Well sort of. The latest ad I’ve seen from the delightful studio of Burger King is for the so-called “polygameat” – a burger made up of more than one kind of meat – the ad can be seen here. In an ordinary village, a mob is hounding a man whom they accuse of committing “polygameat” – the mob is mostly made up of women (and [...]
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SunlessNick
A recent CSI Miami episode focussed on cyber-stalking. Briefly, a school swimming star (Candace Walker) is the subject of a website devoted to stalking and photographing her – consequently, she is being followed by dozens of amateur paparazzi – and at the beginning of the episode, her boyfriend is shot and killed with an arrow. A number of things stood out, and taken together, they [...]
One of my favourite TV historians is Bettany Hughes. But as a presenter, she gets hit from the opposite angle to actresses, being criticised for (what boils down to) looking too hot, and thus cheapening her subject in some way. On the other hand, Michael Wood, my other favourite TV historian, gets to be the “man who made history sexy.” So why is a historian [...]
A recent book I was reading re-introduced me to the folklore of vagina dentata, the notion that women once had – or Sinister Women have now – teeth in their vaginas. A common variant (found in Europe, Africa, and the Americas) being “witches” whose vaginal bite robbed men of their power and virility, and made slaves of them – unless the teeth were broken – [...]
I’ve posted before about how the writers of CSI: New York have handled stories involving Stella. The most recent episode I’ve seen, “The Thing About Heroes,” is another example – it finishes a couple of running arcs through the season – and includes what I found an excellent exploration of a couple a common tropes in stories about women. First is the “next relationship after [...]
So I bought one of Dan Brown’s regular thrillers, figuring that he can pace a scene well, and that I might like one of his books better if it’s not peddling daft conspiracy theories. This one promised a lead, NSA cryptographer Susan Fletcher, fighting for her country, her life, and the life of the man she loves. That promise was not honoured. First, her life. [...]
There’s this essay – http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/david_cox/2007/09/feminisms_rape_fallacy.html – it starts off talking about trials, but quickly lapses into the frequently-made comparison to burglary, and exhortations to women to “think twice” about what they do. Predictable of course: almost any article on rape in a daily newspaper is like that (yet is somehow always treated as some Great New Insight); and just as predictably, it is followed by [...]
