A Lack of Color

I have a celebrity crush on Nonso Anozie. I watched Ender's Game and tweeted that he was just as cute in that as he was Game of Thrones. He favorited it and I did a fangirl squee.

Who is he? He's the black guy in GoT, Dracula (the series), Ender's Game, and The Grey.

I never truly appreciated how white washed my media was until I had to explain who he is but I was definitely starting to see it in Ender's Game. One of the characters was known for being Spanish and an incredibly beautiful young boy. In the book it is very clear this character has tan skin and black hair. While Moises Arias is mixed and fluent in Spanish, he looked as Anglo as anyone in that movie.

Arias did a very good job in the role but they didn't do much to make him look the part. It makes me wonder if the auditioned anyone who did. Something similar happened on The Hunger Games. Jennifer Lawrence did an amazing job but I don't think the casting should have been a call for Aryan breeding.

Looking at GoT, almost everyone is white. There are 2 black characters, the pirate and the richest man in Qarth. Even the background characters have little diversity. I'm against colorblind casting in a period piece but this is a fantasy where characters' hair colors aren't restricted to the norms. Why is the skin color?

Why can't there be any background Wildlings that look like Eskimos? Why can't some of the average citizens in King's Landing have some diversity? Why was the BFF in Warm Bodies a white girl when she's a one-armed black chick in the book?

I have a friend from India who has a roommate named Igor. His group house is like a mini-UN with all the places of origins in that house. The group of people I socialize with includes a variety of faiths, races, genders, and professions. (This includes a Chinese doctor and very WASP-y lawyer. Make your own jokes.)

Why can't Hollywood reflect my reality? If the level of whitewashing in Hollywood is starting to grate on white people, you know it's time to change.

Music: City of Angels by Thirty Seconds to Mars

B*Witching

One of my favorite girl groups when I was growing up was B*Witched. They were an Irish foursome know for rocking denim and singing bubblegum pop. 

I was poking around on iTunes when I discovered they'd released new music. I promptly downloaded in and started looking into what happened with the resurgence. It all started as part of a British TV show called The Big Reunion. Six of the top UK pop bands of the 90's and early 2000s will be reunited for one big concert and one dramatic reality show. I've been watching it on YouTube.

I knew about a few of these bands but these were the days of dial-up internet. If the marketing machine never made it state-side, there wasn't a lot I could find out. Atomic Kitten and Five made it stateside but they weren't as big as B*Witched.

When I fell in love with B*Witched I was 12 and media literacy existed in academic circles. With the rise of smartphones and constant communication, media literacy is a common topic of discussion. I often take apart the media I'm consuming now but I've never taken a look back at the media I consumed growing up.

It's so strange to hear about how the leads on songs were shared until one of their handlers decided they needed a lead singer. They weren't supposed to be seen outside without their 'uniform' of denim. Keavy had an extremely hard time adjusting to living in her twin's shadow. Lindsay felt like she didn't have a voice. When the band was abruptly dropped from their record label, Edele wanted to find another label and make it work. Sinead was ready to call it quits. She and Edele had become so close that she wanted to figure out who she was on her own. Both describe it like the end of a marriage. 

It was so bizarre to hear one of my favorite bubbly girl groups who are always delightful in interviews was dying inside. When Keavy had a minor breakdown on a family trip, their team was worried about the band, not the woman. Edele said "We were a product." 

Looking back at it, those kinds of issues were inevitable. In the Big Brother-esque world of media today, it's harder to hide those issues but it still happens. You can still see the media controlled corporate pop machines like One Direction. They seem like lovely lads but I assure you those boys are walking hormones.

I'll always loved B*Witched and have a soft spot for their music. You don't hear bubble gum pop like that these days. I have a new respect for these women and how hard it was to do what they did. I hope things in the new band are more balanced. I'd like to see them thrive again.

Music: Champagne or Guiness by B*Witched

Girl in a Country Song

A new single just dropped from a new country duo Maddie & Tae and I'm madly in love. Both Maddie and Tae realized that women have no agency in popular country music and it would suck to be them. A soon to be hit single was born.

They're calling out bro country for objectifying women and treating them as props in their story. I tweeted about this but I was careful to use #YesAllWomen instead of the equally accurate #feminism. 

These are things that feminists have been saying about women in all forms of media for decades. Unfortunately pop stars which have a more liberal target audience have been denying the f-bomb including Katy Perry, Kelly Clarkson, and Taylor Swift (who has barely been country since her second album). 

Country caters to a more conservative crowd. Even though feminist values and ideals are what make this song amazing, calling it such seems like a losing battle not worth starting. It's better to see women responding so strongly to the message of the song. Once they're on board the whole equality boat we can tell them what it's been called the whole time.

To really sell the point of how revolutionary this song is for contemporary country music, here's some of the more empowering, BS-calling lyrics,

I hate the way this bikini top chaffs. Do I really have to wear it all day?

I got a name and to you it ain't pretty little thing, honey or baby.

Like all we're good for is lookin' good for you and your friends on the weekend

We used to get a little respect and now we're lucky if we even get to climb up in your truck, keep our mouth shut and ride along like a girl in a country song

There ain't no sugar for you in this shaker of mine

Sure I'll slide on over but you're gonna get slapped

I ain't your tanned legged Juliet

Can we put on some real clothes now?

I only regret I haven't yet found a video to share with you. 

Music: Girl in a Country Song by Maddie & Tae

Stupid Is as Stupid Watches

I saw a pre-release of About Time with my friend Lizzie. We ended up in a conversation with the woman next to us about Girls and Sex and the City. It wasn’t a positive conversation.

For the record, I tried really hard to like Girls. Despite Lena Dunham’s talent sa a writer I hate every character on that show. They are all incredibly self-involved, self-destructive, whiney, and idiotic. No person I know is acquainted with anyone like them so to people outside of Brooklyn, they’re not that believable either.

I thought SATC was overrated as well. These women were doing things in their 30s I know better than to do in my 20s. Samantha would have all kinds of STDs and major emotional intimacy issues. I’ve only known one person my adult life that rivals Charlotte for unrealistic ideas about love and marriage. Carrie spends so much money on designer items and time in emotionally unavailable men that if she were your friend, you’d want to smack her.

The woman next to us said “It’s like they’re glorifying stupidity.” I agree totally.

SATC reinforces the same stupid stereotypes I wish women would get away from. Carrie spends so much money on designer shoes and clothes that she can’t afford her apartment. Years are wasted pining after Mr. Big who was emotionally unavailable. IRL, neither of these situations would have ended well but where’s the fun in reality? Better to teach women you can make a man fall in love with you and designer clothes are more important than rent.

Charlotte firmly believes in the Park Avenue fairytale and once she thinks she has it, she stops working for anything else. When that falls apart, she doesn’t have much left. Despite these major mistakes, she learns nothing. In the second movie she becomes overwhelmed by her family despite not working and having a nanny. The lesson here is that you can have unrealistic ideas about love and marriage and you’ll end up being Mrs. X from The Nanny Diaries.

Girls teaches that you can be a useless, selfish, and lazy but there aren’t any consequences. When Hannah gets an ebook deal and is faced with real work and possible success, she self-sabotages. I found her pathetic but the popularity of the show will reinforce the behavior.

Emotional stability and plotlines based in reality must not make compelling television because these stories keep repeating. In About Time, a woman makes similar mistakes but doesn’t get off so easily. It broke your heart to watch but I loved that she had bona fide consequences.

Maybe that’s why I said About Time was quiet. Every person in the movie was realistic and didn’t act like idiots. We need more of that on TV. I’m going to back to my genre fiction where women don’t take crap and kick butt. Let me know when muggle writers start writing better women.

Music: Suffragette by Nina Gordon

Film at 11 3/3

In part three of my thoughts on the Sandy Hook massacre, I take on the media. It’s a popular scapegoat and fuel for the fire. 

‘Movies and video games made me violent’ is one of the most pathetic excuses for committing a crime I’ve ever heard. It’s like blaming McDonald’s for making you fat. Unless someone pulled a Se7en and made you stuff your face, it’s your own damn fault. No character from Grand Theft Auto jumped out of the game and made you shoot the owner of the 7-11 you robbed.

TV, movies, and video games are not directly responsible for violent crimes or violent people. The culture surrounding them, however, is questionable.

Did you know in order for a movie to have a PG-13 rating, it cannot show realistic depictions of gunshot wounds? If you want to show an accurate amount of blood, guts, and gore, it’s an automatic R rating. I think that is an astonishingly backwards system. It desensitizes kids to violence and its consequences. 

Another fun fact about the movies is that the number of thrusts in a sex scene in some sappy love story will contribute to the NC-17 versus R rating. And oral sex on a woman? No matter how romantic, it’s not appropriate for a wide audience. Seppuku in a murder for morality tale is less likely to get you an NC-17 than a realistic sex scene in a love story. That’s fucked up.

What is a more natural part of being human? Killing for sport or two people consummating their love? According to a board of censors, sex is more damaging to teenagers probably already having it than shooting ‘em up.

I’m not a gamer but if I picked the top 10 selling games of 2012, how many require violence to play? How many have more violence than story? How many parents ignore the ratings on the games? How many clerks selling them? Video games are an international pastime that consume hundreds of hours of people’s lives. If you see and do something often virtually, how long until it has an impact on you actually?

Violence is becoming a primary form of entertainment in this country. How many gun massacres happened in the age of musicals? Michael Moore said that in his movie Roger & Me he showed a man getting shot and a woman killing and skinning a rabbit. People reacted more strongly to the death of the rabbit. 

I watched this movie for a film class and realized he was absolutely right. No one, myself included, so much as blinked when the man got shot. It was nothing we hadn’t seen a hundred times over somewhere else. Watching the skinning of the rabbit, the whole class moaned, groaned, and flinched. It was not something we saw too much of. Again, what’s a more natural part of being human? Killing and skinning game or shooting another person?

The news media is no better. A quote erroneously attributed to Morgan Freeman says that people need to remember the names of the instead of the killer. If the media stopped treating these shooters as pseudo-celebrities, maybe we’d get luck and the next one will just off himself rather than taking a dozen people with him. I don’t know who said it originally, but it’s a great point.

Most people can name the Aurora movie theater shooter but how many people can name his victims? The shooter’s name was all over news broadcast for weeks but how many times in those stories did you actually hear the victim’s names? Without Google, how many victims from Aurora, Sandy Hook, and/or Virginia Tech can you name? I couldn’t get out of single digits.

How many of these sick bastards wanted their 15 minutes? What would happen if shooters like this stopped being household names? These men are not rock stars. They are mass murderers. Their names do not deserve public remembrance. The media and the people need to stop giving it to them. It may not solve everything but it will certainly stop a few people.

Creating a culture of violence happens when small things add up to big things. We can’t undo it all at once but small changes can hopefully lead to big changes. I’m starting be refusing to remember the name of the man who slaughtered children. Instead, I’m going to remember Victoria Soto. I wish more people were like her.

Current Jams: Dirty Laundry by Lisa Presley