OK Wow, So It's Been a Long Time

This blog loosely follows my interests at the time, and last fall that was mainly following the election and all the ass-clownery that went along with it. But it's kind of a depressing season for politics right now (a stimulus that hasn't slowed job loss, a health care reform bill that is not a slam-dunk for improving the national health care picture, a deployment to Afghanistan with a hazy mission) and while I've been following, I haven't felt the urge to write much. Things are either too ridiculous (see Palin's WaPo op-ed on climate change...or George Will's for that matter, which maybe does warrant a rant to the effect of: he's no different from any other ideologue twisting the facts to suit his argument, always referring to "global warming" and shallow reasoning) or too depressing or too complex.

So recently, I've gotten into the fat-o-sphere, and it's made me a bit sensitive to the patriarchy these days. Last night I saw The Hangover, which was fucking hilarious and Bradey Cooper is gorgeous, but I have to go on record to air some of my major issues with the movie. We have 4 images of women throughout the film: the archetypal hooker who is redeemed by a man, who happens to be a rich doctor, the shrew or bitch who is overly controlling of her man and a hypocrite who gets dumped and publicly shamed to boot, actual hookers/strippers all over the lap of a married man (teacher!) like that's okay, and the blushing bride who really doesn't do anything other than sit around, have her hair done, and wait for her man to show up so she can forgive him. Obviously this movie isn't meant to take on the patriarchy, and parts of it were damned funny, but in some ways it's more important to have women portrayed positively in movies like this, as the norm that nobody would think twice about, rather than "ghettoized" in movies that can be written off as feminist propaganda/message movies or with an attitude of "yeah, that would be nice, but that's not how the world works."