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This just isn’t right, not at any time or circumstance. Yet, these witty ad-wizards have decided that sexism sells and are trying to promote a translation device that allows you, as demonstrated, to creep on non-English speakers.
Awesome.
Cringe worthy to say the least.
Oh hey, if you have not zipped over and read the whole article on the New York Times, you should. The attitudes expressed and the hurdles women face are replicated in almost every occupation and fascinatingly enough the dudes in charge seem pretty “OK” with the situation.
“There had long been a strange sort of omertà on talking about the gender disparity. Even though women watched things getting worse, said Helen Hunt, the actress and director, it was hard to speak up: ‘‘Women who say it’s not O.K. are wet blankets or sore losers.’’ When I began reporting this article several months ago and asked some male moguls in the entertainment industry for their perspectives, they shrugged the issue off as ‘‘bogus’’ or ‘‘a tempest in a teapot.’’
‘‘Not that many women have succeeded in the movie business,’’ one top entertainment boss told me, while insisting on anonymity. ‘‘A lot of ’em haven’t tried hard enough. We’re tough about it. It’s a hundred-year-old business, founded by a bunch of old Jewish European men who did not hire anybody of color, no women agents or executives. We’re still slow at anything but white guys.’’
When I phoned another powerful Hollywood player to ask about the issue, he said dismissively, ‘‘Call some chicks.’’
Yep. Go call some chicks… Indeed.
Need more lobe blowing fun(?):shitpeoplesaytowomendirectors
I’m probably already reprinting to much, but frack it. This shit is too important not to repeat. Go to the Ottawa Citizen’s webpage and read the entire article by Shelly Page.
“I was 24, sent by the Toronto Star to write about the slaughter of female engineering students, all around my age; fourteen of them.
Looking back, I fear I sanitized the event of its feminist anger and then infantilized and diminished the victims, turning them from elite engineering students who’d fought for a place among men into teddy-bear loving daughters, sisters and girlfriends.
Twenty-five years later, as I re-evaluate my stories and with the benefit of analysis of the coverage that massacre spawned, I see how journalists— male and female producers, news directors, reporters, anchors — subtly changed the meaning of the tragedy to one that the public would get behind, silencing so-called “angry feminists.” We were “social gatekeeping,” as filmmaker Maureen Bradley later asserted in her 1995 film, Reframing the Montreal Massacre: A media interrogation.”
[…]
“That evening, I thawed my feet in my hotel and watched the late Barbara Frum, one of Canada’s most respected journalists, refuse to admit that the massacre was indeed an act of violence toward women.
“Why do we diminish it by suggesting that it was an act against just one group?” Frum asked on CBC’s The Journal.
Frum was puzzled that so many women insisted the massacre was a result of a society that tolerates violence against women.
“Look at the outrage in our society,” Frum said. “Where is the permission to do this to women?
“If it was 14 men would we be having vigils? Isn’t violence the monstrosity here?”
She refused to even utter the word feminist. But then, her neutralizing of feminist anger must have resonated, and perhaps was reflexive. Bradley, in her documentary, wondered about Frum’s stance: “Was it necessary to deny any shred of feminism in herself in order to get where she was in this bureaucratic, media institution, boys’ club?”
Bradley also pointed out that the national media did not cover an emotional vigil the day after the massacre, where there was an angry confrontation between Montreal feminists and male students from the Université de Montréal. It would have made great content. Intelligent women voicing their outrage. But the story didn’t make it out of campus newspapers and local TV coverage onto a national stage. This story was not allowed to resonate with angry women.
When I review the stories I wrote, I almost never used the word feminist; I never profiled the achievements of one of the slain engineering students or the obstacles she’d toppled. I never interviewed a single woman who was angry, only those who were merely sad. Why? No one told me what not to write, but I just knew, in the way I knew not to seem strident in a workplace where I’d already learned how to laugh at sexist jokes and to wait until a certain boss had gone for the day before ripping down Penthouse centrefolds taped on the wall near his desk.
My stories were restrained, diligent and cautious. For years, I remembered one of my sentences with particular pride. Reading it now, it shows everything that was wrong with how I covered the event:
They stood crying before the coffins of strangers, offering roses and tiger lilies to young women they never knew.
I turned the dead engineering students into sleeping beauties who received flowers from potential suitors.
I should have referred to the buildings they wouldn’t design, the machines they wouldn’t create and the products never imagined.
They weren’t killed for being daughters or girlfriends, but because they were capable women in a male-dominated field.
I should have written that then.”
Wow. What brilliant article by Ms.Fowles recently published by the Walrus. I’m gonna put the whole thing up here because it sheds light on so many of the issues that face women today in the online world. Consider this example #2348239487 of how woman’s experiences in society are dramatically different than those of men.
“Every so often, someone (always a man) sends me a casual tweet asking why he can’t retweet me. Of course, the obvious answer is that my account is locked—a tiny optional blessing of Twitter’s functionality that means I’m not searchable to the world outside. The more complex answer relates to why my account is locked in the first place, why I would choose to keep people from reading my brilliant musings on ’90s’ teen movies, Rihanna’s latest video, or the myriad virtues of Magic Mike XXL. There are easy, palatable answers I have given to those that ask; I value my privacy, or I like to keep my circle small and manageable, or I prefer to keep the personal aspects of my life away from my employers and ex-boyfriends.
But the most important (and truest) answer is this: I am afraid of men on the Internet.
There’s good reason for this fear, and it’s likely one you’ll empathize with if you’re a woman who has ever dared to have an opinion in the techno-public realm. In fact, women have never once asked me why my account is locked—and unlike some of my male editors, they’ve never recommended opening it up. They understand that the online world has become a horror show, and that men largely drive that horror. Men are usually the ones who post nude pictures of their exes, release the home addresses of the women they dislike, and run the vileness that is Gamergate. (I’m even reluctant to type the word Gamergate, as if doing so conjures the hoards like some kind of Internet Candyman.) Of course, Not All Men, but unless a new Twitter follower has “I hate women” or some variation thereof in his bio, there’s no good way to predict which one will decide to take offence at you merely existing. And there’s no way to know whether that person who is offended will be the one to threaten to end your life.
Online technology has allowed a stranger to tell me he’d like to penetrate me with a broken light bulb because I’d “probably like it.” It has let a commenter inform me that women shouldn’t act the “way they do” if they don’t want men to commit crimes against them. I’ve been the subject of mockery and derision on men’s-rights-activist websites and right-wing blogs. On a good day, the Internet helps people let me know I’m stupid, and on a bad one it helps them threaten me with bodily harm. It’s facilitated me being called a man hater, a feminazi, a libtard, a hack, an attention whore, or just a plain old whore. It’s brought me patronizing questions, profanity-laden emails, and abuse masquerading as “criticism.”
It has also been a great way for people to tell me that I should ignore all this, that I should get a thicker skin, and if I don’t like it maybe I should get offline altogether.”
Catch the rest at the Walrus, as apparently they need their ad revenue – tracking down hole in the wall blogs for copyright violations is an expensive business.
The recent terrorist shooting in South Carolina have brought the issue of racism back to the top of the heap in the mainstream media. I’m sure there will be deep introspective think pieces in all of the major dailies and magazines. Then, like any story the media deigns “having being milked enough”, the racist terrorist attack will be quietly shunted to the side while the next tragedy is cued up for consumption.
Consumption of news these days seems to be the problem though. We are expected to keep track of the world, hell even personalize our ‘news experience’, but that is not what being an educated, engaged member of society is all about. The 5th Estate is (should) there to monitor the centres of power in society and report their activities for the citizens of democratic countries can engage with and evaluate said activities. With so much of media today being focused on infotainment rather than critical analysis of important events how the the average citizen get the information she needs?
There are a couple of threads to pull apart with the questions being raised. Firstly, the idea that personalized news is good idea for democratic societies, secondly the role of infotainment media and lastly the effect of the professional media colluding with the centers of power in society. All three of these aspects work against the creation of active, informed democratic participation in society.
“Society” is the watchword here – the ludicrous amount of personalization options presented to us in North America society gives us choice – and we all know (or should know by now the neo-liberal taint associated with that concept) that the choice presented to us is really a form of atomization that keeps our fingers firmly off the pulse of society and rather, firmly on our own as we sail alone through society.
What comes to mind is an captioned black and white image (pro-tip:if you want to every reuse something save it the first time you see it) of people on a train all
A big tip of the hat to Bleatmop for tracking down this picture.
reading the paper. The witty caption was something like this – smartphones and technology have changed society darn much… You can see the obvious parallel being made; every buried in a newspaper vs. everyone buried in their smart phones. On the surface this is correct but I remember pausing then thinking that something wasn’t quite right.
That “something” was that reading the daily newspaper was a still a shared experience in society. You could talk to someone about an article, even a complete stranger, and it was likely that they would have read the same article and then you could start a conversation about it. How neat is is that? Today though, that is a much taller order as many people have tailored their consumption of news to their tastes and sphere of interests making finding a common ground with people that much more difficult. Talking to people about important issues is what community is about, especially when they have different views on what is the correct course of action. Hashing things out, being charitable, accepting an well reasoned argument are all part of living in a democratic society.
Democracy is not a streamlined affair, nor should it be, because our personal freedom and ethical concerns are at stake. When governments act unilaterally and secretly it doesn’t matter what personal choices you make, it is the society around you that is going to shit and your choosy-choices and personal experiences will also be circling the drain since you are part of said society(see Canadian bill C-51, NAFTA, Trans-Pacific-Partnership). So having a reliable, accessible, common base of public knowledge is important to democratic society.
Democratic society has given us many media choices but, coupled with the capitalist infrastructure that actually runs the show our media sources have conglomerated and become ensconced within the power structures of society. See Fox and Faux News for the most shining example of the marriage between news and corporate propaganda. The focus of much of our news media today is to sell advertising, while educating/informing the public on crucial issues facing society is quite far down the list. I shudder when I see how much of the professional media now resembles Entertainment Tonight rather than the venerable Front Page Challenge (The Fifth Estate, Marketplace, et cetera). It now takes a great deal of time just to filter out the dross to get to the important news that people should know about their society and even then one must take into account the bias and elite influence present within ‘serious news’. The importance of public broadcasters cannot be overstated here – public institutions such as the CBC, NPR, and BBC are more free from the elite consensus and can more accurately report on the issues without the elite’s point of view being considered the default (This is a relative judgment – see Media Lens for an annotated listing of how awesomely independent Auntie Beebs is becoming).
Public broadcasting, with all of its problems aside, is one avenue to escape ‘the preferred message’ being broadcast to society by the corporate media with their vested interests of the status-quo. This isn’t a wild conspiracy theory – the way the world currently works benefits a certain class of people and it is their best interests to maintain the current system because it keeps them at the top of the heap. No mystery present. This system also provides the answers to why certain problems keep cropping up again and again within society – inequality, institutionalized racism and sexism for example. There structures within society serve their purpose; the ‘right people’ profit from their existence and thus are maintained. Just look at the perspectives surrounding mass murders:
The evidence, but then put through the media filters and the very different result…
The NYT’s nails it, for once, and lays down a view into the systemic racism that permeates North American society. This is the story that needs constant repetition. Yet, watch how soon the white racial violence dissipates into the ether. This is not a fluke, not a statistical aberration, this is policy. And thus, because of the collusion of much of the media with the current centres of power, the problems that face our society are not adequately dealt with nor are they given the proper amount of time or analysis that would help the people of the nation understand these problems and what can be done about them.
For those in power though it wise to note that only so much tamping down of these systemic problems can be done. Eventually, these issues take a life of their own and people will take radical action to resolve these seemingly ‘intractable’ problems and not in the way that the nestled elite likes.
It wouldn’t work though, there is just too much grit in the show and the source material. Although, if animated we would have much more dragon time in the series, and more dragon-time is never a bad thing.
The amount of horseshit per square centimetre in this Edmonton Journal editorial must violate the laws of physics, it just isn’t reasonable to pack this much fail into one column of newspaper. Who wrote this tepid work of Tory apologia? To me it smells like the business owners out East decided they needed to nobly stand up for the privileged in our province.
I’ve excerpted the parts I wanted to comment on, but you really should read the entire slavering, propagandistic ode the PC party over at the lowly esteemed Edmonton Journal. Duly note that this is corporate boot-licking at its finest, we should expect nothing less from the fearlessly-besotted-lick-spittles of what passes for editorial board over at the EJ.
“The choice, then, in Tuesday’s provincial election, comes down to competing economic visions.
We need a premier who can be our chief executive, piloting a $48-billion public company through a fiscal minefield for at least the next two years, while the world price of Alberta’s lifeblood, its oil, remains below $75 per barrel.
That person is Jim Prentice.”
I’m not looking for a fracking CEO to run our province. The last thing we need is more business bullshit that erodes our values and sense of community, and more to the point our sense of humanity.
“In his March budget, Prentice came to grips with the issue of the province’s dependence on volatile oil revenues, and took the bold move of ending Alberta’s anti-tax political culture.”
Boldly raising the sin taxes and the gas tax. Visionary stuff there, filled with visiony things and stuff…
“Is it a perfect plan? No. Even he’s admitted that, having reversed a decision to cut a charitable tax credit in half. There’s more room for improvement; many voters believe he should have spread the tax pain to the corporate sector.
Those types of changes could come if Prentice listens to the apparent groundswell of discontent that’s being revealed by recent polls.”
OH OF COURSE, our allegiance to the status quo has been serving the people of Alberta so damn well over the last 41 years. Please note that changing the status quo never starts with electing more of the status quo.
“No one wants another costly and divisive election, hard on the heels of this one.”
Then don’t vote PC and we won’t have any problems with another divisive election, you know kinda like this election called opportunistically before the legislated date.
“only the PCs have campaigned on a vision that balances revenue generation with spending cuts in a way that will allow Alberta to weather this fiscal crisis and be better prepared to avoid future catastrophic swings in oil prices.”
Oh you mean where we balance the books on the backs of the poor and middle class while the elites and the corporations continue to unjustly prosper in our society. I’m tired of that particular PC corporate provincial strategy.
“That sort of thinking is a clear sign that Prentice isn’t leading the same old Tory party; he’s a leader with clarity of vision and the aptitude to chart a new course for Alberta.”
How come this ‘new course’ sounds and looks exactly like the old course from yesteryear, only with different clowns at the wheel? There is no ‘new course’ only more of the same BS that has been and will be bad for the average Albertan.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
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