What’s better than a bunchable of munchable lunchables? Pies and fries that you can recognize with your own eyes! So here’s the deal: for your next midday meal I hope you feel the appeal - this option is for real! Whether you want to snack with Jack of beanstalk fame, or feast with a beast from a video game, there is one thing with which I’d like to conclude: don’t be rude to the food you’ve chewed! You never know by whom it may be viewed.
Favorites: the Gene Simmons and Winnie the Pooh lunches
(via pbstv)
“Firstly, acknowledge that the thing you like is problematic and do not attempt to make excuses for it.”
“Secondly, do not gloss over the issues or derail conversations about the problematic elements.”
“Thirdly you must acknowledge other, even less favourable, interpretations of the media you like.”
Another reason why I don’t like the waif-fu trend
The mass media has convinced us that only skinny women can be beautiful or sexually desirable. Corollary: fat women are desexualized and ‘fat’ comes to mean ‘ugly’.
Now mass media is trying to convince us that only skinny women are athletic and strong. Corollary: athletic, butch, and muscular women are defeminized so that having big, defined muscles or a stocky frame means you’re mannish or masculine, i.e. ugly.
NB: I’m not putting down thin women. I’m actually a small, thin person, myself. But I think it’s really fucked up that Hollywood allows only small, thin women to portray shitkicking action stars and sexy characters. They get to be sexy and strong (and smart…lord knows female nerds are always played by superhot actresses). Meanwhile, fat women, non-femme women, and other women who don’t look like Eliza Dushku or Charlize Theron are relegated to being comedic relief or being the first ones killed. I don’t really see that as progress.
More on Whedon and ‘waif-fu’
On one hand, Thus Spake Kate is right in pointing out that Buffy and River Tam’s apparent frailty is written specifically into their characters to make certain, arguably feminist, points. Joss was trying to subvert certain genre conventions by casting Gellar and Glau.
On the other hand, there’s something awfully convenient about the idea that a petite, pretty girl can be credibly cast as an action hero. It’s a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too situation that sidesteps issues like the lack of roles for non-femme or butch-looking women, the fact that good roles nearly always go to the conventionally pretty women, and the unquestioning acceptance of what counts as delicate and/or beautiful (i.e. how often do you see a Black woman cast as a frail little thing?). It reminds me of the ’90s era Sex and the City-type of lipstick feminism that made wearing designer high heels seem totally empowering and unproblematically feminist.
Again, I’m a big fan of Joss and love Buffy, Dollhouse, and Firefly—waify female characters included—but I’m not about to excuse a well-established pattern in Joss’s work and in contemporary pop culture in general. The ass-kicking waif is a very convenient trope since it allows Hollywood to present images of strong women who are also gender-conforming in every way possible.
Waif-fu, sneaky sexism, and faux empowerment
Michelle Rodriguez (pictured above in Girlfight) on being typecast as the strong chick who keeps getting killed:
“… people can call it typecast, but I pigeonholed myself … Saying no to the girlfriend, saying no to the girl that gets captured, no to this, no to that, and eventually I just got left with the strong chick who’s always being killed, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”
You read that right: She’s limited her roles to interesting, strong characters. For a male actor, that means “action hero.” For a woman, it means she has to die — over and over and over again, each time making way for the petite model to take down the villain with her Waif-Fu instead. That’s the phrase TV Tropes coined to describe the martial art that allows a woman to thrash trained soldiers twice her size while having no musculature on her frame at all. It’s considered empowering when Joss Whedon includes ass-kicking females in everything he writes, but when he needs a badass kung fu killing machine, he casts the pretty, wispy Summer Glau.
The women who develop careers as action stars are not just pretty, but are pretty in the most feminine way possible: Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, Uma Thurman, Milla Jovovich, Michelle Yeoh and Halle Berry.[…]Joss Whedon can pretend like the ass-kicking supermodels were created as a reaction to the helpless victims, but he’s just substituting one weird male fantasy with another. It’s as if there’s nothing in between “beautiful victimized woman crying while splattered in blood” and “beautiful invincible woman kicking people while wearing skintight fetish gear.”
Hell, I think Michelle could kick ALL of their tiny asses in one go. Yet we’re supposed to believe that waifish women without visible muscles can credibly play invincible badasses?
I love Joss Whedon’s work, but the point the article makes is undeniable. He did challenge action/horror convention by creating female protagonists who don’t rely on male characters to save them. But he also cast conventionally beautiful, femme, delicate-looking women to play those butt-kicking, strong female characters. One step forward, two steps back.
