gender

Thanks to Early Bird Catches the Worm for linking! “Is abortion no longer taboo for TV?” That’s the question Entertainment Weekly asked last year on the heels of abortions by major characters on Friday Night Lights (Madison Burge’s Becky Sproles) and Mad Men (Christina Hendricks’ Joan Holloway). If this week’s penultimate episode of Private Practice is any [...]

UPDATE: Pixar’s Brave seems to be following in this tradition. Talk to any feminist over the age of, say, 40 or 50, and you’re likely to hear a sigh of resignation at the state of women in Hollywood, in front and behind the camera. Young women today just care about Sex and the City, he [...]

Do women rule the Internet? There are good arguments for why they do: women are avid consumers and social networkers. Yet for some, women are chronically undervalued by marketers online. If Stephanie Piche has a mission, underscoring the importance of women online is certainly one of them. “Women are out there buying. Men don’t like [...]

  In an industry where most people end up doing not much of anything, Susan Miller keeps busy. The playwright just won a Writers Guild new media award for her and Tina Cesa Ward’s critical and audience darling, Anyone But Me (see my first story on the show). After raising tens of thousands of dollars [...]

If you’ve never heard of Lena Dunham, you’re excused. Dunham’s first theatrically released feature, Tiny Furniture, is this year’s critical darling in DIY cinema (last year was Humpday, the year before Medicine for Melancholy). As with most DIY films, these films saw very limited releases and, if they’re blockbusters, gross in the low six-figures. But [...]

Confession: This year was the first I’d heard of the Alison Bechdel Test (or Bechdel Rule). As soon as I knew it, I admit: I was hooked. Suddenly I left every film calculating whether or not it passed, how quickly it passed, how well it passed, etc. It’s a fun game and industrial critique! Did [...]

Full review at SpliceToday Thousands of movies are released each year, yet I’m always surprised when two of them are similar. Usually I shouldn’t be, but two neo-Westerns about a teenage girl looking for or avenging their fathers is a little too coincidental. Why? Mainly because most films, independent or blockbuster, give us so few [...]

Is something changing in the gay community? Are we afraid of campy feminine boys? Anthropologist Esther Newton thinks so. “Where ten years ago the streets of Greenwich Village abounded with limp wrists and eye makeup,” she writes, “now you see an interchangeable parade of young men with cropped hair, leather jackets, and well-trimmed mustaches.” “Leather [...]

Full post at Tubefilter. In the web series world, shows written by and starring black people are a rare but growing segment of the market. Within the sub-genre, there are surprising number of shows starring black women, a real divergence from television and film. The most well-known, Buppies, did some decent business for both BET [...]

Posted at SpliceToday In the penultimate episode of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, Margaret Schroeder stared at herself in the mirror searching for someone recognizable. Margaret started the series a poor, meek Irish housewife with a husband who beat her and a membership in the local temperance league (the series begins right after Prohibition). But by the [...]