FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5hr ago
That's definitely part of it. The difference in this case is that I think a lot of the people saying "men have the male gaze and women don't" would be unable to define the original meaning of the term "male gaze" if put on the spot. They literally think that "male gaze" refers to the way men look at women and have absolutely no idea what this term means in the context of cinema and TV.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
5hr ago
I meant appeal as in sex appeal. But yeah, based.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
6hr ago
Interesting, any idea who it was? Sounds like the kind of thing Jessica Valenti would do.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
7hr ago
(YMMV on whether Banks casts people as hot as the 2000 cast).
Cameron Diaz is gorgeous, as is Lucy Liu (but then, I would say that about an Asian woman wouldn't I?). Frankly, I never understood the appeal of Drew Barrymore: I've legitimately never found her a talented actress or sexy. She's even in one of my favourite movies, Donnie Darko, but every scene she's in grates and her line-readings sound so forced and uncomfortable.
As to the reboot, Kristen Stewart was gorgeous in the Twilight films, but in more recent movies she's received a succession of unflattering haircuts, each more butch than the one preceding it, and Charlie's Angels was no exception. (It's amazing the difference a good or bad haircut can make.) Ella Balinska is pretty hot. I thought the name Naomi Scott sounded familiar, and it turns out she played Jasmine in the live-action Aladdin remake. When I saw clips from that film I thought she looked absolutely stunning, but in photos from Charlie's Angels she looks hardly recognisable and nowhere near as good-looking. I'm calling it a wash.
So I'm impressed with your ability to continue writing at your Substack.
There are honestly periods where it feels like pulling teeth, and I end up just digging out a comment I posted here and polishing it up a bit. One of my new year's resolutions was to write a new post every two weeks, and while the average interval between posts is 13 days there have been several weeks where I fell behind schedule. I don't know if I'll keep up this pace in the new year, I haven't grown my audience as much as I was hoping to.
Probably my favorite post I've ever written was my Junebug Review.
Not having seen it, is it worth seeing unspoiled?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
7hr ago
One thing that frustrates me about media criticism is how interesting and nuanced concepts get abused and boiled down to lowest-common-denominator imitations over time, and how the people who should know better aren't rigorous enough about gatekeeping these concepts.
Take the "male gaze". Anyone who's studied film at an academic level would understand that it's an observation about camera perspective in visual media: that, while movies and TV shows often act as though they are presenting the characters within their works from an objective and disinterested perspective (a "view from nowhere"), in practice, the camera is often positioned in an implicitly heterosexual male posture, and female characters are shot and framed in a systematically different manner than male characters. This is an interesting observation! Once it's pointed out to you, you can't unsee it, and in Western cinema it's damn near omnipresent, to the point that it still feels surprising and fresh when movies go out of their way to turn it on its head (depicting female nudity in a deliberately unsexy fashion, or lusting over the male characters and not the female e.g. Magic Mike).
But decades since the term was coined, it's become corrupted from "the ostensibly objective and disinterested (but implicitly male and heterosexual) camera perspective used in Western movies and TV shows" to "something about the way men look at women, which is bad". I saw a post somewhere in which a young lesbian said she felt guilty about looking at other women she thought were attractive, and someone consoled her saying that she shouldn't worry, because sapphic sexuality isn't aggressive like male heterosexuality and she "didn't have the male gaze". No one "has" the male gaze. The male gaze is a property of cameras, not of people. While I have little doubt that Laura Mulvey, the academic who coined the term "male gaze", would understand that men sometimes leer at women in a manner which is sexually intimidating, that wasn't what the term "male gaze" referred to.
But in any case
Whereas the only times I ever saw it used was to imply or outright state that the book/show/game was bad and wrong.
As ever, stated vs. revealed preferences. It's easy to say that a movie is good because it passes the Bechdel test, or that a movie is bad because it fails it. But I'd hazard a guess that if you were to look at these feminists' favourite movies, they'd include a lot more movies that fail the Bechdel test than that pass it. I think this would actually be an effective rebuttal to this line of argument – just ask someone to name their top five movies. Better still, consult their Netflix history to see which movies they've watched most. Back when it was still good, The Onion had a great article about the gulf between the media feminists claim to enjoy and the media they actually enjoy.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
8hr ago
Nothing in particular, just that I found it so entertaining to read that I kept coming back to it – there are a lot of great zingers in there. I'm happy to delete this comment if it's not appropriate for this thread.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
10hr ago
Prior to our migration from Reddit, @naraburns posted a review of The Cult of Smart, Freddie deBoer's non-fiction book about the shortcomings of mass education. I keep coming back to it, it was a really perceptive deconstruction of his arguments.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
12hr ago
I have male peers who got freaked out by the mere mention of periods. Growing up with two sisters within six years of my age, it quickly becomes just a fact of life.
Funnily enough, back in the halcyon days of 2007-12 when Advice Animals were all the rage, many lulz were had at Foul Bachelor Frog, which chronicled the disgusting things single men when they're at home by themselves. When the distaff counterpart Foul Bachelorette Frog came out, I actually found it weirdly heartening to learn that single women can be exactly as disgusting as single men, which is not at all the impression you'd get from how women are portrayed in most pop culture.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
12hr ago
Most recently, I had a colleague come down with a serious case of AI psychosis (we should definitely start calling it cyberpsychosis)
"Cyberpsychosis" sounds much broader than AI psychosis to me. It could just as easily refer to people getting radicalised by lunatic conspiracy theories shared by human actors.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
12hr ago
Years ago, Cracked had an article pointing out the curious commonality that the female leads in every disposable 2000s romcom were all clumsy. Sandra Bullock, Kate Hudson, Drew Barrymore et al. constantly spilling coffee on themselves, doing pratfalls, knocking things off bookshelves.
The author's thinking was that these films were largely written by male screenwriters, who feared being accused of sexism if they wrote these characters to have actual human flaws. Instead, they erred on the side of caution by having the characters be essentially flawless: gorgeous, sexy, funny, smart, ambitious, caring etc. But they still needed to technically have a flaw, so they independently converged on the same character-flaw-that-isn't-really-a-character-flaw: being clumsy.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
12hr ago
Every 'Want' Has Another Person's Name In It
To me, this sounds like an attempted variation on the Bechdel test, or the stuffed into the fridge complaint: essentially, that the female characters only exist in terms of how they relate to male characters. When feminists brought up these concepts, I never interpreted them as meaning that a book that fails the Bechdel test is automatically bad, nor that a book in which a female character exists only to get murdered to motivate the male protagonist is automatically bad. But if the goal of every female character in your book involves a male character in some way (but not vice versa), it suggests that maybe your female characters aren't as fleshed-out and three-dimensional as they could be.
But then, she's still complaining when the female characters' goals involve other female characters. So I don't really know what she's looking for tbh.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
20hr ago
UNRWA, for instance, hasn't been designated a terrorist organization
Although perhaps they should have been.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
22hr ago
Agreed, eXistenZ did nothing for me in terms of story, but the gun made of teeth and gristle was awesome. I loved Dead Ringers, probably my favourite of his films that I've seen.
I'm curious about Crash. Maybe twenty years ago, I tried reading the source novel, but found it painfully slow and uneventful. May have to try again.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
22hr ago
I'm as opposed to the UK's absurd restrictions on freedom of expression as anyone else. But, to be clear, Rooney has not fallen afoul of British laws penalising certain kinds of speech. It is simply against the law to provide financial aid to a proscribed organisation. One might disagree with Palestine Action being so designated, but this case really has nothing to do with freedom of expression or censorship so far as I can see.
You may be familiar with the Irish Millennial novelist Sally Rooney. Her second novel Normal People was adapted into a TV miniseries which launched the careers of Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones. I've never read any of her novels, but based on the excerpts I've read, they really do not sound like my cup of tea. I've heard multiple critics independently compare her novels (at least, the first two or three) to Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey, arguing that, while they're marketed as sophisticated, class-conscious chronicles of Millennial Irish angst, they're ultimately just sadomasochistic romantic fantasies for women with NPR tote bags.
Being both Irish and painfully leftist (she routinely characterises herself as a Marxist), of course Rooney has a bee in her bonnet about Israel, refusing for many years to allow her novels to be translated into Hebrew and occasionally going on (in my opinion) deranged rants about how freeing Palestine means freeing the entire world or something. She recently announced her intention to donate the royalties of sales of her novels within the UK to Palestine Action, which would constitute a criminal offense, as Palestine Action is a proscribed terrorist organisation. And with good reason: several of their members broke into a British arms facility with the intent of smashing up the place and, when confronted by police officers, struck a female officer with a sledgehammer hard enough to break her spine. In their spare time, they also go around London under cover of darkness smearing red paint on businesses owned by Jews Zionists. As distributing royalties to her knowing that she intends to donate them to a proscribed organisation would put them in breach of the law, her UK publisher Faber & Faber have announced their decision (with Rooney's blessing) to withdraw her novels from publication within the UK. Naturally, this has resulted in a massive spike in sales before the withdrawal comes into effect, along with an open letter making some very idiotic comparisons between Rooney and Salman Rushdie. Voluntarily withdrawing your books from publication is not censorship (as Brendan O'Neill notes, if Rooney really wanted to funnel her money into Palestine Action's coffers, I'm sure she could do so under the table – no need to make such a big song and dance out of it). No one has issued a fatwa on Rooney's head, nor will they ever.
The whole thing is very dumb and retarded, and reading about it is making me depressed.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
The other week, someone raised the possibility of real artists moving away from click tracks to signal authenticity.
It was me. I have things to contribute other than gotchas.
There are a thousand versions of Jones Girl but only one with, you know.
Huh, I thought Hüsker Dü was the only act to use a single-note solo.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I know what you're getting at. Having a fantasy about something, getting it, then realising the real thing can't live up to your fantasy is definitely a real thing.
What I was getting at was the related but distinct phenomenon when you think you want something, then realise you don't really want it, without ever getting it. I'm trying to think of a banal example to illustrate. Supposing you're very drunk and you have an idea for something you want to do, then after you sober up you realise that you actually don't want to do it. Maybe you could say you really did want it at the time, but then you changed your mind. Or would it be accurate to say that you thought you wanted X, but you actually didn't? Hard to say.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Oof. I used to have a close friend who was severely anorexic, to the point of being repeatedly hospitalised. Hugging her felt like hugging a skeleton, I could feel her shoulders pressing into me. It's awful to see someone wasting away like that.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I don't speak German, but ChatGPT informs me that the terms are the similar Chirurg and Chirurgin.
I don't know if he's German, but I would find it equally annoying if he insisted on using Krankenwagen rather than "ambulance" in a comment otherwise written in English.
Digging into it, it seems it was closer to the latter than the former.
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