Posts in category TV

Adult Supervision?

A Facebook friend posted the original version, so I decided to fix it.


HusbandsChildren

Mindy Kaling

MindyKaling

Keeping Up with Limited Options

In a new study conducted by USC Annenberg and the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, researchers looked at the way women are portrayed in the media. They analyzed nearly 12,000 speaking roles on prime-time TV and in children's TV shows and family films, studying "female characters' occupations, attire, body size and whether they spoke or not."

  The results were pretty depressing:

The team's data showed that on prime-time television, 44.3 percent of females were gainfully employed -- compared with 54.5 percent of males. Women across the board were more likely to be shown wearing sexy attire or exposing some skin, and body size trends were apparent: 'Across both prime time and family films, teenaged females are the most likely to be depicted thin.' ... Perhaps most telling are the percentages of speaking female characters in each media form: only 28.3 percent of characters in family films, 30.8 percent of characters in children's shows, and 38.9 percent of characters on prime time television were women.

 

... [R]esearchers reported that they found a lack of aspirational female role models in all three media categories, and cited five main observations: female characters are sidelined, women are stereotyped and sexualized, a clear employment imbalance exists, women on TV come up against a glass ceiling, and there are not enough female characters working in STEM [science, technology, engineering, math] fields."

 

Media messages reinforce sexist attitudes about what women are capable of achieving. As this study shows, female characters are significantly limited in the roles they play -- they're often relegated to supporting roles, as characters less central to the plot, and as sex objects. This impacts how girls grow up feeling about their own abilities and what opportunities are open to them, and it also affects how boys learn to view girls -- who gets to be the star, who gets to be the boss, and who's supposed to just sit there and look pretty:

"Both young girls and boys should see female decision-makers, political leaders, managers, and scientists as the norm, not the exception. By increasing the number and diversity of female leaders and role models on screen, content creators may affect the ambitions and career aspirations of girls and young women domestically and internationally."

 

Read more about the study at Huffington Post.

Stacy London from TLC’s “What Not to Wear”

Portia on Body Image

Portia de Rossi, actress and wife of comedian Ellen DeGeneres, struggled with anorexia for years. Her weight hit a low of 82 pounds while filming the TV show Ally McBeal, partly due to entertainment industry pressure to be thin and also due to the shame of hiding her sexual orientation. She wrote her book, Unbearable Lightness, for anyone who's ever struggled with body image.

 

 

The above quote was from an episode of the brilliant new show, The Conversation with Amanda de Cadenet, which airs on Lifetime. Watch a clip from the show here:

 

 

I Don’t Love Sexism

Truly Mad Men

Courage to be Real Campaign

 

 

This is me. Don't think for one second that posting a picture of myself with dirty hair, no makeup, and in unflattering lighting didn't take some ovaries! Like many women, I've struggled with not feeling pretty enough, thin enough, perfect enough. I'll be the first to admit that I think I look the best in the photo on the right. It's the photo I use on the back of my book and on the About Me page of this website. I am definitely a product of our beauty-obsessed culture. But this is also me sacrificing my vanity for the greater good. How can I talk about body acceptance and the need to fight against sexist and oppressive imagery if I'm not being real with myself? It takes courage to be real. So everyone, this is what I look like in the morning. Deal with it.

 

The media manufacture female insecurity for profit. They invent flaws in our appearance and pressure us to fix them. They segment the female body as if it were a bucket of chicken -- we're just legs and breasts and thighs. They convince us that our bodies are too meaty and fatty, our skin is too greasy, and our hair is too fried. They manipulate us with idealized images of hot chicks who were perfected by plastic surgeons, injectable facial fillers and paralyzers, professional photographers, makeup artists, special lighting, hair stylists, fashion designers, and finally photoshopping. And then we compare our real selves with this illusion. It's not a fair fight.

 

A woman's appearance is always treated as relevant. Tabloids critique female celebrities for gaining weight or having the "worst beach body". The Playmate of the Year is featured on the evening news. Political commentators assess female candidates' appearance almost as much as their political beliefs. We're trained to think that our sexuality is our primary source of power. I discuss this in my upcoming book, If Beauty Is Inside, Why Do We Hate Our Guts?: Pop Culture, Sexism, & Power. In the recent documentary Miss Representation, the filmmaker also examines how our culture's sexualization of women actually minimizes our power in society. Just think about it -- if the most powerful women in the country are reduced to their looks, how can any of us expect to be treated with respect?

 

It starts with respecting ourselves and having the courage to be real. We have to stop allowing the media to define us in such a superficial and demeaning way. When we pull back the curtain, we see that the sculpted and perfected illusion is just a real woman who has more in common with us than we think.

 

I wasn't exactly excited to share my naked face with the Internet, but I put together the above image so that you could see the reality behind the special effects. I'd love to see models and celebrities do the same, but their careers depend on them maintaining the illusion. So for now, maybe it'll just be up to us regular women. And that brings us to Beauty Is Inside's new "Courage to be Real" Campaign!

 

The "Courage to be Real" Campaign is about cracking the illusion of perfection that makes us hate our bodies and compete with each other. I challenge you to be courageous and send in "before and after" photos of yourselves, along with what was manipulated in the "after" photo. Send your photos to real@beautyisinside.com. I'll collect them all in a photo gallery on this site, and I'll also post them on the Beauty Is Inside Facebook page and on Twitter @_BeautyIsInside.

 

Come on -- if I did it, so can you! Together, we can inspire other women and girls to have the courage to be real themselves.

     

Super Sexism – Not Buying It

 

Unlike most commercials, those that air during the Super Bowl are ones that people actually want to watch. These $3.5-million-per-30-second-time-slots can be opportunities for companies to be clever, maybe even inspiring ... but instead, many insist on falling back on lazy and uninspired sexist clichés. This is so expected in fact, that MissRepresentation.org, a campaign named after the brilliant documentary film, asked viewers to call out these companies on Twitter with the hashtag #notbuyingit.


Here are the 5 worst offenders, followed by a sampling of You Tube comments that show how sexist messages reinforce viewers' own sexist beliefs:

 

1) Teleflora -- In what seems more like a Victoria's Secret ad than an ad for a florist, a Victoria's Secret model explains to guys that purchasing a few stargazer lilies is enough to make a girl feel obligated to have sex:

 

 

And here are a few comments from enlightened viewers (typos left intact):

  • • "Shes so much more attractive when she doesnt speak lol" (49 thumbs up)
  • • "I was enjoying it, until she opened her mouth." (16 thumbs up)
  • • "It would be so cool to watch a bunch of fat ugly women, chowing down on chips, burgers and fries while they watched this commercial. Those hogs would be spewed out chewed food swearing at the tv. And fat ugly chicks care to comment on this? And how did you react?"
 

2) Fiat -- In this rarely-used cliché, an attractive woman inexplicably seduces an unattractive geek. She apparently finds being eye-groped a turn-on. I know that I totally wanted to do the last creeper who eye-groped me on the street. I mean what girl wouldn't?

 


And a few comments:

  • • "Insecure and/or ugly chicks tend call things 'sexist'. Lighten up."
  • • "if i buy that car i'll ride it hard:)"
  • • "This commercial gets 4 boners out of 5. There is nothing more sensual and intriguing than foreign women. American women are so one dimensional, this one is amazing. European and Latin women are the best in the world. American women are total crap!" (48 thumbs up)
 

3) NFL -- Here's the super-original fantasy of having a bunch of nearly-nude fembots mindlessly standing at attention in the background in case they're needed to fulfill the sexual fantasies of average-Joe-millionaires.

 


And a couple of comments:
  • • "great ad David! big pimpin!!"
  • • "Expansive girls can be had pretty cheap actually."
 

4) Go Daddy (shocking, I know!) -- Judging by their consistently pervy Super Bowl commercials, you'd think Joe Francis was somehow behind it all. Not sure what half-naked girls gone wild have to do with web-hosting, unless Go Daddy is the go-to web host for porn sites.

 


Here's a comment that's actually critical of the ad:

  • • "sexist douche bags run this company and the ads are almost always sexist. Jillian Michaels has lost any self respect as a woman by working with these tools"
And these two commenters quickly put her in her place:
  • • "Oh Stfu.. Your just mad cause you look like shit so you start calling people "sexist" because of their commericals just stfu and sit down.. They have a Job I don't see them complaining about it.."
  • • "You in the Kitchen?"
 

5) M&Ms -- And last, but not least sexist, and also oddly ironic ... we're introduced to Ms. Brown, an intelligent and articulate female M&M who voices her annoyance at being treated as eye candy, but whose objection gets shut down by an idiot:

 


Sigh. We feel your frustration, Ms. Brown M&M. We really do.


Why the H R they Puff ‘n Stuff?

 

In a previous post, I discussed how the media create arbitrary flaws in women's bodies, then conveniently offer up solutions to fix those flaws. That post was about ugly armpits. Today's example is about the land down under -- and I don't mean Australia. (I've also written about this flawed area before.) Yesterday, Jezebel posted a clip from the CBS daytime show, "The Doctors," in which they discuss how "Your Aging, Deflated Vagina Is Like A Hamburger." (Well technically, it's your aging, deflated vulva, but let's move on.)

 

On the show, Dr. Jennifer Berman, expert in the field of female urology and sexual medicine, made her case by explaining how your private parts become less puffy as they succumb to gravity, age, and having babies, and this makes them sag and deflate. She used a hamburger as a pretend vulva. (I guess a taco would've been too tacky.) She held the burger sideways so that the meat patties represented the inner labia minora and the buns were the outer labia majora -- the parts that don't puff enough. (Side note to show producers: On the next show, you could totally add different condiments to the burger in order to discuss a variety of vaginal maladies, e.g., cheese, mayo, ketchup, etc. Just a thought.)

 

Dr. Berman explained that a procedure called the "Labial Puff" can counteract the sagging and deflating. It entails injecting the outer lips with cosmetic filler, similar to the injections done to the lips on your face. It allegedly helps to revolumize the labia majora -- or in other words -- it puffs your muff.

 

"Ladies, you're not going to notice it if you're just laying down or sitting down. I actually had to bend over and look under and I swear to God, I almost had a heart attack [insert audience laughter]. And it was subtle, but it was there," she said.

 

So, let's get this straight. This alleged labial malformation isn't noticeable unless you're bending over and looking under yourself in some sort of mangled yoga pose, right? And not only that, but while you're contorting yourself to search for your most recently discovered fucked up body part, you discover that it's only subtly fucked up? It doesn't hurt or interfere with your sexual function, but it supposedly looks subtly fucked up according to those who have an interest in fixing it. And that alone is a good reason to perform a cosmetic procedure on it? That's what I think is fucked up.

 

And that, boys and girls, is an example of how the media invent an arbitrary flaw in the female body to create a need, and then serve up a solution to fulfill that need.

 

The Labial Puff is supposed to make your vulva look more youthful ... some would say even childlike. So here's a question: what about the guys? When boys go through puberty, their testicles drop, and they continue their downward descent as men age. Why don't we hear "The Doctors" make a case for the Sack Lift to make men look more youthful? Like the Labial Puff, it could be just a simple outpatient procedure in which they inject cosmetic fillers to pump up the testicular volume. Then they could do a couple of little snips and stitches to raise them up to a more youthful -- and virile state.

 

The best part? "The Doctors" could explain the procedure on their show by using a couple of meatballs.

Women, Sort Yourselves Out!

 

Just LOVE this fake commercial from the British television sketch comedy series, That Mitchell and Webb Look, on BBC. Hilarious way to show how the advertising industry markets to women vs. men.

 

Damn – That’s Some Hot Chocolate!

Call me uptight, but I would never have sex with my chocolate or my broom – regardless of what the commercials would have one believe. Each 30-second spot shows women seeking out romantic relationships with these and other inanimate objects.
Women seem to particularly enjoy making out with chocolate. In our image-and-diet-obsessed culture, indulgences like chocolate are forbidden. It's a guilty pleasure that we should have in secret. One must not show off that she engages in such sinful activities lest she be deemed a fat gluttonous pig. Eating chocolate is our dirty little secret, but oh how it pleasures us. We become practically insatiable, but then the shame sets in and we abstain for awhile.
What do you think happens when we're culturally pressured to be chocolate virgins? We turn into chocolate whores, of course.

Seriously, Dove®. Just because I love your chocolate, it doesn’t mean I love your chocolate.

I’m even less likely to love sweeping the floor. This relationship is a little different than the one we have with chocolate though. It doesn't matter that it's 2011 -- in the world of commercials, cleaning is still women's work. When we’re not using Bounty® to cheerfully wipe up the bounty of milk that our 5-year-olds spill all over the kitchen floor, we're being romanced by our cleaning products. According to the tagline, “Swiffer® gives cleaning a whole new meaning.” Apparently, that meaning implies that we like to get dirty with our cleaning products.

(Looks like this woman can’t handle their differences, so she leaves the broom for a Swiffer®. Although the broom bristles at first, he ends up replacing his human female with a rake. Another meaningless relationship left in the dust.)
If women are so hard up for companionship that we’re hooking up with our brooms, then we’re some pretty desperate housewives indeed. Who’d heavy pet her Swiffer® WetJet? Who’d think her Swiffer® Duster could ever pass muster? Who’d aim for no deeper than her Swiffer® Sweeper? Who’s that lady?
In the context of this absurd alternate universe in which human females choose common household products as mates, I suppose I would have to choose the chocolate over the broom. At least chocolate is sweet and rich, caring for my heart with antioxidants and getting me giddy with endorphins. I could just put a piece between my lips, savor it and let the smooth creaminess slowly melt across my tongue and fill my mouth with pleasure until it becomes a part of me. Ahhh ... how romantic.
Can a broom do all that? Hell, not even Swiffer® can.

The Horror of Sexy Victims

Our culture has a twisted way of dealing with female sexuality. On the upside, women are placed on pedestals as pretty objects to peer at; however on the downside, we're threatened with violence and control. Attractive women are featured as victims in all forms of media: they’re the dead bodies or rape victims in horror movies, action thrillers, and television crime dramas; they're the abused women in Lifetime movies; they’re in print and Internet ads as dismembered, sexual body parts, or they’re striking corpse-like, dominated, or submissive poses in Vogue. As if being victims of violence weren't enough, those victims are usually portrayed in various stages of undress, which further communicates vulnerability.
To be fair, women are not merely portrayed as sexy victims -- we're also the sexy perpetrators. (Yay?) We use our sexuality as weapons against men, threatening them with temptation and making them vulnerable. But the femme fatale fetish is merely the other side of the same coin. It all goes back to a sexually repressed culture that still hasn't gotten over its virgin/whore complex. Both victim and femme fatale imply that female sexuality is dangerous and must be controlled. This is also reflected in our cultural attitudes about virginity, sex education, unwed mothers, and abortion.
"Torture porn" is a recent trend in the horror film genre that features exceedingly graphic violence. The terminology itself links violent imagery with sexuality. Although the films do not necessarily involve sex, they often show nude or partially dressed women being pursued, captured, raped, tortured, and murdered -- therefore making the name quite appropriate. Torture porn is meant to shock, disgust, and degrade more than to frighten and is a more extreme example of the typical forms of media violence.
And this mentality bleeds into real life. Even local news programs, while not exactly entertainment, tend to follow the same theme. They offer airtime for stories about attractive, upper-middle class, white, young, female victims of kidnapping, rape, or murder, while largely ignoring less stereotypically attractive, poor, or minority victims. Is it really true that only cute little blond girls, suburban teenagers, or pretty college coeds get victimized? Of course not, but the media treats those stories as the most compelling. They're just more sympathetic victims, apparently.
The regular depiction of attractive women as victims conveys an undercurrent of hostility. These images create and reflect a culture in which varying degrees of sexual aggression and domination against women are normal -- even socially acceptable. Violence against barely-dressed women in the media suggests the antiquated notion that "boys will be boys," with the unspoken implication that women can "ask for it" or "deserve it" based on what we look like, what we're wearing, or how we act. Overt female sexuality apparently can be a causal factor for violence against us.
Hell, wearing "fuck me" heels must be practically an invitation then.
I didn't have to try hard at all to find the large collection of images displayed here (see more below). Unfortunately, I could've kept going. Men are definitely portrayed as victims in the media as well, but they are not depicted in the same manner. Their lives may be threatened, but their sexuality is not. Why is this?
Violent imagery plays on women’s real fear of sexual violence. Guys may invoke prison movie shower scenes or the “squeal like a pig” scene from Deliverance as humorous ways to refer to the rape of men. It can be joked about, because the threat is far from the reality of most men. There aren’t many situations in which grown men fear sexual violation. Women live in a different world. Female sexuality paired with violence is particularly threatening because it happens, and not just when we’re in prison or on a camping trip in the backwoods of Georgia with inbred hillbilly banjo players. And even if we never personally suffer sexual violence, we live with the fear that it’s a possibility. Most of us have either been assaulted or know another woman who has. We watch the news. We’ve heard the statistics. We’re aware of our vulnerability in fighting off unwanted advances – either due to lack of physical strength or because we’re socialized to please men and we fear speaking up. We nervously glance over our shoulders while walking alone at night. We feel anxious walking past a group of leering men. We feel violated when a male acquaintance get a little too touchy-feely after a few drinks. And for good reason. Women get raped by men we don’t know. We get raped by men we thought were our friends. And we get raped by men we love.
All of this imagery reflects real world dangers for women in the rate of actual violent crime against us and also in the lessons we learn from an early age in how to protect ourselves against those dangers. We learn not to talk to strange men, walk down dark alleys alone, leave our drinks unattended, wear certain outfits, go back to the guy's place on a first date, or to engage in similar risky behavior. As women, we learn that we’re never really safe, but it's our responsibility to avoid being attacked. And then if we fail to take the "right" precautions, the implication is that we may have even asked for it.
There's more than one reason why these images are scary. Individually, they could be considered entertainment. But together, they seem like a warning.
Drag Me to HellUnderworld: Rise of the LycansParanormal EntityTrainWanted
It’s as if we’re daring to seduce death itself.

I Lost 50 lbs. by Eating Cardboard, & You Can Too!*

* Results not typical
I know that this may come as a shock to some, but those prepackaged, Lean Cuisine®-Nutrisystem®-Jenny Craig®-style meals are not food. They’re simply not meant for human consumption. Lean Cuisine® is hardly cuisine in any traditional sense of the word, Nutrisystem® has a negligible number of natural nutrients, and I’m willing to bet that Jenny Craig’s curriculum vitae doesn’t contain any kind of culinary career.
Each cellophane-film-covered plastic tray contains a chemically-enhanced food-like product (and maybe a few extra hyphens). The colorful photo on the box fools us into thinking that the contents are appealing (and only 300 calories!), but once we open that box, we’re dealt the harsh hand of reality, and we find that it’s full of jokers.
Advertisements for these “foods” feature B-list celebrity endorsers standing in front of the camera and striking three-quarter poses in their new Vogue-worthy bodies. They sneer at their ghastly “before” photos snapped by sneaky paparazzi, and treat their old selves with the same disdain reserved for the fat girl in gym class. They wordlessly admit that they’ve given into the shame of being caught fat in public. And damn, if they aren’t going to do something about it! [Enter cape-wearing diet program.]
These celebrities stand there claiming they lost weight by eating delicious treats like pizza and chocolate! OMG! But that sounds crazy, because we all know that pizza and chocolate aren’t diet foods. Duh! ... But wait! Sometimes they are! And if Kirstie Alley and Marie Osmond can drop 50 pounds indulging in such “treats,” then you can too! (Be sure to note the “Results not typical” message in tiny print at the bottom of EVERY one of these ads: Go on and check … I’ll wait.)

Have you ever tried frozen diet pizza? (Choking down a microwaved frozen diet pizza in a cubicle is a sure-fire way to kick off an existential crisis in anyone.) Have you peeled off the cellophane and folded the box over to reveal the advanced science of a crisping tray? Have you stuck it in the microwave, all the while talking yourself into how it’s really not that bad, and you wouldn’t SO rather have the giant carne asada burrito from that delicious Mexican take-out place that your co-worker is devouring (BTW -- she's devouring the burrito, not the place)? Have you bitten into said pizza, burning the roof of your mouth and adding more misery to an already miserable meal? Oh you have? Well, then you most assuredly know that these “pizzas” taste like they smeared a dab of Prego sauce on a slice of cardboard and dusted on a pinch of waxy cheese product. In fact, the box could even double as seconds!
You might as well be eating this:

In other words, it’s delicious!
Look – it even has stuffed crust!





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