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.

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.

-- Peggy Orenstein is teaching women to write Op-Eds.

Ms. Orenstein asked: Could every woman at the large rectangular table name one specific subject that she is an expert in and say why?

...Of the next four women who spoke, three started with a qualification or apology. "I'm really too young to be an expert in anything," said Caitlin Petre, 23.

"Let's stop," Ms. Orenstein said. "It happens in every single session I do with women, and it's never happened with men." Women tend to back away from "what we know and why we know it," she said.

And then…

"What I want to suggest to you," she continued, is that the personal and the public interests are not at odds, and "the belief that they are mutually exclusive has kept women out of power." Don't you want money, credibility, access to aid in your cause? she asked.

Cristina Page, a spokeswoman for Birth Control Watch in Washington, leaned forward. "I've never heard anyone say that before," she said. "What you've just said is so important. It's liberating."

-- Also liberating: having a vagina + playing a guitar.

That she's now a woman who "shreds" — the verb for super-fast, heavy metal-esque guitar playing — doesn't strike her as unusual, even though many still see rock guitar playing as an expression of male sexuality, and the guitar itself as phallic prop... "I'm conscious that I'm a woman playing the electric guitar relatively well, and that it's not that common," Ms. Stern said. "But — and this maybe sounds really cheesy — there's the personal relationship I have with the guitar which doesn't have to do with gender or anything like that. It's the thing that produces a creative side in me. I just see it in a totally separate way."

-- File this under Branding Disguised as Liberation: Piece of CAKE: Recipes for Female Pleasure (the red velvet-covered inanity that was published over a year ago and billed as a bible to women’s sexuality) came out in paperback last month. Gone are the plush covers and fancy transparent slipcover. The book has been re-titled The Hot Woman’s Handbook: The CAKE Guide to Female Sexual Pleasure and the cover now features a tried and true photo of a bra and pantied torso, with no head. But this chick's got her hand on her hip, so you know, she’s sassy.