Is Feminism Still Relevant?

[IWasBored]

The DNA line cracked me up the most, because the people who espouse these kinds of backwards, idealized versions of the 1950s also are the first to denounce any science that pertains to, well, any actual scientific facts. Because there's very little that could possibly be funnier (you know, in a batshit crazy and terrifying sort of way) to me than to think that there are people out there who accept genetics as a reasoning for gender roles in their own warped social definitions, yet also reject evolution. Yes, I know the bible is like that, where you can pick and choose the books/chapters/verses you want to believe while ignoring the parts that contradict your world view, but hey, guess what! Science doesn't quite work that way.

[MrsSpringsteen]

Originally Posted by Pearl

They are a minority, but they do exist. I've seen a few on dating sites, and they were younger than 30. Disturbing, but at least there's not too many of them.

I think the biggest factor is how you were raised, how your parents modeled that and what the expectations were of male and female children. Of course you can get past that when you get older, if you want to and make the effort. But I suppose there are still parents who are role modeling and raising kids in that tradition. There are also cultures that prefer those old traditional ways.

[BonosSaint]

New York Times

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

December 15, 2012


How to Attack the Gender Wage Gap? Speak Up

By JESSICA BENNETT


ANNIE HOULE, grandmother of seven, holds up a stack of pink dollar bills.

“How many of you know about the wage gap?” she asks a roomful of undergraduates, almost all of them women, at the College of Mount St. Vincent in the Bronx.

A few hands go up.

“Now, how many of you worry about being able to afford New York City when you graduate?”

The room laughs. That’s a given.

Ms. Houle is the national director of a group called the WAGE Project, which aims to close the gender pay gap. She explains that her dollar bills represent the amounts that women will make relative to men, on average, once they enter the work force.

Line them up next to a real dollar, and the difference is stark: 77 cents for white women; 69 cents for black women. The final dollar — so small that it can fit in a coin purse, represents 57 cents, for Latina women. On a campus that is two-thirds women, many have heard these numbers before. Yet holding them up next to one another is sobering.

“I’m posting this to Facebook,” one woman says.

One of three male students in the room is heading to the photocopier to make copies for his mother.

Another woman in the group sees a triple threat. “This is crazy,” Dominique Remy, a senior studying communications, says, holding the pink cutouts in her hand. “What if I’m all of them? My mother is Latina. My father is Haitian. I’m a woman.”

I’ve come to this workshop amazed that it exists — and wishing that there had been a version of it when I was in school.

I grew up in the Girl Power moment of the 1980s, outpacing my male peers in school and taking on extracurricular activities by the dozen. I soared through high school and was accepted to the college of my choice. And yet, when I landed in the workplace, it seemed that I’d had a particularly rosy view.

When I was hired as a reporter at Newsweek, I took the first salary number that was offered; I felt lucky to be getting a job at all.

But a few years in, by virtue of much office whispering and a few pointed questions, I realized that the men around me were making more than I was, and more than many of my female colleagues. Despite a landmark sex discrimination lawsuit filed against the magazine in 1970, which paved the way for women there and at other publications to become writers, we still had a long way to go, it turned out.

When I tried to figure out why my salary was comparatively lower, it occurred to me: couldn’t I have simply asked for more? The problem was that I was terrified at the prospect. When I finally mustered up the nerve, I made my pitch clumsily, my voice shaking and my face beet red. I brought along a printed list of my accomplishments, yet I couldn’t help but feel boastful saying them out loud. While waiting to hear whether I would get the raise (I did), I agonized over whether I should have asked at all.

This fear of asking is a problem for many women: we are great advocates for others, but paralyzed when it comes to doing it for ourselves.

BACK at the Bronx workshop, Ms. Houle flips on a projector and introduces Tina and Ted, two fictional graduates whose profiles match what’s typical of the latest data. Tina and Ted graduated from the same university, with the same degree. They work the same number of hours, in the same type of job. And yet, as they start their first jobs, Ted is making $4,000 more than Tina. In the second year, the difference has added up to almost $9,500. Why?

“Maybe he just talked up his work more,” one woman, a marketing major, suggests.

“Maybe he was mentored by other men,” another says.

“Or maybe,” chimes in a third, a nursing student, “she didn’t know that she could negotiate.”

Bingo. Over the next three hours, these women are going to learn how to do it — and to do it well.

There has clearly been much progress since President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, mandating that men and women be paid equally for equal work. Yet nearly 50 years later, if you look at the data, progress toward that goal has stalled.

Of course, not all statistics are created equal. Some account for education and life choices like childbearing; some don’t. But if you sift through the data, the reality is still clear: the gender gap persists — and it persists for young, ambitious, childless women, too.

In October, the American Association of University Women — co-sponsor of the Mount St. Vincent program — offered a report called “Graduating to a Pay Gap,” in which it determined that in their first year out of college, women working full time earned just 82 percent of what their male peers did, on average. Again, women’s choices — college major, occupation, hours at work — could account for some of this. Even so, the A.A.U.W. determined that one-third of the gap remained unexplained.

For years, legislators and women’s advocates have been seeking solutions. In many ways, the wage gap is a complicated problem tied to culture, tradition and politics. But one part of it can be traced to a simple fact: many women just don’t negotiate, or are penalized if they do. In fact, they are one-quarter as likely as men to do so, according to statistics from Carnegie Mellon University. So rather than wax academic about the issue, couldn’t we simply teach women some negotiation skills?

Ms. Houle, along with Evelyn Murphy, the WAGE Project president and a former Massachusetts lieutenant governor, aims to do just that. For almost seven years, Ms. Houle has been training facilitators around the country and introducing their program into schools. (WAGE stands for “women aim to get even.”)

Now, working in conjunction with the A.A.U.W., they plan to have negotiation workshops — called Smart Start — in place by spring in more than 300 colleges and universities nationwide. Nearly 30 colleges have already signed up for three-year commitments.

Several other organizations have also begun working with schools, Girl Scout programs and Y.W.C.A.’s to coach women before they enter the work force.

At Smith College, the Center for Work and Life recently began a program called Leadership for Rebels that teaches young women assertive communication skills, through role-playing and workshops. At Carnegie Mellon, the Heinz School of Public Policy and Management will start its first Negotiation Academy for Women next month, led by the economist Linda Babcock. She is also the founder of a program called “Progress” that aims to teach similar skills to 7- to 12-year-old girls.

“I do think that people are really starting to take this idea seriously,” says Professor Babcock, a co-author of “Women Don’t Ask.” “I think they’re starting to understand that we have to train the next generation of women when they’re young.”

At Mount St. Vincent, the Smart Start workshop is broken into sections: understanding the wage gap, learning one’s worth on the market, and practical negotiation, in which students use role-playing in job-offer situations.

Women learn never to name a salary figure first, and to provide a range, not a number, if they’re pressed about it. They are coached not to offer up a figure from their last job, unless explicitly asked. The use of terms like “initial offer” — it’s not final! — is pounded into them. And, perhaps most important, they learn never, ever, to say yes to an offer immediately.

“I can’t tell you how many times I hear stories of women who go into a negotiation saying, ‘Oh my gosh, thank you so much, I’ll take it!’” says Ms. Houle, noting that one student she coached even hugged her boss. “Here these women are, more educated than ever, incurring incredible debt to get that education, and they’re going to take whatever they’re offered. It’s like, ‘No, no, no!’ “

Many reasons exist for women’s fears about asking for higher pay.

There’s the fear of being turned down. (“I think we take rejection personally,” Ms. Murphy says.) There’s the economy. (If you negotiate in a tough market, might the offer be rescinded?) There’s the fact that women, in general, are less likely to take risks — a business asset in the long run, but one that can make advocating for themselves tricky. There’s also the reality that many women have internalized the idea that asking is somehow not ladylike.

“Girls and women intuit that speaking up can be dangerous to your reputation — that asking for too much can be viewed as conceited or cocky,” says Rachel Simmons, co-founder of the Girls Leadership Institute and a creator of the Leadership for Rebels program at Smith. “This may begin on the playground, but it extends all the way into the workplace.”

Research by the Harvard senior lecturer Hanna Riley Bowles and others has found that women who negotiate are considered pushy and less likable — and, in some cases, less likely to be offered jobs as a result.

That’s why women’s approach to negotiation is crucial. In one study, from Professor Babcock at Carnegie Mellon, men and women asked for raises using identical scripts. People liked the men’s style. But the women were branded as aggressive — unless they gave a smile while they asked, or appeared warm and friendly. In other words, they conformed to feminine stereotypes.

“The data shows that men are able to negotiate for themselves without facing any negative consequences, but when women negotiate, people often like them less and want to work with them less,” says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, whose forthcoming book “Lean In” is about women and leadership. “Even if women haven’t studied this or seen this data, they often implicitly understand this, so they hold back.”

So, it’s a balancing act. Ask, but ask nicely. Demand, but with a smile. It’s not fair — yet understanding these dynamics can be the key to overcoming them, Ms. Sandberg says.

The good news is that all of these things can be learned. In 2003, when Professor Babcock was conducting research for her book, she surveyed Carnegie Mellon graduates of the management school, determining that 13 percent of women had negotiated the salaries in the jobs they’d accepted, versus 52 percent of men. Four years later, after a lengthy book tour and talking relentlessly about these issues on campus, she found that the numbers had flipped: 68 percent of women negotiated, versus 65 percent of men.

Ms. Simmons put it this way: “This is about muscles that need to be developed. This is about practice.”

AND practice they will, one workshop at a time.

At the session at Mount St. Vincent, the women researched median wages and practiced speaking clearly and warmly. They tried to remember the three T’s: tone (be positive but persuasive), tactics (never name a salary figure first) and tips (sell yourself, but anticipate objections; don’t get too personal, but be personal enough).

“It was nerve-racking,” said Ria Grant, a nursing student.

“I stuttered,” recalled Danielle Heumegni, a sociology major.

And yet they felt good.

“I realized there’s a way to sell myself without feeling uncomfortable,” Dominique Remy said.

“You won’t get anything if you don’t at least try,” said Erika Pichardo.

“This,” Ms. Heumegni said, waving her set of pink dollar bills in the air, “was my aha! moment.”


Jessica Bennett is the executive editor of Tumblr.

Does this sound familiar to at least some of us?

[Pearl]

Things may be unfair here in America, but thankfully I don't live in India:

The hours-long gang-rape and near-fatal beating of a 23-year-old student on a bus in New Delhi triggered outrage and anger across the country Wednesday as Indians demanded action from authorities who have long ignored persistent violence and harassment against women.
In the streets and in Parliament, calls rose for stringent and swift punishment against those attacking women, including a proposal to make rapists eligible for the death penalty.
`'I feel it is sick what is happening across the country . it is totally sick, and it needs to stop," said Smitha, a 32-year-old protester who goes by only one name.
Thousands of demonstrators clogged the streets in front of New Delhi's police headquarters, protested near Parliament and rallied outside a major university.
Angry university students set up roadblocks across the city, causing massive traffic jams.
"We want to jolt people awake from the cozy comfort of their cars. We want people to feel the pain of what women go through every day," said Aditi Roy, a Delhi University student.

Analysts say crimes against women were on the rise as more young women left their homes to join the work force in India's booming economy, even as deep-rooted social attitudes that women are inferior remained unchanged. Many families look down on women, viewing the girl child as a burden that forces them to pay a huge dowry to marry her off.
Kumari says a change can come about only when women are seen as equal to men.

India Bus Gang Rape: Outrage Spreads Over Public Sexual Assault

[Moonlit_Angel]

It's truly disturbing what is allowed to happen to women in other parts of the world. Ugh.

I'm thrilled to hear of people rising up and protesting, though, and women risking it all to go and make a life for themselves and demand equal rights. I hope their actions do start to spark some kind of change.

And my heart goes out to the poor woman who was the victim of such horrific violence. I hope the creeps who did that to her get the punishment they deserve.

[Pearl]

The story gets worse:

A Hindustan Times report on Thursday has revealed more shocking details about the assault. The paper reports the woman was not only raped and beaten, but was also "violated with a metal rod."
“It appears to be that a rod was inserted into her and it was pulled out with so much force that the act brought out her intestines... That is probably the only thing that explains such severe damage to her intestines,” said a doctor at Safdarjung Hospital where the woman is being treated.
As earlier reports note, the woman has undergone multiple surgeries this week. On Wednesday, portions of her intestine, which had turned gangrenous, were removed. Doctors say only five percent of her intestine had been left inside her when she arrived at the medial facility on Sunday. Dr. B.D. Athani, medical superintendent at the hospital, said the woman will have to be fed through intravenous fluids for the rest of the life.

Delhi Bus Gang Rape Victim Has Intestines Removed As Shocking Details Of Assault Emerge

Sick. Just sick and it makes me so angry.

[Pearl]

Update: the woman has died. RIP

NEW DELHI — A young woman who had been in critical condition since she was raped two weeks ago by several men who lured her onto a bus here died early Saturday, an official at the hospital in Singapore that is caring for her said.


Two weeks after she was raped, an Indian woman died at Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore.The woman, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student whose rape on Dec. 16 had served as a reminder of the dangerous conditions women face in India, “died peacefully” early Saturday, according to a statement attributed to Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore by The Associated Press.


The woman, whose intestines were removed because of injuries caused by a metal rod used during the rape, has not been identified. She was flown to Singapore on Wednesday night after being treated at a local hospital.
Revulsion and anger over the attack have galvanized India, where women regularly face sexual harassment and assault, and where neither the police nor the judicial system is seen as adequately protecting them.
Angry protesters thronged central Delhi after the attack was made public and assembled in other major cities, demanding better protection from the police and better treatment over all for women. Some protesters and politicians have called for the death penalty for rapists.
Top officials now say that change is needed.
“The emergence of women in public spaces, which is an absolutely essential part of social emancipation, is accompanied by growing threats to their safety and security,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in a speech on Thursday. “We must reflect on this problem, which occurs in all states and regions of our country, and which requires greater attention.”
Activists and lawyers in India have long said that the police are insensitive when dealing with crimes against women. The result, they say, is that many women do not report cases of sexual violence. India, which has more than 1.3 billion people, recorded 24,000 cases of rape last year, a figure that has increased by 25 percent in the past six years.
On Thursday, Delhi government officials said they would register the names and photographs of convicted rapists on the Delhi police Web site, the beginning of a national registry for rapists.
As the condition of the Delhi rape victim worsened on Friday, the family of an 18-year-old woman in the northern Indian state of Punjab who committed suicide on Wednesday after being raped last month by two men blamed the police for her death.
Relatives of the woman say she killed herself because the police delayed registering the case or arresting the rapists.
If the police “had done their job, she would be alive today,” the woman’s sister, Charanjit Kaur, 28, said in a phone interview. “They didn’t listen to us; they didn’t act.”
On Friday, the Punjab high court intervened, asking the police to explain their delay. Three police officers have been suspended in the case, according to news media reports. Punjab police officials did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.
Ms. Kaur said her sister was abducted by two men from a place of worship near the small town of Badshahpur on Nov. 13 and was drugged and raped repeatedly. When the woman reported the episode at the local police station a few days later, she was asked to describe it in graphic detail and was “humiliated,” her sister said.
Over the next few days, Ms. Kaur said, her mother and sister were repeatedly called to the police station and forced to sit there all day. But the case was not registered for two weeks, as police officials and village elders tried to broker a deal between the men accused of the rape and the victim. In some parts of India, women are commonly married to men who have raped them.
Ms. Kaur said the police told her family that, because they were poor, they would not be able to fight the matter in court. “They kept putting pressure on my family to take money or marry the accused or just somehow settle the matter,” she said.
After no agreement was reached, the police registered the case, but they did not make any arrests. The victim was stalked and harassed by the men accused of the rape, who threatened to kill her and her family if she refused to drop the complaint, her suicide note said.
“They have ruined my life,” the note read, according to Ms. Kaur. The note names two men and a woman who allegedly helped the other two men as they kidnapped her. Those two men have now been arrested, the police said Friday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/29/wo...ndia.html?_r=0


I hope because of these two women's death, India will finally start to really do something about the abuse of women. Its a shame they had to die in order for anything to happen.

[Moonlit_Angel]

Just saw that on the Yahoo! page, yeah. Very tragic indeed.

The woman, whose intestines were removed because of injuries caused by a metal rod used during the rape, has not been identified.

Jesus Christ.

[MrsSpringsteen]

Beyond any words. It makes me so angry too, and so sad.

[Pearl]

I don't mean to turn this thread into a rape awareness/rape victims' rights type of thread, but because this involves a woman's marital status, this story belongs here:

A California appeals court overturned the rape conviction of a man who pretended to be a sleeping woman's boyfriend, ruling, in part, Wednesday that an arcane law from 1872 doesn't protect unmarried women in such cases.
A panel of judges reversed the trial court's conviction of Julio Morales and remanded it for retrial, in a decision posted Wednesday from the Los Angeles-based court.
Morales had been sentenced to three years in state prison. He was accused of entering a woman's bedroom late one night after her boyfriend had gone home and initiating sexual intercourse while she was asleep, after a night of drinking.
The victim said her boyfriend was in the room when she fell asleep, and they'd decided against having sex that night because he didn't have a condom and he had to be somewhere early the next day.
Morales pretended to be her boyfriend in the darkened room, and it wasn't until a ray of light from outside the room flashed across his face that she realized he wasn't her boyfriend, according to prosecutors.
"Has the man committed rape? Because of historical anomalies in the law and the statutory definition of rape, the answer is no, even though, if the woman had been married and the man had impersonated her husband, the answer would be yes," Judge Thomas L. Willhite Jr. wrote in the court's decision.

California Appeals Court Overturns Rape Conviction, Rules State Law Doesn't Protect Unmarried Women

Will the people of California please demand their state politicians to get their asses moving and overturn this ridiculous and outdated law?

I am so disgusted now. This means any guy who was convicted of raping a single woman in California has a right to appeal.

[Moonlit_Angel]

Holy hell, really?

How does that make any sort of logical sense? Who the hell cares what some law from the 1800s has to say about this issue? He broke into a place and forced himself on someone. That puts him square in the "WRONG" category, case closed.

It's truly, truly frightening that we have people who are judges actually making decisions of this sort.

[PhilsFan]

It's cases like these that get those laws changed. No one bothers to read through the old laws until they come up in cases like these. The same thing is happening in Pennsylvania now with its laws on reporting child abuse.

[MrsSpringsteen]

If anyone's looking for a movie with a lead female character who is strong and smart and not all about getting with a guy..Zero Dark Thirty. Supposedly based upon the real CIA agent who helped to find Bin Laden. It was so great to see that type of female character in a movie. Very good movie too.

[deep]

See Cloud Atlas, it has a heroine we can believe in, Sonmi
She does not torture.

[BonosSaint]

NY Times

January 12, 2013
We Offer More Than Ankles, Gentlemen
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

PRESIDENT OBAMA ran promoting women’s issues.

But how about promoting some women?

With the old white boys’ club rearing its hoary head in the White House of the first black president, the historian Michael Beschloss recalled the days when the distaff was deemed biologically unsuited for the manly discourse of politics. He tweeted: “1/12/1915, U.S. House refused women voting rights. One Congressman: ‘Their ankles are beautiful ... but they are not interested in the state.’ ”

Now comes a parade of women to plead the case for the value of female perspective in high office: Women reach across the aisle, seek consensus, verbalize and empathize more, manage and listen better. Women are more pragmatic, risk-averse and, unburdened by testosterone, less bellicose.

Unfortunately, these “truisms” haven’t held true with many of the top women I’ve covered in Washington.

Janet Reno was trigger-happy on Waco, and a tragic conflagration ensued. Hillary Clinton’s my-way-or-the-highway obduracy doomed her heath care initiative; she also voted to authorize the Iraq invasion without even reading the National Intelligence Estimate, and badly mismanaged her 2008 campaign. Condi Rice avidly sold W.’s bogus war in Iraq. One of Susan Rice’s most memorable moments was when she flipped the finger at Richard Holbrooke during a State Department meeting.

Maybe these women in the first wave to the top had to be more-macho-than-thou to succeed. And maybe women don’t always bring a completely different or superior skill set to the table. And maybe none of that matters.

We’re equal partners in life and governance now, and we merit equal representation, good traits and bad, warts and all.

It’s passing strange that Obama, carried to a second term by women, blacks and Latinos, chooses to give away the plummiest Cabinet and White House jobs to white dudes.

If there’s one thing white men have never had a problem with in this clubby, white marble enclave of Washington, it’s getting pulled up the ladder by other men. (New York magazine claims that of late, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has a better record of appointing top women than Obama does.)

Last week, The New York Times ran a startling photo, released by the White House, of the president in the Oval Office surrounded by 10 male advisers (nine white and one black). Valerie Jarrett was there, but was obscured by a white guy (though a bit of leg and “beautiful ankle” did show).

Obama has brought in a lot of women, including two he appointed to the Supreme Court, but it is more than an “optics” problem, to use the irritating cliché of the moment. Word from the White House is that the president himself is irritated, and demanding answers about the faces his staff is pushing forward. Unfortunately, he has only a bunch of white guys to offer an explanation of why the picture looks like a bunch of white guys.

Right from the start, the president who pledged “Change We Can Believe In” has been so cautious about change that there have been periodic eruptions from women and minorities.

Maybe Obama thinks he’s such a huge change for the nation to digest that everything else must look like the Eisenhower administration, with Michelle obligingly playing Laura Petrie. But it’s Barry tripping over the ottoman.

In more “He’s Like Ike” moments, the president spends his free time golfing with white male junior aides. The mood got sour early in the first term when senior female aides had a dinner to gripe directly to Obama about lack of access and getting elbowed out of big policy debates.

Some women around Obama who say that he never empowers women to take charge of anything are privately gratified at the latest kerfuffle, hoping it will shut down the West Wing man cave. It’s particularly galling because the president won re-election — and a record number of women ascended to Congress — on the strength of high-toned denunciations of the oldfangled Mitt Romney and the Republican kamikaze raid on women.

“We don’t have to order up some binders to find qualified, talented, driven young women” to excel in all fields, the president said on the trail, vowing to unfurl the future for “our daughters.”

It may be because the president knows what a matriarchal world he himself lives in that he assumes we understand that the most trusted people in his life have been female — his wife, his daughters, his mother, his grandmother, his mother-in-law, his closest aide, Valerie.

But this isn’t about how he feels, or what his comfort zone is, or who’s in his line of sight. It’s about what he projects to the world — not to mention to his own daughters.

Obama is an insular man who is not as dependent on his staff as some other presidents. With no particular vision for his staff, he surrounds himself with guys who then hire their guy friends.

Most people who work in the top tier of campaigns are men; most people who work for Obama now were on his campaigns; ergo, most people in his inner circle are men. Pretty soon, nobody’s thinking it through and going out of the way to reflect a world where daughters have the same opportunities as sons.

And then the avatars of modernity hit the front page of The Times, looking just as backward as the pasty, patriarchal Republicans they mocked.

[Moonlit_Angel]

This country is very, veeeeeeeery slow in embracing change on a lot of things, unfortunately. People imagined and hoped that by the 21st century we wouldn't have to be discussing this stuff much anymore, if at all, and yet here we are doing just that. Bizarre.

I found the bit about women having to act "tough" and "macho" to be taken seriously in politics particularly interesting. It does seem many women feel like they have to try and act like a man would in order to get any attention or respect in situations, and sometimes they are encouraged, by other women, no less, to do just that.

And yet sometimes when women do try and take charge in such a manner they also get refered to as "bitches" and are made fun of for not being "feminine enough". Seems that often winds up being a "no-win" situation.

[BonosSaint]

Originally Posted by Moonlit_Angel

This country is very, veeeeeeeery slow in embracing change on a lot of things, unfortunately. People imagined and hoped that by the 21st century we wouldn't have to be discussing this stuff much anymore, if at all, and yet here we are doing just that. Bizarre.

I found the bit about women having to act "tough" and "macho" to be taken seriously in politics particularly interesting. It does seem many women feel like they have to try and act like a man would in order to get any attention or respect in situations, and sometimes they are encouraged, by other women, no less, to do just that.

And yet sometimes when women do try and take charge in such a manner they also get refered to as "bitches" and are made fun of for not being "feminine enough". Seems that often winds up being a "no-win" situation.

Althuogh men are often held to a standard of "maleness" both by men and women that can be harmful to them, I think that women are less seen as individuals with individual strengths, talents and foibles than men are. We are much more perceived in a group status. Society allows men to be defined by many attributes in a single package, to have nuance and complexity. Women aren't given as much. That's the price of being considered a lesser, even (sometimes unconsciously) by other women.

We accept the limits or we don't. There have been a lot of changes in the last 40 years or so, but a lot still remains the same under the surface.

[MrsSpringsteen]

Originally Posted by deep

See Cloud Atlas, it has a heroine we can believe in, Sonmi
She does not torture.

Yes, I'm all about the torture. That's why I watched most of the torture scenes with my head down. Did you miss the part in which SHE thought of the non-torture method of getting the desired information? I did some online research after I saw the movie, and the real CIA started actively recruiting women (or chicks as the male agents at the time called them) because of their acumen for thinking about relationships between people (like the courier), and that kind of intuitive outside of the box thinking that the male agents seemed to be lacking. That's the same reason that the female agents were actively sought out in the hunt for Bin Laden.

The movie doesn't insult your intelligence and spoon feed it to the viewer. I think they assume that we are smart enough to form our own conclusions. I didn't know what the character's feelings were about the torture, other than her expressions after witnessing it. Much of Jessica's acting is done with facial expressions and not words-again, not spoon feeding it. Which to me told me she didn't exactly approve of it. Yes she went along with it. The SEAL Team 6 member who wrote the book that he wasn't supposed to write, he claims that the real agent was curled up in a fetal position and crying after identifying Bin Laden's body. If that's true well what does that mean? Absent being able to talk to her directly, well I think the reader and the viewer reach their own conclusions. But I certainly don't think it means she's just a wimpy "chick".

I still admired the character, and would love to know more about the real woman. Don't think that makes me a torture lover. I saw Cloud Atlas, thought it was a jumbled mess (cool looking, visually interesting..and yes I got the message of it) that wouldn't really stay in my memory. Hurt Locker and ZDT, they will.

[BonosSaint]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/mo....html?hpw&_r=0

January 14, 2013
A Salute to Girl Power in Hollywood
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

At a time when President Obama is under attack for appointing so many white men — and so few women — to senior positions in the White House, Hollywood seemed intent Sunday on correcting the imbalance at the Golden Globes.

Ricky Gervais took the awards to the edge of puerile bullying three years in a row, but Tina Fey and Amy Poehler brought charm and easy good humor to a ceremony where stars are supposed to relax and have fun.

And it was one of the more amusing awards shows because of it. The two comedians were gentle — up to a point. In their opening, Ms. Fey and Ms. Poehler pointed out Kathryn Bigelow and made a joke about the controversy over her film “Zero Dark Thirty.” Ms. Poehler said, “When it comes to torture, I trust a lady who spent three years married to James Cameron.” The camera panned to stars looking a little shocked as they laughed.

It wasn’t the only Girl Power moment. Former President Bill Clinton was met with a standing ovation when he arrived to introduce the Steven Spielberg film “Lincoln.” But it was Ms. Poehler who got the biggest laugh when she returned to the stage and said rapturously, “That was Hillary Clinton’s husband.”

Female wunderkinds of every age seemed to dominate the night, including Jodie Foster, a former child star who was awarded the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award, and the newcomer Lena Dunham, the creator and star of “Girls.”

Ms. Foster, long reticent about her personal life, gave a brilliant, somewhat incomprehensible soliloquy that was almost a coming-out speech, but then veered away. (It was like Garbo talks, then Garbo is garbled.) Ms. Dunham accepted for best actress in a TV comedy by saying somewhat tremulously that other, more senior nominees for the award, like Ms. Fey and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, were the comfort of her youth. Ms. Fey underlined the slight by saying sarcastically, “Congratulations, Lena, I’m glad we got you through middle school.”

Julianne Moore, who won best actress in a television movie for her depiction of Sarah Palin in the HBO film “Game Change,” made a point of saluting two women who had nothing to do with the film but everything with exposing Ms. Palin’s weaknesses: Ms. Fey, who impersonated Ms. Palin on “Saturday Night Live,” and Katie Couric, whose interviews with Ms. Palin during the 2008 election campaign provided Ms. Fey with raw material for her parody.

And one of the most unlikely star turns was by Aida Takla O’Reilly, the president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a group that is often mocked but is not known for having a sense of humor. Ms. Takla O’Reilly said, “I know that Jeffrey Katzenberg will never forget my name, because he never knew it in the first place.”

In so many studied efforts at levity, lapses are all the more glaring. British actors are known for their witty good manners at awards shows, but Damian Lewis, who won best actor in a TV drama for “Homeland,” thanked many colleagues and friends but didn’t even mention his co-star, Claire Danes — one of the more startling omissions since Hilary Swank forgot to thank her husband at the time, Chad Lowe. (When Ms. Dunham was onstage after winning the award for best comedy or musical TV series, she made an oblique reference to that slip, joking, “I also promised myself that if I ever got this chance, I would thank Chad Lowe.”)

Most of the women were studiously gracious in victory (except the pop singer Adele, who used a rather salty Britishism to describe how much she was enjoying the show). While accepting her award, Jennifer Lawrence made a joke about beating out Meryl Streep, but praised her co-star Bradley Cooper and also the producer Harvey Weinstein, whom she thanked for “killing whoever you had to kill to get me up here today.” Anne Hathaway, who won for best supporting actress in a movie, even reached out to one of her rivals for the award, thanking Sally Field, nominated for playing the president’s wife in “Lincoln,” for being “a vanguard against typecasting” by going from “The Flying Nun” to “Norma Rae.” (Ms. Hathaway rose to fame as the star of “The Princess Diaries.”)

And it could be that all the female success has left a pall on some of the men.

On the red carpet before the show Jay Leno gave the hosts of the night a backhanded compliment: he called Ms. Fey and Ms. Poehler “two of the funniest women I know,” then added of Ms. Poehler’s sitcom: “ ‘Parks and Recreation’ is my wife’s favorite show. She never misses it.”

Ms. Poehler had the last laugh, closing the show by saying of herself and Ms. Fey, “We’re going home with Jodie Foster.”

[cobl04]

I thought Ricky Gervais was hilarious.