Items of interest found recently in my RSS feed-reader. What did I miss? Please share what you’ve been reading (and writing!) in the comments.
- More Ratings Controversy – Made in Dagenham
- links for 2010-11-04
- Fat Ladies UK
- Tweeting your abortion
- Stephen Colbert Weighs in on the “Man Up” Chide
- Kotex Sells Tampons by Making Fun of Selling Tampons
- What Guides To Interacting With Police Leave Out
- RIP Democracy
- Toy Story 3 on DVD–More Jessie, Please?
- Recommended Reading for Wednesday, November 3
- Aww, but they made us do it
- Daily Telegraph spruiks to suckers
- Not what we meant by a feminine mystique
- Next time you’re thinking John Howard was the Meanness of Spirit King …
- “There is no way you can ever convince me that Made in Dagenham deserves the same rating as Saw 3-D and an higher rating than Red and The Social Network. No way. Mutilating, shooting, stabbing, and drug use and underage drinking is ok for kids, but using the f word makes your film not acceptable for those under 17. This is so wrong.”
- roundup from Racialicious
- “But on Law & Order: UK, fat women are just another part of the population. Across four episodes, I’ve seen a fat female cop, a fat female witness, a fat female attorney, and a fat female forensics analyst (and possibly some I’m forgetting), all of whom were fat for no other reason than because Fat People Exist.”
- “It seems silly to argue over whether tweeting about your abortion is provocative; of course it is, and the point is to make it less so. The real question is whether or not the #ihadanabortion thread is an effective step in that direction.”
- Well done, Mister Colbert.
- “Let’s not forget, however, that as truly hilarious and inventive as the Old Spice Guy commercials are, their hyperviral popularity was the best thing that ever happened to Old Spice. Likewise, as insightful as this Kotex campaign is, in the end the main goal is to sell you tampons”
- “How many cases of ‘shoot first and ask questions later’ do there need to be before we acknowledge that the ‘communication breakdown’ here is not on the side of people with disabilities, but on the side of law enforcement?”
- “Meanwhile, most USians probably can’t tell you what the fuck the Fairness Doctrine or Citizens United even are, despite their being the two key turning-points in turning this flawed-but-great democratic republic into a giant sweatshop to line the pockets of Garbage Corp.”
- “Media is our lens on the world, our socially constructing and norm-producing mirror, and when it becomes normalized for boys (whether they be toys, monsters, cars, bugs, or humans) to always be the most important characters, this lens is not only reflecting but perpetuating gender inequality.”
- Bloggers on Autistics Speaking Day
- “Sure, that’s a pretty shitty way to spend a couple of weeks, but why go along with it? Why let the people you are reporting on dictate the way you report? Why not just say, ‘no, we’re not going to cover the election like that’?”
- Shameless advertorialising.
- “Now obviously it was very naughty of him to presume to comment on matters of which he is profoundly ignorant.* And of course we can’t expect him to know any better, the dear over-excited puppy.
Hang on one fucking minute.
We’re women, not tablets of Linear fucking B. Our vaginas [for those of us who have vaginas] aren’t Rubik’s Cubes and our boobs [for those of us who have boobs] aren’t the Grand Unified Theory.
And when we fuck, if we fuck, we fuck just like normal human beings.”
- “Given the published reaction of some of the selfish, short-sighted, mean-spirited citizens of Woodside (and I bet there are plenty of Woodside citizens who don’t fit that description, but did they make the papers? Oh my wordy lordy no they did not)…”
*dies of squee*
Squee yourself! I thought you and Pickled Think both made t’riffic responses to Fry’s belated acknowledgement of the whole mess, too.
I get that he meant to be just goofing off around other gay guys, I really do. That’s one of the things that’s so disappointing about the tired old tropes he used
to do soin the process – he would never have dreamed of saying anything so ridiculous if there’d been women in the room, so why is it supposed to be OK that he thought it was OK to say it when there weren’t?Ah. Stephen Fry’s “Silliness” post. It seems to me that one of the least suitable ways to respond, when women are talking about you displaying some eensy teensy gender issyews, is to invite your readers to compared your giving print interviews to their being raped.
And of course, the problem with his self-congratulatory “I don’t read what people say about me on the Internet” stance is that he hasn’t even allowed himself to appreciate that his rubbish was so trivialising towards the fully justifiable concern that women have about any scenario where they are on their own in a dark park, whether the park is full of sexy SNAGs, chocolate smorgasbords or Jimmy Choo sales (to go the stereotype trifecta).
@tigtog: Thanks! I think the whole “just talking to other gay guys” thing hit a lot of my buttons, because I *love* thinking about how we modify our language or tone or opinions for different audiences – but the activism centre of my brain still insists that there are lines that just shouldn’t be crossed, because crossing them in one set of circumstances just makes it easier to cross it in others.
And of course while I realise that not everyone’s an overly-analytical cynic-feminist like myself, it just continues to baffle me that apparently parroting classic, cliched notions about women is somehow meant to obviously be parody. I mean, come on, Stephen, even some of your fans were defending you on the horribly offensive basis that “bipolar made him do it”, not “it was clearly in jest”.
@lauredhel – I managed to miss that bit! But on re-reading I feel entirely smug to see Fry repeating the “well I’m gay, I can’t POSSIBLY know about women’s urges” directly after playing the “some of my best friends are women” card.
Don’t forget the ones who were defending him on the basis of “but he’s absolutely right and you just can’t compete with his giant intellect”.
@lauredhel
I completely shut down after that line. I officially don’t give a fuck about anything Stephen Fry has to say anymore. I wonder if he has a publicist or a friend standing by on the sidelines screaming “You’re making it worse!!!”
I’m trying to think of any reason Fry would have re-tweeted Boganette’s line the way he did, besides that he knew she would get dumped on, and that’s what he intended. At this point I can’t think of one, and I find that really disturbing.
The “playing with an idea” line was pretty disingenuous from someone of his known inventiveness. He must know that repeating the status-quo line verbatim is neither a riff nor a subversion.
It wouldn’t entirely surprise me if Fry is in the habit of broadcasting links that people send to him when it’s an article about himself without paying too much further attention to the content of the article so long as he knows it’s one he actually did do an interview for. Perhaps he just did what he usually does with such links, and this time that blase thoughtlessness came back to bite him. Of course I don’t know whether my hypothesis here is true, it’s just that I do see it as a plausible non-malicious construction of his action, and I don’t generally think that he is a malicious person.
The problem was that she was asking him to confirm/deny that he’d been correctly quoted, and he didn’t bother to do so before broadcasting the link. Perhaps if he had been paying more attention he would have actually thought about her question, reread the interview, and responded a bit more appropriately.
Or not. Maybe he still would have been in brainfart mode.
Ohhh, Hoyden love! :D Ty Tigtog :)
If “some of his best friends are women” I’m trying to imagine what some of them might be saying:
Emma Thompson: *ET exasperated voice* “Oh STEPHEN…”
Judy Dench: *firm M type voice* “STEPHEN!”
Helen Mirren: *menacing, low Mirren voice* “Steeeephen…”
Don’t forget Jo Brand. She’s not one for just doing a gentle eye-roll.