Casting a feminist gaze over film and pop culture

EAM, if a new male takes over the pride is it not true he usually kills off any existing cubs ?

Flippinada, haven't seen 50/50 so can't comment but cancer, coupled with 2 female leads and Beaches springs to mind.

Shameless has had some fascinating female characters over the years - Fiona, Debbie, Veronica, Yvonne, Libby etc. Not exactly role models for the middle classes.

I think the creators of Family Guy really DO get how sexist the storylines are, they're doing the whole "hey, it's so ironic, that means we can get away with it!" thing. They get to play out making up storylines where women get abused, where a baby constantly wants to kill his mother basically just for being his mother, where a woman accepts her fucking awful husband and even really fancies him, but have a safe "out" of supposedly being cleverer than their target audience.

I think Green Wing was pretty good on the female character front - in fact in my head I can only think of 5-6 male characters and 8-9 female ones - and they weren't all young/pretty either. In fact the only character who was their mainly because of his hotness was one of the male medical students.

Oh AND can I just play feminism with nature programmes for a second? It's always fun to imagine nature progs without the "the gender politics of the savannah resembles that of 1950s america" viewpoint. For instance, a pride of lions exists as a stable and supportive environment for female lions to hunt together and raise their cubs. They usually permit only one male lion to accompany them, as a sperm donor and bodyguard.

I watched something called Happy Endings the other day. The 3 women worked in fashion, PR (not sure about the 3rd job) and one was ditzy and promiscuous, another was a neurotic, ball busting control freak and the third was the pretty and nice one. It was friends all over again apart except one of the male leads was gay and one was black.

What really bothers me about Family Guy & American Dad is that the creators see themselves as very, very liberal. OTOH One joke from American Dad that did make me laugh was when the dad, Stan, was talking to another American white male and says something along the lines of, "but what really pisses me off is that we don't have all of the privilege any more, now we only have 90% of the privilege and that just really pisses me off."

SGM I am pleased to read about your name. Family Guy is one of those things that you keep reading 'oh it's perfect comedy one you get into it' but after seeing one episode I thought 'I never, ever want to see that again'. Your name makes more sense now.

I agree about Peep Show. Basically all the characters are awful in some way, regardless of gender. (I also love that Big Suze is a countess or something now, it's like she played the role in RL...)

I've never watched more than 5 mins of Miranda, is that a show with a kind of unattractive female loser as a lead? Or is it disappointing?

You can't really blame Disney for the lion king storyline or non realism wrt natural lions - it's the story of Hamlet. Same with 10 things; taming of the shrew. Either would be a decent place to start a discussion on Elizabethan culture but they were written in an era where female roles were portrayed by men on stage so would all have a little of a characature about them

again, its been mentioned before - but almost all of the Studio Ghibli animations have very strong female characters for girls.

My Neighbour Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke...

I have said this before, but tinkerbell and the great fairy rescue

Nearly all characters are female, and are fully realised, not ciphers or plot-moving devices and they possess a range of virtues and flaws, not just the stereotypical girl ones- they should bravery, initiative, resourcefulness, they have agency and an inner life, but they aren't boy characters wearing girlmasks iyswim

best of all, no one falls in love! the film is a paean to female friendship though

i really enjoyed watching it with my then 3 yo dd, shame this was probably the only film that put her and her world front and centre; nearly every other children's film is a wander in guyland, no matter how well written

dd and other girls make up half the population. They deserve better than to see their faces on a big screen as eternal sidekicks or flesh for conquest, while meanwhile, the real life is lived by people, that is to say, men/boys :(

The film 'A Few Good Men' markets Demi Moore as if she's on equal footing with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson. Demi Moore is given all the trappings of a strong powerful woman, but when you look at what she says and what she does, it's just bullshit. She loses every discussion with Tom Cruise, he constantly puts her down, and his brilliance (and when he's not being brilliant, his tearful vulnerability) means that she falls for him.

And the girl Julia Stiles in 10 Things I Hate About You is even worse for that. She's given all the trappings of an actual feminist, interest in womens' rights and challenging males, but all it means is she strops about being moody while trapped in the plot of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. She melts in the ends, though. And young female students think she's a role model.

It's a good point about there not being a lot of recent comedies that aren't gut wrenchingly awful wrt women. I can only think of a couple of recent ones, both of which I thoroughly enjoy.

The first one is Peep Show. I don't know if you'd want to call it feminist as such, but I think it does make it quite clear that Jeremy and Mark aren't meant to be seen as "lovable losers": even though the set-up is superficially similar to something like Men Behaving Badly, it seems to me that the tone of it is quite different - they are straightforwardly losers and we're not meant to think "gosh those poor helpless men". Jeremy is quite definitely meant to be seen as a complete idiot, and Mark comes across as being weak and rather nasty and manipulative at times. But crucially, neither of them are rewarded for it in the way that say Ross in Friends gets rewarded: Jeremy loses every woman he gets together with through his own idiocy and has no career; Mark does eventually marry Sophie, but she then realises that she hates him shortly after marrying him, and he also keeps sabotaging the romance with Dobby. And the women in Peep Show aren't always sympathetic, but they are fully formed characters - Sophie is also rather horrible in her own way, but then at least she figures out how totally incompatible Mark is and dumps him. And Dobby - I can't think of many characters like her on TV - a normal looking, genuinely funny, genuinely geeky misfit woman who works in IT and delivers a magnificent, spot-on rant about porn to Mark. And refuses to put up with him being obnoxious to her.

But at the same time, it would be hard to see a comedy like this with women in the Mark and Jeremy roles, because TV will tolerate men being unattractive losers in lead roles, but not women. Perhaps the closest equivalent is something like Ab Fab, where they get away with it because the main cast were established names and the characters were just so extreme and funny.

And secondly, I would put in a vote for Arrested Development: again, all the characters are horribly manipulative and selfish, but all the women are real characters. Although it does that Simpsons thing of tricking you into thinking there are more women characters in the cast than there actually are.

I thought your name was making a joke about you having a baby who looked like he would say very sarcastic things (and try to take over the world) if he could talk.

It is a tyranny

Four of the bastards darlings.

They own the house and everything in it and let us in under sufferance, it seems.

i worship them really

A tyranny of cats

excellent collective noun

I live in a tyranny of cats as well.

Many's the time when both DP and I are pinioned in our seats by a cat, and out of reach of the remote control, so have to sit there and watch something like Deal or No Deal.

The cats don't give a shit.

Anyone else like Bones? Strong women in that, and usually passes the bechdel test. I can't bear phinneas and ferb, the sister never seems to win.

Really enjoying tht Friends thread again

I urge you all to check out that comedy clip I posted. It really is funny! About MTV.
Americn Dad is by the same people? well don't overstretch those imaginations.

I don't watch Family Guy, it seems a bit frat boy humour, but I've seen a few episodes.
Isn't there a running gag about the elderly neighbour's paedophilic tendencies? And the onus is on Christopher to avoid him. Hilarious

I love this thread www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/1209195-Ways-the-TV-series-Friends-was-anti-feminist