This year we saw many hilarious performances by women, and many idiotic articles from men about how women suddenly became funny. Yes, imagine how great ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ would have been had Mary, Betty White, Cloris Leachman, and Valerie Harper actually been funny. If only Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, Gilda Radner, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus had been able to get a laugh. I guess what I’m saying is, this isn’t the year that women finally became funny. This is the year that men finally pulled their heads out of their asses.
Game of Thrones: Favourite Joffrey moments
This is the most satisfying gifset I’ve ever seen
Rob Talks: Why does everyone assume when I bake something that it contains weed?
And then when I tell them bluntly, “No. They’re just regular cupcakes. You know I don’t smoke weed” I get this look like “Well, what’s the point?” What’s the point? What’s the fucking point?! The fucking point of a fucking cupcake is that it tastes good! Is that not enough now? As…
Wait, we’re supposed to be fighting Loki? I thought you said “have lattes with.”
from now on, i’m the news
- gas prices
- something bad is happening in the middle east probably
- south korea prepares zerg rush to take out north
- obama sneezes, nation agrees it’s “adorable”
- polar bear floating away on global warming-induced iceberg says it “could be worse”
- local man debates whether or not picking up a dime off the floor is worth it
- male british celebrity does something inane, thousands of american girls cry for weeks
Okay. Reasons that this scene is the best thing ever include but are by no means limited to:
- how well Maisie Williams is holding her own here, I mean here she is playing against this amazing veteran actor and she’s just bringing it
- the way this is like her fucked-up revenge fantasy of what she wishes her brother could do to the Lannisters
- but she’s already disillusioned enough to know it’s a fantasy
- because “anyone can be killed” is an implicit threat to Tywin but it’s also an acknowledgement of the fact that she or Robb or anyone else can bite it at any time
- (because apparently Arya has already read ASOIAF and knows how fucked they all are)
- and let’s talk about the fact that this kid just threatened Tywin Lannister
- TYWIN FUCKING LANNISTER
- whose own kids can barely look him in the face when they’re talking to him
- his kids who are grownups and have killed kings and won battles and run kingdoms are terrified of him
- and he looks at Arya and thinks “why aren’t my kids awesome like you”
- “you’re like five years old and you just threatened me, you little badass”
- (‘cause don’t think for a second that Tywin doesn’t get the subtext here)
- “why do my children have to be such cringing little asshats”
- (but of course Tywin is the one who made them into cringing little asshats.)
Yes indeed, oh yes, yes indeed.
How to make a female celebrity that’s relatable to the current generation, a handy guide:
So you’re looking to make a female celebrity, but you want her to be relatable to the current generation. Seems like a pretty impossible task, right? First, let’s see how the music industry does things with the virgin/whore dichotomy. In the 90s, the music industry would make every female popstar or begin as a virgin. Songs about how to earn their trust if you want to take them on a date or how they hate highschool gossip, usually with innuendo that could slightly hint at sexuality, were commonplace on their first album. As time progressed (usually by the second album), they would have made the transition to the ‘whore’. Controversial film clips and songs about being spanked and various other innuendo became commonplace.
They did this so that their fans could make the progression with them, first identifying with them in their early teens as a positive and relatable influence and then as a symbol of their own sexuality as they began discovering it. And in the 90s, this worked. But in the 00s this trick seemed to be failing. So what did the music industry do? It further split the virgin whore dichotomy with an untraversable valley. Now their stars either start as virgins and remain virgins throughout , or they start as whores and continue spiraling in a controversial media storm of whoredom.
But what about the film industry? Well, they tried to emulate the music industry, but as their shiny virgins made the transition to the whore side of the dichotomy they spun out of control and lost their following.
This created a large gap in the relatable celebrity market for young women, and people were running out of ideas. It seemed that no matter how many happy, healthy virgins were thrown at todays teens, they seemed too apathetic and self-involved to latch on. So what did they do? They made an apathetic and self-involved heroine out of a remarkably apathetic and almost overly sardonic celebrity.
While this was their most successful attempt in a decade, the results were split right down the middle. This celebrity definitely had a strong following, but she also had incredibly vocal detractors that seemed to loathe her. This meant that the film industry had to go back to basics and answer one very fundamental question; Who is the female teenager of the 00s? The results were startling. They found that here in the 00s, be it because of Elmo, the internet or video games, literally everyone has ADHD. Also, the limitless free expression enabled through the internet had made everyone suffer from a disorder in which they considered themselves to be ‘special snowflakes’, thinking that their every thought was worthy of a status, tweet, blog or worse yet, vlog. The confidence that this snowflake syndrome caused combined with the ADHD made these teens completely loathable in reality, which meant that in real life they were nowhere near as popular as they felt they deserved to be. To avoid the painful cognitive dissonance that would be caused by thinking themselves to be wonderful expressive indaviduals while being hated by social society, they had also decided to label themselves weird. Crazy. Quirky. Phrases like “People don’t get me because I’m so random lol whatever penguin XD” popped up in about mes all over the internet.
How could this mess of information possibly help construct a relatable celebrity? Enter Jennifer Lawrence. She is everything that the youth of today see themselves as. Beautiful without realizing it, quirky in unexpected ways, talented yet modest; A breaker of every mold.
But this still left the important question of sexuality. After decades of placing such importance on the virgin/whore dichotomy, where would this awkward snowflake fit in? This was perhaps the most masterful stroke of all; She wouldn’t. She would simply ignore her sexuality in person, never mentioning it or seemingly acting on it, yet she would appear in multiple artsy yet erotic photoshoots. The idea came from the various teen blogs in which the blogger would spend her day talking about fandoms, food and her other virgin interests before suddenly posting awkward topless webcam shots in the middle of the night.
So there you have it! Here is your new relatable female celebrity, we hope you enjoy her.
*standing ovation*
Yes, we live in a sexist culture, in which women have no good choices when it comes to our bodies. We live in a sexist culture in which women are valued primarily as sexual objects, and at the same time are shamed for our sexuality. It seems to me that we have two choices as to how to respond to this. We can try to navigate the narrow, essentially impossible shoals of these contradictory expectations, and try to find that perfect, socially acceptable line between slut and prude.
Or we can say, “Fuck it. There is no way I can win — so I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want. I’m going to wear overalls, or I’m going to wear high heels. I’m going to have sex with twenty strangers in a night, or I’m not going to have sex with anyone. I’m going to dress conservatively and professionally in public at all times, or I’m going to sell naked pictures of myself on the Internet if I bloody well feel like it.”
And in saying, “I can’t win, so I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want to do,” we can create the beginnings of a victory. We can create the beginnings of a world where we really can win. We can create the beginnings of a world where we’re a little more free than the women who came before us… and where the women who come after us are a little more free than we are. We probably can’t create a perfect world, where women’s bodies aren’t commodified in the slightest (not in this generation, anyway). But we can create a better world: a world where women’s bodies and minds belong less to the patriarchy, and more to ourselves.
For a brief moment she said
fuck all of the money
fuck the fans
I’m not going to be your ‘pretty girl’
anymore
and she shore off the blonde
scrubbed off the face
that someone made six figures
to create for her.
She lit a cigarette
poured whiskey into a Red Bull can
and said ‘fuck you’
I’m just going to be
a twenty something from Louisiana
who doesn’t need your damn attention.
Until they told her
that being just her
that throwing away the barbie concoction
could hurt her family
and they convinced her
to weave the crown of blonde back on
and let them pull her puppet strings
while her scalp bled
and her heart broke.
No one actually wanted
the person behind
the blonde.
-Cindy M. Emch (2/30 poetry challenge)
well that’s an interesting point
and it isn’t until now i realized how sexist the media was towards britney spears
