Enchanted, the new Disney kid-flick, is being sold as a kind of post-modern fairy tale, inverting the stereotypes that Disney has helped construct about femininity. Sound progressive? Well, it’s still more enchanted than empowered.

The first scene paints a familiar Disney picture. Our classic heroine is singing to the forest creatures in her living room and dressing a dummy like Prince Charming so that all the animals can recognize her one true love. Her waist is the size of her neck, her eyes are wide and doe-like, and she’s pluck and perky as she trills about dreams and true love and her perfect prince.

One can’t help but picture the scene in YouTube parody: how completely insane-o, desperate and sad such a scene would seem un-animated. Which is, as it turns out, exactly where this is headed: into live action (and into parody). (more inside…)

And now for your Friday fun: something I’ve wanted to post for a long time but honestly couldn’t find a good reason to do so. But heck, since we’ve been talking a lot about ads we don’t like this week, (along with ads we’re not sure about,) I thought I’d throw something out there that just brings me total joy.

Because there always seems to be a constant sexualization of female athletes and ads that focus on their “hotness” rather than their skill (why tennis players have to pose in bikinis is beyond me,) I love this Canon Power Shot ad that exploits “cuteness” for profit, rather than Maria Sharapova’s body. Guess what? I want to buy this product, and I never even had to see Sharapova sexed-up.

“Yes, yes, I see you tennis champion…”

Amnesty International has launched an ad campaign to raise awareness about the practice of genital cutting. The imagery is effective, but I’m interested to see what readers think of the use of the vagina/flower parallel and whether or not the message behind the campaign overrides the possibility of it being problematic?

Research. It always gets you into trouble. This review was supposed to say “Empowering! Feminist! Realism! Actually Tough Women of Colour!”. But then I did a little googling, (damn you google!) and now I’m confused.

The movie Bandit Queen is based on the story of the real life Phoolan Devi. In the 80’s in India, Devi led groups of bandits to pillage high caste villages for money. She was notorious and fearsome, and this was a big, shocking, deal - not only was she a woman, she was a low caste woman.

A kind of Robin Hood with a gender twist: at 11 Devi was married to a 30-something man who raped and mistreated her. As an adult she found him and stabbed him in front of his village, as a warning for old men who marry young girls.

Devi was always described to me as a hero for poor people and women. Separate from who she actually was, Devi became a legend and a symbol of the one woman who just wasn’t going to take it anymore. She was tough shit! She was brutalised, pushed around and dehumanised by patriarchal culture (more on that later) - but she actually pushed back!

So a movie about the life of this feminist hero - ok, the violence she committed makes her a problematic feminist hero - would definitely be a feminist movie wouldn’t you say? Well, this is where the confusion kicks in.

What I liked most about this movie was how it is such an unflinching, unsentimental portrayal of life for women in a patriarchal culture. The violence against women in Bandit Queen is essentially constant and blatant (I didn’t say it was a fun movie to watch), but that amazed me. Because the movie seems to be saying, look, it’s not just that some men are bad apples, and it’s not just that women will experience gender violence once in their lives. It’s that under a patriarchal system the threat of violence and the incidence of violence against women is constant and total.

For example, often “rapists” and “wife beaters” in North American cinema are portrayed as dirty, creepy, foul-smelling and poor. The men who assualt Devi in Bandit Queen however, are just regular, average men. This seemed to say to me that, it’s not just lower income men who don’t wash their shirts who are capable of violence, it’s all men who’ve been socialised by rampant sexism.

BUT, that’s exactly the problem with Bandit Queen: the constant gender violence. (more inside…)

As a child of the ‘80s and a Kathleen Hanna fan, I was tickled pink to stumble onto this video a few minutes ago. It’s Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon” mashed up with images from the kid’s TV series Jem, and it’s actually quite well done. Showtime, Synergy!

Above and beyond the fact that this television commercial is offensive because its patronizing to women, fat-phobic and all around offensive, how messed up is it that her “supervisor” is making derogatory remarks about her body and her live-in partner (a “sensitive male chauvinist,” if you will) lies to her about the comment’s actual meaning and then says, jokingly, “hey, lay off my girl, har har.” Actually, patronizing boyfriend, I think what happened to “your girl” constitutes workplace harassment.

This gave me chills. Last night in the continuing saga that is the CNN/YouTube debate, the Republican candidates were asked what the punishment should be for a woman who has an abortion if abortion is banned. We’ve talked about the anti-choice response to this complex question here on the Shameless blog before - it seems that no one in the pro-life movement wants to touch it, which is only further emphasized by the “pass the buck” responses of the candidates, saying “it’s not a federal function” to decide and there’s no need for a “federal abortion police.” Every (pro-life) candidate questioned said they’d let the states decide individually, should Roe V. Wade be overturned.

How I love watching a bunch of old white men talk about the future of every woman’s right to choose…

Frankly, the idea of Roe V. Wade being overturned terrifies me, as does the criminalization of abortion and the legal necessity of parental consent, all things that are mentioned by the candidates in this video. I suppose up until I saw this I really thought the idea that Roe V. Wade would be overturned was an impossibility, but after hearing one of the candidates say that is was a “number one focus” I’m not so sure. Can you even imagine if each state had a different approach to a woman’s right to choose? Most intelligent people realize that overturning Roe Vs. Wade wouldn’t keep abortions from happening, it would simply keep safe abortions from happening.

By the way, even though Giuliani said he’d let each state decide individually, he wouldn’t personally sign a federal ban on abortion - he’s firm on his pro-choice stance, but is still willing to let individual states go pro-life if they choose to do so.

What would such a decision mean for Canadians? Although I doubt abortion would be criminalized in Canada, I don’t think it bodes well for our reproductive rights if our neighbours to the south decide to take a woman’s right to choose out of her hands and put it into the hand of the state she lives in.

According to these (old, white, male) candidates America is ready to overturn Roe V. Wade, but not ready to ban abortion.

One more thing - how weird is it seeing District Attorney Arthur Branch from Law & Order say that his number one focus is to overturn something that protects a woman’s reproductive rights?

Via Feministing.

You may have read the tabloid headline “Pregnant Christina Aguilera Bares Belly on Cover of Marie Claire.” Aguilera is not the first to pose nude or semi-nude while pregnant on the cover of a mainstream mag, but what I think is interesting is how the imagery and the reaction has changed over the years. When Demi Moore posed in a Annie Leibovitz shoot for the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991, reactions were extreme - retailers pulled the issue from newsstands while others sold it in a brown paper bag. “The frankness of Leibovitz’ portrayal of a pregnant sex symbol led to divided opinions, ranging from complaints of sexual objectification to celebrations of the photograph as a symbol of empowerment.”

In 2006 Britney Spears appeared nude and pregnant on the cover of Bazaar to a very different brand of criticism. Rather than being offended by the sexualization of motherhood (as was the case with Demi Moore,) the public outcry was more of a “I don’t want to have to see that.”(more inside…)

Whether its Canadian Club or Unilever, the ad world is a pretty hostile place for women. Dare I say things have actually gotten better? The Daily Mail ran a piece today that included print ads from the time before “equality:”

And there is no doubt these adverts - many taken from the first half of the last century - reveal just how much women used to be caricatured as downtrodden housewives or hair-brained office girls.

The ads included in the piece are excerpted from a new collection, You Mean A Woman Can Open It?: The Woman’s Place In The Classic Age Of Advertising, and include some of the worst offenders, mostly appearing pre-1950. For example, this Pitney-Bowes gem:

I want to say times have changed, but this billboard apparently turned up on a roadside in Lockport recently:

The company’s explanation? “I think the mainstream understands it,” (the owner) said. “It’s unfortunate that some people are reading much more into it than they should.”

Us feminists, we just can’t take a joke? Violence against women? Ha Ha?

Oh my, how far we’ve come…