Castle: Apparently, "drunk" girls deserve what they get.

It's safe to say I'm not really a fan of the program Castle. Any show with a male lead who is a sleazy tool who isn't actually qualified to do anything but drive a porsche yet is somehow smarter than the qualified woman isn't something I generally watch. However, I am running about packing for #RadFem2013 and it was on in the background.

This weeks episode features a sleazy man [a la Girls Gone Wild dickhead-in-charge] who is murdered by a beautiful woman with her bra. Many, many jokes about women with large breasts ensue. It features lots of gratuitous shots of women in very little clothing being used as objects. I left it on as inspiration for a weekend of ranting with brilliant women.

Right up until the moment, the "good girl" [over-achieving, super-smart daughter of the sleazy tool] comes home from university to visit Daddy who is worried about her blog. Daddy mansplains' the big wide internet world to his baby girl [who is 18 and way smarter than her father]. They reference the Girls Gone Wild videos and teenage daughter explains that Daddy shouldn't worry about her because she's a super-smart university student and not one of "Those Girls" who get drunk and "flash their tits".

Because women who get drunk deserve whatever happens to them.

Because women who "flash their tits" deserve whatever happens to them.

I fucking hate the Patriarchy.

There are no such thing as "sluts" or "good girls". There are women. Just women. And, none of us deserve to get hurt because of something we do or do not do.

Castle is now on my ban list. 

SmashtheP shared this article in response to my rant on twitter. It's one of my favourite articles by Feminist Current.

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Cultural Femicide on a Sunday Morning

Sunday’s TV guide: 66 males and 18 females are named.

Reblogged from Tricialo

On Sunday after a morning lie-in I wandered downstairs, grabbed a cuppa and idly flicked through the channels on my TV. On every screen I flicked through, out of around 20 ‘favourites, there were only male faces, not one single woman or girl’s face showed up. It was all men talking to men, men talking about men, male actors acting out male dominated drama; there was Eddie, Nick, James, Jeremy, Simon, Frasier, Tony and on and on, on every channel. I went through them all again just to make sure; even the children’s channels were boy dominated. Some women showed up as I watched a little longer, but they weren’t onscreen when I’d first flicked through and in general women were either minor characters or absent. It wasn’t until around 10.30 that a woman fronted show turned up; something about food, with Lynda Bellingham.

People can come up with as many reasons as they like for explaining this, but I’d bet my life that no-one has ever yet flicked through all the channels on offer and seen only women’s faces. The words cultural femicide came into my head. Cultural Femicide is a term which was originally coined, (as far as I know), by Bidisha, to mean ‘the erasure of women in public life’.  This absence of women in mainstream culture, on our TV screens and radio, in theatres, movies, libraries and art galleries is hard to credit. It amazes me how little some people even seem to notice it, never mind care. The Women’s Room is one website set up to challenge this gendered cultural hegemony and provide a voice for women in media, yet even those few female voices we do hear tend to be the type that seeks male approval.

Back to Sunday; my five year old daughter was in the room with me and I considered the effect it might be having on her to repeatedly see men showing up as experts and authorities. I don’t let her have a lot of screen time, but as she grows older and wiser it’s increasingly difficult to monitor her intake and I’m not sure that it’s desirable to keep her in a protected bubble anyway. She asked me if she could have some screen time, but was bored by the boy dominated shows on offer. She seen the words Angelina Ballerina on the screen; a show we’d just missed, she’d recently seen an Angelina Ballerina book at a friend’s house and was curious about it so asked me to make sure that she could watch it when it was next on. We watched an episode together, on my laptop. As the theme tune began, my daughter commented, ‘It’s so pink. Why is everything always so pink?” The episode we watched concerned four mice, two ‘girl’ mice, (wearing pretty dresses), and two boy mice. It’s the only episode I’ve ever watched, (and ever hope to), and it actually centred on a ‘boy’ mouse called AJ. It was AJ’s birthday and the other mice were planning a surprise party for him. So, in what I imagined would be a show that was, if not ideal, at least girl centred, I watched as the two girls planned how to make a boy happy. As it ended I asked my daughter if she’d liked it. She answered that she would have liked it better if it had been about Angelina.

Later on I let my daughter watch a film; part of the Studio Ghibli series currently showing on Film Four. Studio Ghibli is a Japanese company, generally seen as being much more girl friendly than US studios such as Disney, and it’s played an important part in my daughter’s movie intake to date. There are some great Ghibli films, but as a canon it’s far from perfect, and yesterday, yet again, we watched as the girl in the story became a princess, a prospective bride and had to be rescued by male characters. The film was ‘The Cat Returns,’ in which a girl, Haru, rescues a cat from a near death collision with a lorry. Unfortunately the cat is a prince and Haru is now expected to become his cat princess. She is rescued by a team of male helpers; the heroic Baron, another male cat and a male raven. There is one female cat who tries to help her; Haru’s first comment upon meeting her is about how beautiful she is; a white cat with long eyelashes and a pink bow, not stereotyped at all then. The few other females in the movie are unsympathetic characters, such as the two cat maidservants who help Haru to dress and tell her how lucky she is because all the girl cats have crushes on the prince. Early on in the film, a delegation from the Land of Cats marches past Haru’s window and stops to talk with her. At this point my daughter piped up; “Are all of those cats boys?” Well spotted little one, best get used to it.

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Using Amazon for Feminist Activism

Yes, I know Amazon are tax-dodging arseholes who are destroying small businesses everywhere but this isn't about increasing their profits. It's about using a handy little tool Amazon is already using to increase the number of books written by women available.

Lots of key feminist texts are only available second-hand so I've been using Amazon's "I'd Like to Read This Book on Kindle" button to ask that out-of-print books [or books simply not published in an e-format] be published on kindle. It's not really a great piece of feminist activism but  it's one I can do at home even when ill. And, it does feel good to make sure that books by amazing feminists don't get lost.

And, it does nothing to increase Amazon's profits since I then buy the books elsewhere! 

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New Criminal Minds: Badly Written With A Dangerous Message

I have to confess that I did like the original series of Criminal Minds before it got repetitive with one too many long and goofy story-arcs. This new series starring Forest Whittaker is appalling. I've only seen one episode with the most tedious dialogue which involved stating-the-bleeding-obvious whilst pontificating. It's obviously written by a Committee of Mansplainers.

The episode I saw was called "The Girl in the Blue Mask". It is the story of an violent abusive man with a long history of intimate partner violence who kidnaps his daughter. In a drunken rage years later, he deliberately burns his daughter's face  causing her physical disfigurement. The daughter is kept locked in a house with no access to the outside world and is psychologically tortured by her father who tells her over and over and over again how ugly she is. The episode focuses on the fathers' attempt to harvest skin from other people to graft onto the face of his daughter.The subplot of the episode is a female FBI agent who has "Daddy issues". Chunks of the episode are of this women with a good education and good job reinforcing her role as "Daddy's Unwanted Girl".

The final scene of the episode: female FBI agent telling abused girl that the reason her father tortured her was because he "loved her too much".

You did read that right: a violent abusive man who repeatedly and severely abuses his spouse, then kidnaps and physically and emotionally abuses his child, and then murders 3 people does so because he loves his child too much. 

It's totally okay if your Daddy assaults your Mummy, burns your face, calls you ugly and then murders 3 people if he loves you. Not loving you would be wrong. But loving, well, probably he should get the Congressional Medal of Honour.

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Hilary Devey's Women on Top

I watched exactly ten minutes of Hilary Devey's Women on Top. The premise is interesting: a successful British business woman who didn't understand the gendered barriers to women's equality within capitalism traveled to Norway to investigate their practise of quotas of women's participation in employment. 

I stopped watching after they said women in Norway "embrace their feminine side" with 1 years maternity pay. Because women in business must have babies otherwise they aren't actually women. Or, something equally stupid. 

Perhaps, the BBC might want to actually think about gender stereotypes before embarking on these types of programs and don't reinforce the same misogynistic bullshit that they claim to be "investigating".

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