We have all seen the portrayal a million times before. The Bridezilla, beast with bouquet. The reason men do not want to get married. The film Bride Wars looks like it will be offering the same old story about women and why we are horrible people.

The premise of the film is that two best friends, one blonde and one brunette (because that’s as different as women get, right?), who both dream of getting married at the Plaza Hotel end up double-booked by some twist of Candace Burgen-y fate. Naturally, the lead characters are heterosexual, well off (the Plaza ain’t cheap), thin, and white. What results is an hour and a half of hair pulling and sabotaging, because obviously all women are huge bitches who will do whatever it takes to get their dream wedding.

Oh, wait a minute, that’s complete crap! I am sorry, but if these two women were really best friends, they would find some sort of solution that did not involve brightly coloured hair dye or booby-trapped spray tans. While I am sure this film ends happily – because in order to get people into the theatre to see it, it must – the path to the happy ending is ridden with offensive depictions of women as selfish, trivial, and horrible.

The trailer is enough to guarantee that I will not be seeing this film. If the main characters are not enough, let’s take a look at the beauty regimens the film assumes are part of the normal marriage prep: spray tans, dye jobs, dress shopping, big rings. Where is the love in this movie? It seems to me that it really does not matter who these women are marrying, but what they will look like, where the ceremony will take place, and that they are getting married. Their fiances get to chip in with an occasional witty quip about how silly women are, but other than that could probably get away without having any lines and it would not impact the movie at all.

Sadly, any day of the week you can turn on cable television to one of the many wedding shows and see the same portrayal. I am fairly certain that most women who get married do so because they are in love, but this film and similar shows encourage marriage based on consumerism and commodity fetishism more than anything else.

When you can't sell adventure... Sell clothes and shoes!

Rumour has it that the popular children’s heroine, Dora the Explorer, will be growing up this fall. And by growing up, I mean, getting transformed into a thin and fashionable model for Western consumerism.

My little sister is twelve years old now, and has grown up with Dora the Explorer. We used to watch the show together, and I have to say, I found it extremely annoying (the repetition of random Spanish words and cultural exploitation was a bit much). But at least it gave girls a positive role model, a young action heroine, if you will. Dora was intelligent, brave, and active. And now they are going to ruin it.

Although the designs for the updated Dora tween doll are being kept under wraps, the entire scheme suggests a sell out. Tween Dora means accompanying accessories, make up lines, tween clothing lines, etc. Tween girls represent a huge market, just waiting to be tapped. I guess I just expected more of the Dora franchise, but once more, mass media disappoints.

Conan... The Non-Barbarian Variety

Are women not funny, or something? No disrespect to the late night men out there, but has anyone else noticed the serious gender disparity on late night comedy shows? Jay, Conan, Jimmy, John, Stephen… but what about Tina?

Normally, I wouldn’t have noticed the lack of women in this block of programing, but the other night I was watching Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and he had a guest comedian on the show. The comedian, a guy, told the following hilarious joke about domestic violence: “My girlfriend used to be in an abusive relationship. But I didn’t know. For the first while, I thought she was just afraid of high fives.”

. . . Really?

Not only is this joke not funny, but it makes light of a really serious, horrible, and persistent problem. I kept watching, and throughout the next two shows, the gender jokes continued attacking and mocking women and also queer men. I think we need a woman to take back late night comedy, and to bring insightful, witty humour that does not rely on gender bashing to bring about some balance!

Possessive, controlling, dangerous, AND undead? This guy’s too good to be true!

I have hated the film Twilight from the minute I heard about it, but not for the reasons you might think. I first heard of Twilight when they announced that Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince would not be released in November, a date I literally had marked on my calendar. But, the random entertainment blog consolled, Twilight will premiere that day instead. My first response was “What’s Twilight?”

The next time I heard about the vampire love story was in August, 2008 when my three sisters and my mother became completely obsessed with Stephanie Meyer’s novels. Actually, I am not surprised my mum liked the books – she has always been a huge harlequin romance novel fan, and Meyer’s four book series can be summed up as three parts sexual tension and one part acting on it. The books and film offer the same form of escapism as any other romance novel, but in a more distilled, teen appropriate form. Since that time, I have read all four books, seen the movie, and written an essay on the topic. My conlusion? I wish freaking Harry Potter had been released on time and that I could un-read and un-see the film.

Twilight is about a seventeen year old girl who falls in love with a vampire, and about the challenges they face in their relationship, given that, well, he wants abandon his vows of animal-only blood drinking to suck the blood out of her body. Many have praised the novel and the film for the strong message of abstinence. The couple can barely touch, let alone have sex. But the message of abstinence is blurred, particularly given that the film, marketed toward tweens, teens, and adults alike, contains a scene of Edward creeping on Bella while she sits on her bed in her underpants. Moreover, the film contains some other questionable messages. Edward convinces Bella to lie to her father, brings her into dangerous situations, controls her, and follows her. His actions verge on stalking and completely violate Bella’s privacy and independence. And yet, she falls head over heels for the guy.

Bella’s only personality trait is her obsession with Edward, and her happiness in the film revolves around his paying her attention. She puts herself in the line of fire simply to be around him, without knowing anything about him except for what he looks like. Yes, Robert Pattinson is an attractive man, but really? The director, a woman I might add, might have considered developing a relationship based on more than appearances and scent-addition.

Edward says some pretty creepy stuff throughout the movie, referring to drinking Bella’s blood casually, in a way somewhat akin to dangling a knife over her. Bella’s dad, Charlie, seems to be the only one who finds this off-putting. My favourite scene in the whole movie is when Bella comes down the stairs for prom, and Edward says something along the lines of “you’re perfect.” Charlie shoots him this look that sums up exactly how I feel about the whole movie.

Toward the end of the film, Bella confirms that she is in fact brainless with the following statement: “I can’t bring myself to regret the decisions that brought me face to face with death, they also brought me to Edward.” This seems to be her attitude throughout the film, referring to herself as a stupid lamb, and telling Edward over and over again that she does not care that he is dangerous, that he has killed people, or even that he wanted to kill her. None of it matters because… he’s hot? That’s essentially all the movie offers as a justification. Way to set an example for healthy relationships, Twilight.

On a typical day at my university, it is not uncommon to hear a girl or guy murmur “that’s what she said” in the middle of a conversation. I hear, and even use, the phrase so often that I decided to name my blog after it. At first, I thought it was just a funny phrase, but the other day, I realized… what about what he said?

There are a lot of things I like about ‘The Office’ – great characters, funny dialogue, great plot lines – but there is also a lot that really bothers me. The above clip showcases a few examples. The language used toward women is disgusting and often crosses the line of what is funny.

Now, it’s not that I don’t see the humour. ‘The Office’ is satirical, mocking business settings and the people who often get put in power. That said, I do not think this excuses a lot of the anti-woman, anti-feminist jokes the show contains. Michael Scott’s behaviour demonstrates everything offensive, inappropriate, and oppressive about sexist, chauvenist employers but somehow manages to come out on top most of the time, his only punishment a sheepish “silly Michael” sigh from Pam, the ideal pink-collar, innocent, quiet woman.

The show is so well-known and often quoted that these degrading phrases have worked their way into the vocabulary of an entire generation. This is to the disservice of the feminist cause, particularly when women buy into the joke. The fact is, inequality in the workplace is very much a reality. In ‘The Office’, the strong women are typically portrayed as bitchy, mean spirited, and aggressive. Workplace inequality and sexism remain very real issues confronting women, particularly women in business. Contrary to popular belief, the wage gap is not disappearing. I found a brilliant commercial speaking out for pay equity and have included it in this post.

As much as I enjoy ‘The Office’ and find it amusing, whenever I watch it I end up thinking about this time I was in high school and my mum came home from work. She was visibly upset because in a meeting earlier that day, the debate got heated and her boss, a man, told her to “stop being such a cunt about it”. At the time, I did not even know what the word meant, but now I am shocked and appalled that such misogynistic language is used in the workplace today.

So while I am not going to stop watching the show, I will keep questioning its validity and the messages it is putting out there. It’s definitely not the worst show on the air for its slights against women (uhm, “Two and a Half Men” anyone?), but it’s certainly not waving the flag of equality either.

All communications are encoded with messages, and more often than not these messages are targetted toward a specific audience. The story is the same no matter what type of media you are viewing – newspapers, television commercials, books, magazines, television shows, movies – all are carefully coded to carry a message to a particular audience. What the audience actually reads from any given medium will depend on their sex, gender, culture, sexual orientation, political attitudes, etc. This is what makes media analysis fascinating! Human communication (and mis-communication) results in some interesting patterns and phenemenon, which I hope to explore through this blog.

To me, “Hello world!” is just a greeting. To the computer crowd out there, it is a targetted shout out. See, I never would have caught that on my own, hence the importance of sharing ideas, through blogs or zines or consciousness raising groups or whatever – to decode the messages and open your eyes to the intricacies of communication.