Folks, we have a new champion for Worst Oirish Accent Onscreen: Rose McGowan.

She gave up even trying after her first scene.

Terrible actor.

I went to see "Fifty Dead Men Walking" after seeing that it scored 89% over at RottenTomatoes.

One review even compared it to "Donnie Brasco."

It was awful, and not even for its historical inaccuracies and poor casting.

It's based on Martin McGartland's memoir about being an informer inside the IRA.

We get no sense of who the so-called hard cunts are beside one dude saying that "you're not a man unless you have a cause."

They're just cardboard cut outs.

In the lead role, Jim Sturgess did a pretty decent job with the accent, but his character has no crisis of conscience about his duplicity, a necessary component when you're trying to show that he's a good guy. Johnny Depp in "Donnie Brasco" and Sean Penn in "State of Grace" both had scenes where we see them struggling with their own betrayal and back-stabbing.

What audience likes a rat?

I don't care if the macho club is the mafia or the IRA, you don't live for years among your community as a snitch without suffering a dark night of the soul, no matter how you think you're justified. What's worse is that he was paid handsomely by his British intelligence contact Fergus (Ben Kingsley), so much so that his superiors come around his fancy house to see all the expensive stuff he has that they don't.

It takes the shine from his claim to be serving the greater good when he profits from it.

Most of the scenes are between Martin and Fergus. Ben Kingsley sports the most ridiculous wig and is otherwise drained of affect or gravitas.

After the IRA thugs discover he's a tout and begin torturing him, he's kept in a fifth floor apartment while Fergus tries to figure out which one he's in and rescue him. When he jumps out the window, all I could think was Omar Little did it much better.

And the dialogue was painful.

Out on a first date with Lara (Natalie Press), she asks him what he thinks about religion. "Well, you're Irish, aren't you? You were born with an opinion."

Yeah, like I believe any woman in Belfast would say that.

When Fergus and Martin discuss Grace (Rose McGowan), head of IRA intelligence, the cop warns "she uses her body like Mata Hari."

Yack.

Critics must have been smoking crack to have liked this assemblage of stereotypes and a dude without a moral compass.

Joshua Zeitz's "Flapper," a study of the first sexual revolution in the twentieth century, captures with aplomb how radically women's lives changed in the 1920s, and stands as an excellent example of how men can contribute to feminist scholarship.

Zeitz anchors his analysis of how the real material conditions for women moved into modernity and out of the Victorian rigidity around the biographies of influential women such as Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald who set the wanton tone of the flapper phenomemon; fashion icon Coco Chanel; screen stars who the authors refers to as the "flapper triumvirate" of Colleen Moore, Clara Bow and Louise Brooks; and Lois Long, who wrote for The New Yorker under the pen name "Lipstick" chronicling the nightlife adventures of the hipster flapper set. It was as if women could finally take a breath outside the affliction of corsets, boning, petticoats and all the other burdensome clothing that weighed anywhere from 20-80 pounds on their impossibly stifled bodies. The slippish dresses marketed as the flapper style were a revelation in comfort and mobility compared to the physical and psychological trauma of nineteenth century fashion.

As the first type or figure of modern popular culture, the flapper signalled a break with traditional conventions regarding appropriate gender roles and norms for women. Zeitz quotes Louise Brooks self-summary: "I like to drink and I like to fuck" as perhaps the boldest affirmation of the New Woman. In general, flappers wanted to smoke, drink cocktails in pubs, wear modern clothing and experiment with casual sex, including the fabled "petting parties." Zeitz points to surveys of the era which found that "only 14 percent of women born before 1900 engaged in premarital sex by the age of twenty-five, somewhere between 36 percent and 39 percent of women who came of age in the 1910s and 1920s lost their virginity before marriage" women of the flapper era were also "more than twice as likely to experience an orgasm" than women in the previous generations. Women wanted pleasure and autonomy and didn't feel the need to apologize for it.

Clara Bow's biography was of particular interest. Born in the Brooklyn slums, she clawed her way past a speech impediment, schoolyard taunts, pitiable loneliness and crippling poverty to get Hollywood's notice. Zeitz reports that everyone on set adored her mostly for her exceptional work ethic of being on time and a professional. When she bought her first home, a modest little bungalow, she filled one room with dirt so that her dog could have a play space. After she made the picture "It" she became known as the first "It Girl." I've never seen any of her films but now I'm going to hunt that one down.

"Flapper" is both informative and a page turner.

When "Nurse Jackie" premiered I thought, "oh, yes, I'll watch that" and then put it out of mind.

Last night I finally watched the first six episodes and *holy fuck* this is my new favourite.

I'm going to have to give you some spoilers just for the first episode.

Edie Falco's Jackie Peyton appears as a rare dynamic woman on television; she must mirror a thousand or more women who effectively run hospitals as the head nurse. When she discusses a patient with a young doctor "Coop" (Peter Facinelli) we can see her smoulder as he brushes off her expertise. He's a doctor dude who breezes around like he's in the middle of a frat house social. Jackie dresses him down at one point and he grabs her tit blankly, later explaining that it's a form of Tourette's that makes him act sexually inappropriate during periods of stress. Have you ever heard of a more bullshit explanation for macho thuggery in your life?

Every day at noon, Jackie fucks the pharmacist who slips her painkillers for her "bad back." She's no saint, clearly, yet I loved her by the end of the first episode. In one scene, the police brought in a sex worker who had been hacked up in the back of a limo. They tell Jackie that the woman wrested the knife away from the attacker and then sliced his ear off. Jackie peers at the ear and quips "Good girl!" Then the violent pay-to-rape dude comes in to get his ear re-attached as the cops explain that they can't arrest him because he's with the Libyan embassy and has immunity. Jackie enters the exam room, telling the diplomat that the woman he cut up required 287 stitches and 10 pints of blood. Rapist dude sneers that she wanted to be cut up, that she liked it. Calmly, Jackie steps into the toilet, holds the dude's ear in front of her mouth, yells "fuck you" and flushes it. She's fabulous!

"Nurse Jackie" has a stellar supporting cast. Mohammed, called Mo-Mo (Haaz Sleiman), is a feisty gay nurse who, like Jackie, seems like he's seen it all. Dr. Eleanor O'Hara (Eve Best) has a snarky sense of humour and a taste for the best shoes and clothing. She hands Jackie a bag of clothes to get rid of because she doesn't want to be troubled to have them cleaned. Zoey (Merritt Wever) turns up as the fresh-faced innocent nursing student to shadow Jackie. She pukes when Jackie hands her the rapist's ear and later gets scorned for bringing in muffins she baked. Basically, everyone's great.

This is required viewing.

Here's another food trend I'm over: ceviche style anything.

This ubiquitous preparation technique makes me recoil from the table.

I don't accept that marinating seafood in some fucking citrus juice can be called "cooking."

The result is an odd mixture of slimey and gummy sea creatures.

I'd like some fuel to cook food properly, please.

The NYT's obituary for Gerald Gardner captures the impressive life of an Irish feminist activist.

He waged a campaign against the sexist bias in the help wanted section which went all the way to the Supreme Court:

"In 1969, First Pittsburgh, led by Wilma Scott Heide, who would become president of the national organization a few years later, filed a complaint with the Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations against The Pittsburgh Press, then the leading local daily. The complaint contended that the division by sex of the paper’s employment ads — 'Male Help Wanted' and 'Female Help Wanted' — amounted to discrimination against women.
'What Gerry did was calculate the statistical chance that a woman could get a job in one of the male categories,' said Eleanor Smeal, the president of the Feminist Majority and a former president of NOW. 'He calculated pay differentials. The disparities just flabbergasted him. He contributed the hard intellectual theory based on the math, and he made it understandable, powerfully so.'
When the commission upheld the complaint, The Pittsburgh Press took the commission to court, saying that the ruling violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press. The case went to the Supreme Court, whose ruling, in 1973, effectively forbade newspapers to carry sex-designated advertising columns for most job opportunities."

The article also states that the man born in Tullamore went on to rally to have more women and African Americans hired on the police force in Pittsburgh..

Huzzah to Gardner's legacy.

We need more men like him.

This is turning into the summer of books that disappoint.

"Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present" didn't have much new information that I haven't already encountered from other authors. There's a level of detail which I found tedious and unnecessary. I suppose this could serve as part of a feminist 101 reading list, for those who know nothing of the topic.

So now I know how you get a job writing at The New Yorker: write a book that blames women for raunch culture.

Women are the problem.

That's the kind of feminism that mainstream society will tolerate.

The pornification of culture is women's fault, the "female chauvinist pigs" Ariel Levy identifies are really just women who internalize and enact patriarchy's designation that they be femmebot fuck toys.

She holds girls and women responsible while the boys and men get off scott free.

They're not to be held accountable with all the porn consumption, stripper fixation and pimps-and-hos nonsense.

Plus, this material seems so dated even though it's only five years old.

It's pearl-clutching and hand-wringing over girls in thongs, "Girls Gone Wild" and "Sex in the City."

Waste of time.

Mr. M watches "The Dog Whisperer" on sundays with Kima next to him.
I generally avoid the show because his macho posturing and talk of the alien "female psychology" makes my face twitch.
But I caught this episode with Kitten, a woman who is so pathologically invested in gender mythology with willing infantilization and puke pink on everything, even with her little dog.
Sweetie, you're 40, not 14.
Time to grow the fuck up and be an adult.
Give your dog some dignity and stop saturating its fur with pink dye.

The lady delivered the travel crates yesterday so the pooches can get familiar.
They calculate the size needed based on the distance from the tip of their ear to the floor.
Omar has big ears.
Look at how enormous these things are.
I could fit into it for fuck's sake.

I'm setting records for impatience at this point.

Vampire priest!
Park Chan-Wook's "Thirst" won the Jury Prize at Cannes this year.
This looks fabulous.
Can't wait.

If I were looking for a celluloid illustration of Germaine Greer's aphorism "women have very little idea of how much men hate them," I'd point directly to Anne Fontaine's "The Girl from Monaco." Although I'm fairly certain that this was not the director's intention; in fact, I'd say the real focus remains with the love story or bond between the male leads.

Pity.

My ass was in the seat as a precursor for Fontaine's next project, "Coco Avant Chanel," one of the rare biopics that I actually want to view.

This one's billed as a comedy despite being a heavy-handed morality play.

Fabrice Luchini plays Bertrand Beauvois, the most celebrated defense attorney in France who's called to Monaco to defend Edith Lassalle (Stephane Audran), a rich widow who stands accused of murdering her gigolo Russian mobster. From the opening scene, Beauvois is established as a man who enjoys conversing and flirting with women, but cares little for sex, which he later explains away as a waste of time and inevitably a big let down. He wants women to keep their clothes on. As he's trying to explain why it's better to delay the disappointment to a woman he's just met, he learns that the man tailing him, Christophe Abadi (Roschdy Zem) has been hired to act as security to protect the lawyer in the high profile case. They grow into an easy friendship after Christophe "does what needed to be done" by screwing one of his charge's inconvenient dalliances who shows up needy after a breakup. Between the men, women are a complication, a distraction from the important dudely business. Bertrand and Christophe are each control junkies who demand order and mastery of thier affairs. Bertrand's passion for Audrey (Louise Bourgoin) essentially stymies him in such a way that he can't bear it. Lust unhinges him to the point where he'd rather have the comfortable ease of dismissing women without a thought.

Audrey appears onscreen as a study in perfected female beauty, and yet she's tabula rasa rather than femme fatale. Audrey is more girl than woman. There's no hidden agenda, she's just enjoying the limited power that comes with being beautiful and desired. Men want her, but they also hate her for it. The scene when Christophe's alone in the car with Audrey was chilling for clarifying the mixture of animosity and arousal men reserve for certain women. Fontaine could have fashioned a provocative meditation on this dynamic of gender, except she abandons the potential in favour of the greater accord men share. It brings to mind Leslie Fiedler's "Love and Death in the American Novel" where he famously argued that the greatest romantic or thinly veiled erotic couplings were found among men.

Roschdy Zem gives a standout performance which would really be the only reason to see it.

As a rule, I don't watch morning television unless I'm in a hotel room.
At home, the time is spent blogging, reading and doing pesky chores.
Today I decided to turn on "Live with Regis and Kelly" while folding laundry.
Gerard*Douche*Butler was on and then also this feature "Date Night Makeover."
I take a guilty pleasure in makeover shows such as "What Not to Wear" even though they're anything but feminist-friendly.
This clip was about as wretchedly sexist as the genre gets.
Teresa and Tom have been married for 33 years we're told. The hosts gave her the makeover to spice up their relationship and added a dinner and theatre tickets for their "date night."
Teresa looks gorgeous with the shorter hair and smart clothes. Shit, her husband's a hair's breath away from dry-humping her on camera.
What galls me is that Tom may as well carry a sign saying he's Mr. 1983.
Check out the brown polyester pants he's sporting, last scene on Dick Vernon (Paul Gleason) in "The Breakfast Club." Add in the 'stache, floppy hair and tie, and this dude screams "stuck forever on the wrong side of 80s fashion."
Why didn't the show treat Teresa to the same libidinal boost as they gave her husband?
Why does she get same-old style and he gets a modern rejuvenated wife?
I'm calling bullshit on this sexist practice that holds only women have to make themselves attractive to husbands who can wear the same ugly shit for over three decades.
I'm sure they're a lovely couple, but Teresa got the shaft.

The horror!
Mr. M tipped me off to this commercial for WaterWorks douche, a product marketed for $29.95.
The "douching alternative" is really just a penis-shaped douche.
I mean, really?
Hasn't everyone already been educated that douching fucks up women's bodies?
The vagina functions as a self-cleaning restorative centre all on its own.
No need for interference from any man-made object.
Are we not long past the scary era when women shoved Lysol and water into their vaginas in an effort to expunge any trace of natural fragrance? Lacerated, chemically singed pussies should rest firmly in our collective memory as an example of how culture reeks of misogyny and harms women. Sure, there's only water on prescription in this advertisement; nonetheless, the manufacturers still argue that women must be debilitated, shamed, and vigilant against the state of their own bodies.
It's pussy-as-contamination fearmongering of the highest order.
Of course there's a doctor dude, Dr. Dave E. David, to assure us that WaterWorks has medically efficacious results, yet how could we doubt the willingness of white coats to pathologize women?
Physicians built their authority upon a vast catalogue connoting women and muliebrity as inferior, diseased, hysterical, infantile when compared to the male ideal.
"Freshness is just a phone call away!"
Fuck them and the whole douche nonsense.

Nordstrom's anniversary sale had me peeping at what's on offer. The first thing that popped up was this Nanette Lepore suit, like they were trying to lure me in. I've said countless times how much I adore vintage style, but there's a line for me which can make vintage feel like a costume. It's the difference between Dita Von Teese's red carpet look and Zooey Deschanel's character Summer Finn, a matter of choosing clothes that don't make you look like you're walking out of a time machine, but rather pay homage to past fashion with modern embellishments or material.

This suit screams Peggy Olson, doesn't it?

It's super cute and yet I wouldn't feel comfortable wearing it.

The sleeves seem too large and impractical and I have an instinctive dislike of bouclé, that matronly, bulky and dated fabric seems as unyielding and stiff as the garter belts women had to wear.

I'm just browsing anyway.

Each time we move it's easy to pick up cues about the new town when we look at homes for sale.

In Oregon, the Tibetan prayer flags, water fountains and portable native-esque drums in many houses should have been a tip-off to the hippie-wannabe-Buddhist vibe.

But in Kansas, the one common denominator in every single house of the more than two dozen we viewed was the utter absence of books, save the Bible and either the "Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul" or "Chicken Soup for the Mother's Soul." Now I've railed against the book snobs because the act of reading itself plays such a pivotal role in nurturing our imaginative capacity and there's absolutely nothing wrong with reading for a meaty plot. But I have to draw the line at this series by Canfield in protest to this Chicken Soup nonsense as nothing other than patriarchal bouillon. First, the title lets you know that "Chicken Soup for the Soul" defines the subject as male. The collection of inspirational essays for dames gets qualified as outside the dickly norm. Next, the books tell women that their lot in life is to eat a plate of shit, to suffer silently, to marry early, endure emotionally removed husbands, and live through and for their family. The reader reviews posted on Amazon widely reference needing boxes of tissues on hand as you read, as if the narrow scope of women's lives on parade makes the bittersweet tears flow. Celebrating the beauty of submission at this level, the book should come with a gimp mask, not tissues.

The Bible and a Chicken Soup for the Doormat Pussy-Bearers Soul registered a woman submerged in patriarchal propaganda. When she would then walk in with a plate of cookies in hand, I knew I was observing the Stockholm Syndrome writ large.

This potent evil should be tossed out in the trash at once.

Sweet cherry pie.
I cheated with the crust; it's frozen.
But this fucker will taste fab with ice cream when I'm finished dog duty.

Hilarious!

Loved the "Bookshelf Etiquette" article up at the Guardian.

We've actually had arguments about this and revisit the topic each time we move house.
Mr. M thinks all the books should be shelved in alphabetical order, end of story.
That's not how I have them arranged.
First, there's too many to locate them all in the same spot.
So authors get divided by topic and gender.
In the basement you'll find travel guides, Old English, Shakespeare and text books. Also my language study guides for Spanish and Irish.
On the main floor, there's the Irish section, comprised of Irish authors or books about Ireland. (I know the Irish language stuff should be here yet it isn't).
Then women writers take up one side of the large case and men the other. My reasoning behind dividing by gender in the general lit section was because at one point I had realized that I'd read far more male authors as an English major, and so I wanted a visual cue to register that I had balanced out my reading.
In my office are whatever books I'm referencing or writing about at the moment, the Harvard Classics that belonged to Mr. M's grandmother Sylvia and a stack of books about Canada.
In the bedroom books on feminism, postcolonialism and race, film, modernity and the books on theory that I read in grad school. There are also a couple of stacks which I would categorize as "herstory," the witchy stuff I read when I was 18.

An A-Z arrangement seems to lack inspiration.

The Star reports on a recent study tracking how service providers were rated by U.S. consumers. The results mark an overwhelming preference for and higher ratings given to white men, even when women and minorities performed at the same level or better. The researchers surveyed responses to service rendered in health care, on golf courses and in a bookstore scenario.
Evidence of white dude privilege may have surprised the researchers, but not the rest of us.

"For the bookstore setting, the researchers filmed actors interacting with customers and had university students rate the level of customer service. Even though the scripts and behaviour of the actors playing the bookstore employees never changed, the students gave the female and black male bookstore employees significantly lower ratings than the white male employees.
The students also gave lower ratings to the physical environment of the bookstore when females or minorities served customers, a phenomenon known as the 'contamination effect.'
'You put a certain person in an environment and people think somehow that it's not as clean or the quality isn't as good,' said Aquino."

Folks feel blessed just by having the attention or care of white men who are perceived to be smarter, more capable and competant than anyone else. Bitches and black men are born to serve afterall. We're second rate in the social hierarchy.

At this point I've scaled down my closet by more than half.

Whether as gifts or donated to charity, I've gotten rid of a fuckload of stuff.

The packing has begun, at least of the out of season stuff for shipping over.

I don't think I've ever calculated my wardrobe until I read the British Vogue feature where they took stock of a few women's closets.

5 coats.

7 jackets

4 jeans

6 trousers

15 dresses

11 skirts

18 blouses/shirts

10 pairs shoes, three boots.

This should be enough for the year.

Sweet baby jeebus.

If this woman was coming at me, I'd run away thinking she wanted to eat my brain.

The trend for removing eyebrows repulses me more than the idea of eating sushi with a white plastic fork.

Think of all the affect and expression transmitted by your eyebrows.

From Spock's trademark "fascinating" pose of curious regard, Jack Nicholson's furry level "Here's Johnny," Ava Gardiner's brow-smile, Jennifer Connolly's furrow, to Brooke Shield's unspoiled look of innocence, eyebrows play a pivotal role in creating characters.

Our eyes are naked and emptied without them.

They signal our humanity for fuck's sake.

Looking like a zombie or a machine seems hardly aspirational, but one woman tries to justify the look:

" 'It’s unifying,' she said. 'There is an asexual element to no eyebrows. We are much more accepting of the ‘other’ nowadays. Removing eyebrows removes a degree of expression, which makes one look less human and more cerebral, maybe even mechanical. It’s an exercise in modernity.'"

Sounds like she's watched way too many midnight screenings of "Metropolis" and read Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" too closely.

Modernity makes us more human, not less.

These are two of Mr. M's favourite "bad English" signs that we pass by with the pooches.

Hollywood, take note.

You can produce a romantic comedy free from mars and venus gender mythology and stereotypes. You can make a film which makes women and men alike laugh in the audience and go "aw." It's so far superior to every other production in the genre (shit like "The Ugly Truth" wherein men only want women for sex and women only want a gold band) that I flinch from clubbing it with the rom-com label.

"500 Days of Summer" is a winsome film graced by the lead actors Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Summer and Tom. Tom believes in "love at first sight" and the quest of finding "the one." Summer doesn't. She also has an enviable wardrobe, including the dress she wears to a co-worker's wedding, the top half pictured above.

Mr. M also enjoyed it, although he said he wouldn't remember it except for them yelling out "penis." Ahem.

Highly recommended.

Excuse me if someone has already posted about this.
From the interview with Julianne Moore in the latest British Vogue:

"We are in Cafe Cluny, just around the corner from Moore's impeccably tasteful house in Greenwich Village. She meets friends in this cafe so often that her husband Bart Freundlich refuses to set foot in it, on the grounds that it 'smells of girl.' "

What are you 10 years old?
The feminine presence has the same power to repel the menz as garlic can drive away vampires.
Woman-as-pollution remains one of the hoariest patriarchal myths.

Seal Press is cultivating an impressive feminism 101 series. The most recent edition was published in May: "Men and Feminism" by Shira Tarrant. Divided into 5 chapters with a discusssion and reading guide, and further resources at the end, the book offers a sound and engaging appeal to men about why they should embrace feminism. Tarrant's work provides a clear description of feminist politics, an historical overview of men in feminism, a level assessment of how masculinity is socially constructed, and she has an ingenious chapter defining male privilege.

Chapter 3 begins with an insightful simile: "For most people, talking about gender is like a fish talking about water." We're so immersed in it that both the process and outcome become invisible. In this chapter she turns to the popular account which explains how conception occurs as an example of how science may be used as a vehicle to advance patriarchy. Frequently people use science in order to authenticate or explain gender differences, and hence gender inequality whereby it offers evidence proving it's natural and therefore unchangeable. We've all heard the story of how the sperm and egg meet. The sperm are described as aggressive and active in the search of the passive egg, much like an army looking to rape and pillage the village damsel. This is but one of many examples of "common knowledge" which accounts for gender inequity and the social order of male dominance and female submission. Tarrant cites scientist dude David H. Freedman who corrects the popular misconception about the dynamics of conception:

"A wastefully large swarm of sperm weakly flops along, its members bumping into walls and flailing aimlessly through thick strands of mucus. Eventually, through sheer odds of pinball-like bouncing more than anything else, a few sperm wind up close to an egg. As they mill around, the egg selects one and reels it in, pinning it down in spite of its efforts to escape. It's no contest, really. The gigantic, hardy egg yanks this tiny sperm inside, distills out the chromosomes, and sets out to become an embryo."

Tarrant has done her research, blending experts on masculinities and feminism into her appeal for men to identify as feminists. I'm sure that some of the menz will object to her argument, but reasonable dudes who navigate their moral compass will see the sense she makes:

"Of course, none of this is to insist that men and women are exactly the same. Rather, the real questions are why binary gender standards are so strictly enforced and why gender distinctions still come at a price--such as lower wages for women or fewer opportunities for men to nurture and parent. Why is our culture so heavily invested in policing and enforcing particular types of behavior and prohibiting others? Why are traits that are associated with men or masculinity (e.g., logical reasoning, autonomy) considered better, more valuable, and more worthwhile than traits associated with women or femininity (e.g., emotion, interaction, relational reasoning)? These are political arguments--not biological ones--and they affect who gets access to the resources and rewards of our culture."

There's a sidebar featuring 22 benefits of being male in order to illustrate how gender privilege works, the last of which is "I don't need to think about sexism every day. I have the privilege of not having to think about my privilege." Also included in the list:

#1 "I can be pretty sure that when I walk down the street nobody will yell at me about my body or tell me what they want to do to me sexually."

#4 "If I choose not to have children, nobody will question my masculinity."

#10 "I can be pretty sure that when I talk in groups or in public, people will listen to what I'm saying and they will believe I know what I'm talking about."

#13 "I generally feel safe when walking to my car at night, hiking alone in the woods or the mountains, or walking on the beach."

#14 "I can turn on the TV or open the newspaper and expect to see people of my sex represented, including political and business leaders, top athletes, movie stars and experts. My elected representatives are mostly people of my own sex."

#16 "I have heard men belittle women's abilities, women's writing or music, women's intelligence, or physical strength, or make other comments about women being inferior to men--especially if there are no women in the room when they say it.."

#20 "I can dress how I want, without people assuming I want to have sex with them."

She counsels men to "man up" by refusing to be complicit with the automatic advantages they enjoy and strive for realizing a life based upon egalitarian relationships with women. I don't expect dudes to become feminist activists, but they should sort their shit out. That means speaking out against sexism and misogyny even when you risk being called a pussy or suffer the loss of your dude status. Otherwise, you're just another bully choked with entitlement.

"Do you think a bike can be like a car?"

"Like how?"

"Well, when I was hosing all of my blood off the bike I thought it might have a taste for it now."

"Ah. Christine."

Last weekend, Mr. M walked in the door splattered in his own blood, a gashed and bruised nose and a potential broken thumb (the one he had broken when he fell from the roof painting the house in Kansas).

Amateur cyclist on a rented bike smashed into him by the lake.

Looking at him I could feel my hair turning grey.

Don't you hate when you read three books in a row that all leave you feeling "meh"?

In Stacy Richter's story collection "My Date With Satan," I loved "The Beauty Treatment" and "Rats Eat Cats" but not much else.

Anya Ulinich's "Petropolis" was billed as a novel about a Russian mail order bride who legs it the first chance she gets away from the American dude. The first part about her life in Asbestos 2, a tiny town in Siberia was more interesting than the latter story which read like so many other immigration narratives.

Hard to believe that Nathaniel Hawthorne would disappoint. "The Blithedale Romance" was obvious, predictable and the idea that Zenobia would pull an Ophelia for a dour drip like Hollingsworth rankles my last nerve. The New Woman never killed herself in response to being rejected by a stooge reformist. It's worth reading only for the allegorical emblem of the veiled lady. Now there's all the brilliance of his work. You could guess that I'm viewing the veil as a grand metaphor for patriarchy. Yep.

Damn.

I was combing through the Warner archives offering $14.95 downloads of treasures from the Golden Age of Hollywood and put "This Woman is Dangerous" into the basket in a hurry.

Joan Crawford as a mob boss?

Oh, yes please.

Then at the last stage of the checkout process they tell me they won't let me do it from Canada.

Grrrrr.

It was impossible to concentrate on Hawthorne's "The Blithedale Romance" on the subway after seeing "The Hurt Locker."
Technically speaking, it's a perfect film. I could not isolate a film with more suspense. I was sweating after the opening scene and one of my shirt buttons popped open at one point.
Kathryn Bigelow's film rocks your pulse.
*One minor spoiler*

And yet, it carries some wholly dangerous messages.
It's unapologetically pro-war which just seems crudely unethical now. The Iraqis are depicted as savage assailants but for one lone boy who parrots American slang, calls himself Beckham and sells pirated dvds. He's the good one because he wants to be just like us.
What's celebrated throughout is a brand of toxic masculinity based upon a rogue individualism, failure to communicate and risky behaviour that puts others in harm's way.
The dudes who work as a team sharing information are painted as pussies who wind up dead.
When Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) goes to get the cereal his wife requests, he stands in the grocery aisle scanning the nearly endless variety stacked on the shelves. The shot composing the boxes of sugar and the futile expression on the soldier's faces tells us that this is bullshit. His life with wife and son is meaningless, empty, superfluous.
James only comes to life fully in the war zone.
From the whooping reaction among the men in the audience, this macho glory-fest will play big with conservatives who will use it in their warmongering.

"Auditorium" has been in my head all day.

This blurb for Jose Saramago's novel "Blindness" up at Amazon argues:

"In this one woman Saramago has created an enduring, fully developed character who serves both as the eyes and ears of the reader and as the conscience of the race. And in Blindness he has written a profound, ultimately transcendent meditation on what it means to be human. --Alix Wilber."

I've never read it and therefore have no idea how much of a "fully developed character" the doctor's wife was meant to be, but as far as the film goes, we're asked to believe that a woman with vision among an otherwise blinded citizenry would toil away doing the shit work, playing mommy and nursemaid to everyone else and submit to rape.

When she can see.

Not only is "Blindness" a ham-fisted metaphor about how the world has deteriorated through a lack of religious faith, it's also insulting to feminists. This is cheap patriarchal fantasy, complete with dawdling over women's sexual subjugation and a gratuitous sapphic shower scene. The film says bitches will eat shit even if they retain the faculties men lose. Julianne Moore's purported protagonist functions without a name, while everyone else bears the appellation of their job or profession, she gets to be the doctor's wife.

Lemme take a breath.

An infection rages within a large city (it was filmed here in Toronto) which makes folks go blind after seeing a bright glow of light, our first indication of the jeebus message creeping around. Mark Ruffalo plays the fancy eye doctor who treats the first dude to lose his sight. He explains to the wife that he thinks it may be due to agnosia, a condition where one loses the ability to recognize objects. Moore's character asks about the derivation of the word, did it share a root with agnosticism, and bingo, we get that she's taking us by the hand to connect the physical to the spiritual. It's a pedestrian metaphor, to be sure. It's stretched again when the one blind dude calls up later in the film "we need some guidance" to the guards, or more ostensibly to the fairy tale dude in the sky.

Anyhoo, when the doc wakes up blind, he's packing for the quarantine before we even get a larger sense of the epidemic. I know I wouldn't hesitate for a moment over being taken away to some unknown containment facility. His wife goes with him to the huge empty building where the blind get locked away under guard. Danny Glover's voiceover must be taken directly from the novel, and it's awful stuff: "Joy and sorrow are not like oil and water. They co-exist."

Terrible, just terrible.

As the population increases, the doctor takes charge of the group, giving instructions, calling meetings, keeping order. Meanwhile the woman who can see silently manages to take care of everything and everyone. Get it? Because that's what women were born to do. She even bonds with the woman who accepts the doctor's gropes and fucks him through some recognition that he did it to keep from feeling emasculated by her careful ministrations. Seriously, what blind dude needs someone to wipe his ass and bathe him? It doesn't make any sense, it's just a way to show the wife as servile.

Then it's just a matter of how we arrive at positioning women as fuck toys.

Patriarchy saunters along undisturbed.

Gael Garcia Bernal's thug declares himself king of the joint, takes control of the food, first asking for valuables in exchange. Next, he wants services. Women for food. The men in the first barracks joke that any women who "volunteers" to be a cum dumpster is a whore. One dude orders his wife not to join in since "dignity has no price." Women don't get the luxury of such sentiments when they're viewed as commodities to be bartered among men. Nine women including the doctor's wife go so that everyone else can eat after three foodless days. The women's bodies are crudely felt up and evaluated as if they were livestock. When one woman gets repeatedly referred to as a "dead fish" who will not reciprocate sexual reponse during the rape, it's clear she'll not make it through alive.

I'm supposed to believe a woman could be so impotent, cowed and meek that she would choose to get raped by blind men rather than going on a rampage? For reals?

Moore's character has a brief scene where she begins to act like a real woman would. She shanks the lead rapist and tells his henchman that she'll kill one of them each day if they fail to send over food. But then just after this flash of viewing a woman as a full human being, it's back to the bunker with the doctor still in charge, telling the group "gather around me and we'll make a plan." Dudes still run the show.

Later when they escape and the woman with vision finds some fucking food, her husband saves her when she's set upon by a mob. The blind man saves her!

Really, it's too much.

When one woman calls her the leader near the end of the film, it was a moment of pure affront.

Women have to eschew all visible sign of leadership to be in charge and keep a low profile behind a dude.

What a load of dog poo.

This trend piece in the NYT tracking downscale clubs which are moving away from bottle service, velvet ropes and catering to the elite sounds in line with the troubled economy.
It mentions "Superdive" offering keg service as pictured above.
On one hand, fine, you want to take this as a positive sign that maybe you could go out and actually have a conversation with friends and not have to pay a fortune.
All very reasonable, except for the introduction where the dudes above are assembled for "Manday," what they refer to "as a semiregular male-bonding night out."

And then just like that, they announce themselves as gigantic douche bags.
We live in patriarchy; wherein, for fuck's sake every day is Manday.
Our language already places an enormous emphasis on masculinity and the male gender.
Male stands as the norm, baseline, subject position.
There's no need for this persistent trend to revise every available word with a hyper-dudely intensity. It's all about the men to begin with, so there's no need to impress anymore masculinity into the lexicon.
I see this shit everywhere: manday, bromance, mancave, mandate, mandage, mancome, mance, mancation, manbition, manazing, murse, manceptionist.
There's no end to the manifestations of the masculine prefix.

When you utter one of these nonsensical words, you're saying a couple of things.

Whatever activity people with a penis undertake must be underscored with an emphasis on gender exclusivity. Men are so freaking special that whatever they do, it needs to be kept separate from whatever those lowly bitches are doing. "Don't call me a nurse! Dear lord, everyone knows that designates pussy. I'm a murse." There's also a rush to distinguish yourself from a gay dude, hence this kind of slang reeks of heterosexism and well as misogyny. You know, it's as if you have to say "we're not two men dancing, it's mancing. We're totally not interested in sucking cock."

Menz require extra nomenclature as a buttress against their fragile sense of self and the anxiety they feel over not being king of all they survey. "I need to withdrawl from the emotional needs of my family in a mancave." If we don't gender everything, it'll be chaos and your dick will fall off.
Dudes who attach the male prefix exhibit no sense of their automatic gender privilege they enjoy in patriarchy. You may as well wear a sign on your neck tagging yourself "choked on privilege" or "mr. self-entitled," "has no clue, ladies move on."
Get over it, dude, and grow up.
You're out with friends having some beer.
End of story.

"SLC Punk" captures my teen years closer than any other film.
It's required viewing. You can watch it in 10 parts on YouTube.
The cast couldn't be better.
Even Jason Segel kicks ass, before he became a slack-jawed Apatovian dude.

Ugh.

Dude, really?

Glance, don't gawk.

"What are their names?"

"Omar and Kima."

"Omar, as in 'Khayyam' ?"

"No. As in 'Little.' "

"Wha?"

If I told you how much it's costing us to bring the dogs over you would think we're mentalists.

I explored several different options for their transport.

There's no way around the expense.

At least we're getting door-to-door service out of this robbery.

Omar's going to have his nervous soft-serve poo for a full week after he arrives.

Since we were married, I have been hearing folks cite popular myths about how the gold band alters your waist line and your sex life. You've heard this mars and venus bullshit. It's poor reasoning guided by sexism, which holds that marriage makes women fat and lose interest in sex.
Even on our wedding day I heard men jokingly warn Mr. M that I was going to pack on the pounds and cut off sex now that I had the ring. The 'ol ball and chain was just itching to "let herself go." One dude in Mr. M's doctoral program affirmed an old fashioned calculation about a penny in the jar for each time you had sex the first year, and then how you took one out of the jar for each time after that, the point being that you were always left with pennies. The shady bastard extended the cash nexus everywhere, even the bedroom. He also opined that wives gain five pounds a year. No surprise that he turned out to be a cruel, abusive husband with a long-time mistress on the side.

Gender-based fatalism has never been my thing.
It's reductive, petty, simplistic.
In reality, we both weigh just ten pounds more than the day we met 18 years ago.
And we've always shared a healthy lust for each another.
I don't write about sex on the blog because the internet is in many ways the primary source of the pornification of culture and I don't want to invite that element here. My blog isn't for male titillation, obviously.
The point is that most of what you are told about how marriage changes women is a crock of fucking shit.

What exactly am I supposed to think about Jeremy Piven's hair in "The Goods" trailer?
I couldn't stop staring.
His top tresses are the most stylized image onscreen.
Each strand has been coaxed to curtsy.
And the sideburns!

I see he's resigned to play Ari Gold on autopilot for the rest of his career.
His stale braggadocio, desperate vanity and alpha male hijinks soured my stomach, along with the racist humour.
Jokes about a group attack on a small Asian dude are really beyond crass.
Pass.

Recently I posted about how lots of women try to become "one of the boys" as a strategy to get ahead in patriarchy. Since the state of being female is reviled and shunned, lest any taint of it disarm dudeliness, plenty of women walk around with the point of view of a middle aged white dude. We all receive a steady stream of "what a man wants" since birth, so the psychological transfer barely even registers. Pick up a newspaper, turn on the television, open most books, or browse the interwebs and you get a good dose of dude nation, where its all about the menz, even when it appears to be directed specifically at women, such as the Lifetime network or something similar, it's still a predictable narrative, narrowed to a limited set of men are________ and women are _________.
You can isolate cues about gender norms everywhere, telling you how you should behave and what to expect your life to resemble. Women internalize all the stuff about manhood alongside the lessons for muliebrity, which often lends us the ability to come up with compelling male characters. Take a look at what an international media darling Zadie Smith became for "White Teeth," a bestseller about two middle aged dudes. It's profitable to make men the centre of your work. Or, as another bestseller instructs, "Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man."

The NYT offers the most recent example of a woman making a name for herself by making it all about the men with the feature "She's a Director Who's Just Another Dude." Lynn Shelton's recent film "Humpday," premiered:

"At Sundance, where the film made its debut in January, the film’s pitch alone — two buddies reunite a decade out of college only to find themselves agreeing to shoot an arty porn flick on a kind of regressive, Dionysian dare — hit the festival’s sweet spot, and not by accident."

The NYT attempts to class up the premise with the allusion to mythology. Of course a woman who makes a "bromance" film where two scumbags make a porno will fill the theatre seats. Rule number one of being "one of the boys" instructs a woman to laugh when men engage in sexist jokes and to never call them on bad behaviour. Shelton sounds like an enthusiastic cheerleader for dudes. Or, as the author quips, "Ms. Shelton has created an exploration of the male ego and the passionate rigors of platonic, dude-on-dude love." It's sure to be a hit. You know it's bad when they report that she's being called the "female Apatow."
Exalt unquestioned male privilege in all its excess and you will make some bank.

Her credentials as "one of the boys" also receives confirmation: "Mr. Duplass credited Ms. Shelton’s facility with actors, enthusiasm for the working process and, tangentially, her greater affinity for men: 'You know those girls who are closer with dudes, in general? She’s got a little bit of that going on, so that obviously plays into it.'" Men are the centre of the universe, and the women who recognize that will find success.
We also get assurance that Shelton appropriately assumes the supporting role to the altogether more important funnymen; " 'But Lynn is not the one cracking jokes, she’s the one laughing hardest.'" Women shouldn't outshine the men or hold the spotlight, just laugh and cheer on the men.

Miller High Life's "Innovations" ad series acts as the gender police to remind dudes what they need to do in order to be real menz. You prove your masculinity by drinking shitty beer, for starters, none of that limp-wristed crafted micro-brews or imports allowed. If it's possible to locate a beer even more of a piss-drink than Budweiser, it'd be the High Life, even if it's Da Mayor's brew of choice.

Teh menz don't cross their legs like those effete intellectual types. Instead they spread their legs apart as far as possible to have easy access to ball scratching and to occupy the maximum physical space. They must also think it lays the groundwork for a sexual overture. It's like "yeah, baby, getta loada my peen." Real menz shun sophistication because it would make them gay. Totally.

Keep your hands clenched around a beer, in a fist or on your balls. Real menz never allow a pinky extension. Why, all the testosterone would drain from their bodies in an instant. Any sign of manners is a sure-fired de-sexer for menz. Your dick will fall right off.

Finally, real menz refuse to follow any fashion trends or resemble any of that super scary metrosexual stuff. Again, that's for the gays and the chicks.

Real menz care nothing about clothes and walk around in hideous, colourless neutral tones.

Fashion is for pussies.

Thus concludes the lesson in gender mythology.

My first thought this morning was that I had to empty the green bin of the organic waste that's been rotting for two weeks since the strike began. Plus the meat and bits that were stinking up the freezer.
Le sigh.
Downstairs, I glumly told Mr. M what I'd be doing on the way to the market.
"I already took it this morning when I was out with the dogs. I packed it up into my hiking backpack."

Reader, I had a friend who used to gloat about how often her husband brought her flowers or little gifts with the tacit implication that my husband wasn't as thoughtful.
You know what?
Shlepping a shitload of garbage for more than two miles in the pricey hiking gear resonates as a sincere romantic gesture. Fuck the flowers and the candy, I'd rather have an odious task taken off my hands.

"Now I'm feeling like the germaphobe you are. I've already washed my hands three times."
That's love, people.

John Waters ranks as the king of Irish menz, also known as dudes who bemoan and lament the loss of unchecked male privilege.

In his most recent elegy for the waning of dude nation (the uncontested authority of church and state in classic patriarchal form), he stretches the example of an airport queue as a metaphor for contemporary Irish ills. It's pretty lame, but let's parse it out anyway.

Waters observes a man jumping a long queue in Dublin's airport, who is then caught by an employee and sent to the back of the line. Most folks would say well done to the staff members. Not Waters, though. He aligns himself with the rogue attempt to sidestep civil manners and custom in order to get ahead. The reflexive insistence that you come first above all others remains part and parcel of the gender privilege instilled in and reserved for the penis bearers. It's a level of expectation built up that makes you say "screw everyone else" and jump the queue. Waters doesn't place any importance on politeness or the shared out empathy that maintains a fair spirit within the queue. Instead, he regards calling out those choked with entitlement when they jump the queue in terms of "moralistic tyranny." If you check his privilege, it's tyranny. You're just like that Hitler fella.
Give me a motherfucking break, dude:

"We used not to be like this. We had lives. We did not guard every single bureaucratic regulation with a jealous fury. Once, we might have seen someone jumping a queue and smiled at his brass neck or just thought that perhaps he faced some urgent circumstance.
Once, Ireland was world famous for being a place where everything was not reduced to “ethics” and “equality” and rules."

His placement of ethics, equality and rules in quotes speak volumes; it says that ethics and equality don't mesh with his conservative and retrograde worldview.
He's arguing that only dudes should have agency and fuck everyone else.
He locates a crisis in an egalitarian society where everyone has a voice, a mentalist view of the highest order. Even wacko menz like Bill O'Reilly will at least pay lip service to the merits of social equality, even if everything else he says contradicts it.
When Waters claims that standing up against privilege is "turning us into moralistic bloodhounds who sniff the air for the scent of sinners," he's describing the past, where his moral compass is stuck. How dare he admonish folks for speaking up for themselves.
Social parity scares the shit out of John Waters because he'd much rather retain the privilege to behave without consequence.

*Spoilers*

Kate Winslet's April Wheeler implores her husband Frank (Baby Stewie, I mean Leo DiCaprio) to leave their life in suburban New York and move to Paris, by telling him they should leave because he doesn't understand "what he is." She coos and soothes him by saying "you're the most beautiful and wonderful thing in the world. You're a man."

I choked on my tea.

This early scene bears the crux of the film's point of view, which receives further emphasis in the last shot, the closeup of Howard Givings (Richard Easton) turning down his hearing aid to silence his wife (Kathy Bates), who had been prattling on about how the Wheelers failed as suitable homeowners.

"Revolutionary Road" alleges that women have nothing to say worth hearing.

Tune the bitches out.

It's all about the menz.

There's no lasting spark of a feminist critique of "the problem that has no name" within the feminine mystique of 1950s suburbia.

In the end, women are dead or silenced.

First, April's proposed rebellion where the family move to Paris so that they can live authentically revolves completely around Frank's self-discovery, as she aspires only to working as a secretary so that her husband might figure out what he wants to do with his life. The plan's all about him. Her speech about wanting to save him from toiling at a job he hates was fellating the patriarchy for fuck's sake. She doesn't mention herself or what she wants, other than to earn the family income by serving male diplomats. Way to think big and reach for the stars! The life April envisions in France seems hardly changed from the one she has now, so it's difficult to accept why she's so heavily invested.

Second, after a big promotion lures Frank away from the move to Paris, he gets to tell his wife suddenly that she needs a psychiatrist for getting so wrapped up in an immature and unrealistic plan. Money and power hold more sway than a romantic dream, and instead of admitting it, Frank cunningly pathologizes his wife. April's rebellious streak channels itself into a limp suicide. She doesn't get the life she wants; instead, the abortion kills her as the last failure among many. Frank gets to tell her more than once that she's a lousy actress and that she's a bad mother because she doesn't want the third child. April's characterization spins out as an unfocused desperation, an inarticulate longing for what's beyond her scope or ability.

We don't get to see her do anything beyond bleed out after settling in to a Stepford Wife demeanor at breakfast.

There's only punishment waiting for women who break with convention.

"Revolutionary Road" borrows a page from the patriarchal playbook.

Also, the idea that you would host a crazy man twice just to please your realtor insults the viewer. He's mad but so insightful! He will provide the catalyst for the plot's emotional peaks and valleys!

That character had to be one of the most artificial plot devices I've seen in ages.

Check out this clever ad campaign from the Bloom agency in Dublin for Pat the Baker's sliced bread with the tagline "Toast of Ireland."

It's smart and creative and doesn't resort to the cheap sexism deeply ingrained in the advertising industry.

The trailer for "Couples Retreat" ran before Mann's movie yesterday.

I'm guessing no less than one thousand tired gender stereotypes will make their way into it. The horny husband and frigid wife dynamic is already a lock. She's a nag, he's non-communicative. Blah, blah, blah.

The premise makes no sense at all. If you knew that your friends were thinking about divorce, would you want to be locked into an island vacation with them?
Hell no.
Also:
Someone needs take a pin and see if they can deflate Vince Vaughn's bloated face.
And is Jason Bateman in absolutely every movie due for the next year?
*Yawn*

I'm a Sephora devotee.
Today I just popped in to pick up some sponges and walked out with the palette on the right.
The store's giving them away when you have 500 points on your "Beauty Insider" card.
Most likely I won't use half the shit in there ( such as blush, which I've never had on my face).
But it looks pretty.

"Public Enemies" will most likely rake it in hand over fist.

*No Spoilers*

It's not just an eminently well-shot film comprised of many beautiful scenes and images, Michael Mann's film bears gravitas about the persons and events involved in the foundation of the FBI. Those savage fuckers set the precedent for men like Rumsfeld and Cheney and the torture at Abu Ghraib. J. Edgar Hoover and his men had no regard for the rule of law.

There's a great scene after Dillinger (Johnny Depp) meets Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) and takes her to a fancy restaurant. She interrupts his romantic overture to point out that they're being stared at because the patrons are not used to seeing a woman in a $3 dress seated among them. As he escorts her out we get a detailed look at the frock that drapes with modern elegance. She makes the other women look positively last century in their unyielding black lace.

I do believe I would put a hurt on someone to get the dress (although not in red. Teal, please).

As the camera follows behind Dillinger and his men walking up the marble steps to a bank they are there to rob, their wool coats balloon out almost like the capes of super heroes. It's a gorgeous effect coupled with their sharp fedoras and rifles. Mann's giving us iconic gangster-sexy here.

No surprise, Depp is beyond dreamy. His affable robber tells a dude in one bank to put his withdrawl away because he's there for the bank's money, not his.

All class. He cowers Christian Bale with talent in the scene they share. Bale does absolutely nothing for me as an actor. He's creepy and wooden and his nose irks me.

I didn't recognize Billy Crudup in the role of Hoover. His inflected accent sounds exactly like dudes in so many films of the era. He's dead on in delivery.

Giovanni Ribisi, Jason Clarke and Stephen Graham all struck a strong presence.

Lili Taylor show up briefly as a small town sheriff and also has an authentic performance.

Brilliant film.

"Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" was unwatchable.
After forty minutes I had to turn it off.
The screeching, caterwauling hyperbolic "ladies" were about as appealing to me as curdled milk.
I know this is a huge cult favourite that I somehow missed until last night.
Not my cup of tea.
It's as if they took the very worst stereotypes attributed to women in the mars and venus mythology and then decided to make them writ large in the flesh.
They were vain, shallow, catty, gossipy, competitive, narcissistic.
No thank you.