I was looking at TV pilots for the 2007-2008 television season, and I was struck by how many pilots related to ‘girl power,’ especially the idea of a supermom who balances work and family.  It’ll also be interesting to see how many of them actually get picked up by the networks, and if the number that are picked up is proportional to how many were created.  Here are some examples (there are probably a lot more, but I thought these were particularly relevant):

ABC

• Mr. and Mrs. Smith: based on the blockbuster movie
• Cashmere Mafia: “Sex and the City creator Darren Star is back to New York in this new dramedy pilot, about four female executives, friends since college, who support one another through the trials and tribulations of work, family, and everything else life in New York City throws at them.”
• Women’s Murder Club: “A series of mystery books by James Patterson was the inspiration for this new series, which tells the story of four women who work together to solve some of the most confounding murder cases out there. Their jobs as a homicide detective, a medical examiner, a newspaper reporter, and an assistant district attorney give them a formidable range of skills, and their strong friendship provides basis for the teamwork that’s necessary to crack each case.”
• The Middle: “This new comedy series uses a mother’s point of view to shed light on the lives of a middle-class family in the Midwest.”
• Untitled Rina Mimoun Project: “A lawyer, Annie (Alyssa Milano of Charmed), and her infant son move from Boston to her hometown of Charleston, SC where she must deal with her eccentric family while adjusting to her new job at her father’s law firm.”
• Football Wives: “Based on the cult British soap Footballers’ Wive$, this remake chronicles the exciting and dangerous lives of three wealthy women, Donna, Tanya and Chardonnay, all wives to superstar footballers. Updated for the US by Ugly Betty’s Marco Pennette, ABC’s remake promises to retain the trashy, high-camp drama of the original series, whilst adding its own unique charm and flare to the premise.”
• Judy’s Got a Gun: “A woman seeks balance between her life as a single mom and her job as a suburban detective.”
• Traveling in Packs: “Three single women decide they’re sick of being alone…so they all move in together!”
• Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office: “Can a ‘nice girl’ make it big in the world of bloodthirsty corporate sharks? This new comedy aims to find out!”
• See Jayne Run: “A tough-as-nails investment banker strikes an indelicate balance between career and motherhood.” 

CBS

• Untitled Stiller & Taylor Project: “A comedy about a famous actress struggling to balance her fame and career with the demands of her close-knit family.”

NBC

• Lipstick Jungle: Based on the novel by Sex & the City writer Candace Bushnell, “Lipstick Jungle tracks three powerful career women who are willing to do almost anything for success in the business world. Their thirst for achievement is sure to get them where they want to go–but at what personal cost?”
• Winters: “In a traditionally male-dominated world, one female police officer finds her place at the center of this new drama for NBC.”
• The Bionic Woman: “Jamie Sommers is a young woman working as bartender and raising her teenage sister, Becca. When she is hit by a car and seriously injured. Her only hope becomes an experimental and top secret procedure. But this salvation comes at a high price.”

FOX

•  The Return of Jezebel James: “Amy Sherman-Palladino, creator of Gilmore Girls, brings us this multi-camera comedy about how two estranged sisters who are polar opposites try to raise a baby together.  Boston Legal’s Parker Posey was cast in the lead role in this comedy pilot as Sarah Tomkins. Sarah is an intelligent, optimistic and determined woman who has it all. She’s a successful editor of children’s books with a very helpful assistant Buddy (The Good Shepherd’s Michael Arden) who keeps her life together. Also she has a steady, no-strings-attached relationship with businessman Marcus Sonti (Gilmore Girls’s Scott Cohen) a confirmed bachelor.  At the same time Sarah’s father, Ronald (Trump Unauthorized Ron McLarty) always reminds her that although she has the perfect job and boyfriend, something is missing in her life. When Sarah comes home from work she feels alone and she is also not getting any younger, so she decides to get pregnant. But the doctor soon tells her that she cannot have children, so Sarah begins an alternate plan. When she can’t find anyone she can count on to have the baby for her, she turns to her estranged sister Coco (Six Feet Under’s Lauren Ambrose). Coco refuses at first, but when Sarah mentions that she has turned Jezebel James, Coco’s imaginary childhood friend, into a story book, Coco begins to take her sister’s idea more seriously. Coco thinks about her current living status on her friend’s couch and decides to go ahead with her sister’s plan.
• When Women Rule the World: “FOX takes a look at what would happen if gender roles are turned upside down. Participants will go to a remote, primitive location where they will be tasked with creating a new society where women are in charge and men are subservient.”
• Revenge: “Fed up with the trials and tribulations of dating life, three female friends set out on a mission of justice against all the men who’ve done them wrong.”
• The Hot Years: “Four hard-partying young women plow headfirst through their twenties in this age of online dating, celebrity exploits, and sexual experimentation…but they’re about to realize that if they want to grow up, they’ll have to make some major changes.”

The CW

• Crowned: “Crowned is an eight episode reality program where mother-daughter teams compete to win a beauty pageant title.”
• Gossip Girl: “Based on the popular book series of the same name, this drama gives viewers a peek into the world of privileged teenagers on an elite private school in New York City.”
• I am Paige Armstrong: “After becoming fed up with her boss’ morally suspect wheeling and dealing, a brilliant and idealistic congressional aide does the only thing she can to fight ‘the man:’ run against him!”
• Hell on Earth: “Dawnn Lewish, Kim Coles, and Lamont Thompson star in this comedy about a spoiled, bratty girl who is killed in a bus accident and granted a second chance at life…as a normal girl from a working-class neighborhood.”
• M.I.L.F. and Cookies: “Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, among others, will executive produce this comedy pilot about a group of sexy single moms all living in the same apartment complex. The story will be told through the eyes of a very observant security guard.”

And as a side, I was kind of disappointed by the lack of nonwhite characters, but especially nonwhite leads, in these pilots.  There were some pleasant surprises (like while looking around some more online I found out that there were many more Asian/Asian-American characters than I had expected [e.g. Lucy Liu in Cashmere Mafia and Lindsay Price in Lipstick Jungle, both seemingly exactly the same show, oddly enough], and there was the one about a multigenerational Latino family, as well as Frangela), buuut I’m willing to bet that the more ‘colorful’ ones won’t get picked up.  See this LA Times article about how ABC wants to tell a story of race relations through Cavemen…even though it canceled The George Lopez Show.

So, in normal Amherst fashion, I was procrastinating my finals work by searching around on facebook and looking at this weekends edition of fun and fabulous pictures. I started to see a theme: girls pose differently then guys: ok I know “WOW!” what a find! Shocking, but in thinking about the male gaze, it is really easy to notice that women pose for men in their pictures: particularly on drunken Saturday nights. Many groups even do it for their girl friends, even at other schools: so that they can look at the pictures and say: “oh look how cute so and so looks out with her friends in their little langerie!” I think that this might be something that is different then a few years a go. Facebook and Myspace have allowed for internet stalking and picture posting, and allowed each and every member to create a little album of themselves for the opposite sex or for their friends to get jealous from. Specifically relating to girls: do we really think about how and who we are posing for when we take pictures? (particularly those on drunken or wild nights) So is it always the confusing: women like to see men looking at them, or is it women like to see other women looking at men who are looking at them….or even worse: women like to see anyone looking, as long as their being looked at!

Someone a while back posted a link to Ms. Dewey, which is an online search engine with a woman named Ms. Dewey who reacts to what you type in, played by actress Janina Gavankar.  It’s kind of weird and obectifying and totally all about the male gaze.  Well, after surfing the internet for a bit, I came upon something even worse: Virtual Bartender 1 and Virtual Bartender 2.  You can place random orders to these ’beer girls’ and they will act really suggestive (pre-filmed) in front of the camera.

What I kind find of odd about Ms. Dewey and Virtual Bartender is that although they’re all about the male gaze, they’re also about interaction, of sorts, with these virtual women.  But I guess since we’re so separated from them, they’re still just performing, not actually responding and interacting with us.

I just came across this article in the New York Times about Leonard Nimoy (yes, Spock) and his new book, “The Full Body Project.” His book features nude, obese women in provocative poses.  He says that the project is a direct response to the pressures women face in being a size 2…

“The women are interested in fat liberation. Their self-esteem is strong. They will tell you that too many people suffer because the body they live in is not the body you find in the fashion magazines.”

He also has a show of photographs, and guess where it is… the photographs are on view at the R. Michelson Galleries in Northampton, Mass., through June!
So what do you guys think? Is this girl power or just another, albeit very different, form of the male gaze?

My friend showed me this website yesterday that claims to show you the side effects of Reversa’s facial products, which are directed at older women trying to get rid of wrinkles, age spots, etc.

Each “side effect” is basically a man doing something, whether that man is a chef, a firefighter, plumber, or gardener. I would recommend watching the “Bread Making” side effect of the first product (a spot remover). I suppose the general message of the ad is that these products will make you look so great and young that men will flock to you and do anything and everything for you. On the other hand, it could be an attempt to convince women that they are currently not beautiful enough to attract these men and use to need Reversa in order to attain such “side effects.”

While the ad seems to attempt to empower women by putting them in the position of “the gaze,” at the same time, the company seems to be watching us watching the men and exploiting this for capital gains.

I still don’t know what to make of this website. I definitely laughed my way through it, but then thought twice about its implications. What do you guys think??

While browsing youtube yesterday, my friend and I came across this music video from Japan:

The video was one of the top viewed for the day, even though it’s in Japanese. About 5 seconds into the video my friend immediately noticed that this singer or group was some strange Asian version of the Pussycat Dolls. This is most noticeable in the outfits and dancing. At times the main singer even stops mouthing the words, concentrating more on her dancing.

The video also features the main singer watching two men fight and seemingly getting turned-on by this display of “masculinity.” While this may be reversing the male-gaze, the men are blurred and it seems as though we should be watching her watching (returning us to the position of the gaze and her to the position of subject).

The video made me wonder if the brand of “new girl power” that the Pussycat Dolls is marketing is spreading internationally. While Melissa’s post on the Cheetah Girls said that, at least for now, little girls may be safe from the Pussycat Dolls, how safe is the rest of the world?

This article from the NY Times discusses, although it is a year and a half old(published september 2005), Ariel Levy’s claims about what women these days are turning themselves into. I found this quote from the article particularly interesting and very much the focus of class discussion the past few weeks: “Our popular culture, she argues, has embraced a model of female sexuality that comes straight from pornography and strip clubs, in which the woman’s job is to excite and titillate – to perform for men. According to Levy, women have bought into this by altering their bodies surgically and cosmetically, and – more insidiously – by confusing sexual power with power, so that embracing this caricaturish form of sexuality becomes, in their minds, a perverse kind of feminism.” Levy goes on to discuss the rise of the number of Olympic athletes that pose for playboy, Paris Hilton, Girls Gone wild, and stereotypes of cartoon men and women. The woman who wrote this article: Jennifer Egan, believes that Levy shapes her examples to fit her theories, and argues that she drew from a small pool of women and girls. What do we think? Do we agree with Levy? Egan does in the end praise the book for posing a tough question: “Many women can buy their own plane tickets and pay their own rent. They can treat themselves. Why, then, do they persist in watching themselves through male eyes?”

So, the folks at Postwire discovered that there is a remarkable difference in Hermione’s (Emma Watson’s) breast size between the IMAX Order of the Phoenix poster and the regular poster.

Mmmm, I love hypersexualizing young teenagers.

Anyone else appalled?

I recently came across an advertisement from PETA that featured one of Hugh Hefner’s “girlfriends,” Holly Madison, completely nude saying she would “rather go naked then wear fur.”  I found it strange that an organization dedicated to the ethical treatment of animals would find no problem objectifying women in their ads. Of course, Holly is not the first person to pose nude for PETA. Pamela Anderson, Pink,and a whole array of other stars also posed for the same ad campaign. Not surprisingly, they were all women. I was wondering if anyone else found this as ridiculous as I did.

I posted some pictures after the jump.

The men in Thelma and Louise seemed to fall into two brackets: pigs who see the women through the traditional objectifying male gaze, and those whom we were supposed to view the women, or those holding the “male gaze” for the audience viewers.

The “pigs” clearly represented what the women were fighting against: sexual violence against, and general oppression of, women (the dirty trucker, the guy they shot outside the bar (Harlan), Thelma’s husband, Darryl). They are played so over the top in these roles (the trucker has female bodies engraved on his truck to clearly show his objectification of women, and Harlan and Darryl clearly have no respect for the women in all of their assigned dialogue. By having such a clearly negative group to fight against, viewers are drawn into the female protagonists’ plight, and feel sympathy for all their brushes with the law. However, I feel as those this is compromised throughout the film, by the other male characters, who provide their own “male gaze” on screen. 

The main detective, Investigator Slocomb seems to be oddly sympathetic to the girls, because as we randomly find out, he “knows what happened to [Louise] in Texas” referencing her own rape. Also, Louise’s boyfriend, Jimmy, is wonderfully supportive and loving towards her, offering her the money she needs, and even proposing in order to keep her by his side. After Jimmy serves this purpose, however, he is rarely seen again, his part as supporter seems lost, as if when he heard that she was in trouble with the law, he would do nothing. Darryl follows the investigation closely, but Jimmy seems to disappear. These two men in particular, seem to distract from the main focus of the audience, which is to support Thelma and Louise, and draws then into a man’s world, where some guys do understand, and makes the audience ask: why do they have to keep running? Slocomb and Jimmy will work it out, they’re nice guys. I feel as though those loose ends make the film less about female empowerment, and more about two crazy women getting beat up and lost in a man’s world. 

The last shot of the film, Slocomb chasing the car, could show, if one were to argue this way, that he was running after them to try and pull them back into the man’s world, that they had broken free and he was trying to reign them in. However by not having the camera follow the girls off at the end, but having a shot from behind Slocomb’s shoulder, and then the car flying over the edge on the side, I feel like we end disconnected from the girls. We follow them from the point of a male detective who, while clearly (and in my mind strangely) is empathetic and supportive of the girls, is also a man, and a representation of the police (controlling men).