A Crash Course in Feminism Mk. II (or, why everyone should be a feminist)

[Earl Harbinger]

And in [url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/markkermode/posts/Star-Trek-A-Sorry-Business]other news[/url] Director of Into Darkness to apologise for gratuitous shot of leading lady in her scuddies.

Shame he's not apologising for making such a rubbish film

But yes. Said shot was entirely gratuitous. Was there need for her to change clothing? Yeah, ok I'll give them that one. Was there any need for us the audience to see the inbetween? Nope. Kirk, yes as it's part of his character. But the audience? Just gave us cheapies.

I think it was David Duchovny who said that pretty much all nudity is usually gratuitous.

I haven't seen the movie and it certainly seems to be a case of using an actress as eye candy, and I can understand the exasperation that directors/studios still such trite appeals to the lowest common denominator. That said, it does seem to be a bit of making a mountain out of a mole hill. It's a summer movie that's a retcon of a sci fi series, the movie isn't harming anyone. It's not like there isn't a history of this type of thing in Star Trek. Why did Kirk always have to fight shirtless? Why did the Starfleet uniform for women consist of a miniskirt?

[Mr Mystery]

He's such a dude!

And nice to see he's taking a dual approach. Help tackle the abuse, and the cause.

Top, top man.

[eldargal]

I don't think it is making a mountain out of a mole hill. It was a stupid, pointless, gratuitous scene and it is being treated as such and the writer and director have acknowledged it as such and apologised. It was still an excellent film, in my opinion, and I've seen it twice.

[Earl Harbinger]

I don't think it is making a mountain out of a mole hill. It was a stupid, pointless, gratuitous scene and it is being treated as such and the writer and director have acknowledged it as such and apologised. It was still an excellent film, in my opinion, and I've seen it twice.

But it happens in virtually every movie, Alien, Return of the Jedi, Transformers, Barbarella, Independence Day, Total Recall, etc. Why is it a newsworthy travesty this time?

[Psychosplodge]

T
[URL="http://lemonsweetie.tumblr.com/post/51652237280/let-me-tell-you-a-thing-about-an-amazing-man"]From here[/URL] via Lipstick Femininsts tumblr

Saw that earlier elsewhere on tumblr.
Lot of respect for Sir Patrick Stewart.

[eldargal]

Because people expect better of Star Trek, it isn't always perfect but Star Trek has been one of the most empowering shows for women for decades.

[Mr Mystery]

There's nudity, scuddie shots....and gratuitous ones of the same.

For instance, Alien. She's in cryosleep. Undies makes sense. RotJ...she was a slave girl, makes sense. Transformers? Gratuitous. Barbarella? Sexploitation film. ID? She's a stripper. Gratuitous role. Total Recall? EDITING THIS BIT... Whole film is about one man's ego trip. The gratuitous nature is part and parcel, and one could say a witty take on it, being deliberately gratuitous....

Into Darkness? Fully gratutious in what is essentially a family film. No need for it. Nothing to do with the plot. First one, where we see the lovely Rachel Nicholl greened up and in her scuddies? They're making out, and it's establishing the womanising part of Kirk's character. Less gratuitous, but still not entirely necessary.

[eldargal]

Right! Take the alien girls earlier. Yes they were scantily clad but they were there having consensual, adult sex with Kirk. No problem there. There was a purpose. There was no purpose to the other scene, in fact it was quite voyeuristic because Kirk was told not to look, indicating the character wanted her privacy, and he looks anyway AND the audience gets an eyeful. All for absolutely no purpose.

[Denzark]

I like these things where I learn something new - such as Misandrist. But there are contradicitions. EG spoke earlier in favour of positive discrimination. But that is an enemy of true equality. It is illiberal to try and change someones socialized for another socialized view, ie from non-feminist to feminist.

'But,' I hear you cry: 'those socialized views don't allow for the true equality of the male and female of the species in their natural form, we are all homo sapiens and thus equal.' Hang on though - if we go by pure Darwin the female isn't equal and tends to be (with notable exceptions stnad fast Zola Budd et al) be physically weaker.

So why should one acquiesce to a feminist viewpoint of equality, in opposition to one's social upbringing, just to accomodate the social mores of another, when the illusion of equality is against survival of the fittest (which issue was brought up in the links referenced by EG - ie the female homo sapiens takes on board a male homo sapiens protector and acts in submission to him in order to protect her against the other more sexually predatory male homo sapiens?

I rapidly come to the conclusion that society cannot take on board all view points as valid, thus society itself will always engender inequality - because there is a need to sacrifice self interest for the benefit of the many. Thus until all societal ideas of social standing disappear, society will always be unequal - probably because it matches the inherent inequality of the natural world.

I would not relinquish my social identity - the funny thing is those who suffer no qualms about their low social standing (I generalise with the Jeremy Kyle example) are those who I wish to distinguish from by highllighting my own social differences.

[Earl Harbinger]

Interesting article from earlier this week. I agree that feminism should be focused on removing barriers limitting women's achievements and not focused on demonizing men. Yet whether it's due to a media contrivance/conspiracy, or a misconception of feminism by some (many?) of the more publicized feminist groups the movement seems to focus more on the latter than the former. Domestic violence and abusive relationships are a serious problem but it seems rather myopic, hypocritical and political to take a position that satirical Facebook pages about domestic violence directed at women are horrible but satirical Facebook pages about domestic violence directed at men are ok. Shouldn't the focus be on educating people that healthy relationships don't involve violence at all? Taking a position that bad behavior is acceptable if it's directed at them but not if it's directed at us isn't going to be an effective strategy for eliminating that behabior form society.

Feminists vs. Facebook
By Cathy Young - May 28, 2013

Of course there is some real, gross misogyny on the Web. But how likely is it that a Facebook user would encounter such content on the site without actively looking for it? For the record, its existence was news to me after several years of Facebook activity. The now-removed pages were hardly popular: a Google cache shows that “Violently raping your friends, just for laughs” had a whopping 17 “likes”; “Kicking your girlfriend in the fanny because she won’t make you a sandwich” had 34. (That’s one fewer than the still-existing “Dumping your boyfriend via castration”.) On the HuffPost Live panel, Friedman and co-campaigner Laura Bates talked about women being driven off Facebook by sexism, but the evidence is, once again, strictly anecdotal. Non-anecdotally, women were 57 percent of Facebook users last year. Friedman also claimed that Facebook staff is “overwhelmingly male”; actually, in 2011, it was about one-third female, the best among the major technology companies.

Now, the feminist protest coalition is pushing advertisers to drop Facebook unless the company takes appropriate action. The demands include training moderators to recognize gender-based hate speech (presumably as defined by radical feminists) and “to understand how online harassment differently affects women and men.” The last part is especially revealing. The activists clearly don’t want equal treatment for what could be considered gender-based hate speech against men, such as the Facebook page “Beating up your boyfriend to keep him in line” (which is still online and has over 16,000 “likes”)—or a feminist “satire” exhorting the average man not to rape women, which has over a thousand Facebook shares.

People have every right to speak out against bigotry and bashing—and to ask moderated websites to reject noxious content. But letting ideologues dictate the boundaries of acceptable speech on a large area of the Internet is a very bad idea.


Read more: [url]http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/05/28/feminists_vs_facebook_118574.html#ixzz2UmxdGxSD[/url]
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