CONGRATS TO STACEYANN CHIN!!!
Beyonce and slut-shaming.
Other nerds FREQUENTLY disappoint me.
This is a really powerful op-ed.
Some gorgeous images of chic afros.
Abuse survivors speak out
Saddest kids’ book EVER.
From Cassandra: Some kick ass girls!
In defense of Y tu mama tambien
How sexists find girls.
Are Puerto Ricans and other Latinos with US citizenship not welcome in the Tequila Party?
Oh, Ron Paul.
<3 Oh, Audre Lorde.
Tea Party wants slavery removed from textbooks.
From Casey:
Apparently a guy in the audience of an improv performance confessed to raping a woman and he thought it would be funny for the players to act it out…
NO.
http://www.themarysue.com/
Fashion choices for women over fifty.
Whaaaaaaat. The Human Project app looks AMAZING.
From SunlessNick: Is Mad Men a soap opera?
From Azzy:
http://slacktivist.typepad.
“There has been a long history of people with more power or more privilege using more familiar names or forms of address, like dropping titles, to create a sense of intimacy without the permission of the other person.”
Death threats on the rise for women bloggers.
From MC:
Lately there’s been alot of talk in the Doctor Who fandom whether or not head writer Steven Moffat is sexist.
Monica Coleman talks about why she writes about depression and mental health issues as a woman and Christian.
Hahaha, guess what’s on Toronto’s only dead-drop.
Hooray for good parents! Boo to frivolous lawsuits.
The five most traumatizing rape culture scenes in Harry Potter
ETA: Forgot to post this: someone’s having a book grab!
Criticism of US tropes in fiction. Some of those seem post-Enlightenment, Western tropes to me… plus y’all know how I feel about literacy rights, so the assumption that people in a nation with dramatically rising rates of illiteracy “can’t be bothered” to deal with subtitles is weird to me. Other than those two points, I really agree with the poster’s main point: that there’s a Western/American stranglehold on media production.
Also, in googling the links above, I found this really neat concept for teaching reading.
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Maria,
I think I found what Mintywolf was talking about, and it IS from the article: “I’m tired of how genre(s) put(s) a disproportionate value on heroes who are active and not passive (and, by extension, belittles and dismisses every use of passive voice, and always asks for sentences to be frenetically punchy)… I am sick of the redefinition of narrative as violence, of how everything has to be a conflict in order to be valid–even to the point of defining conflict “against yourself”, which contributes to trivialising the use of the word “conflict”, not to mention twist it far beyond its original meaning.”
I don’t read this at all as Mintywolf did:
The passive voice DOES have artistic merit. English class and creative writing classes teach us that we should mainly use active voice, because they’re worried about keeping awake an audience that doesn’t want to be there, anyway. That’s a strangely American cultural value: always chasing the one you don’t got. Readers like Anne Rice know that some of us want to get lost for hours in a novel rather than skim for a book report, and they use passive voice to set up an unreal, nostalgic or dreamy sense, or convey that some characters are more passive/submissive than others, etc.
As for “conflict”, there’s a HUGE BIG GRAY AREA between cramming conflict everywhere you possibly can until it’s no longer possible to buy your characters haven’t all murdered each other already, and you wish they would because they’re behaving so ridiculously, and people sitting around being endlessly pleasant to each other. I have to say it’s also kind of a weirdly American cultural trait to assume if someone objects to Extreme A, they must support Extreme Z. Again, folks: HUGE BIG GRAY AREAS EVERYWHERE. Twenty-four other letters to choose from along the spectrum.
Does anyone know of a term for the logical fallacy that is assuming someone who objects to one extreme must support the opposite extreme? It’s sort of a False Dichotomy with a touch of Straw Man, but I was hoping to find a more descriptive term for that specific assumption, because it’s derailed more than a few threads around here.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
What’s ironic is that I’m almost certain the Americanization! tropes are amplified and condensed when American screen writers try to market to a global audience. When you’re trying to get a plot light and uncomplicated as possible, action! and violence and clear oppositional morality and sexy women are pretty near the simplest things to translate.
Quib(Quote) (Reply)
This was why I put in ‘to each their own’. The link was expressing an opinion, I shared my own. Some people enjoy picaresques, for example, I don’t find them particularly compelling. That’s all.
Mintywolf(Quote) (Reply)
I think the above doesn’t sound like you were expressing an opinion, but more like you were stating a fact about writing and stories. I think this is what Jenn and I were responding to from your initial post. Thanks for clarifying!
Maria(Quote) (Reply)
Maria,
Ditto. Though I still think this is an unfounded conclusion: “They seem to be arguing that they want to see stories/movies/etc about people sitting around being culturally homogenous watching things they aren’t involved in going on around them.” That’s why I kept emphasizing the big gray areas.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Maria,
This doesn’t actually qualify as a LoGI or news but I just wanted to point out (if you weren’t already aware) that the next tropical storm will be Maria and that little glimmer in the southeast could be her already: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/index.shtml
May your reign be long and record-breaking.
Shaun(Quote) (Reply)
I promise to be a merciful overlord!
Maria(Quote) (Reply)
IANA fashion designer, but those Afros look too plain to me. The first thing I want to do when I see a glorious head of hair is ornament it with anything from one perfect flower to a one-of-a-kind piece of wearable art serving as a hairband. But again, IANA fashion designer.
Jenny Islander(Quote) (Reply)
This thread is old now in internet time, but I just found this tweet from Steven Moffat:
http://twitter.com/#!/steven_moffat/status/73013478759211009
It’s a response to the sexist quote from The Scotsman. He says that he never said that and doesn’t agree with it. Which makes me very happy since I love his stuff.
Ida(Quote) (Reply)
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