Please pardon the interruption of our regularly-scheduled programming (er…posts) for a brief Public Service Announcement:

Jennifer’s been working very hard the past couple months trying to make Hathor bigger and better (you may have noticed that even the main page looks a little different as things shift around). We’ve got a lot of great plans in the works, including more frequent posting, regular link roundups, an essay contest (with prizes!) and something possibly involving our Twitter feed (yet to be determined, but if you want to follow THL on Twitter, you can find us here).

For now, I’m posting to let you all know about a banner/link exchange program we’re starting. Our Recommended Sites page now features other blogs and sites by our readers, and we’d love to include you all. If you want to participate, all you have to do is put one of The Hathor Legacy’s banners somewhere on your blog/site, link to us through the banner, and email me (Aviva, at fourthwave[dot]feminism[at]gmail[dot]com) with a link to your site and your preferred category (let me know if you feel your site doesn’t fit any of the categories already on the links page and we’ll figure something out). If you already have a THL banner up and you’re not yet on the links page, let me know and I’ll make sure to add you.

And check back often on our Recommended Sites page for links to other great blogs!

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Okay, y’all, I’m taking a break from paper checking to let you know WHY I HATE EVERYTHING. Theoretically this is a link round up from yours truly. We’ll see how that goes.

What’s inspiring a particularly burning, virulent passion in my most barren of hearts is… THANKSGIVING! I frikking hate this holiday… not because I don’t have anything to be thankful for, because I am truly blessed, but because of the icky icky politics involved in the portrayal of Native peoples. What specifically gets me riled up are the ways in which Natives become implicated in these conversations as the baddies, WHEN THEY’RE COMPLAINING ABOUT RACIST STEREOTYPES THAT DEMEAN THEIR VERY EXISTANCE. Oh god, the rage. It burns me.

The ever lovely Lisa gets sociological with it by pointing out that

American Indians are as modern as the rest of us, why are representations of American Indians, as they live today, so unusual?  And what effect might that have on the psyche of American Indian people?

Read more of her thought-provoking post here. Racialicious picked up the post here, where there’s an interesting conversation going on that involves Rob Schmidt from Blue Corn Comics, who as you no doubt recall had some great comments on Twilight.

Now, the thing is, this is not about some tragic interior monologue. Anti-Racist Parent has set up an open thread to discuss the recent case in Claremont, CA. The children of this Cali town have become the epicenter of a LIBERAL CONSPIRACY, since some of their crazy pinko parents had the AUDACITY to complain about the public school tradition surrounding Pilgrims and Indians. Please note the way the article frames this as a brown vs brown issue:

Raheja, whose mother is a Seneca, wrote the letter upon hearing of a four-decade district tradition, where kindergartners at Condit and Mountain View elementary schools take annual turns dressing up and visiting the other school for a Thanksgiving feast. This year, the Mountain View children would have dressed as Native Americans and walked to Condit, whose students would have dressed as Pilgrims.

Raheja, an English professor at UC Riverside who specializes in Native American literature, said she met with teachers and administrators in hopes that the district could hold a public forum to discuss alternatives that celebrate thankfulness without “dehumanizing” her daughter’s ancestry.

“There is nothing to be served by dressing up as a racist stereotype,” she said.

then,

Kathleen Lucas, a Condit parent who is of Choctaw heritage, said her son — now a first-grader — still wears the vest and feathered headband he made last year to celebrate the holiday.

“My son was so proud,” she said. “In his eyes, he thinks that’s what it looks like to be Indian.”

which I think nicely picks up on some of the themes from Lisa’s earlier post.

Finally, I’m gonna conclude by (twitch) noting the framing of the recent incident at Plimoth, where a little girl was asked to change out of her Indian costume before going on to the Wampanoag Historical Site. Several conservative sites are trying to paint this as the victory of the PC over everything else, but considering that it was a heck of a lot easier for me to find websites on Indian girls’ costumes vs. actual news articles on racism, I’d say that they are FAIL and quite possibly INCORRECT. Also, please note the fun fun conflation of racism AND sexism in their criticism of Linda Coombs, the assoc. directory involved in the incident. Calling someone a cow is always a rhetorical trick made out of FAIL.

This is exactly why my butt stays over in Books. Now I am all agitated. Anyways, if you’re looking for an amazing read on Native issues, please check out Andrea Smith’s Conquest, which will, I think, be my brain bleach of choice for the next few hours. If you wanna join me in getting that oh-so-clean feeling, check out the excerpt South End press has so courteously provided. I’ll get back to those papers… eventually.

Posted in I Read The Internets, The Think Box
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Why yes, I am reviewing Mystery Science Theater 3000, the hilarious cult phenomenon TV show in which a guy marooned in space and two robots watched a terrible movie and made fun of it. MST3K was my first experience of someone outside my home making sarcastic and delicious fun of a movie for, among other things, portraying women poorly:

“Yes, non-skinny women are inherently unhappy.”

-Laserblast

“We’ll just stand here, because they’re men and we’re not. We don’t want to get involved.”

-Catalina Caper

What I love about this show was that there’s no way anyone could think they were just looking for something to complain about (as some visitors to this site have accused us of doing). MST couldn’t possibly be linked with the missions of feminists, anti-racists or other equality activists: it had no purpose but to make fun of movies that had utterly failed. And yet, part of what they perceived as bad entertainment was the very stuff we criticize here: lazy stereotypes, tropes, and the obsession with sidelining females in a desperate attempt to make poorly written male protagonists look like they could handle a malfunctioning Xerox machine without crying for their mommies.

Because the stuff we criticize is bad entertainment. As concerned as we are about the fact that portraying women as less than human reinforces existing misogynistic beliefs, let us never lose site of the fact that it just plain makes your movie/TV show suck. It’s been done to death, and because we all know women aren’t really like that, it’s a cheat as big as having a car suddenly take off flying just to convenience your plot. It shows how uncreative the filmmakers are, or how incapable they are of showing any perspective but their own - or it provides a really embarrassing glipmse into the filmmaker’s extreme lack of experience with women, or his/her own seeming misogyny.

Why did the writers of MST get it? It’s not as if they made perfect choices in their own setup - the lead character (Joel and later Mike) was always a white man; the robots who made fun of movies with him were characterized as male; Gypsy, the only female robot we heard from very occasionally, was characterized at about the level of a particularly giddy ten year old who liked unicorns and pretty flowers and had a weird crush on Richard Basehart (and even she was voiced by a man!). And the bad guys who kept Joel/Mike and the bots marooned in space with bad movies were also male (for the first eight years).

Of course, when this setup was established way back at the beginning, there were no female writers on the show. Mary Jo Pehl and Bridget Jones (Nelson) came a couple of years later, as did a few new male writers. Which is not to say the male writers didn’t contribute to the jokes about bad female portrayals - I imagine they did, and in the worst case, I still have to credit the original group of men for hiring not one but two women as writers. And for later putting both women on screen, where they were hilarious.

MST provides incontrovertible proof that fans with no agenda other than to enjoy a movie are just as annoyed by lazy reliance on stereotypes as equality activists.

Posted in *Comedy, *Sci-Fi/Fant.
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Hey people, and welcome to my roundup.  These are some of the cool links I found this week…enjoy!

First off, from The F-Word…a display of one of my least favorite things to see: sexist rape-celebrating t-shirts.

From Feministing, an expose of how sexist Jean-Claude Van Damme acted towards a female interviewer.

From the Rachel in WY at the Feministing Community Blog, a fuck-you to the princess fad.

From Alas, a Blog, a video from The Onion about the Nice Guy complex.

From Cruella-Blog, a discussion of how annoying Facebook weight-loss ads are–and how to get rid of them (though the solution is rather annoying).

Tamaura Lomax at RH Reality Check discusses the historical and societal implications behind the sexualization of Michelle Obama.

Renee at Womanist Musings discusses how Prince’s “finding God” apparently consisted of finding a way to criticize gay people.

Mz Bitca of What a Crazy Random Happenstance writes about Tyra Banks’ offering of gender reassignment surgery to Isis King, the transgendered contestant on America’s Next Top Model.

Kate Harding of Shapely Prose discusses a fat-mocking advertisement.

Over at my own place, UneFemmePlusCourageuse, my thoughts on the world of modern comedy.

And just for fun, from Pajiba, the five most obnoxious literary fads.

Posted in I Read The Internets, Recommended Articles, Retro Roundup
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