Chart it!

Who wants to get drunk and make a genre chart this weekend?

Come on, I can't be the only one who loves charts...
speaking of ilovecharts, actually, you guys would probably like some of them.... shayla? hannah? carrie? (referring to your art stuff, not your health)
and a little gender related holiday cheer?

Childbirth, sons, marriage, and more

When I started watching Pan's Lab, I thought of Octavia Butler's "Bloodchild," which is available in full online (about 30ish pages in a normal book) if any of you are interested in reading it. It's a sci-fi story - Hugo winner, Nebulus winner. Even though it's not a fairy tale (or I hadn't thought of it that way previously...), it definitely touches on feminist issues we've been talking about in class. And it's fabulous.

Disney, Disney, Disney

Hey guys,

So some people may already know that I'm a huge animation nerd. I've been following Tangled since once upon a time when it was still Rapunzel. By following, I mean reading stories, looking at pictures, listening to the song samples, and watching videos.

Today I watched a video on YouTube. This is a Disney-sponsored video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV1pPsji7BQ

I was wondering if anyone else thinks that this video is as problematic as I think it is. I'm talking specifically about the part in the middle, when it's showing "What you can do if you're 'Grounded For Life.'" The overall message is irking me a little bit, too. I'm not even sure I can say why.

As we continue with the Bluebeard section...

I mentioned in class today that "Bluebeard's Egg" works as an artistic illustration of Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. As we continue with the Bluebeard section, we might also consider Emma Goldman's "Marriage and Love" essay, particularly these portions:

• From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal; therefore her training and education must be directed towards that end. Like the mute beast fattened for slaughter, she is prepared for that. Yet, strange to say, she is allowed to know much less about her function as wife and mother than the ordinary artisan of his trade. It is indecent and filthy for a respectable girl to know anything of the marital relation. Oh, for the inconsistency of respectability, that needs the marriage vow to turn[7] something which is filthy into the purest and most sacred arrangement that none dare question or criticize. Yet that is exactly the attitude of the average upholder of marriage. The prospective wife and mother is kept in complete ignorance of her only asset in the competitive field—sex. Thus she enters into life-long relations with a man only to find herself shocked, repelled, outraged beyond measure by the most natural and healthy instinct, sex. It is safe to say that a large percentage of the unhappiness, misery, distress, and physical suffering of matrimony is due to the criminal ignorance in sex matters that is being extolled as a great virtue. Nor is it at all an exaggeration when I say that more than one home has been broken up because of this deplorable fact. (6-7)

• ...what remains of the protection and glory of the home? As a matter of fact, even the middle-class girl in marriage can not speak of her home, since it is the man who creates her sphere. It is not important[10] whether the husband is a brute or a darling. What I wish to prove is that marriage guarantees woman a home only by the grace of her husband. There she moves about in his home, year after year, until her aspect of life and human affairs becomes as flat, narrow, and drab as her surroundings. Small wonder if she becomes a nag, petty, quarrelsome, gossipy, unbearable, thus driving the man from the house. She could not go, if she wanted to; there is no place to go. Besides, a short period of married life, of complete surrender of all faculties, absolutely incapacitates the average woman for the outside world. She becomes reckless in appearance, clumsy in her movements, dependent in her decisions, cowardly in her judgment, a weight and a bore, which most men grow to hate and despise. Wonderfully inspiring atmosphere for the bearing of life, is it not? (9-10)

• The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates her for life's struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection, which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character. (11)

What do you guys think? Connections between these bits and the Bluebeard stories we've read so far?

Ahhh you guys have to check this out!

http://www.overthinkingit.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Overthinking-It-Female-Character-Flowchart.png

Apples

I'm doing some image research for an art project right now... came across some great vinyl laptop details/skins:

eve
snow white I
snow white II
witch

Vivian Ward and Her Fairy Godlover

There’s something about Cinderella stories that has always bugged me. Is it the way she wins the day? In the end, her hard, backbreaking work doesn’t matter for shit. It’s her cherubic face, bouncing blonde curls, and small, slender feet that make her a princess. 

In Pretty Woman, we meet Vivian Ward, our prostitute Cinderella, whose hard work isn’t getting her anywhere, either. And the work is much harder and more dangerous than cleaning for an evil stepmother. Evil stepmothers might be preferable to the men Vivian might meet on the streets, the ever-present chance that this guy or the next is going to be much worse than what she expected when she took on the job. 

It’s luck, a cute blonde wig, and slender legs that draw in Edward Lewis, the guy who could be Vivian's Prince Charming. Interestingly enough, the original Cinderella’s work ethic seems to have been transplanted in Edward instead of Vivian. He’s a workaholic businessman who toils even while Vivian dangles over his desk and wonders what in the world he hired her for.

Vivian herself is . . . what? Spunky? Funny? Friendly? Oddly childlike for someone entrenched in what we consider to be an “adult” occupation. Blow jobs and I Love Lucy, innocent bubble baths turned into an exercise in voyeurism. Not that her personality matters all that much. It might be enough to win over Edward, at least initially, but the rest of the cast don't soften up to her until she's glittering and glamorous. Her real value, the movie would have us believe, is her beauty. She puts on a dress and suddenly people who never would’ve given her the time of day beforehand become servile and groveling, desperate to please the pretty woman. The value of her expensive clothes rubs off on her. Defines her, even.

Of course, these aren’t really Vivian's clothes. They weren’t bought with her money. Her value is a gift given by her Prince Charming, who is, at the same time, her Fairy Godmother. A flash of Edward's magic dollar, and Vivian's rags (blood red, the color of sex and violence), transform into a beautiful gown, and only then is she ready to go to the ball.

In the end, when it looks like she's ready to stand on her own two feet, her Prince Charming sweeps in as if to rescue her. As if she needed rescuing from the horrors of making her own way. Edward scales her apartment-complex-slash-tower, an action that might seem much more heroic if Vivian weren't about to walk out without much fuss anyways, and they ride into the sunset on his noble limousine. Happily ever after, at least until his controlling attitude drives her to walk out on him again.

Ellen Handler Spitz Reviews "The Grimm Reader: The Classic Tales Of The Brothers Grimm" | The New Republic

Ellen Handler Spitz Reviews "The Grimm Reader: The Classic Tales Of The Brothers Grimm" | The New Republic

In Response to "Notes on Isolation"

(This was originally supposed to be a comment, but it ended up getting a little long. I thought it'd be more readable in this form.)

Personally, I think it would be way more interesting if the Princesses passed the Bechdel test. I love character interactions, and I can imagine that there are quite a few girls out there who've basically said to hell with Disney's canon and made up their own stories using as many princesses as they had dolls.

"Notes on Isolation" reminded me of something most people versed in Disney lore probably don't know much about, a video game by the name of Kingdom Hearts. In it, a young boy travels across a universe of Disney worlds in order to stop the "Heartless," creatures of darkness encroaching on each world. Over the course of the game, the seven "Princesses of Heart" (Cinderella, Aurora, Snow White, Alice, Jasmine, Belle, and a new girl added by the game, the hero's own love interest, Kairi) are kidnapped from their realms and transported to one of the final levels, Hollow Bastion, where the boy eventually rescues them.

And somehow, despite the fact that all of the Princesses are obviously sharing the same space, standing right next to each other in an identifiable world, Disney manages to keep up the Disney ideal set forth by Mooney.

You can see, in this video (skip to 0:44, watch until 1:42), that the Princesses never look at each other.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc-ZgqL5q4U

Though they say "we," referring to the Princesses as a group, they never address one another, only Sora, the young hero. In the entirety of the game, I can't think of an instance where the Princesses chat amongst themselves. In many of Kingdom Hearts' levels, in fact, there is only one female to be found at all! If there are two, the second is usually a Disney villain. This may be due to the constraints of basing the levels around Disney films, but it's still a bit jarring.

In the one case that I can think of which may adhere to the Bechdel test, the female characters don't belong to Disney at all. They're taken from the Final Fantasy series. The two that spring to mind are Aerith Gainsborough and Yuffie Kisaragi, who, alongside Squall Leonhart, provide background support for Sora. They probably fail the test, anywho, because I'm almost certain that all of their conversations are about Sora and his quest.

It's also interesting to note that in every new land, Sora gets to team up with a Disney movie star. In the "Alice in Wonderland" level, rather than allow Sora to team up with Alice, the movie's heroine, he gets no one. Over the course of his journey, he meets Tarzan, combs the streets of Agrabah with Aladdin, traipses through Halloween Town with Jack Skellington, flies through London with Peter Pan, rescues Belle from a cursed castle with Beast, and defeats Ursula with Ariel.

Yep. Ariel. The only female character to earn a place in the party. And in the second game, Mulan is the standout female party member while Ariel has been relegated to a minigame.

I'll be the first to say that I love these games. They're a ton of fun, and as a "fangirl" of both Final Fantasy and Disney movies, I can't help but enjoy the relentless cameos. But I'd never thought about them with a feminist eye before. It's startling and disappointing, especially since this mingling of movies could have given us so much more than Disney's same old, same old.

Notes on Isolation

I was drinking out of my Princess mug (looks something like this) the other day after class... it was the day that Hannah had introduced us to the Bechdel Test, I believe. I realized: the Princess mug doesn't pass the Bechdel Test, either.

Peggy Orenstein, in her NYT article "What's wrong with Cinderella" (Dr G. passed it out at some point), touches on the non-interactivity of the way that the Princesses are marketed:

• "Mooney [Disney marketing executive] picked a mix of old and new heroines to wear the Pantone pink No. 241 corona: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Mulan and Pocahontas. It was the first time Disney marketed characters separately from a film’s release, let alone lumped together those from different stories. To ensure the sanctity of what Mooney called their individual “mythologies,” the princesses never make eye contact when they’re grouped: each stares off in a slightly different direction as if unaware of the others’ presence" (Orenstein, fourth paragraph on page 2).

Here's a quick Google image search example.

However, Orenstein doesn't explore the implications of this isolation. What do you guys think? Should the princesses be kept separate to maintain the "individual 'mythologies'" or should they pass the Bechdel test?

Project Gutenberg is awesommmme. Check it out.

Project Gutenberg is...
"the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks" (from their website). Everything is free because their copyrights have expired; it's all in the public domain. Therefore, it's a fab place to find oooold texts that discussed gender and sexuality. One of my favorite ones is Henry Stanton's Sex: Avoided Subjects Discussed in Plain English (circa 1922).

Here are some other wonderful links to texts about sex...
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26117/26117-h/26117-h.htm
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31352/31352-h/31352-h.htm
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20830/20830-h/20830-h.htm
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14969/14969-h/14969-h.htm
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21840/21840-h/21840-h.htm


Aaand, there are some really awesome fairy tales available! MANY by the Grimm brothers, Frank L. Baum (and here and here), and many more - different cultures, time periods, languages are represented. Just type in "Fairy" in the second search box on the left column.

Kicking things off in the proper way

This is some really well-crafted comedy... we danced around a bit of this today in class (gay sex and representations of it in pop culture). It's short, hilarious, wonderful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in9SiDtJLaU
(if you're really pressed for time, start at about :45)