat underachieving geek, suddenly finds himself in possession of all of the state secrets anyone could ever want. It’s an unsubtle male-geek fantasy fulfillment show, creating a set of circumstances [...]
Tekanji has written a great new Feminism 101 FAQ article on internalized sexism. I think this is one of the more difficult things to talk about within feminist communities, as well as one of the more important. No individual can be unaffected by the sexist messages of our culture, and yet I often expect myself to somehow be different–I think I should be “smart enough, [...]
I find myself a little bit conflicted by my reaction to feminist men/feminist allies. We have a couple of great men who write here, and by no means do I intend to belittle their contributions or those of other men who are actively involved in feminist work. Not only do I think that power imbalance is destructive to everyone (though not in equal measure), I [...]
