I’ve posted about this channel before, as they make a lot of great videos shedding light on some weird, regressive tropes in media, and this one is no exception. Portraying kidnapping situations as ones where two people are equals, and are therefore might lead to romance, has always struck me as a little weird.
There are lots of things you can do in movies or TV where characters can partner up in creative ways, and many don’t require a character to threaten or hold somebody against their will. Enabling female characters to be more than just victims or valuable objects isn’t difficult, but it typically requires a more diverse writing team. With more voices at the table, these kinds of problematic storylines can usually be avoided, and audiences will usually be more interested and invested in what happens if the stories they see make more sense than a victim immediately developing feeling for their captors.
I’ve always liked sports, and in the last few years when I’ve spent quite a bit of time as an audio engineer, I’ve been noticing more and more just how much goes in to making things on TV and in movies sound good.
However, nothing could have prepared me for just how much audio equipment and microphones are embedded in and active during sporting events. This video gives great insight in to just how much work is done live during sporting events to make them sound great. It’s been getting clearer and clearer to me that you often get much more out of watching a sport on TV than you can from attending one live, and this stuff is a big part of why.
Growing up, learning about geography and studying the world and the countries in it, we fail to really capture just how transient some parts of the world can really be.
I definitely had no idea just how in flux this area of the Middle East has been, since our maps don’t really update often enough to capture the new areas popping up, and even if they did, Google Maps isn’t going to send a push notification saying ‘New Territory Settled – Click to view’. It’s terrible and fascinating, all at the same time, considering the reasons for this particular set of borders.
It’s a special week here, celebrating a new series, Mind Grapes!
The first video will be coming out tomorrow (September 15), and it’s all about my adventure seeing the total solar eclipse this summer.
In the meantime, I’ve published a short podcast episode (it’s literally 3 minutes) talking about my plans and goals for the website and YouTube channel, which you can find at its permanent home: unwindmedia.com/seedsofthought.
Come back tomorrow to find out some of the interesting science of a solar eclipse.
I’ve taken a video from this channel as a jumping-off point before, I’m back to do it again. Pop Culture Detective just keep bringing up such great points of oddly misogynistic characters and story-lines in popular culture, that I can’t help but pick up exactly what they’re putting down, and examining new TV and movies I watch with a more thoughtful view.
The video embedded here mainly discusses the Big Bang Theory as its example of male characters who are part of the problem in a male-dominated culture that tries to gain power by belittling the women around them (women aren’t the only groups subjected to this kind of treatment in popular culture, or on this show in particular, but let’s save that for a future discussion).
Having gone to grad school with as many or more extremely talented female scientists as I did male ones, I can definitively say that gender should absolutely not be a factor in deciding who can be successful in any particular career path. I was fortunate to not have seen any of this directly in my lab, but working in grant administration now, I see that gender bias is a huge focus of federal science funding, especially as one rises in the ranks of academia.
It’s jokes or insults at the expense of someone that focus on traits that are innate to a person that really get to me the most. Denigrating or belittling someone based on gender, sex, race, sexual orientation, or other traits that either come pre-determined at birth, or are fully determined internally later on in life is an attempt to exert power over someone, and generally nothing more.
There is a big difference between making a joke about somebody based on a stereotype – taunting someone saying “you’re gay” or “be a man” – and making a joke subverting those stereotypes or tropes, even if the joke itself hinges on an inferred call to those stereotypes.
This past weekend, I was watching an episode of Friends subverts expectations about homophobia. The show on the whole, especially in the early years, is actually pretty bad about this, and many jokes in this vein don’t hold up all that well (sorry, Chandler). But, in this episode, Ross and Joey fall asleep on the couch together while watching Die Hard.
When the two wake up, they realize they took a nap together, and both are horrified at the prospect of it ever coming up to the group. However, as the episode goes on, both Ross and Joey realize more and more that the nap they took together was one of the best naps they’d ever had. Even though their friends finding out about this might lead them to be ridiculed, the two good friends are considering planning another (completely non-sexual) nap together.
At the very end of the episode, Joey tells Ross he’ll be taking a nap in his apartment upstairs, implying that he would be taking a nap and that Ross would be welcome to join. Joey leaves, and a few seconds later, Ross surreptitiously follows him. I really love this depiction of intimate male friendship in popular culture, especially in the late nineties/early 2000s, because you just didn’t see it that much.
Both Joey and Ross were willing to potentially be ridiculed for napping together, but they valued the experience so much that they did it anyways (and based on the final scene, both friends seemed to be satisfied by the nap). The fact that the very end of the episode involves Ross and Joey being confronted by the rest of the friends upon waking up tells me the writers weren’t all the way there yet, but Ross’ reaction at the end tells viewers and the rest of the gang that both he and Joey knew what they were doing.
I love that moments in pop culture like this still happen, and it’s refreshing to see more and more shows and movies tackling personal moments and stories from a wide variety of viewpoints. I think there’s hope that one day characters like those on the Big Bang Theory will not be misogynist stereotypes, and that the writers won’t feel like they need to make characters assert dominance over one another to get laughs anymore.
I don’t know if I fully agree that riding a bicycle is for everybody, or that it’s the best possible treatment for any condition. However, I do know that, for me at least, riding a bike to and from work for the last several summers has given me more energy, revitalized my health and the way I feel, and helped me to lose 60 pounds since 2015.
While I was visiting family in Calgary for the last couple of weeks, I had the opportunity(ies) to drag my dad and cousin out for bike rides, something neither had really done this year after commuting by bicycle previously. Both were (hopefully) motivated by my eagerness to get out and enjoy the sunshine, and getting the first ride of the season in always helps make subsequent rides easier. Keeping that in mind, I hope both will continue biking when they can, because the benefits of incorporating cycling in to your everyday life are immense!
*The most striking statistic from this video is that in the Netherlands (and other Nordic countries), they consider every euro invested in bicycle infrastructure to be worth 8 euro in returns across the economy.
**As mentioned in the video, perhaps the *most* striking statistic should be the number of people killed in car crashes each year (33,000 in the US alone), but for some reason we accept this in society.
I’ll be honest, I did not see the first movie to come out in the Harry Potter Expanded Universe, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. I haven’t had time to see many movies lately, and I’ve only really made time to be a Marvel completionist for the last couple of years (along with a few other movies here and there).
However, since watching the video below, discussing Eddie Redmayne’s nuanced and emotional portrayal of the wizard protagonist Newt Scamander in Fantastic Beasts, I’m really eager to watch this movie in its entirety.
I love a good action movie, and the first 8 Harry Potter movies rarely failed to deliver at least some compelling action and story. I enjoy superhero movies for the same reason, but most of them are missing a certain something you don’t see very often, if at all, in popular culture.
Masculinity is a narrowly defined set of personality traits that are defined in popular culture mostly in stereotypes and shallow characters. There are male characters who are able to break out of these moulds, but in general, men in the TV and movies are tough, strong, and unemotional. Departure from those traits is considered a departure from the masculine.
The same idea, with a separate set of traits, exists for female characters in the same way. I consider both stereotypical depictions, male and female, to be generally unfair, but for very different reasons.
In Fantastic Beasts, at least as far as I can tell from the Pop Culture Detective video above, Newt is allowed MUCH more emotional and physical leeway in his ‘masculinity’ than male protagonists are normally afforded. He’s not shown as physically strong, and he shows compassion and avoids confrontation where possible. I’m only going to go into a small portion of what the video discusses, but I think a lot of the same reasoning applies.
In the same vein as with Fantastic Beasts, one of the reasons I think 2017’s Wonder Woman was such a refreshing departure from the normal superhero fare is Gal Godot’s incredible portrayal of Diana Prince. She is a fearless warrior who doesn’t back away from a fight, and she’s strong but she deeply cares about and values life and peace. She’s not your typical woman, instead she’s somewhere in the grey area between ‘male’ and ‘female’ archetypes.
Personally, I believe the reason these characters both resonate so strongly with me is that I have always found the ‘male’ archetype wholly unsatisfying to draw aspects of my personality from. There’s nothing wrong with being a beer-swilling, weight-lifting, punch-throwing dude, but that has never been me.
I want to watch chick flicks, I have a good cry when I feel bad, and I’m happier supporting my team from a distance in a fight than engaging in battle directly (whether metaphorically or literally, like in sports). I’m not embarrassed or emasculated if challenged or proven wrong, but I really do enjoy watching sports and showing off my mental or physical strengths.
I’ve met a large enough sample of people in my life to realize that it’s very rare to find somebody who fits entirely in to the ‘male’ or ‘female’ type, and that’s the way I would expect it to be. Life is full of gradients, and most people don’t live in the extremes.
It’s extremely satisfying to see characters in popular culture defying stereotypes and living in grey areas, because it gives people who see them ‘permission’ to behave in non-typical ways, and shows other people that there is more to the human experience than black or white, male or female, and red or blue. Life is full of nuance, and the more people see it that way, the better off we’ll all be.
Wow, this video from Vox starts out slow, in the wake of Bill O’Reilly’s (apparently thoroughly well-deserved) removal from Fox News. Once it gets going though, the clips shown to illustrate the rampant sexism, misogyny, and inappropriate comments from many hosts and talking heads on Fox surprised even me (somebody who is well aware of the ridiculousness of Fox News).
If you don’t make a habit of watching the network (and I hope for your sake that you don’t), it’s worth watching the video just in case you weren’t convinced there is a pattern of sexist behaviour spanning many different shows.
A couple of days ago, the Washington Post published an opinion piece about the actual state of democracy in Canadian government that I disagreed with. I didn’t have the knowledge or time to back that up in any kind of concrete way, but most of it just didn’t make any sense.
One day later, Drew Brown at Vice published a piece that directly responded to the opinion of J.J. McCullough, and I am hoping to point people to that piece, since it did such a great job of thoroughly and thoughtfully debunking almost every single thing I felt was wrong in the original letter.
I know in my heart that while Canadian government is not perfect (as Drew readily admits too), it takes a massively crooked perspective to twist words like J.J. does to make Justin Trudeau and his party seem like dictatorial despots.
