- Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin Are Naughty and Nice
- AC: Were you really teased?
- KG: Viciously. I have the typical female comedian story. And a lot of it is tied into my looks.
- AC: I think I was much more interesting as a child than I am as an adult.
- KG: Outgoing?
- AC: Yeah.
- KG: What happened?
- AC: My dad died when I was 10, and I got introspective and quiet.
- Knowing how long to wait for a marriage proposal…
- "People tend to use relationships for everything short of building a future with someone. Relationships are 100% optional so if you’re ready, willing, or able to commit to someone, then don’t! The sole purpose of being in a relationship is to have the added support from someone you’re romantically interested in, with the potential to grow. If there’s no potential to grow, there’s no sense in being in an exclusive relationship with someone; you can do bad/good all by yourself."
- Measuring 2011 on the Sticky Scale: Year in Review, Pt.1
- "…conflicts hinging upon a single meddling force tend to get real old, real fast. That’s the issue we’re facing now, with one character supplying most of the trouble, which muddies what began as an unconventional drama and sends it into the land of tired clichés."
- Odds and Ends: Ineffectual villainy
- "When I see those sweet Candys, even when I like them I’m still wondering, 'Why don’t you feel real emotions? Nobody’s that good.'"
- The empire on which the sun never sets
- Seeing Beyond Labels by Michael McMillan
- "During my speech I had explained how our focus creates our reality. If we focus on trouble, we’ll find it. If we focus on happiness, it will appear. I also shared how labels influence our perception. When we label something a problem, it becomes one. These labels act as filters to enhance our perceptual blindness."
- Hers; The Smurfette Principle by Katha Pollitt
- "Contemporary shows are either essentially all-male, like "Garfield," or are organized on what I call the Smurfette principle: a group of male buddies will be accented by a lone female, stereotypically defined."
- "The message is clear. Boys are the norm, girls the variation; boys are central, girls peripheral; boys are individuals, girls types. Boys define the group, its story and its code of values. Girls exist only in relation to boys."
- "Do kids pick up on the sexism in children's culture? You bet. Preschoolers are like medieval philosophers: the text -- a book, a movie, a TV show -- is more authoritative than the evidence of their own eyes."
- "The sexism in preschool culture deforms both boys and girls. Little girls learn to split their consciousness, filtering their dreams and ambitions through boy characters while admiring the clothes of the princess. The more privileged and daring can dream of becoming exceptional women in a man's world -- Smurfettes. The others are being taught to accept the more usual fate, which is to be a passenger car drawn through life by a masculine train engine. Boys, who are rarely confronted with stories in which males play only minor roles, learn a simpler lesson: girls just don't matter much."
- "How can it be that 25 years of feminist social change have made so little impression on preschool culture? Molly, now 6 and well aware that women can be doctors, has one theory: children's entertainment is mostly made by men. That's true, as it happens, and I'm sure it explains a lot. It's also true that, as a society, we don't seem to care much what goes on with kids, as long as they are reasonably quiet. Marshmallow cereal, junky toys, endless hours in front of the tube -- a society that accepts all that is not going to get in a lather about a little gender stereotyping. It's easier to focus on the bright side. I had "Cinderella," Sophie has "The Little Mermaid" -- that's progress, isn't it?"
- Margaret Atwood: The Prophet of Dystopia
- "She attended the Toronto iteration of the Women’s March, wearing a wide-brimmed floppy hat the color of Pepto-Bismol: not so much a pussy hat as the chapeau of a lioness. Among the signs she saw that day, her favorite was one held by a woman close to her own age; it said, “i can’t believe i’m still holding this fucking sign.” Atwood remarked, “After sixty years, why are we doing this again? But, as you know, in any area of life, it’s push and pushback. We have had the pushback, and now we are going to have the push again.”
- “'If you see a person heading toward a huge hole in the ground, is it not a friendly act to warn him?'” she wrote."
- "Whenever tyranny is exercised, Atwood warns, it is wise to ask, 'Cui bono?' Who profits by it?"
- "In the sometimes divisive years of second-wave feminism, Atwood reserved the right to remain nonaligned. 'I didn’t want to become a megaphone for any one particular set of beliefs,' she said. 'Having gone through that initial phase of feminism when you weren’t supposed to wear frocks and lipstick — I never had any use for that. You should be able to wear them without people saying you are a traitor to your sex.'"
- "At another moment, she suggests that her novels should be thought of as being in the tradition of the Victorian realist or social novel, and should be read in the light of objective facts, rather than subjective experience. / Some of her most perceptive readers have taken this approach. The novelist Francine Prose, reviewing “Alias Grace,” noted that 'Atwood has always had much in common with those writers of the last century who were engaged less by the subtle minutiae of human interaction than by the chance to use fiction as a means of exploring and dramatizing ideas.'"
- "In those days, Atwood said, there was no fear of rape on campus, as there seemed to be today. 'I am not saying that it didn’t happen, but you would never hear of it,' she said. 'And I would suspect that the chances of that happening were quite low, because what everybody was afraid of then was getting pregnant. The boys were afraid of getting pregnant, too, because you could end up married at an early age that way, and people didn’t particularly want that. But there was no Pill.' / One young interviewer, wide-eyed, said, 'It is very interesting to consider the importance of the Pill, not just for women but in changing society.'"
dec 7 2016 ∞
jul 18 2018 +