Ads plastered in subway stations and a provocative television preview (above) have alerted me to the fact that a new version of Beverly Hills 90210 is about to air. While the original show, which ran for 10 years in the 1990s, had a massive impact on television and teen culture—see, for example, the slew of academic discussion analyzing the show—I’m guessing 90210’s revival has a lot more to do with the success of recent teen drama hits The O.C. and Gossip Girl.

Which means, as the trailer for the new show suggests, that the new version of 90210 will have to be way more sexy than the original to keep up with our current lust for consumerist, celebrity-crazed, sex-saturated culture.

Shayla Thiel-Stern has an interesting article up at FlowTV, a site that takes a critical look at television. She argues that comparing the bodies of the women in the first 90210 to the bodies of the woman in the show’s current incarnation reveals a great deal about shifting cultural ideas about adolescent female bodies.

As she writes,

“…the women from both shows demonstrate how in a very short but increasingly mediated point in history, women’s and girls’ bodies are shaped and inscribed by the culture surrounding them. Through pilates, cosmetic surgery, low-carb diets, hair straightening, skin lightening, Botox, and so many other means, women have mirrored media representations of “perfect” women and shaped their bodies to fit the representation. While Photoshop almost certainly plays a role in the perfection process of promotional photos, however, it does not stop women and girls in reality from attempting to alter their bodies and faces to conform to this fantasy portrayal. The old and new versions of 90210 exemplify this idea perfectly.”

Here’s the rest of the article.

A few years ago I wrote a piece for This Magazine on the important role campus/community radio stations have played in the lives and activism of feminists. The piece isn’t available online, so I’ll just cut and paste my general point.

Campus/community radio has long been welcoming to women and their views, especially considering the limited access feminists have historically had to mainstream media. Campus/community radio has been an important platform for feminists to engage in discussions rarely heard on mainstream airwaves, tackle important women’s issues and give underrepresented female musicians a presence. It’s a vital outlet in the face of mass media that is becoming increasingly hostile to feminist ideas and generally perpetuates narrow, stereotypical ideas about gender.

That said, I’d like to draw your attention to the horrible situation over at CKLN, the campus/community based at Ryerson University in Toronto. Over the past few months, many programmers and hosts that have been at the station for years have been shut out by illegitimate station management in an effort to make the station commercial.

Among the lists of cancelled shows is Radio Cliteracy, an important and bold feminist talk show, as well as Frequency Feminisms and Honour The Earth, which have been removed from the Sunday grid. So far, over 30 volunteers have been dismissed from CLKN without warning and without cause, including many LGTB, First Nations, psychiatric survivor programmers, women of colour and a trans person.

Luckily, people have been fighting to get back into the station and onto the airwaves with pickets, and by organizing meetings and a website. They need our support, so please do what you can to spread the word about keeping campus/community radio open for all.

There has been much outrage over the Harper government’s quiet cuts to Canadian arts funding.

In the case of the PromArt program – a grant that enables artists to travel abroad to perform, show their films, or promote their books – the cuts weren’t made so quietly. Toronto band Holy Fuck received a lot of media attention, their name evoking the reactionary nature of the government’s assessment of who has been getting (arguably a small slice of) taxpayer dollars.

But it’s not just a band with a swear in its name or lefty journalists like Avi Lewis and Gwynne Dyer who’ve received money, although, as many have suggested, artists’ politics might indeed have something to do with the Conservatives’ budget slashing. Recipients of PromArt have included ballet companies and other high-art performances, which makes the cuts even more confusing at a time when “culture” is increasingly used by governments around the world to attract investment dollars for business development.

The discussions over the arts cuts have directed some attention to the role culture plays in our lives and the often precarious careers of people who make the art and culture that are the base for campaigns like Toronto’s Live With Culture, for example.

Here’s a sample of what people have been saying about the arts cuts, including the always insightful Heather Mallick.

If funding, sustaining and promoting Canadian art and culture is important to you, then take a moment to send an email to your MP. Here’s an action alert from the Council of Canadians with background info and directions on how to send a note of protest.

On September 3, Fuse, a magazine of arts and politics, is hosting a town hall meeting to talk about the impact of cuts to arts funding. Details here.

The Save Our Net coalition and Campaign for Democratic Media are hosting an event this weekend to discuss net neutrality and to strategize ways to prevent the internet from being tightly controlled by telecommunications corps, which are trying to limit what information we can access online.

Steve Anderson, national co-ordinator of the Campaign For Democratic Media, will speak about the issues, including: how these companies have already been caught throttling or slowing internet traffic to businesses and consumers, blocking access to websites that criticized them for doing so, and crippling consumer devices and applications.

Details:
Sunday, June 22
5:00 p.m. - 11:00 p.m.
Windward Co-op, 34 Little Norway Crescent Lake-view room (one block west of Queen’s Quay)
BYOB, vegetarian refreshments provided
RSVP: saveournetcanada at gmail.com

The Campaign for a Democratic Media is heading to Parliament Hill on Tuesday for a Net Neutrality Rally (I love rhyming names!) to demand broadband access and choice for all, as part of their campaign to stop internet throttling by telecommunications corporations.

Tuesday May 27, 2008
Parliament Hill, Ottawa
Event starts at 11:30 am
Speeches start at 1 PM

Speakers include:
Charlie Angus - NDP MP Mauril Béllanger - Liberal MP
Steve Anderson – Campaign For Democratic Media & SaveOurNet.ca
James Clancy - NUPGE
Philippa Lawson - CIPPIC
John Selwyn - National Capital Freenet
Meera Karunananthan - Council of Canadians

Buses available from Toronto, Montreal, and Chatham. If you can’t make the rally, you can get involved online.

Exciting news from the world of contraception today: the Toronto Star reported that the morning after pill will be available on drugstore shelves in Canada, which means it will be available to any woman who needs it, and women won’t have to request it from their pharmacist, which can often mean invasive, embarrassing, or judgmental questions, or even outright refusal.

Click here for some of this blog’s most recent thoughts on emergency contraception.

On Monday, May 5, a bilingual panel discussion called “Women and Radio in Canada”/ « Les femmes et la radio au Canada » will be held at McGill University in Montreal, featuring a range of women from academia and the world of radio, Shameless favourite Patti Schmidt (CBC Radio 2).

The panel with explore the challenges of radio in the 21st century, the differences between working in French or English in this milieu, historical contributions of women to radio, the role of women in the industry, and the contributions of minorities. They will also share a few trade secrets of the trade and anecdotes.

A complete program can be found here.

Participants: Colette Brin (Laval University), Kristiana Clemens (CKUT, 90.3 FM), Annie Lessard (RockDétente, 107,3 FM), Christine Maki (McGill University), Andra McCartney (Concordia University), Lise Millette (103.3 FM), Thomasina Phillips (The Monster, K103.7 FM), Gertrude Robinson (McGill University), Kim Rossi (CHOM, 97.7 FM), Patti Schmidt (CBC Radio 2, 93.5 FM), Gregory Taylor (McGill University).

Presented by the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada
Monday, May 2, 2008
Thomson House Ballroom, 2nd Floor, 3650 McTavish, 1 p.m.

RSVP to genevieve.bonin at mail dot mcgill dot ca

Last week I got a notice from my Rogers, my internet service provider, informing me of changes they’re making to “better serve” my online needs. The big change, of course, is putting a cap on my “usage allowance,” which means they can charge me more for my internet use, depending on how much I download. Bell is also limiting the amount of content Sympatico subscribers can download.

This isn’t just a corporate ploy to get people to pay more for their connections – this is part of a disturbing move by ISPs to change the way the internet works. What we have come to know and depend on as a space for the seemingly-free flow of information, connecting people around the world, is beginning to reflect the stronghold media conglomerates have around other means of communication, including newspapers and broadcasting, which means the kind of content we can access online, just like the kind of content we can access from the mainstream media, will be limited.

(Of course, the internet is not a perfect place: access is limited to those who can afford it, and the most highly-trafficked sites are still those owned by bottom-line driven major corporations. Still, the potential the internet holds for democratizing communication is critical).

This latest move is part of the struggle over neutrality, which has become a big issue for media activists in the United States.

Here in Canada, the Campaign for Democratic Media is leading the charge in trying to stop what they call “the throttling of the Internet and the strangling of our choice.” They argue that internet service providers have the potential to fundamentally change how we are able to use the internet if their efforts at limiting downloads aren’t stopped.

As the Campaign writes in a statement:

Using the… ‘traffic shaping’ principle, the companies can steer subscribers to their own content, or content produced by affiliated companies, and away from that offered by competitors — including the public broadcaster. For example, some Internet users who recently tried to download CBC’s The Next Greatest Prime Minister on Bittorrent were told it would take hours to do so.

Apart from public broadcasters, this could one day have serious implications for alternative and independent media, such as this blog you’re reading.

You can get involved in the campaign here or join the Facebook group here. Also, check out this insightful article on the issue.

For those of you in Ottawa concerned about the state of child care in this country, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is hosting an event on Tuesday you should check out.

From the press release:
Multinational child care corporations, including Australian giant ABC
Learning, are moving into Canada. Corporate-run child care will damage
high-quality, community-based non-profit early learning and child care
–and threaten the future of a pan-Canadian system.

Learn more and find out what you can do at this free event. (more inside…)