This week, one of my friends informed me of the premature passing of filmmaker John Hughes, a man who practically defined youth culture in the Eighties with his brat pack movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty In Pink, and The Breakfast Club. We were discussing our favorite Hughes films, our favorite brat pack members, our favorite soundtrack song, when someone brought up Sixteen Candles.

We all remembered loving Sixteen Candles when we were younger, but when we rewatched it as adults, we found certain aspects disturbing. There was the racist comic relief provided by the Asian minstrel/exchange student, Long Duk Dong, and there was the scene where Jake Ryan, Molly Ringwald’s Object of Affection, passes off his car and his bitchy cheerleader girlfriend to The Geek, the lovable loser portrayed by Anthony Michael Hall. The girlfriend has had too much to drink and has passed out in the front seat. Instead of, I don’t know, doing something crazy like driving her home, Jake Ryan, Dreamboat Extraordinaire, gives her to The Geek, telling him to have fun (read: have sex with her, she won’t even remember in the morning). Wow. Thanks a lot for that wonderful message, John Hughes.

I’m not trying to hate on the man. After all, he gave the world the forever-awesome scene of Jeannie Bueller kicking Ed Rooney in the face. But I find the casual and unremarkable depiction of men trading a woman as a commodity disturbing. Unfortunately, sexual assault and violence against women is running rampant in Hollywood. Rape or the threat of rape appears in everything from comedies to action movies. Hollywood takes our terrifying culture of misogyny, which has most recently gifted us with a massacre in a fitness club, and turns it into a punchline. And it’s becoming more and more common.

I rented Blindness and found myself sick to my stomach after a 10-minute gang rape scene. My friend Trancer was grossed out by the threat of rape playing a part in the new Terminator movie, especially offensive since the franchise has spent over two decades as a bastion for strong female characters. In response, she decided to make a list of all the movies in which sexual assault or rape occurs. The list doesn’t judge the quality of the movies. As she states, “Some of these are good movies, some are bad and some are *really* bad! Some of these deal with the issue seriously. Most of them don’t.” And like the Guerilla Girls statistics comparing the number of exhibited women artists versus the number of female nudes on display in museums, Trancer decided to compare the number of films depicting men being sexually assaulted or threatened with sexual assault with the number of films depicting women being sexually assaulted or threatened with sexual assault. The current count, just based on reader submissions?

MOVIES IN WHICH WOMEN ARE SEXUALLY ASSAULTED OR THREATENED WITH SEXUAL ASSAULT: 179

MOVIES IN WHICH MEN ARE SEXUALLY ASSAULTED OR THREATENED WITH SEXUAL ASSAULT: 15

Click more to see the list as it currently stands. Have another film to add? Leave it in the comments. Let’s see exactly how big this list can grow. Let’s “show how commonplace and totally cliched sexual violence against women (while presented as entertainment and something that only happens to women) has become.”

(more inside…)

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I was more than just a little bit upset by the new Bacardi Breezer ad campaign that Mir posted about this morning. This campaign, with the tagline “Get Yourself An Ugly Girlfriend” is one of the most offensive, sexist attempts at promoting alcohol that I have ever seen, which is saying a lot, considering the general grossness of alcohol advertising.

I’m not sure how Bacardi thought it could convince women to drink Breezers by insulting their looks, but, well… that’s what they’re trying to do. Certainly the best way to sell a product is to remind women of all the things they hate about their bodies, right? That makes total sense.

I have been looking for an excuse to do some more feminist adbusting since Your Mom Had Groupies, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. Thus, I present a new ad campaign that I like to call Take A Beach Stroll With Sally (Click the image to make it bigger):

Once again, I’m putting out the call for contributions, because adbusting is more fun in groups! Who would you like to join you at the beach or at the mall? Make your own ad or just leave a comment saying how you would bust this gross ad campaign. If you have a contribution, please submit it here and I’ll make a big post with all the responses!

Or, if you don’t feel like spending your day messing around with Photoshop, you can just tell Bacardi exactly how you feel about their new campaign.

EDIT: Sources in Israel (oooh, I love saying that) have informed me that this is an old campaign, dating from 2007 or 2008. They are not sure if it was dropped by the company or even if it was ever officially used by Bacardi. McCann Digital is an Internet exclusive ad agency known for its disgustingly offensive campaigns. McCann recently listed the ad campaign on Best TV Now, dating it as being from this month and listing the client that commissioned it as Tempo.

Possibly, and this is entirely my speculation, it was going to be submitted to the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. Does anyone else have any clues? I, for one, would love to hear from Bacardi on the matter. Adbusting remains very satisfying, whatever the response.

EDIT: McCann has pulled the promotional minisite down and removed it from their website!

Last week, Heather Wood Rudúlph wrote an article for Huffington Post highlighting five reasons we still need feminism. Number four on that list was as follows:

Obsessed, Bride Wars, Bridezillas and everything else that paints women as crazed (in various and sundry ways) to find, keep, and marry a man.

To that, I say “Amen, sister.” I am quite sick of living in a world that offers men movies like The Hangover or the oeuvre of Judd Apatow, where shlubby loser guys get to have all the fun and women exist only as punchlines to the jokes, and offers women… well, very little. Except for, y’know, a chance to fight with each other over said shlubby men.

The white heterosexual male still rules Hollywood and sometimes I think that will never, ever change. Not when I read articles like this one, in which an earnest and talented young screenwriter is told repeatedly by both professors and producers that the world doesn’t want to see a movie starring a woman, or about a woman, or even a movie where two women talk to each other about something other than a man.

To this I say, fine. If Hollywood insists on offering me nothing in the way of suitable entertainment, well, then, I will make my own fun! I have long been a devotee of fanfiction, if only because, as a queer girl, I gotta take representation where I can get it. If Hollywood isn’t going to give me a TV show where the hero is a woman who just happens to enjoy making out with other women, well, I am not going to scoff at any writer who helps to fill that gap. Plus, I’ve always thought there’s something rather subversive about fanfiction, about taking the subtext, or even the text, and seeing it in a radical new way.

And thus, I present, Bride Wars: The Alternative Story, in which, using nothing but film stills, one of the most sexist, misogynist movies of the year is turned into nothing short of a glorious lesbian love story. Don’t you just love it when the two women get married at the end? Everyone say it with me: Awwwwwww.

And they lived happily ever after…

Interested in adding some female oriented fanfiction and subversive subtext to your summer reading list? You’re just in time! Next month is the second annual International Day of Femslash.

Since the discussion has been so lively on my previous post about sexism in the new Star Trek movie, I thought I would open up the discussion of race in the new movie and in the series.

While I thought Sulu’s dramatic sword fight was awesome (and pretty sexy, too), I was disappointed by Uhura’s reduced role in the new movie. Already saddled with a legacy of being a glorified receptionist, this new Uhura lost even more power by becoming not much more than Spock’s girlfriend. A franchise that had once been praised for its diversity (which was impressive for the ‘60s) has once again become the playground of white heterosexual men.

Diversity in space?

Danielle C. Benton has written an interesting article (note: contains spoilers) for The American Prospect about the history of minorities in science fiction shows, connecting Uhura to Petty Officer Dualla of Battlestar Galactica by their occupation — answering the phone.

She also points out why a future society envisioned by white writers as being “post-racial” is so dangerous:

Most Hollywood sci-fi presents a “post-racial” world in which we’ve moved from fighting each other over cultural differences to fighting some bigger intergalactic evil. On its face, this type of film should allow for more colour-blind casting and minority roles. Yet even in the Star Wars and Star Trek universes, where the humanoids are “beyond race,” black and other minority actors are rare. Morton calls such tokenized roles the “new Mammy”

Another blogger, Center of Gravitas (note: also contains spoilers!), has also tackled the less than impressive diversity of the new film:

Unlike 1967, it is no longer revolutionary to just acknowledge the presence of people-of-colour or women. They can’t be the tokens who promise future inclusion, but then step aside when the “real” decisions need to be made. This new Star Trek only sneaked around questions of gender and racial equality. In the end, it is still a boys’ franchise that no longer wants to think about contemporary problems of racism and sexism.

I do hope that if there is a sequel, and I’m sure there will be, that some of these problems will be addressed. What was considered groundbreaking in the ‘60s just looks dated today.

What are some of your favorite sci-fi characters of colour? What about queers in space?

I have mixed feelings about the new Star Trek movie. While I quite enjoyed it as an adventurous space romp, my nagging issues with the original series re-emerged in spades.

I grew up on the later series, so I’ve always found it difficult to enjoy the terrible special effects and campiness of Kirk’s bridge. I also hated the lack of women, except as girlfriends for Kirk, and the fact that female officers would wear miniskirts and go-go boots on the bridge. In what universe would that be practical?

I was much more invested in Captain Janeway, Major Kira, and my favourite female characters in the Star Trek Universe: the sexy warrior Klingon co-captains, the Duras Sisters.

Don’t mess with the best.

So let’s just say I was a bit peeved that J.J. Abrams’ new movie cut the female cast from two to one and that Uhura was once again wearing a miniskirt. I expect a bit more from the man who gave the world Felicity, Sydney Bristow, and Olivia Dunham. I was genuinely surprised that he could not do better than this new Uhura, a woman who spends the whole movie bickering or staring meaningfully at a not-very-logical Spock.

Ellen Lawrence, in her article for Playtime Magazine, perfectly summarizes - in the light of Roddenberry’s original vision - exactly why it was so illogical to make the future sexist. Although I may take slight issue with her positive reading of the “equality” in the later series (no one will ever be able to convince me that Troi, with her low-cut leotards and her “emotional” job description, was cool), I think her criticism of this new movie, which had a chance to create an entirely new Star Trek universe, is spot on.

What did you think of the new Star Trek? What would be your hopes for a sequel?

In January, I blogged about RiP: A Remix Manifesto, a movie aimed at criticizing international copyright law, a system that tramples art and innovation, and makes criminals of small children and old ladies. We live in a world where major corporations are declaring they “own” everything from rain forest plants to human DNA. In February, the Electronic Frontier Foundation began a protest of YouTube’s Fair Use Massacre, in which copyright owners (notably Warner Music Group) sent out takedown notices, threatening users who posted videos as innocent as teen girls practicing their piano and singing Christmas songs. Fair use has been gutted and major corporations are seizing “ownership” of our entire universe.

Join the remix revolution!

RiP: A Remix Manifesto has since been released, screened in theaters and available in its entirety on the Internet. Brett Gaylor, the filmmaker, still considers it a work in progress, open to being remixed by its audience. At the end of each chapter, Brett offers a prompt to viewers, asking fans to add everything from animation to soundtrack music. Grab material from Open Source Cinema and work your own magic! Art is meant to be shared, not owned.

Amazon, already the scourge of small publishers and independent booksellers, has finally gone too far. No, I am not talking about the Kindle. That thing is just pointless. I am talking about Amazon’s new policy of labeling any and all LGBT printed matter as “Adult.” This policy strips the material of its sales rank, excluding it from bestseller lists and certain search results, and basically destroys its sales. This policy has not just been applied to erotica, but to general fiction, young adult novels, academic theory, political treatises, history books, dictionaries, and self-help books. Books that have not suffered the same fate include heterosexual romance novels by authors like Jackie Collins or even pornographic books published by Playboy.

Here is a constantly expanding list of books that have been stripped of their rank, classified as “Adult” for daring to contain mentions of the horrible, deviant behavior that is same sex love. Examples include classics such as Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Also marginalized are Brokeback Mountain, Stone Butch Blues, books by respected fiction authors like Sarah Waters and Christopher Isherwood, as well as non-fiction (and completely non-erotic) works by Kate Bornstein and Randy Shilts, including The Mayor of Castro Street, which certainly must have received a boost in sales after the release of the Oscar winning film, “Milk.”

Thank you Amazon, for first putting all my favorite bookstores out of business, and now trying to make it so that no one will ever publish LGBT books ever again. Because with profit margins tight and a terrible economy, why bother sinking money into a book that will never sell, because the largest bookseller in the world will declare it to be shameful porn and hide it on a dusty shelf behind a beaded curtain at the back of the store?

EDIT: Amazon has declared the de-ranking of almost all gay related titles to have been the result of a “computer glitch,” which is apparently what we get instead of an apology or an explanation. I think it is highly improbable that a simple “glitch” managed to somehow single out only titles that mention homosexuality in a positive light, but leave titles like A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality alone.

Pissed off about this new policy? Want an apology? Here’s what you can do:
(more inside…)

I recently had one of my videos muted by YouTube in response to a “Content ID Match.” This two minute movie about a trip my friends and I took to Coney Island used “Cumbia En Do Menor” by Lito Barrientos for a soundtrack. This home movie was created for personal entertainment (Look Ma! I went to the beach!) and not for profit. However, because it “may have content that is owned or licensed by Warner Music Group,” it was determined to be in violation of copyright laws and muted.

I suppose I should count myself lucky that Warner Music Group didn’t sue me for all I was worth (which is not much). As it is, I am guilty until proven innocent. WMG was not required to provide any evidence that they either own or license that song, nor were they expected to prove that I was impacting their commercial business or had gone beyond fair use. If I wanted to dispute the claim, I would have to do all the work, and open myself up to the full wrath of the WMG legal department.

How did we let this happen? How did we let corporations take such control of our collective creative output that the public domain has become a joke, with copyrights extended ad infinitum, and robot crawlers searching the internet for unlicensed songs in home videos (Look Ma! I went to the beach… in silence!)? Why are we letting these corporations stifle our creativity by making art illegal or prohibitively expensive?

In answer to these questions, I offer Open Source Cinema, an open source documentary film about copyright.

(more inside…)

The latest advertising abomination (adbomination?) to make the rounds is a campaign for Israel’s Gold Star beer. These ridiculous ads, structured as cartoony flowcharts, trade on the old trope that men are low-maintenance sex hounds who just want to drink beer and get laid, while as women are high-maintenance fashion lunatics who spend five hours obsessing over what shoes they wear before going out for girly cocktails in hopes of meeting a knight in shining armor who will marry them so they can pop out baby after baby and live happily ever after. The tag line for this lovely campaign? “Thank God you’re a man.”

Click here to see a larger image, along with the rest of the campaign (it only gets worse).

(more inside…)