Heartwarming Misogyny?

Yesterday night, my wife was watching a movie called The Proposal. It is a romantic comedy with the standard formula, really. Innocuous, and, from what I can see, relatively funny. Last night I caught a scene I hadn't seen:

Sandra Bullock is in the woods; she meets Betty White (Bullock's love-interest's grandmother) who is dressed in pseudo Native American garb. White encourages Bullock to participate in a ceremonial dance and to chant. When Bullock says she doesn't know how, White encourages her to just say whatever comes to mind. Bullock goes nuts and starts doing a rap song.

I won't repeat the lyrics, because doing so would work contrary to the point I am about to make. Let it suffice to say that they were more disgusting than you could probably imagine. The question I ask myself is: Would the scene have been as funny with rap lyrics that were even remotely appropriate? I think it would have been. How is it that anyone responsible for the film decided it was a good artistic decision that cute Sandra Bullock ought to be rapping about sweaty male nether-regions (I kid you not -- and that isn't the worst of the full song, believe me) from a misogynistic lyric whose writers treat women like disposable sexual devices?

Thank goodness we have moved past
this sort of objectification. We are so much more
enlightened, now. (from Tex Avery)

Using the disgusting lyrics is just another example, to me, of adults acting like kids trying to get away with what they are able. We are becoming a society that is increasingly beginning to act as if it is made up exclusively of children -- children who don't really care much about the real kids and what they might see or hear. (But that might be another post...)

Programming Families vs. Family Programming

One doesn't want to label everything that is surprising or offensive as a portent of doom -- as a sign of the collapse of modern culture. Still, every captain of his own little ship wants to remain wary that icebergs are generally smaller at the tip and fatter under water...

"The Family Channel" (or "ABC Family") -- which markets itself to "a new kind of family" (I'll say) -- looks like just such an iceberg to me.

Andy Griffith: family programming: then...

I don't generally see much of an attempt on the channel to keep things family friendly, at least by my standards -- so why market it as a "family" channel?

Here's your typical family channel irony: the other night I was flipping through stations and I saw that a movie was about to come on. It was called Burlesque. The channel, before rolling the film, labeled it as a movie that contains: "intense sexual situations; intensely suggestive dialogue." The PG-13 rating portends partial nudity, profane language and -- go figure -- suggestive dance routines.

In short, not a movie I would sit and watch with my little ones. So...I suppose, to a father of "a new kind of family" -- one that thinks it is okay to watch burlesque dancing with children -- that would all be fine.

NewSouth Books Censors Mark Twain

The world is full of short-sighted morons. You know that, right? Especially when it comes racial issues in literature. I was once evaluated, by a student in one of my college classes, as a racist. Why? I taught The Sun Also Rises, in which the narrator uses the "n" word; therefore, I was a racist for having chosen the book. Yeah -- slightly flawed logic.

A teacher I worked with informed me, today, that a librarian that he worked with in a school whose demographics were 100% African-American refused to have any book in the school library that contained the "n" word. While I get the sentiment, one wonders where that leaves, say, Richard Wright.