Lisa Armstrong's helpful hints gets tagged with the strange headline "How Buy Clothes That Last."
What, they couldn't fit "To" in there for clarity's sake?

Her tips are sound at any rate:

"1 Hang it casually on the peg. Then let it fall on the floor. Retrieve. Examine.
2 Put it on. Take it off. Put it on. Marks out of ten for ease and state of garment at end.
3 With trousers, skirts or dresses, sit down, stand up, sit down. Is it creased and disorderly? Are you? Is your underwear on show to the world when you’re seated?
4 If white, look carefully at the care label.
5 If fluffy, feather or furry, try it on with something dark. If it leaves traces, put it back.
6 This isn’t vandalism, but if you’re worried about creasing, scrumple a tiny corner in your hand and see what happens. Julia Dee recommends tugging at the seams gently to see whether they bag. That’s not vandalism either. It’s canny shopping. "

When I was younger I realized that shopping solely based on price is a bad strategy that leads to a whole lot of shit in your closet you can't wear. It's better to balance the quality of the stitching, material and fit against the price tag, along with a realistic estimation of how often you'll wear it and how much it'll cost to clean the garment. I've used Armstrong's practical advice for years, especially #3 and 6. I also look at how uncomfortable labels may be and how difficult they are to remove as well as how likely the trend becomes cringeworthy before I get to wear it enough to make it worth the cost. You know the new shoulder pad look will soon be ridiculous.




The McDonald's commerical running when I was in Ireland last week winks at how quickly fashion trends can spin out.
"OMG. Flares."
Hee.

Coming out of "The Reader" this afternoon, two women behind me grabbed each other's arms. One of them said, "how romantic! Hurry up in the washroom so we can talk all about it."

Folks, I stopped dead in my tracks with my jaw agape.

It's a pile of shit.

Worst film I've seen in ages.

*Spoilers*

The crux of the moral dilemma for Kate Winslet's character Hanna is that she was more ashamed of being illiterate than becoming a Nazi. That's it in a nutshell.

Instead of taking a promotion, she signs up with the SS to become a prison guard because she was too sheepish to admit that she could not read or write.

Even worse, she harbours no regret for her tenure as an enthusiastic lap cat of the patriarchy; she had sternly culled 10 women per month for the gas chamber, and then later allowed 300 women and girls to roast alive once they marched out of the camp and locked the prisoners in a church that took a hit from an Allied bomber.

A lack of education does not excuse her role in the largest modern murder campaign.

In addition to being a Nazi, Hanna was a child molester.

She gets no sympathy from me.

It was also annoying that the German accented boy grows up to be Ralph-fucking-Fiennes with a British accent.

He takes his daughter to Hanna's grave at the end, I suppose out of deference to what a good ride the Nazi was.

Grrrrrrr.

It was only a matter of time before that hack Jerry Seinfeld formulated another television project.
Instead of some cheesy sit-com, he's pitched a reality show about to go into production called "The Marriage Refs."

Everything is a fucking sports metaphor for some dudes, and for this douchebag, it's the idea that married couples are engaged in a competitive sport requiring a puposefully wacky adjudicator. Honestly, can you even imagine being in a relationship where you cannot reach an accord between yourselves and are forced to have a stranger "settle" the dispute or argument for you? In patriarchy, marriage often gets painted as combat, but if this is the case, why the fuck does anyone bother? The characterization of husband and wife as The Bickersons is too grim a prospect for me to entertain, let alone turn to in order to find actual entertainment. My sense is that many folks are labouring under one of the greatest myths of patriarchy when they swallow the disastrous "opposites attract" model for finding a spouse. Why would anyone choose contrary over compatible? It's probably so that women are tricked into thinking that it's inevitable that dudes be emotionally absent from relationships or unable to pull their own weight around the house.
All of the traits that I aspire to and value most in human beings are in no way gender specific. Curiosity, intelligence, kindness, sincerity, humour and generosity have no bearing on what kind of junk you pack in your jeans.

But back to the mars and venus show.

The NYT feature explains that Seinfeld's idea "revolves around the vagaries of marriage and children. His strength was always playing the observational-comedy card and what he has been observing is married life. As he said in a telephone interview, 'Any comedian will tell you marriage is a gold mine of comedy.'
'No one seemed to be doing this on TV,' he said. 'You used to have ‘The Honeymooners’ and classic shows like that. So we’re going to try to fill the void.' "

Ah, yes. The classic programme "The Honeymooners" where the husband regularly threatened to beat up his wife. Classic. Seinfeld's explanation also reeks of mendacity. The show's not interested in observing married life in any broad scope, but rather, it's only interested in highlighting discord and dysfunction for some cheap Jerry Springer-level thrills. The comedic gold mine is always already invested in propping up deeply entrenched stereotypes regarding gender. Same old shit: women are nagging cunts and men are perpetual children.
There's nothing here that we haven't seen a million times before.

In his own words, Seinfeld sketches the show's enthusiasm for shitting on women:

"After capturing a series of couples having the same argument (on unmanned cameras the producers will place in houses in as many households as they can get to cooperate, Ms. Rakieten said), the show will bring them to the set where a panel of commentators will offer their own opinions on the spat — humorously of course.
'The marriage ref will be like the guy on the field,' Mr. Seinfeld said. 'We’ll have a telestrator, instant replays, different camera angles. Then the ref will make the decision. And it could be for whatever reason he wants. He could say to the wife, ‘You had the better argument, but I didn’t like the way you said something.’ ”

Men will referee and judge the conflicts on their own whims. Even when women may be technically right, he can rule against them for being uppity bitches who fail to properly grovel before the man.
Then the women can also be laughed at and off the stage.

Did you see the Global Gender Gap Report for the rankings of 2008?
Ireland scored #8 out of 130 countries surveyed for those with the most gender equity, while the U.S. was down the list at #27 and Canada even further at #31.
Check it out:


Ireland
Gender Gap Index 2008 (out of 130 countries) 8 0.752
Gender Gap Index 2007 (out of 128 countries) 9 0.746
Gender Gap Index 2006 (out of 115 countries) 10 0.733
Key Indicators
Total population (millions), 2006 .............................................................4.37
Population growth (%) .............................................................................2.58
GDP (US$ billions), 2006.......................................................................131.18
GDP (PPP) per capita...........................................................................39,025
Mean age of marriage for women (years)..............................................31
Fertility rate (births per woman) ............................................................2.00
Year women received right to vote ............................................1918, 1928
Overall population sex ratio (male/female)..........................................0.99

Here's an 8 minute clip from the opening of "The Lady Eve" (1941) starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda. Unfortunately, it's the only segment worth watching, thanks to the rapid-sly delivery of Stanwyck in her role as the card sharp Jean Herrington.

She kills me with lines such as "Holy smoke, the dropped kerchief! That hasn't been used since Lily Langtree!" She's the high-chinned, forthright leading lady that all but disappeared once baby-lispy voiced sex bombs like Monroe showed up to play into the Cold War fantasies of pliant women who wanted dominant dudes. I always felt sorry for Stanwyck getting stuck with that hideous over-sized wig in "Double Indemnity." She should have choked the sylist on that set.

"The Lady Eve" has a bloodless love interest. Henry Fonda may have been excellent as the moral centre of such films as "The Grapes of Wrath" or "12 Angry Men," yet I just couldn't trace any evidence of simmering/smouldering sexuality in this role. Maybe he was too upright to emote lust or something, but I was getting no sense of passion from him, just an awkward reserve. There's no shortage of sexual innuendo in the film with all the snakes, trains, tunnels, steam. It'd be a great example to show in a Freud 101 class. But Fonda never rises to the material or to the lovely Ms. Stanwyck.

I also sneered at the heavy-handed retrograde gender mythologizing, which leads Stanwyck's character through a gauntlet of schemes filled with humiliations in order to trick and land her man. Jean explains "if you waited for a man to propose of natural causes, why you'd die of old maidenhood." Egad, not that. The film beats women up with the limitations on the scope of their lives set at marriage as the end goal, like some modernized version of Jane Austen's marriage fetishism, with plenty of virgin/slut dualism as the ballast.

Watch the opening clip and skip the rest.

What the fuck is this hair salon in Montreal thinking?

Do they really think that women are so desperate to "change your style" that they'd patronize a beauty shop that suggests decapitation as the ideal route to a new look?

Women are just Brides of Frankenstein with interchangeable, hackable body parts?

Stitched up throats and vacant gazes are so sexy!

We're only fleshed-out mannequins after all.

Yack.

Philip Jose Farmer died in his sleep today.

He was 91.

I haven't thought of that dude in years.

I'm guessing that my feminist education would have me recoil at his work now, but I associate him with Mr. M and my younger self.

When we first moved in together, we used to take turns reading out novels before bed, and one Mr. M read to me was Farmer's "To Your Scattered Bodies Go," the first installment of his Riverworld series. I don't remember much of the book, only that the premise placed everyone who had ever lived in the same setting. What I do remember was being lulled to sleep by the voice.

For our first wedding anniversary, the paper one, I bought him a first edition, signed hardcover of "Gods of Riverworld" (1983), which was in pristine condition and still sits on the shelf.

So thanks for the memories, Mr. Farmer.

Here's yet another entry in the violent teenage girl genre.

"Triple Dog" slated for a November release, pathologizes female adolescence in the same vein as "The Craft" or "Jawbreaker" or any number of films which depicts young women as wantonly cruel bitches bent on chaos and destruction. The traditional slumber party game of "truth or dare" spirals out of control when the "triple dog dare" challenge coaxes the girls into increasingly bold behaviour. Because clearly, when teenage girls engage in any action outside of prim or decorous gender prescriptions regarding femininity, well then, blood and mayhem are sure to follow.

The young bitches are hysterical and out of control!

Lock 'em up until they're ready to be married off!

The comment thread attached to Ruby's post about Gail Trimble was the best smackdown party feminists have hosted in a long time.
Not only did I laugh, but it also warmed my bitter heart to see so many smart folks dismantle the pea-brained rhetoric of misogynists.
Go read it.

Sweet baby jeebus was I still drunk on the plane today.

Arrrgh.

The aviational gods took pity and tossed me a row of three seats to stretch out under my coat and get some much needed sleep.

Impulsive though it was, I'm tickled that I decided to hop over at the last minute.

I've never been so graced with such singularly exceptional hospitality during my time in Dublin.

You know who you are and you fucking rock.

The Cork International Hotel was quite the swanky little gem with all its enthusiastic modern embellishments; the service was off the hook.

Maybe the venue had some influence on the fashions, because I was admiring dresses and shoes all evening. We must have had five separate exchanges about teal as one of the big colours for the spring season.

After complimenting a charming woman in a dress of said hue, she offered a little anecdote knowing that I collect these things. She said a photographer from the Irish Times asked her and another woman to lean against the car in the lobby in an obvious bid for some cheesecake shot.

She told him hell no and why he shouldn't ask for such nonsense from women.

Huzzah!

The whole evening was brilliant. I felt privileged to be there.

I look forward to next year when I won't have to travel so fucking far to attend.

Cheers to all.

To the kind man who was able to yank my credit card out of the damn parking meter that was trying to eat it thus catapulting me into a state of shock and panic the evening before I'm about to leave the country: Thank you.

I probably won't be posting again until after the blog extravaganza.

I'd like to see this skinny prick say that to Omar Little.

Brad Gooch's biography of Mary Flannery O'Connor frames the author's legacy with an episode from just before her seventh birthday in 1932. A man from Pathé Newsreels came to the family's home in Savannah in order to get some footage of the little girl's chicken that she had taught to walk backwards. The camera man waited for hours for the bantam to do his trick. When he was about ready to give up and leave, little Mary coaxed the cock into taking the jaunty steps in reverse by imitating him. A four-second segment of the girl walking with her rooster was captured for posterity, and although the author never caught a glimpse of herself in the newsreel, she remembered the afternoon as one of those emblematic moments of childhood. This scene lingers with the reader, for it symbolizes not only her love of fowl, but also the sheer delight she took in any peculiarities. Walking backward metaphorically nails O'Connor's desire to gain a new perspective or angle on life; her eye was trained to see more than average folks. As Gooch puts it near the end, "Flannery had spent her life making literary chickens walk backward." Later in her career, O'Connor famously explained "when I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it's because we are still able to recognize one." While she characterized herself as a writer in terms of region, she also compared her work with Nathaniel Hawthorne's when he declared that he wrote romances, not novels.

She began her writing career in university, publishing under a truncated version of her name because she thought that no one would take her seriously if she went by Mary Flannery O'Connor. Too ordinary and school-girlish, she thought. The biggest revelations for me in Gooch's account of her life would be O'Connor's virulent anti-Irish sentiment, as well as the polite racism and homophobia she harboured. And she was a total nutter when it came to Catholicism.

Gooch doesn't flesh out exactly why a woman whose family hailed from Ireland would claim such a life-long aversion to the nation. The only sense I can draw from her stance is that Savannah had the largest population of Irish immigrants in the South, many of whom were champions of the Confederacy, and they reveled in keeping alive the petty politics of the Civil War. In regard to her view of race relations, Gooch traces an early liberal spirit which then matured into a more conservative position mirroring her own racial privilege in the South. She told a friend that she could not meet James Baldwin at her home in Georgia because "I observe the traditions of the society I feed on--it's only fair." Like William Faulkner, O'Connor blanched at having progressive whites from the North come down duing the growth of the Civil Rights movement and tell them how to solve racial strife. Both Faulkner and O'Connor took a patronizing view, as if African Americans were children who needed their protection. Her view toward homosexuality was just as narrow; most surely a life-long virgin, O'Connor was sexually repressed and considered gays and lesbians either in need of restraint or redemption or simply as flat-out deviants. It's always best to have a clear understanding of a writer, warts and all. No matter how exceptionally gifted, she was still a woman of place and time.

Diagnosed with lupus when she was 25, O'Connor wrote to a friend shortly before she succumbed to the disease at 39, that "the wolf, I'm afraid, is inside tearing up the place." She was even witty enough to offer a pun on the disease in order to characterize the terrible physical cost of the treatment and the terminal disease.

There's a wealth of information about her work, including the origins of "Good Country People," a story that she wrote more quickly than any other, based upon her own first kiss. The indignity she suffered burns through the page. Brad Gooch shares in the acknowledgements that he wrote the book that he wanted to take from a shelf and read about the prolific author, and he succeeds admirably. Through exhaustive research and interviews, he reconstructs O'Connor's family, friendships, education, and writer's craft with respect, affection and an unwavering glance. He underscores the reasons why she's one of the most influential and timeless American authors.

Fucking Fabulous.

Congratulations to everyone on the final shortlist for the Irish Blog Awards.

I'm honoured to be in such brilliant company.

Good luck especially to everyone else in the Pop Culture category:

BiffSniff

Fustar

Rapture Ponies

Rick O'Shea

The section on the negative depictions of feminism in the media over at The Gender Ad Project is fascinating.

The ad with the Cybill Shepherd look-a-like makes a lame pun on the women's movement to tell us that the female form was designed to be filmed, silly. I'm sure there's no pornified subtext.

Maxim's "Cure a Feminist" feature includes the cringe-inducing reference to dudes getting their chins buttered. Ew.

Yep, we're cured when we're nearly naked and compliant to dudely desires.

The last one's a classic.

Yes, to "take" a woman should be a crime, dammit.

Saw this in the paper today.
$10 gets you 25 plastic bags printed with green spots on both sides to fend off the lunch thieves.
Clever.

Fashion week rolls by without much notice, although I did think Jason Wu's dresses posted on Jezebel last week were really fetching.
When the truly horrible trends get revived, a woman has to sit up and take notice.

Take for example the biker shorts in Alexander Wang's new collection. There are several versions of the ultra-spandexy cycling shorts shown in the slideshow over at the NYT. They're even paired with an evening formal jacket in one dreaded incarnation.

Pictured above with a motorcycle jacket and piece of a dead animal, it looks dead wrong.

First, the jacket is swimming on her without any sense of proportion in the waist or shoulders. She could be smuggling an Easter ham under there and we'd never know the difference. Motor cycle jackets are meant to be fitted, always.

Look, I love "Singles" just like anyone else, but even in 1992, I didn't want Debbie Hunt's wardrobe. No cycling shorts!

I'm smitten with Brad Gooch's biography of Flannery O'Connor that was just published this month. This short film based on her story "Good Country People" was produced sometime in the 60s. It's only ten minutes and is worth a look. If you haven't read it, do click the linky.

How the fuck is it possible that I've never heard of John Norman's 27 Gor novels about women's natural state as slaves?

This is some seriously fucked up shit.

Seriously.

My day had been too long yesterday to endure more than the first 25 minutes of the premiere of "Dollhouse."

I still fail to understand why feminists have given their laurel leaves to Joss Whedon.

Based on this show, he's just another exploitative goober who thinks he's edgy by having women operate like live-action barbie dolls.

The nefarious "Dollhouse" is an agency which loans human beings out for a million bucks to fulfill a client's fantasies. Early in the episode, Echo (Eliza Dushku) is finishing up her role in providing the "perfect weekend" for some dude, including a kinky bondage session followed by a motor cycle race. Before they part he hands her one of those shitty heart pendants men get at the mall when they feel obligated to buy presents for women and have no imagination. Echo trots off to a black van waiting to deliver her to HQ and have her memory wiped clean.

There's a small amount of backstory, but one scene with Echo and a stereotypical icy British woman explains how she became enslaved by the organization. The boss lady warns her that actions have consequences and that she has to pay for five years. In other words, Echo has committed some sort of transgression and will have to pay for it by being a slave for half a decade. Boss lady then wonders archly, what if actions didn't have consequences?

We're meant to meditate on the idea of having the freedom to act without compunction.

Other characters note how happy and untroubled Echo is after her memory of being a sex worker for the weekend gets erased. We wimminz should revel in not having to trouble our pretty heads about anything.

The whole premise is that Echo becomes whatever paying cutomers require.

Fuck toy. Assassin. She does it all, and then it's back to the 'ol tabula rasa.

Women have always been browbeaten to become whatever folks require, so how can this meta reading be considered subversive?

And then there's her name. Echo, from the mythological story of Echo and Narcissus wherein we learn that men can only love themselves and that women can only repeat what men say without any thoughts or words of their own. Women are not much more than subhuman parrots in this tale.

Even if this seven episode arc is going to wind up drawing some larger parallel between the Dollhouse and patriarchy, we're still going to be asked to claim our eye candy on the sexy-times and ass kicking of a modern programmable equivalent of a Stepford Wife doll.

Or you can go with Mr. M's shorthand review: "Didn't Jennifer Garner already do this years ago?"

I found this over at Passive Aggressive Notes via Feministe.

Got that?

When women ignore and reject men, it's characterized by the woman-hater set as "abuse."

If men don't get unrestricted access to pussy, it's a fucking human rights violation.

This public service announcement is posted somewhere here in Toronto.

I'm guessing it's in the Entertainment District where dudes in untucked striped shirts and too much hair gel troll for women.

Like this dude, for example.

Leslie T. Chang offers a solidly balanced examination into the lives of women migrant workers in China over a span of several years in "Factory Girls." On one hand, it's easy to identify with the concern over unchecked industrialization wherein workers are sure to feel adrift in sprawling manufacturing centres, some of which house 70,000 workers making running shoes for Western companies such as Adidas and Nike. I'm no armchair Marxist, yet the funneling of an unprecedented 130 million peasants into factories seems like a textbook illustration of the alienation of labour. At the same time, I'm struck by the scenario's potential to correct the hoary tradition of male privilege and female submission in China. Chang notes she never encountered an unmistaken feminist declaration from any of the women that she interviewed, but it's clear from reading the details of multiple case studies that there was a direct prototypical feminist politic working for the migrant women. You don't have to be outwardly self-identified or cognizant of feminist theory in order to call bullshit on patriarchy. It was the cold hard cash money which brought about social mobility for women beyond their role as unpaid servants of men.

Chang explains that a long-established Chinese custom reserved a familial home for male offspring, but not female. Sons were expected to return to the family's home to live with their bride, while daughters belonged to their future husband's family. Since they were regarded as part of another family since birth, women had an unfettered path to chuqu, "to go out" to work and leave home. The author studied women who migrated to Dongguan, a part of the Pearl River Delta. Arriving as young as 17, the girls are often overwhelmed and lonely on occasion, but they soon gain self-confidence, a commitment to self-improvement, and a newfound sense of power and agency within their own family. Young women who send home several times over their parents' annual salary claim a degree of autonomy never before experienced by women from the rural impoverished population. The young women in Dongguan are now free from the censure of village elders, take lovers as they wish and changed jobs when they feel like it. The migrant women are learning one of the primary lessons of first wave feminism: women's autonomy can be gained through control of the purse strings. Migrants depended on their own job experience for support rather than depending on some dude with a shack and some chickens.

There are several chapters devoted to how women fared in the labour market. Those who are bold enough to lie or hedge in regard to skills or experience were promoted off the factory floor and into clerk or management positions. There's a real sense of a suspension of long-standing rules or that folks are really making it up as they go along. Young women study the industry, English, computer systems, manners and public speaking. Chang argues that for most of the rural poor, an ingrained shyness and fear of standing out or public speaking stands as an obstacle for getting ahead. In one unaccredited night school, the all-female student body train every night after an 11 hour shift at the factory in order to become proficient in the communication/ networking skills integral to modern business. The majority of students move up to a better position as a result.

Chang discerns a disturbing degree of evangelicalism behind the self-help fervour. In modern China, the historic authority of either Confucious or Mao's "Little Red Book" has fallen to the likes of Dale Carnegie. The self-help mania promotes individual success and achievement over the greater good or social harmony. Ayn Rand's tomes should be wildly popular as a result, along with all the other status-driven parasites in print. While it's great to learn of so many young and formerly abject women creating daily affirmations about how they can improve to become anything, it's also daunting to see that these enthusiastic campaigns for progress have been so little informed by an attention to ethics. There are pyramid schemes and woo cure-alls running rampant.

One cannot ignore how transformative a woman's income is in offering an escape route from a muted work-horse status. Chang observes:

"It was amazing to me how quickly Min overturned the power structure within her family. When my grandfather returned home to his village after seven years in America, he had been beaten by his father for changing his course of study without permission. The man had become a modern, foreign-educated person, but he had not gained the slightest status in his father's eyes. In contrast, Min was able to dictate family affairs from afar. She monitored her father's purchases and rejected his business plans, and the fact that she had sent home $1,300 gave her such authority."

Min and other industrious women succeed in defining the terms of their own lives as well as their extended family. "Factory Girls" makes plain that one clear method for expunging the tradition of son-worship in China is to have daughters who are economically independent. The capitalist market system may be criticized for the social inequality it fosters; at the same time, evidence exists where the cash-nexus erodes a deeply entrenched gendered hierarchy. How can you continue to call girls a burden and a curse when they're supporting the family and becoming captains of industry?

You can't.

"Factory Girls" is highly recommended.

J Crew is having a killer sale.

This Sophia dress came in the post today.

It's now down to $50.

The fabric, stitching and lining are all top notch.

The origin of the contemporary slasher film harkens back to Hitchcock's "Psycho" in 1960. Many a fanboy scopophiliac copped a thrill from seeing the lovely Janet Leigh get penetrated with Normy's knife in the seminal shower scene. None of the jowly-dude's critical appraisals minces the ugly truth about the famous director's misogyny. He fetishized, objectified and harassed women onset and off. Women were repositories and mirrors for his desire and psychological conflictions. He clearly popped a stiffy on their punishment and unravelling.

Hitchcock's warped regard for women resonates through the larger cultural disgust for women, a tradition which found its apotheosis in the B-grade slasher films which came into vogue during the 1980s, in tandem with the larger social and political backlash against the progress made by feminists in the 60s and 70s. Any way you slice it, the slasher genre was all about showing tits and mutilating female flesh. The surfeit of chopped up ladies both in and out of showers in commercially and cultishly hailed films such as "Halloween," "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "Dressed to Kill," "Prom Night," "Friday the 13th" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street" dominated theatre and home screens for that decade and far beyond. Just as many viewers watched white girls fall in love with affectless rich boys in the John Hughes franchise as those watching Michael, Jason and Freddy hack up similar teen girls. Shit, they're still producing films from the slasher stock mainstays with a recent "Prom Night" and yet another movie featuring the dude in the mask who likes to hack up nubile hotties who have the temerity to hook up with boys by the lake.

Added to this unseemly genealogy is the French film "À l'intérieur" ("Inside") from 2007.

This relentless 82 minute onslaught stars Alysson Paradis (yes, Johnny's sister-in-law) as Sarah, a pregnant woman who lost her husband in the opening car wreck. Cut to four months later, she prepares to spend Christmas Eve alone before delivering the child the next day. Ah, the heavy handed symbolism. She's a reluctant Madonna figure, still mourning the loss of her beloved. She's surprised by a knock at the door in the evening. There's been trouble, a woman explains; she needs help and a phone. When Sarah sagely declines to open the door to a stranger, saying that sorry, her husband's sleeping, the woman calls her by name and knows she's lying because her husband is dead.

Cue the creep factor.

Billed as La Femme (Beatrice Dalle), the stranger sneaks her way into the house and demands Sarah's unborn child.

"Why me?" Sarah asks.

The dispassionate reponse: "I want one."

Horror films generally don't require much exposition, so we take the determined woman at her word.

It's not that "Inside" is shlocky, parochial or even unbelievable.

There are enough crazy bitches taking breath who would prize an unborn child over an adult woman. It's no secret that the Manson gang almost went as far as taking Sharon Tate's baby.

The problem resides in the thrill we're invited to take.

Horror films are all about sneaking into and unsettling our safe spots (dreams, dates, camp, babysitting, home) or exploiting our vulnerabilites. This production checks both boxes because what scenario fits the model better than a ready-to-deliver widow home alone?

"Inside" locates the horror in the quotidian household objects transformed into deadly weapons as a means of making the mise-en-scène firmly grounded in the domestic realm of women. The house serves as either weapon of offense or defense. Even when guns are available, they are not armament of choice. Instead, knitting needles, bathroom scissors, kitchen knives and a mirror prove to be natural extensions of women's will to survive. The everyday objects lend a cinematic cohesion to the plot and characters, but fuck me if any woman's really going to choose her knitting needle over a handgun. That's as insulting as all the violence against the female body. It's a way of saying, oh, those women are just naturally more comfortable with the lady stuff. They wouldn't know what to do with a clean steady shot.

The major problem here is that you can't pass off a film as woman-centred or sympathetic to the anxieties and vulnerability surrounding parturition when you assault your audience with the spectacle of a bloodied and besieged woman heavy with child.

We even get scenes cut to show us the distressed child in utero.

How is that entertainment?

What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?

Female flesh: always ripe for brutalization onscreen.

In the post yesterday was an invitation to drop by some "event" at an M.A.C. shop for the debut of their new Hello Kitty line of cosmetics.
The problem with this is that I am not 12.
Nor do I long to be.
Adult women who have a thing for the consumer kitteh creep me out.
Infantilization was never appealing, even when I was a kid.
I would not be caught dead in pigtails and knee highs.
I knew a 25 year-old woman who insisted that she was a "girl" and that it was perfectly healthy to hold on to childish things such as Hello Kitty.
The world will not be gentle with you just because you want to avoid being an adult.
Look at the cartoonish hues they're hawking.
What grown woman needs baby blue and bubble gum pink on her face?
Yack.

I've never heard Lady Gaga's popular dance tune.

I know of her only through her aversion to pants in the pictures that turn up on the gossip blogs.

I had to heave a sigh of disgust at reading this interview with her in the latest issue of "Entertainment Weekly" where she demonstrates a clear ignorance of feminism and some muddled thinking.

Oh, how I despair for young women.

"But Lady GaGa is not a feminist. 'I think it's great to be a sexy, beautiful woman who can f--- her man after she makes him dinner,' she says. 'There's a stigma around feminism that's a little bit man-hating. And I don't promote hatred, ever. That's not to say that I don't appreciate women who feel that way. I've got a lot of gay women friends that are like, 'Put your clothes on.' People just have different views about it. I'm not wrong. I'm free. And if it's wrong to be free, then I don't want to be right. Things are changing. We've got a black president, people.''

Does this even make any sense?

Is she saying that the pinnacle of women's worth is found in being pretty, cooking for a man and then fucking the man? Also, must we revisit the lazy and reductive "man-hating" myth? So she doesn't support hating men, but she can appreciate it?

And is she characterizing lesbians as man-haters as well?

Oh, and she's free is she?

What the fuck kind of nonsense is she jabbering on about?

You could drive a bus through the rhetorical holes in her logic.

Honey, you are wrong and the only thing you're free of is a deep thought.

We were watching the "Dog Whisperer" with Kima last night when my eyes rolled so far back in my head I was in danger of passing out.
In this episode, Cesar Millan's working with a couple in San Francisco who have a crazy Jack Russell named Sooner who picks fights with Trace, a Cattle Dog adopted years later. Trace has torn the smaller dog apart, as evidenced by the stitched up shots shown onscreen. At one point he sits down with the couple and learns that the husband is more firm with the pooches than the wife. At this point Cesar becomes the "Wife Whisperer" by telling the dude that he has to learn to understand "female psychology," a strain of cognition just as strange and foreign to dudes as if it were from another planet. See, the wimminz are ruled by emotion. It doesn't matter what you say to one of the pussy bearers, Cesar intones, because all the bitch will hear is how your tone makes her feel. Forget logic and reason; we're dealing with ovaries here!
You need to coo and tickle our chin if you want to see some results, fellas.
Cesar's out to show a dude how to master his wife just as much as any dog.
It's the natural order, afterall.

Every film about a plucky dumb blonde shamelessly attempts to match the perfection of Judy Holliday in 1950 when she played the gun moll Billie Dawn in "Born Yesterday." Billie's crook-turned-legit boyfriend Harry (Broderick Crawford) wants to have her polished up to take out socially and calls in William Holden's character Paul to do the refining. Billie's awakening to the larger world and to her identity as defined separately from a man acts like a fable for second wave feminism. Aside from that film, I find the dumb blonde genre a cheap, one trick pony gimmick whether it features Marilyn Monroe, Goldie Hawn, Reese Witherspoon or Jessica Simpson. The most recent incarnation, "The House Bunny" starring Anna Faris is by far the most hateful of the bunch; it's devoid of any humour that is not also wretchedly sexist or misogynist. The writers Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith (also credited with the bullshit "Ella Enchanted" and "Legally Blonde") want to ensure they stay employed in Hollywood through metaphoric cock-gobbling and shitting on other women. I would have thought it an impossible task for two women to write a screenplay about a Playboy bunny without even the slightest critique of the franchise run by that viagra-fuelled incubus who sucks the life out of young women. Then I forget that the industry loves any lap cats of the patriarchy because they're so eager to show how hateful women are in every project.

"The House Bunny" begins with a voice-over from Shelley (Anna Faris) narrating the grim details of her life spent in an orphanage placed in the context of a fairy tale. Let's just say that "Cinderella" comes off as a radical feminist treatise in comparison with this shlock. Everyone gets adopted but poor Shelley, who is ugly and unwanted until she develops into a hottie during adolescence. Well then, everyone wants her because what higher aspiration could a girl have than being totally fuckable?

She moves into her dream house, the Playboy mansion!

Shelley has a cat named pooter (this is when I had to check to see if 14 year-old boys wrote the script) and hopes for the grand birthday wish of finally becoming a centrefold model. After the big party, she gets a letter from Hef saying now that she's 27, she's too old to be a bunny and has to move out. Some butler-type dude brings the letter, explaining that 27 is really like 59 in bunny years. Get it? Women have an early expiration date. They're pretty gross at any age over 18. There's plenty more knuckle-dragging humour, such as this exchange when the butler-dude brings Shelley breakfast in bed and the letter telling her she's washed up:

"Shelley, I put something in your drink"

"Thanks for telling me. I usually only find out much later.."

Let's have more jokes about women getting drugged and raped!

Hilarious.

Bereft, Shelley wanders around in slutware until she stumbles in her stripper shoes upon a sorority house, which she notes is just like "a mini Playboy mansion." Painful.

She becomes a house mother to the "losers" on campus. The Zeta sorority girls include geeks with glasses, a pierced angry feminist, a mute black girl and a pregnant student.

So it's racist in addition to misogynist.

You can see the rest of this dismal film coming a mile away.

Makeovers!

Boys!

Hef didn't really write the letter!

There's also Shelley's bad advice that we can use as a shorthand for the fucked up gender mythology that haunts the film, including "boys want what other boys want" and "boys don't like girls that are too smart." It's always already about the menz.

Even worse, when "The House Bunny" makes a play for redemption and tries to suggest that Shelley might actually have to *gasp* pick up a book in order to have a conversation with Oliver (Colin Hanks), it distills her book-learnin' into the same montage sequence as we're given for any makeover segment. Getting educated can be done just as quickly as finding the right push-up bra to maximize your décolletage. Ladies, if you just pull a dozen books from the library shelves and read a paragraph from each, you'll convince a dude that you're smart enough. Natalie (Emma Stone) seems to be the head of the Zeta girls, but wastes her time pining after some goober-brained fraternity dude who can barely string a sentence together. She has to hide her intelligence in order to be his girlfriend. She's so lucky to have him. Every woman onscreen lives for a man. Since it's set on a university campus, would it be too terribly much to ask to see at least one depiction of female aspiration or ambition that moves beyond shacking up with a dude?

There are also two scenes featuring the despicable trend of "boob punching."

I shit you not.

My brain yearned for a sound bleach scrubbing by the end.

There were so many stylish women onscreen during the golden age of Hollywood who are once again serving as fashion icons for a variety of retro clothing trends.

I covet a range of looks with panache from the past.

Lauren Bacall rocked pencil skirts and men's wear.

Janet Leigh's cardigan buttoned up the back.

Joan Crawford's shoulder pads and fuck-me pumps.

Rita Hayworth's bouncy curls and long gloves.

Natalie Wood's affinity for sheath dresses.

Elizabeth Taylor's cat eye makeup and evening gowns.

Bette Davis' hippish swagger and teeny waist.

Rosalind Russell's rolled hair and hats.

All of those women had an incredible presence and not one of them was a doormat.

There is however one retro style that I could never, ever embrace: animal prints.

An animal print is an aesthetic affront on par with a weapons-grade pointy bra.

Cheetah, leopard, zebra, giraffe, snake or whatever other animal patterns all seem so sad.

For me, they instantly register women's subhuman status in patriarchy.

How many fashion spreads use wild kingdom prints in order to portray women as animals?

No doubt the "fun feminists" sporting Bettie Page's bangs get a kick out of them, all the more reason to avoid any animal prints.

Sweet jeebus.

I watched myself being interviewed on television tonight.

Why the fuckity-fuck do I sound like The Nanny?

It's unbearable.

My current fascination with the show "What Would You Do" may be explained by how much evidence it offers for rampant misogyny and fucked up gender mythology which positions women as subhuman cum dumpsters.

You may remember that the first episode I caught was the startling exploration of rape culture wherein men can drug women openly in preparation for rape without impediment. Women and men largely kept their trap shut when they witnessed a woman being primed for rape.

If we take the social experimentation conducted by the show as a measure to gauge the public's moral compass regarding women's status, the outlook is grim indeed.

One scenario last night staged a woman being abusive with a hired nanny in a trendy Park Slope cafe. The first person shown to intercede on the young careworker's behalf is a woman who calls the raging employer repulsive, and justifies her interruption by saying that she shouldn't yell at the worker in public if she doesn't want folks to interfere. Less than three minutes into the clip, the bystander explains to the camera that what the woman did was "inappropriate," that it was in other words "kinda like if you're gonna hit your wife, do it at home-thing."
Men can smack a bitch around, sure, just not in public.
It's impolite afterall.
When the producers switched the dynamic by placing an African American woman as the nanny, fewer folks raised an objection to the wanton cruelty she sustained. Racial privilege is as likely to go unchecked as gender privilege.

There was also the segment billed as "relentless flirting," which is venus and mars doublespeak for sexual predation. Flirting implies a shared or reciprocal communication, yet there's none of that from the woman in the experiment.
An actor dude hounds and harasses a woman at a bar because as we all know, women should not expect to claim any personal space free from men's right to ask for attention or pussy.
When the actor was in "wholesome" clothing, she received support and "protection" from patrons, but when she wore a low-cut dress and raised her voice to the man, everyone backed off but one other woman. Once the ta-tas make an appearance, she's no longer a helpless maiden who deserves support; she's just a slut looking for trouble.

The "ingredients" commercial for Pepsi Max allays the tender anxieties of dudes who want a diet soda but one without all the feminizing taint associated with the beverage. It's made with "the crushed up bones of a Viking," has foam from "rabid wolverines," gets its low calorie sweetness from either "pepper spray" or "scorpion venom," and sits in a can made from the "hull of a nuclear submarine."

The menz won't be caught dead drinking any sissy drink.

"The first diet cola for men" will make sure that your peen won't fall off while comsuming said beverage: they swear it's totally masculine.

You know it has been a shitty winter when it hits 3C and suddenly feels like a warm day.

We took the dogs to the beach.

This is Kima and Omar doing their new trick called "evolve."

The girl has game.

Based on François Bégaudeau's memoir of teaching French in a school on the edge of Paris, "The Class" (Entre Les Murs) traces the author's experience during one academic year. In the film he plays François Marin, a placid man who rises to the challenge of motivating 13 and 14 year olds, with many first generation immigrants. Marin cannot be understood as an invulnerable pedagogue in the breed of Hollywood dramas about white folks who reach out to kids in the ghetto; he's not a saintly saviour. Instead, what I found most compelling about his character was that he dramatizes the teacher's fatal flaw. No matter how gifted a teacher, when you think that you are always right and hold separate ethical standards for yourself and your students, you've entered perilous territory bordering on hubris. "The Class" illustrates how easily the teaching persona may slide away in exchange for an impulsive slip into adolescent behaviour.

The film reminds us that there's a wealth of drama in the classroom.

I was riveted. It won the Palme D'Or at Cannes and is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.