The Good:

Daniel Craig and his body look much as he did in Casino Royale; I presume most readers will consider that good news :). The film is a direct sequel to CR and it looks like the next will be a direct sequel to this (not a feminist issue, but I like that the organisation presented in CR is taking several films to deal with).

M: Judy Dench is as good as ever. M is smart, seeing through some bullshit from the CIA purely on the basis of who told it to her, and what it implies that they’re the one who did. She sees through Bond’s morass of emotions surrounding Vesper’s betrayal and death (and he admits that she was right), but nonetheless can tell the difference between his bad conclusions and his good ones. You can see why she’s the boss. She does get one terribly rattled moment, but it’s in the wake of something that would rattle anyone. In short, there’s nothing she says or does that I wouldn’t find credible if a man was saying or doing it.

Vesper: Vesper has a big presence in the film; much of Bond’s internal journey is through the turmoil of grief, betrayal, hatred, and guilt he feels. The boyfriend mentioned in Casino Royale come up here as well - and it’s worth noting that “endangered loved one of a similar age” is rarely employed as a motive for a woman to commit a betrayal (it’s usually kids) - there’s more to this at the end of the post, but it’s a spoiler. Anyway Vesper is neither shallow not disposable.

Camille: Camille is on a similar grief/vengeance kick to Bond; they are quite similar people in a lot of ways. They also have similar capabilities, though she’s put into a distinctly secondary tier compared to Bond (which might deserve to go in the Ominous category). But they get parallel fights at the end, each against the adversary who means more to them. And they don’t shag, which is cool. They do share one intense kiss, which neither seems to want to push any further (possibly because it would have meant something).

The Bad:

The guy that Camille wants to kill is a mass murderer. They also make him a mass rapist, for no particular reason but to underscore what a bad man he is. But what it also does is add a sexualised quality to his climactic fight with Camille, which I would have preferred to be a straight combat.

The Ominous:

The opening credits have the abstractly rendered women creeping in again, which I could stand to do without. They centred on long images of Bond though, and the women formed out of sandscapes, giving it a kind of navigational look - which certainly fit Bond’s inner journey at the time. So maybe it’s a one off. Hope so.

There’s an MI6 woman called Fields who Bond ends up sleeping with. On the plus side, it’s not given much screen time, and it seems as much a decision on her part as his - she ends up dead, possibly to get to him, and also possibly found as a result of his wanting to stay somewhere higher profile than she did - M does call him on his casual charm having lasting consequences for the women he uses it on, and he does seem to feel some guilt. The reason I find it ominous is that apparently her first name is Strawberry (though I don’t remember hearing it used in the film; she introduces herself as Fields). But weirdly and innuendily-named women are something I could certainly do without seeing come back.

In conclusion, then, it carried on most of the positive changes from Casino Royale (including the ones that have nothing to do with gender), but with some warning signs that they might start listening to people who say it’s not real Bond without the shallow women and misogyny. I hope they don’t. A Bond who pursues shallow interactions - not because he looks down on women, but because he avoids any emotional depth, for both good and bad reasons - is much more interesting than the philanderer of early incarnations. And women with their own goals and personalities - and duties and attachments - are certainly more interesting.

*****SPOILER WARNING : Vesper’s boyfriend turns out to be a bad guy who seduces women with access to sensitive information, and is then “held hostage” in order to extort it from them. A seducer is a common enough trope (though it’s seen differently depending on which side of the equation the woman is, and thus how she needs to be disdained - either as manipulator or emotionally led). But in this case, the boyfriend is definitely painted as the bad guy, and Bond isn’t hypocritical enough to harp on Vesper’s emotions when his have been so turbulent. And I have to say, pretending to be endangered for the purpose of extortion is a very female stereotype, and it’s interesting to see a man do it. *****

Anyway! Go read ye some carnival. And then volunteer to host one. You know you want to.

When you’re done with that, take a look at this post by Betty about strong women in The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Though she has a penchant for wearing inexplicable belts in promotional images, Betty thinks the title character comes off as really strong, not just physically so:

Sarah Connor, on the other hand, is the decision maker on the show. John, her son, doesn’t like the fact that her word is law, and occasionally challenges her authority, but he’s not stupid enough that he can’t recognize her experience is vaster than his own. You might critique the fact that her primary purpose is to bring John Connor, humanity’s messiah into the world, but you have to acknowledge she hasn’t faded into the background after the womb-work was done. It’s her name on the opening title, and her story.

The difference is, obviously, agency.

I haven’t watched Sarah Connor Chronicles, but I’m thinking maybe I should. I do love me some strong women.

More on the topic of physical strength, E. Cabell Hankinson Gathman wrote a really interesting piece this month for Strange Horizons called “Wii Fitness: Rocking the Hula Hoops (and the Weight Issues).” Cabell talks about how much she hates Boardy, which is something I’d definitely thought of on my own (she and I compared notes briefly but neither of us know how to murder the little monster), but she also goes into the skeezy issues with weight and fitness that Wii Fit buys into:

…this is the crux of the matter: the only goal you can set is a weight change—a loss, of course; Boardy encourages you to think about how, with a BMI of 22 (right in the middle of normal and least likely to die, according to the somewhat dubious stats that Boardy himself reports), you’re okay, but you could be better!

I have the console and the game, and I enjoy playing with it, but it is definitely frustrating and dispiriting to have sanctimonious Boardy constantly chiding me about my weight. I’m heavier than is healthy for me right now, but even at my most athletic I’ve never had a BMI near 22. I’m too muscular. And it’s pretty absurd to assume that that means I’m unhealthy.

Over at Fantasy Magazine, Silvia Moreno-Garcia wrote an article about “Pre-Columbian Cultures in Film” that I found really thought-provoking. Moreno-Garcia talks about the ways in which several pre-Columbian cultures are smushed together and then super-simplified to create the interchangeable “loin-clothed savage” that we see in film. This ignores the rich and varied history of actual pre-Columbian cultures:

The pre-Columbian people that inhabit movies are far removed from reality. Two-dimensional, without a real culture or language, their accomplishments in art, astronomy or mathematics are ignored. Instead, they wander the screen clad in clichés.

When they are good, they are presented as child-like, primitive but harmless people like the chief from Road to el Dorado. A visit from a kind conquistador is all it takes to rectify their ways. But sometimes they are naughty and they decide to bring a stone jaguar to life (like that movie’s evil sorcerer). When that happens they’re appropriately punished.

I noticed some pretty obviously Mexica-derivative cultures in a couple of sci-fantasy books that I read lately, and though individual characters from them were reasonably three-dimensional, the cultures as a whole were all evil and savage-y. I was pretty perturbed to see that going on in depictions of groups that were so clearly based on a real culture. I mentioned it to a couple of friends, and they observed, as Moreno-Garcia does, that there aren’t really any “autochthonous leading voice[s]” in fantasy, whether it’s cinema or novels. But Moreno-Garcia also points out that:

…there’s also no ancient Romans or Greeks making movies and they generally get better portrayals than the average indigenous culture. One can only hope that one day movie makers will decide it is more interesting to explore rich, complex worlds than have a dozen men in chicken feathers and body paint worshiping a white dude who just landed in the area.

For an interesting exploration of some of the same ideas, check out Liz Henry’s post (and the resulting robust comments section) at Feminist SF – The Blog! about Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home. I haven’t read the book yet, but I’m putting it on my list.

You should also read Liz’s post about a blogging party that she’ll be hosting which will have a virtual component related to it for those of us who can’t hang out together in meatspace.

And closing with humor, as I like to do, I recommend to you MightyGodKing’s “MGK Versus His Adolescent Reading Habits” series: parts one, two, and three. I laughed so hard I choked, for serious.

Happy reading, internets! I’ll see you next time.

I was incredibly disappointed with it. Why? Because Max and Page’s conning is almost exclusively restricted to seduce-and-destroy tactics. In the opening scenario, Max has inveigled Dean (Ray Liotta) into marrying her by withholding sex. Then she continues to withhold sex after the wedding. Enter Page posing as his sexy, skimpily-attired secretary who maneuvers Dean into a compromising position. Instant divorce settlement. The rest of the move evolves around Max and Page trying for one last scores with a mega-millionaire while falling in actual love with men who conveniently happen to be very wealthy.

For sure, Max and Paige have a few petty scams which don’t rely on sex – pretending to slip on the floor of a posh hotel and then spilling water as leverage for a free room; sprinkling crushed glass into their meals to get comped. But for the most part, the tactics are sexual, from Page’s comically sexy outfits to Max distracting a guy at the petrol pump so Page can use his charge card.

The sad thing is, Max actually had potential because of the way she thinks on her feet – in one scene, posing as a Russian, her potential new husband William (Gene Hackman) takes her to a Russian club and she has to fake her way through the language. But this was an isolated scene and in the context of her playing a sexy Russian in distress because she is threatened with deportation and wouldn’t you know, if she marries an American, she gets to stay.

Oh, and then Max-as-the-sexy-Russian locks horns with William’s housekeeper, who has her eye on a cut of William’s inheritance and sees Max as a threat. Because female conwomen relying on seduce-and-destroy tactics isn’t tacky enough, no, we need a housekeeper waiting for her boss to cark it so she can inherit.

Why couldn’t we have a female conwomen movie with lots of cool gadgets a la Oceans, or a smooth-talking duo posing as postal workers or IRS agents a la Matchstick Men? Why did they have to be obviously sexy, and rely on sexual tactics? The closest I can think to one of the men in abovementioned movies using seduction tactics is Linus (Matt Damon) in Ocean’s Thirteen… and he still gets to spend most of the trilogy demonstrating his technical skills.

I wonder what Ripley would say if she were to meet Max.

It’s not McCain’s campaining that cost him the election. Nor was it his choice to echo the policies of an extremely unpopular president until he bought a clue and changed his tune midstream except not really. Nor was it his ham-handed attempt to woo Hillary Clinton voters with the substitution of another woman, as if they’re all interchangeable to us. No, it was, as always, The Woman who cost him the election.

Now, let’s be clear. Palin is underqualified to be president (so am I; so are most of us), and I believe McCain’s rationale in selecting her was all about demographics, and that shows a reckless disregard for the well-being of the US on McCain’s part. Attempting to hide Palin’s lack of qualification shows a reckless disregard on the part of whomever dictated that it not be reported.

But none of this is Palin’s fault. You can criticize her for her policies and her actions and things she says (and there’s plenty there to criticize), but it’s not her responsibility to turn down the offer of a lifetime. It’s McCain’s job to exercise some intelligence and discretion. But there’s nothing quite like using a woman, casting her aside, and then scapegoating her for your (or your party’s) failures, and that’s what everyone from McCain to the press is doing.

Choosing Palin probably did harm McCain’s chances. But it was the choice, not the woman. It was the man who made the choice, not the woman who played her part as asked.

Remember, girls and women: when they make you an offer that’s too good to be true, you may regret accepting. On the other hand, if you don’t accept, things will never change. On the other other hand, if you accept and then make a fool of yourself, you might set us all back twenty years. Oh, never mind. We’re damned if we do, damned if we don’t and damned when we point out what bullshit it all is.

I didn’t go. Why? Because it’s about a young girl who’s been raped. In fact, the rape is in the movie - filmed in a very tasteful manner, apparently, putting across her trauma. That doesn’t help me at all.

I have trouble watching rape storylines, period. I’ve watched a lot of them for this site, and they disturb me for a long time after. There are a lot of reasons some women have trouble watching rape storylines: for one thing, about a quarter of us have lived through it. For another, they often re-victimize the (almost always female) victim. For another, some of us are just plain capable of empathy. We can extrapolate from our experiences of hate and/or violation what rape would feel like, even if we’ve never been through it. And “going there” unlocks a lot of stuff we have to suppress if we’re to go around functioning in life like we don’t have good reason to be paranoid (1 in 4? Yep, they’re after us).

I felt it was important to prove I can watch anything, critique anything - but in the last few months I’ve been on a crusade to alter my perfectionist tendencies, and I decided to cut myself some slack here. And from that one decision, an avalanche of epiphanies followed:

• What do male critics have to watch that compares to this? What genre/theme disturbs the male psyche with not only its horrific nature, but the reminder that this particular horror happens every day, to many people just like you, and if not to you then to someone you know? There isn’t one. Therefore, it is placing an unfair burden on the female film critic to demand she watch movies about rape.
• This site shouldn’t need to exist.
• Blogs about rape and rape awareness and sexism and bigotry shouldn’t need to exist.
• Movies about rape shouldn’t need to exist, at least not to the degree that they do.
• Our lives are being wasted on crusading against sexism, in that it shouldn’t need doing. We should have equal opportunities and equal odds of experiencing victimization, and then who knows what we’d be accomplishing? Stuff that would be needed even in an egalitarian world. Everything we’re doing now, we do in the hopes that it will someday be obselete. It is necessary… and yet its necessity is so offensive that I feel squandered.

Don’t get me wrong. Movies like Hounddog need to be made for the same reason this site needs to exist. But who is the audience for them? People who find them cathartic as they work through issues of their own? People like me, who are haunted and disturbed by the theme but have been brainwashed into thinking, “I must watch it, or I’m a bad women’s advocate and a bad film critic. I must prove I… have a pair of balls?” Or people who don’t think rape is so awful, but could be persuaded by a two-hour movie to believe it is?

Good rape movies are made for the first and third groups: those who need to feel they’re not the only ones who’ve suffered violation, and those who think rape is something women sometimes deserve. I don’t think they’re really meant for the viewing of people like me, who already get how awful rape is and wouldn’t be able to leave the house every day if they reminded themselves constantly what their chances of being raped are.

But it’s more than that. So much more. I think most of us get that rape is horrible and unfair, but consider how much energy and time women spend fortifying themselves against sexism. Against the in-law who thinks you’re some kind of witch if your husband agrees to move to the city where you got a better job offer than he did. Against the parent who just doesn’t see your accomplishments in the same light as your brother’s. Against the teacher who calls on the boys first. Against the friend you just found out thinks, well, you’re just asking to be raped if you go out to bars alone and have a few drinks. Against the friend who listens to your complaints about sexism in your life, then hints that you’d be happy if you’d just find a boyfriend, or a different boyfriend, or marry the one you have, or have a baby with the one you’ve married, etc. - the finish line shifts until you stop complaining about sexism, which you realize was her point all along.

It’s not just women, of course. All marginalized groups get these little occasional smacks in the face that don’t sound all that awful on their own, but serve to remind you that the world still sees you as a lesser being. And sometimes these reminders are harder to forgive than a brutal attack. After all, you can assume someone who rapes is a psycho, and not representative of his demographic as a whole. But when the rest of his demographic essentially apologizes for him… that’s when you lose all faith in humanity, and open a website where you are accused of “loving to complain.”

Love to complain, my ass. It is my fondest wish for this website to someday become irrelevant, a reminder of past mistakes, a chronicle of history we want to avoid repeating.

The daughter of my recently acquired housemate is an avid fan of Hannah Montana, and I can’t help but notice that half the episodes are about how - despite her superstar status - she should remember that her brother is as super special as she is.

And then I recall Aerin’s letter to the mailbag about Horton Hears a Who. Now, sure, “Your siblings are as special as you, and you should appreciate them” isn’t a bad moral in general terms - but why does it always seem to be sisters who must learn it about brothers?

Every so often, I like to ask you, dear readers, what you want from Hathor. More reviews? If so, which sort (more movie reviews, more TV shows, more sci-fi, more drama, more international, etc.)? More video game reviews? More topical posts on gender, or on themes and tropes common to a lot of movies and TV shows, or on a specific topic you’ve wished we would tackle? Interviews with directors or screenwriters or someone else? Something else I haven’t even thought of?

Let us know in the comments. We can’t promise we’ll be able to give you everything you want, but the more we know about why you read us, the better our chances of improving the site from your perspective.

The link is: Media Women.

I hope to see you there! And please invite anyone you know who might be interested - the more, the merrier!

Since I know some people have objections to LJ’s corporate policies and don’t care to have LJ identities, I have left the community open to posts from anyone, which (if I understand correctly) means those without LJ identities will still be able to post and comment. If anyone can advise me better on this, please email me. ETA: Don Camus just informed me there’s no way for non-LJ members to post, though they can comment anonymously. That blows. If any non-members want to post, please email me and we’ll try to think up a solution.

For example, I like Fight Club because as *I* read the story, it breaks down the myth that the cult of masculinity is where a man finds his identity and value. Doesn’t say a damn thing about women or our journey, but the obsession with manhood (and lack of corresponding value put on “womanhood”) is definitely part of why we need feminism…

A few days later, I used the phrase “cult of masculinity” in my post The myth of the woman who craves abuse:

Unfortunately, men are less likely than women to fully recover from childhood abuse, mostly because the cult of masculinity insists they can overcome anything simply by “being a man”, which aparently does not include the very emotional work required for full recovery.

I should explain what I mean by “cult of masculinity.”

No one ever says “You need to grow up and be a woman.” Or “Time to separate the women from the girls.” Or “Are you a woman or a mouse?” That’s because a woman is not a construct in the patriarchy’s eyes; it is viewed as simply the inevitable outcome of a human being born female, as opposed to something to strive for.

What our culture means by “a man”, however, is a construct. It is something that does not occur in nature. It is a supernatural creature of extraordinary emotional, physical and mental resilience. It can withstand enemy torture for years on end without ever giving out the codes; it can somehow magically love its family, God and country without actually being distracted by normal human feelings; it has no moods and is always perfectly even-tempered, except when roused to fight for good. It can get over abuses and wrongs done against it, even in its most vulnerable formative years, without sorting or processing its feelings and experiences.

None can be all these things. No one should try. Manhood is a pretense to be acted, a mask to be donned, not a potential to be realized. The cult of masculinity wants men to be superhuman, and to that end, it places women beneath men (and various men beneath other men) to act as support units in this ridiculous struggle to create Supermen. Superman hasn’t got time to do his own household chores or menial tasks or parent his kids - women must do that for him. Even with all that off his plate, not even Superman can really run a country/run a huge corporation/find the cure for a disease all on his lonesome - he needs women (and “lesser” men) doing 90% of the work for him without expecting shared credit. Superman hasn’t got time to sort through his emotional baggage from his abusive mom/dad/grade school bullies - he needs a wife who accepts that sometimes being a punching bag is a woman’s job so he can work out all that frustration and appear to be a Good Man to the outside world… where it counts.

To get everyone else to accept this ridiculous imbalance, we have to be brainwashed into the cult of masculinity. We all have to believe that just being a Man is such a glorious achievement that we should all be honored to help build Men. We must forgive fathers and husbands for lashing out at us occasionally: they work so hard! We must forgive our male religious leaders for occasionally committing the very sins they damn us to hell for - their path is so difficult! We must know our place and stay in it, for if we venture forth into Man’s world and Man’s work and prove that we’re just as good at the pretense of manhood as men are, what’s the point of being a man?

What’s the point, indeed? This, not women’s quest for equality, is what men need to unshackle themselves from. Men and women alike should strive to be good people who take personal responsibility for their happiness, but refuse to harm others in the pursuit of it. Our phrases should be “Time to grow up and be an adult.” “Time to separate the grown-ups from the kiddies.” That would be equality.

Fight Club demonstrates how “being a man” doesn’t solve anything. Jack (Edward Norton) is a struggling human being, trying to figure out who he is. His job - helping an auto manufacturer determine if a car’s lethal flaw will lose them enough money in court to merit a recall before people die - effectively makes him a button-down serial killer (this, I believe, is the real trigger for his mental illness). He’s done everything his culture told him to do and it’s led him to this. So he tries some new-fangled solutions - the support groups - and that doesn’t work either, because they don’t address the fundamental problem. He meets Tyler, who acts independently of the system, living by his own rules. This quickly becomes the ideal of manhood Jack wants to emulate. But that doesn’t work for him either, because Tyler’s not only independent - he’s disconnected. At the end of the day, what Jack really wants to be is a human being who has meaningful connections with other human beings. He needs passion.

That’s not a “man.” That’s… a woman! At least according to our warped culture. But really, it’s just plain human.

So many men are realizing they don’t want to be the distant, uninvolved, but successful fathers and husbands past generations idealized. They don’t want to be measured by their incomes, their sexual prowess or their conformity to arbitrary social ideals. They’re realizing they can’t live without love or passion for someone or something - for their families, for a cause, for art, for a job they love whether or not it’s the most lucrative career they could have chosen. They should never have been asked to become superhuman; it is enough just to be a good human. That’s the lesson I get from Fight Club, and that’s why I love the film.

I must caution casual readers: this article is not a “Men’s Rights Activist” platform. The form of feminism I grew up taking seriously was the kind that believed the current patriarchal system was hurting both women and men, and wanted to replace it with something that would establish equal opportunity and equal responsibility for all adults (and legal protection for children and for adults unable to care for themselves). Men’s Rights Activism has a fatal flaw of interpreting natural consequences for male behavior - so long suppressed and suffered by innocents instead - as infringements of their rights, and this makes most MRA arguments illogical to the point of hilarity, if they weren’t so frightening in their blindness. Therefore, comments spewing bile about how Womenz Is Ruining Menz (which I always get on Fight Club posts) will not make it through moderation. This article is not about women hurting men; it’s about how something that’s sold by men to other men as a boon for them is actually a ticking timebomb that destroys everyone in its path, regardless of gender. You need to learn the difference.

Over at Pajiba.com, a review of The Rachel Maddow Show, probably the best news show out there now (at least for crazy liberals like myself).

Sarah Haskins of Target: Women has been everywhere in the feminist blogosphere in the last few months, and Jezebel has an interview with her.

Several bloggers…among them Cara, Lynne of The F Word, and Renee, have been calling attention to Pepsi’s latest horrible ad campaign. Because apparently women are worth no more than soft drinks.

Chevy plays to the stereotype of the ridiculous materialistic woman–and with a gas-guzzling SUV, no less. From Feministing.

Beyonce has an interesting new video exploring gender roles in relationships. From the Feministing Community Blog.

Ampersand from Alas, a Blog writes about the new Watchmen adaptation and how its directors just can’t seem to allow a character to be fat.

Jesse Taylor and Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon review Rock Band 2.

Kate Smurthwaite of Cruella Blog talks about some awful headlines in British free newspapers.

MzBitca of A Crazy Random Happenstance discusses the awesome female characters of Harry Potter, focusing particularly on Molly Weasley.

Carrie Brownstein, of Sleater-Kinney and the blog Monitor Mix, wrote a funny list of songs that could save a person’s life (and how.)

Sweet Machine over at Shapely Prose has an open thread up about Halloween costumes. And Kate Harding discusses what an asshole Denis Leary is (personally, I have despised Denis Leary for a long time.)

And something I’ve been enjoying…and being unnerved by…lately–Linda Hirshman’s serialized novel Red State over on RH Reality Check.

And because I’m not above self-linking…Hannah Montana is racist.