Female Pop Culture (I spent 20 minutes manually trying to put this behind a cut, it wouldn't work!)

[ceilidh_ann]

Today, I finished reading “Eat Pray Love.” It had been on my radar ever since the inescapable movie trailers and adverts starting popping up around the internet a few weeks ago and this article on female pop culture piqued my interest so I thought it would be interesting to see what all the fuss was about as well as the growing criticism for the

Comments

[ceilidh_ann]

Thanks for that article, it's always informative to read damning opinions of that book/movie. Oprah recommended, my arse!

Thanks for reading, I'm glad you enjoyed it.

[dutchtulips]

Selfishness is the problem I have with a lot of romance novels, myself. The way the women are written, like Bella in Twilight or Clare in The Time Traveler's Wife, because they're all about no consideration for anyone else other than themselves and what they want from a man. And then sometimes other novels try to write more liberated women, but they try too hard and come across as too stereotypical bitchy for me, which I can't relate to, either. What happened to just writing a female character like a PERSON first, instead of being too preoccupied about her being a woman? That's the problem, I think - writers have tried too hard to capture the modern woman in their female characters, without thinking about the fact that we're people just like men are people. But then the way some men are written aggravates me, too, so I suppose that's a whole other ball of wax.

The sad thing is, not so much that so many female characters are written so selfishly, but that so many women reading these books and watching these films are relating to them

[duckgirlie]

I loved most of the SATC2 reviews (Lindy West/Kermode/Ebert in particular), but I think the most interesting, particularly as an examination of the differences between the series and the movies was TLo's, which talks a lot about how the films re-drafted the world of the series from one of attempting-realism to pure fantasy. And their reviews (of 1 and 2) were the only ones I saw that called out the 'Carrie learns a valuable lesson from a non-white servant and expresses her gratitude by lavishing money on them' problems with both films.

[psychedeliceyes]

This is why I will not see or read Eat, Pray, Love. I'm sorry, I don't think I'd be able to "relate" to a book in which the author gets to see three of the most beautiful places on Earth and does nothing but complain while I have only left my state once in my eighteen years of life. Self-indulgence is only human but I just can't stomach people complaining about being privileged. I can't comment on Sex and the City since I've never seen it, but this is one (of many) huge problems in Twilight. Bella is such a self-centered heroine, I can't see how anyone can claim to relate to her. "My boyfriend bought me a nice car but now I have to shoulder the burden of everyone admiring it! How utterly terrible!" She gives no thought to anyone around her save for Edward, and her admiration of Edward is strictly superficial. He's gorgeous! He sparkles! He's strong! He's chivalrous! He's rich! Even his breath is intoxicating! She comes off as a sociopath if you ask me

[shveta_thakrar]

*clap, clap, clap*

I love this post so much. You may be "only" twenty, but you've already got a keen eye for the misogyny and appropriation rampant in Western society. Sometimes it makes me want to pull my hair out.