fun with numbers

So the new issue of Good magazine is out, in which they take the time to disapprovingly note that only 10 world leaders are female. Thanks! But Doree at Gawker is good enough to point out that the magazine's own masthead shows less consciousness of the whole gender balance thing:

Out of 21 editorial staffers—including Owner/Founder Ben Goldhirsh, and the photo, design, and web staffs—Good has six women. Three of them are in copy/research, one of them is an editorial assistant, and two others work on the web. So really, there's just one woman, Features Editor Siobhan O'Connor, in a significant masthead position. There are several male staffers with gender-ambiguous names! But a quick Google proves that Casey Caplowe, Morgan Clendaniel, and even Jaime Wolf are all men.

-- Here's what the Times has to say about Descent (not to be confused with The Descent, a 2005 thriller about scary things crawling around in caves):

...the rape's awakening of Maya's [Rosario Dawson] consciousness as a woman of color...elevates "Descent" beyond case study and into the realm of bomb-throwing polemic....[the movie] is not just about the personal experience of rape, but rape as a metaphor for sexual, racial and cultural dominance, and the inadequacy of cruelty as a response.

...Hard to watch but essential to see, "Descent" is at once realistic and rhetorical, and driven throughout by righteous anger that comes from an honest place.

-- Joss Whedon talks to the AV Club about his adaptation of Wonder Woman, which isn't getting made. My hopes for the kind of Wonder Woman movie that can get made are not high.

AVC: In movies and comics, an awful lot of female characters still fall into eye-candy/damsel-in-distress fantasy-object roles, even the supposedly strong heroine types. You've taken a strong stance toward a more empowering kind of feminism in your work -- was that ever an issue?

JW: I have no idea. Obviously, nobody ever said "Don't be a feminist." And nobody ever said "Don't be political." The politics of the movie were all more or less moral, it wasn't like we picked somebody to root against, it's just more like everybody either steps up or they don't, and this is their opportunity to do that. I think that's part of how I got the gig. They wanted her to be strong. It wasn't like Buffy was a crone. It wasn't like anybody thought I wasn't going to make Wonder Woman extraordinarily beautiful. That's part of her thing, that she's so beautiful that men can hardly bear it. I'm all about that, and power just makes her sexier. I certainly wasn't turning my back on her hottie-ness, just because of my politics. I think that's a common misconception about feminism in general.

Itty Bitty Titty Committee… It’s the new film by Jamie Babbit, who made But I’m a Cheerleader, a movie I really liked when I watched it on the floor of someone’s dorm in college. Itty Bitty looks like it could be uncomfortably heavy-handed, which is always the risk with things that have such overt politics. But I have to say, I’m psyched. It’s a clear and unabashed celebration of feminism riot grrrl style (the tag line is “every generation needs a new revolution”), and it’ll be fun to watch. Looks like it opens in (likely very) limited distribution on September 28th.

Bizarrely, The Advocate has one male and one female critic reviewing the film, setting it up as a literal “he said/she said” thing. But their views on it are about the same (which, considering that the woman, Jessica Stities, writes for Ms. and the guy is The Advocate’s film critic Kyle Buchanan, is not so surprising).

Film Threat says:

Sure, there are moments of feminist-filmic stereotypes, like the idea of a happy-time road trip, aggro-fem punk as a full angst release and home movie-looking footage that could be argued as being similar to a million other "women getting empowered, look at them laugh and be happy in their anarchy" scenarios, but you can forgive it here because it fits.

Cinematical allows that the movie is "hard to hate," but asks:

When marginalized and traditionally-underrepresented groups make entertainment as weak, thin, shallow and laden with wish-fulfillment fantasy as the mainstream does, is that a moment of triumph against the dominant paradigm, or a statement of surrender to it?

The production company behind it, Power Up, also looks pretty cool. Their mission is “to promote the visibility and integration of gay women in entertainment, the arts, and all forms of media.”

Here’s the trailer. And here’s a behind-the-scenes thing.

-- Video and performance artist Amber Hawk Swanson got a Realdoll made to look just like her, and then “married” it in Las Vegas. She and the doll wore matching gowns. Now she’s putting Amber Doll to work,

in a project exploring the interplay between fantasy and reality in sexual relationships. The finished work, which is still untitled, will contrast stills of intimate “partnership” scenes with video reenactments of rape scenes from movies such as Irreversible and The Accused.

-- As the leader of Destiny’s Child and now on her own, Beyoncé presents herself as a hard-working, self-guided, amorous woman amid men who can be undependable but irresistible. Destiny’s Child sometimes aimed for songs of female solidarity like “Independent Woman” and “Survivor” — part of a Destiny’s Child medley during the set — while Beyoncé on her own usually keeps things one to one, addressing her man with passion or anger. Onstage she had an all-woman band, and the show used men only as dancers: decorative beefcake for her primarily female audience.

It’s Friday! Let’s go see Bratz: The Movie.

"There's so many other bad influences out there," says Logan Browning, one of the film's four teenage starlets, who plays Sasha. "My dream in life is to impact the world in some way that someone can relate to me, and this movie is perfect. Little girls are going to look up to us and just have a positive outlook on life now."

"The moms love it," says Nathalia Ramos, who plays Yasmin. "There's this one line where Cloe goes, 'My mom is my hero,' and all the moms in the audience just go, 'Awww.' It's empowerment for girls and it's empowerment for mothers, too."

The Washington Post sits down with these radical feminists and asks them “what their characters represent.”

Skyler: "Self-empowering, being true to yourself."

Nathalia: "The value of friendship."

Janel and Logan, almost in unison: "Yes, friendship!"

"This is a great way to start out [your acting career]," says Logan. "It's really good to start out young and fresh and innocent."

Sighs The AV Club, “This is why the terrorists hate us.”

Luckily, Becoming Jane is also out today!

The AV Club says...

Hathaway acquits herself reasonably well under the circumstances, but her Austen has been conceived as a Disney heroine, a headstrong, frisky beauty who seems independent, but melts at a touch.

And Salon calls it a...

...weird effort to remake Austen's life -- about which we actually know very little -- into a genteel, tasteful Harlequin romance. Was Austen really a smarter, feistier Carrie Bradshaw in more sensible shoes, longing for love even as she failed to hang onto it? Becoming Jane would have been more honest if it had been called No Sex in the Country.

Meanwhile, an ad for the movie that’s kicking around the interweb includes what is surely the most important critical response:

Guys, take her to see this one. She’ll love you for it. – Jeffrey Lyons

(Actually, the ad reads “take her to this see one,” the mild dyslexia rendering it only slightly less coherent.)

Well, who reallywants to see a girl-centric movie anyway? There’s Hot Rod, with Andy Samburg. We like him.

Rod is the latest version of what is fast becoming a cliché: the guy who thinks he’s cool but is actually, objectively a loser. You are meant to laugh knowingly at the discrepancy between his self-image and the reality he cluelessly inhabits, and then, to excuse the cruelty latent in this laughter, to sympathize with the sincerity and nobility of his dreams and root for their fulfillment.

…Rod also has a crush on his next-door neighbor, Denise (Isla Fisher), who has a jerky rich boyfriend (Will Arnett) and an endlessly sweet disposition. Ms. Fisher, an actress who showed herself to be a nimble comic performer in Wedding Crashers, is not allowed to be funny in this infantile comic universe. Funny is apparently a guy thing.

At least we have this to look forward to:

Story revolves around a gorgeous transfer student who clings to her virginity and gets all the promiscuous girls in school to abstain from sex; in response, the popular guys ask the school stud to try to bed the poster girl and ending her "virginity rocks" campaign.

Pic will be released as "Maxim's Virginity Rocks," and it's the third that has been set up with a division of the mag designed for randy lads.

Amelie Gillette explains.

Nerve talks to Chris Urbanowicz of The Editors:

Do you have any rock star crushes?

There's no Debbie Harry of our generation at the moment — a girl who's cool but really hot. I mean, there's Karen O, who's definitely as cool as Debbie Harry, but not quite hot on the same level.

inconceivable!

Why, look. It’s an article about author and feminist Rebecca Walker in the Times Sunday Styles section. Walker has a new book coming out on Thursday called Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence. It’s even reviewed, alongside Peggy Orenstein’s similarly mommy-themed book, in this weekend’s Book Review. So what is it about this piece that makes it right for the Styles section? Is it the detailed description of Walker's estrangement from her famous mother, Alice Walker? Maybe. But more importantly, we learn that:

Ms. Walker and her partner, a Buddhist teacher named Glen (whose last name does not appear in the book), have been living in Maui, where [her son] Tenzin plays amid the lush landscape and is pushed about in a Maclaren stroller.

Oooh, I want a Maclaren stroller. And a trip to Hawaii.

In her review, Alexandra Jacobs calls Baby Love “a solipsistic open diary of gestation,” and prefers Orenstein’s account of trying to conceive by any means necessary. “Orenstein’s interrogation of her own profiteering pregnancy retinue comes across as a welcome, even necessary exposé,” Jacobs writes. “Walker’s merely a paean to pampering.” They both sound pretty excruciating to me. Jacobs’ lede is a gem:

One of the pill’s most pernicious side effects is bloat in the publishing industry. For most of history, having a baby — or heck, a dozen — has simply been women’s natural lot, not something they had time or inclination to examine at any length. Now the “journey to motherhood,” as it is often called, is something to be feared, postponed, mulled and eventually exalted in endless memoirs, or “mom-oirs” (though plenty of dads are writing them too).

But what luck! If certain insurance companies have anything to say about it, women will have a hard time getting those birth control pills (while men enjoy coverage for their Viagra). Less birth control and more babies might weaken people's interest in writing about their journeys to parenthood.