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Tuesday, March 07, 2017

International Women's Day & Beauty and the Beast

Here's the start of an article in The New Yorker: The Women’s Strike and the Messy Space of Change ...

Tomorrow is the Women’s Strike, the fourth of ten actions that have been called for by the organizers of the Women’s March on Washington. The strike was planned to coincide with International Women’s Day, and the march organizers, in tandem with a team organizing protests in forty countries around the world, have asked women to take whatever form of action their lives allow for. Take the day off from “paid and unpaid labor,” including housework and child care, if you can, or avoid shopping at corporate or male-owned businesses, or simply wear red in solidarity. There will be rallies in at least fifty cities around the United States ...

Standing up for women's rights seems especially necessary in this time of Republican ascendancy and Trump. As we speak, they are planning again to defund Planned Parenthood: The GOP Obamacare replacement defunds Planned Parenthood and restricts abortion coverage

I hesitate to go here, but since we're talking about feminism, I noticed the stuff in the news about Emma Watson of the new Beauty and the Beast movie involved in an argument over whether her under-boob pic in Vanity Fair still allows her to be a believable feminist. My short answer to that is 'no', but I think the real anti-feminist thingy here is the Beauty and the Beast storyline ...



Laugh if you want, but just try to imagine a story in which a wonderful and attractive young man is expected to happily devote his life to reforming and loving a beast of a woman (think Sunset Boulevard). And that's the thing about feminism ... no Emma Watson, it isn't about women doing whatever they want, it's about letting men and women be equally people.

3 Comments:

Blogger Stanley Kopacz said...

Crystal,
regarding "Beauty and the Beast", if I remember correctly, he changed before they got married. I like to think love can change people and I think it does. But pathological types are another matter. I've seen normal guys get more civilized. But, violence is a whole other thing.
Stan

1:10 PM  
Blogger crystal said...

I've never actually read the story or seen the movies but there is a Beauty and Beast storyline in the tv series Once Upon a Time, which I like. The "Beast" is actually Rumpelstiltskin, a sorcerer called the Dark One, and the "Beauty" was his captive housekeeper, Belle. But by now, season 5, they are estranged ... https://youtu.be/ILz6qL6ZJgc ... it's just that little kids are really influenced by these stories and maybe sometimes the messages in them aren't all that healthy.

1:55 PM  
Blogger Stanley Kopacz said...

I can believe that. There's a lot of bad messages like power and violence solve everything. The Walking dead, entertaining as i found it, is way over the top. It's a conservative don't trust thy neighbor story.

As for Beauty and the Beast, I liked Jean Cocteau's French version. I saw it years ago on PBS before PBS was clobbered by the Republicans.

3:40 PM  

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