Interesting posts, weekend of 7/17

07/18/2010 at 8:22 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Tags: blogging, Feminism, news

Dear internet, I watched Disney’s The Princess and the Frog on DVD. While I’m glad to see a return to traditional 2-D animation and Disney’s first black princess, there are (obviously) several problems with the film.
If I could summarize the moral of the story, I would say it’s, “Give up your lifelong dreams for love.” and by “Love,” I mean, falling in cis het love. You have this young black lady, Tiana, clearly struggling against a history of classism and racism as she works toward her goal of being an entrepreneur, and she gets derailed to bail this strange man, Prince Naveen, out of trouble, even though she’s never met the guy before. And I was not impressed by the prince at all, he was very underdeveloped. He didn’t do much other than serve as a foil for Tiana.
And Tiana is pressured by other characters to relax on her dream and settle down, with a man. There’s no stopping to ask whether or not Tiana is even interested in a relationship.
And yet when they are thrown together, Tiana and Naveen somehow fall in love after only 24 or maybe 48 hours. The price is ready to give up his philandering ways and settle down into monogamy after only about a day of exposure to Tiana. He’s supposed to have learned a valuable lesson about hard work and independence but since he was so free rolling for his entire life up to that point, I doubt he’ll change overnight. Obviously it’s not a realistic scenario. I don’t want to spoil the ending but it bothered me. I found the ending disturbing.
Don’t even get me started on the character shading, or lack thereof. You’d think with the importance of shadows throughout the film, the animators would take more time to add subtle shading to costumes and faces and arms and such. I was expecting a full feature-length animation masterpiece over here, not some Saturday Morning Cartoon rushjob with the shading! And Disney has this thing where they recycle old character designs. The alligator looked identical to some of the alligators in the Rescuers movie. I guess there’s only so many ways you can draw an alligator in such a way as to give it a unique personality but this was a very generic looking cartoon alligator to me.
I loved Keith David as Dr. Facilier though :3 I want to know everything there is to know about the Shadow Man. How did Facilier become the Shadowman? What deal did he make with his friends on the other side? What is the extent of his magic? What specialty is his doctorate in? (I bet it’s philosophy.) What a show stopper. Ohh man can you imagine how good he would look in 3D, like in a Kingdom Hearts game? And I don’t even play Kingdom Hearts. Oh man if Disney made one of those direct-to-DVD prequel movies to The Princess and the Frog, and it was about Facilier, I’d totally watch it. But it better be scary and he better get a detailed back story.

Also, I need to ask this here because it is a deeply philosophical question: What would happen if a tick bit a vampire?

These are the deeply philosophical questions we need to better understand the world around us!

Friendly reminder: I am looking for Guest Posters. I want to hear more perspectives on the themes dealt with here at Feminists with Female Sexual Dysfunction. Because I am dealing with such a sensitive topic, I don’t think I can actively recruit new posters, since if I went onto someone else’s blog and said something like, “Hey u wanna write a post about your sexual health and/or feminism on a public forum?!” that would probably be very invasive. For this reason, Guest Posters requesting to remain anonymous will also be taken seriously.
At this time, criteria for inclusion is, “If you think you would fit in here, you probably would.” This may be subject to change but for now we’ll try that & see how it goes.
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Can’t get enough of feminism and sexual dysfunction on the internet? You may want to think about following the Twitter feed, which is more accurately described as my Twitter feed since no one else manages it. Some of my daily mundane and/or angry thoughts sneak in there but I try to include trendy topics as well as a healthy dose of sexual dysfunction related news when I find it.

Now then, on with the weekly blog link roundup. Posts I found interesting over the last weeks. Share links if’n you got’em.

Please note, I wrote most of this week’s blog link roundup while working on my mobile device. Due to the nature of the mobile device and mobile media, there may be some manufacturing errors in this week’s collection. If you see anything glaringly wrong, let me know.

First up here’s some links pertaining to sexual dysfunction –

In Which I Masochistically Attempt to Understand Camille Paglia – a rebuttal to Camille Paglia’s bizzaire anti-flibanserin, anti-FSD in general NYT piece. Surprisingly this rebuttal treats FSD with the same respect as any other disability.

Vaginismus & Pain During Sex – A short piece of advice & encouragement from Dr. Lissa Rankin, who has personally dealt with vaginismus & vulvar vestibulitis.

Two (maybe NSFW) posts about Dr. Amy Marsh, a sex educator & sexologist who has experience working with clients who have Asperger’s Syndrome. This one is about her. Sex Educator Profiles: Dr. Amy Marsh. And here, she answers questions about sex and Asperger’s Syndrome. Sex & Asperger’s Syndrome: An Interview with Dr. Amy Marsh

My disabilities and sex – about sex and sexual problems with depression and possibly another disability, though the word “Dysfunction” is not explicitly used.

There was yet another post about Orgasm Inc by someone who hasn’t watched it yet and I was going to include it but then I watched the trailer and I was like, “Not today…”

And here’s some stuff not necessarily related to sexual dysfunction.

Media, news, celebrity and art:

Roman Polanski set free by Swiss authorities – After all that, Roman Polanski walks free, not to be extradicted to the US to face charges for child rape.
“Why does this matter,” ask hardcore Polanski fans. C. L. Minou has an analysis of Polanski getting off the hook over at Tiger Beatdown. Forget it, Jake: It’s Patriarchy.

Speaking of art, media and Tiger Beatdown, here’s a post that addresses two other contemporary cases – a farce of a non-trial revolving around (swear to god) milk enema porn (something about obsenity laws,) and a photographer (not related) who took video of his daughter’s developing breasts and passed it off as Art. SEXIST BEATDOWN: What’s Good For the Goose Is Good for Buttman Edition. Interesting to me because I have had art teachers who would defend a pile of dog shit as artistic expression so long as someone called it art. Or better yet a photograph of a dog taking a shit.

Accessibility and disability:

What Does it Mean to Get Better? – Changing the way you think about “Better” when living with chronic health conditions.

Announcing: Disability Carnival #68 – Deeply Problematic will host the next Disability Blog Carnival. The theme is “Evidence.” You have until July 26 to submit something.

On access policies, conventions, and sausages – steps to consider when designing programs, to make such programs more accessible.

Quite a number of links on racism and racefail this week:

The Master’s Publishing House – the publisher who shall not be named is Seal Press FYI and if you browse the internet back far enough you can get confirmation on what the commenters are talking about.

Learning Fail – Gizmondo editor engages in racefail, sexism, colonialism, at least. Guest poster knitmeapony concludes,

My psychic prediction: Next week, Gizmodo once again laments that tech & programming culture have a dearth of women and people of color. I will definitely get that irony. Sigh.

Mm-hm.

Unusualmusic spells out the long term problem of racism and whitewashing in Hollywood: Whitewashing: Stealing our stories from real life to fiction.

‘Fair and Handsome’= White as Vaseline Skin Whitening Facebook Tool markets colorism in India – Vaseline is marketing its potentially dangerous skin-lightening cream in India with a photo editing FaceBook application.

Bait taken – The NAACP called out the Tea Party on its systemic racism and in response Tea Partier Mark Williams posted a racist message which just proved the NAACP’s point.

Ungroupable:

Mansplaining – defining mansplaining, with examples.

Some Good News On Pay Equity – – “Some” being the key word here. If you’re under 35 you’ll probably do better in pay equality relative to older generations, but after that we still got a long way to go.

Feel the Homomentum! – Argentina has legalized same sex marriage.

These two things are not like each other. – the Catholic Church has declared that inordinating women is an abominable crime on an equal level as molesting children. Because I don’t know why.

Michael Kimmel on male entitlement, anger and invisible privilege – I liked this post about masculinity and feminism. It’s not a happy post per se though.

Dear Imprudence: When to Out a Transgendered Dater? How About Never? – Terrible to the point of dangerous advice given by an advice columnist.

I’m sure there’s more…