Probably the easiest criticism of Seth MacFarlane’s “sexist” “Why couldn’t the song have been about men?

To that end, flowy-locked New York software developer Kevin Gisi has released his own gender-swapped version of “We Saw Your Boobs,” called “We Saw Your Junk.” If I had one criticism of this, it’s that he doesn’t use Harvey Keitel for the breakdown. Come on! If ever there was a male Kate Winslet, it’s Harvey Keitel. Harvey Keitel’s penis has been in The Piano (which he mentions), Bad Lieutenant, and Ulysses’ Gaze, and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I’m sure Harvey Keitel’s penis has been a bunch of places, places I can’t even imagine.

If I had a second criticism of this, it would be WHY ISN’T A WOMYN SINGING IT, HUH? Is it because Kevin Gisi doesn’t think women are funny? Is it because he thinks women can’t sing? Oh yeah, nice one, dude, I guess you’ve never heard of Taylor Swift or Aretha Franklin. If a woman sang this, YouTube would probably only pay her 70% of a man’s ad-sharing, because that’s the world we live in. That’s the reality. Kevin Gisi is probably some jock redneck who thinks women should just stay in the kitchen baking and popping out babies and not singing, and it’s just such typical bullshit that a white man has co-opted female culture and silenced women of color and stolen the voice of the disenfranchised yet again. I mean look at his hair! What’s that about? Is he mocking women? How is this any different from blackface? This whole video is like cultural rape. At the very least, it’s promoting a culture of cultural rape. Shame on you, Kevin, you bully rapist.

[AV Club]

A study being released Monday by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism found that women made up less than a third of all roles in the top films of the last two years, proving that gender inequality in Hollywood still exists. Not surprisingly, women haven’t stopped bitching about it, but it’s probably because they’re just on their period.

In a survey of the top 100-grossing movies of 2009 — including “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” and “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” — researchers found that 32.8% of the 4,342 speaking characters were female and 67.2% were male, a percentage identical to that of the top-grossing movies of 2008.
“We see remarkably stable trends,” said USC Annenberg associate professor Stacy L. Smith. “This reveals an industry formula for gender that may be outside of people’s conscious awareness.”

Well sure, if you only want to count speaking roles. Maybe talking just wasn’t their thing, you know? I mean look what happened when that Stacy chick opened her mouth, she started to talk and it was all “blah blah” this and “yap yap” that, I think. I mean, I wasn’t even really paying attention. Probably she just sucked at storytelling.

It’s not just the ratio of female to male characters that continues to be imbalanced but the manner in which they’re depicted, according to Smith.
The USC study determined that women were still far more likely than men to wear sexy clothing in movies, such as swimwear and unbuttoned shirts (25.8% versus 4.7%), to expose skin (23% versus 7.4%) and to be described by another character as attractive (10.9% versus 2.5%).

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Stage actor Harry Lennix has taken to Huffington Post to write a lengthy screed/defense of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark director Julie Taymor, who was fired from the production a week before the scheduled opening. He decries her “unmerited and unprecedented persecution,” as if she was Jesus, or Hitler, and not a chick who directs musicals.

In my opinion, the producers of Spider-Man have found a convenient whipping girl to bear the brunt of any woes related to the production. They seem to have absolved themselves from accountability for the show’s production while reaping the benefit of the publicity surrounding the absurd decision to jettison the creative visionary behind it. In their minds, the fault couldn’t possibly lie with an untested Broadway producer, or the two all but absent rock star composers whose notoriety is derived from a completely different medium.

The “convenient whipping girl” part might be true, but I might also argue that the root of the problem was the original idea for a $60 million musical about Spider-Man with music by U2. And calling her “the creative visionary behind it” isn’t a great way to absolve her from that. Also, are you really going to criticize someone “whose notoriety is derived from a completely different medium” in a piece about A SPIDER-MAN MUSICAL?

Would a male director receive the lashing Julie has received? If it were a male director with the reputation and accomplishments of Julie Taymor I cannot believe in good conscience that this would happen in this way. Julie’s career is an unqualified success. She is a singular pioneer who deserves to be given as much freedom and support to create as any man with her accomplishments would be given. I marvel at this double standard. We are witnessing a situation where a woman is unceremoniously and illogically dismissed, treated with senseless hostility from her male employers, and nobody speaks in advocacy of her — not even women’s groups. It boggles the mind. [HuffPo]

If there’s one rhetorical strategy that needs to be put to bed, it’s this type of asinine hypothetical.  Here’s how it works: you take someone who’s receiving unquestionably-justified criticism, be it Julie Taymor, Chris Brown, Charlie Sheen, etc., and instead of defending their actions, which you know would be preposterous, you simply turn it around and ask “BUT WOULD WE HOLD A WHITE/BLACK/FEMALE/GAY/STRAIGHT/MAN/WOMAN TO THIS SAME STANDARD?!” and fold your arms as if you’ve just made some profound statement.  The answer, by the way, is almost always “yes.”  There’s no conspiracy.  Yes, Bono deserves to be ripped on for this just as hard (if he hasn’t, it’s only because people get bored with ripping on Bono), and when he does, you won’t see me defending him just because we’re both handsome rock stars.

Over the weekend, director Joe Wright spoke to a crowd at WonderCon in San Francisco, and among other things, he heroically criticized Sucker Punch for its shameless objectification of women.  And Joe Wright should know a little something about terrible movies set entirely in the protagonist’s imagination, he directed Atonement.

“For me, one of the main issues in terms of women’s place in society and feminism is the sexual objectification of women,” said Wright, speaking at Wondercon in L.A. on Saturday. “That’s something that feminists in the ’70s tried to fight against but has been totally lost in the 21st century consumer-celebrity world. So for me, when I look at the poster for Sucker Punch it seems actually incredibly sexist, because it is sexually objectifying women regardless of if they can shoot you or not.”

Yes, it takes a real hero to finally take a stand against Zack Snyder’s sleazy whorephanage fantasy that everyone hated and hardly anyone saw.  But tell us, Joe, is bullying bad?  What of breast cancer?  Is this terrible scourge stealing away our mothers and sisters?  And please, be sure to phrase your answer in the form of semi-meaningless, PC buzzwords.

“I have a kind of immediate, knee-jerk reaction to such iconography,” Wright continued. “I remember when the Spice Girls came out in the mid-’90s and it was all about girl power, but one of them was dressed as a baby doll, do you know what I mean? That isn’t girl power, that isn’t feminism. That’s marketing bullsh*t. And I find it very, very alarming.”

You’re right, this terrible objectification is keeping our western women down, as evidenced by young women out-earning their male counterparts in 147 of America’s 150 biggest cities.  We should cover their flesh and start treating them better, like they do in Afghanistan.  That would be so much more “feminist.”  It’s nice to finally see someone who’s against all this marketing bullsh*t.  Wait, why are you at WonderCon, again?  It’s not to promote a movie, is it?

Wright’s Hanna, in which a totally not-scantily clad young girl kicks a bunch of ass, opens on Friday.

Oh right, that.

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It's only fair to illustrate an Aaron Sorkin movie with a mouth that never stops moving

Despite being well-reviewed by almost everyone but Armond White, The Social Network has taken its share of criticism, usually for being sexist.  When it comes to criticism, there are generally two approaches — you can either accept it for what it is and attempt to explain yourself, or you can just do like M. Night Shyamalan and claim the 95% of people who thought your movie sucked just don’t get your “European sensibility.”  Social Network writer Aaron Sorkin recently responded to criticism in the comments section of a small blog, and to his credit, he seems to have take the non-Shyammy approach.

Believe me, I get it. It’s not hard to understand how bright women could be appalled by what they saw in the movie but you have to understand that that was the very specific world I was writing about. Women are both prizes an equal [sic - "prizes and equals", I think]. Mark’s blogging that we hear in voiceover as he drinks, hacks, creates Facemash and dreams of the kind of party he’s sure he’s missing, came directly from Mark’s blog. With the exception of doing some cuts and tightening (and I can promise you that nothing that I cut would have changed your perception of the people or the trajectory of the story by even an inch) I used Mark’s blog verbatim. Mark said, “Erica Albright’s a bitch” (Erica isn’t her real name–I changed three names in the movie when there was no need to embarrass anyone further), “Do you think that’s because all B.U. girls are bitches?” Facebook was born during a night of incredible misogyny. The idea of comparing women to farm animals, and then to each other, based on their looks and then publicly ranking them. It was a revenge stunt, aimed first at the woman who’d most recently broke his heart (who should get some kind of medal for not breaking his head) and then at the entire female population of Harvard.

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