Jaclyn Friedman has a fascinating column in the Guardian about the fact that even empowered princesses don’t do as much for girls as ordinary-boys-turned-heroes do for boys:

The studio whose most iconic heroes include a toy cowboy, a rat, a fish, a boy scout, and a lonely trash compactor (all male-identified, of course), couldn’t figure out how to tell a story about a human girl without making her a princess. That’s the problem in a nutshell: if the sparkling minds at Pixar can’t imagine their way out of the princess paradigm, how can we expect girls to?

The past decade may have seen a welcome increase in on-screen female action heroes, but we’re still far from gender parity in the genre, and even when they’re not princesses, they’re nearly all trained assassins or Chosen Ones. Joseph Campbell wrote indelibly about the power of The Hero with a Thousand Faces – an ur-hero who’s living a mundane life when he’s faced with a challenge through which he can discover his greatness. It’s easy to see why this matters: everyman hero stories teach every boy that he can make himself great through his own actions, regardless of how dull or difficult the lot in life he’s been handed.

Princess stories – even Action Princess stories – inherently fail the Conrad test.

I do think there’s something really important about teaching girls that the gender norms laid out for them are add-ons, rather than restrictions. Leaching the meaning out of a word like “princess” is a task that has value. But if we’re ascribing strength to states that girls in the audience think don’t apply to them, if the lesson and Brave and other movies is that if your father hasn’t hooked you up with weaponry and training as a child that adventure is still out of site, then we’re winning one battle at the expense of another. I’m not entirely sure that’s the case—the little girls in the audience at the screening I attended didn’t seem to have trouble identifying with Merida. But there’s nothing wrong with empowering girls who aren’t princesses, in making the journey to heroism a little longer, but proving it can still be traveled no matter where in the process you start.

Upon news that the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) commissioners had approved a four-team playoff to determine college football’s national champion Tuesday evening, media outlets were quick to report that the BCS was on its deathbed. “BCS is dead,” the Associated Press said. “Playoff is here, BCS is dead…,” read a headline at CBS Sports. “Ding, dong, the wicked BCS witch is almost dead,” an ESPN columnist tweeted.

Well, no. Not really.

The tradition of the BCS deciding who plays for the national championship using a faulty computer metric is (almost) dead. The worst parts of the BCS, however, are more alive than ever.

The Sugar Bowl earned $11.6 million in tax-free profits in 2007 because it and other bowls classify themselves as “charities.” It is (likely) still a part of the process.

The Fiesta Bowl is taking $6.45 million in public subsidies from the state of Arizona years after it was enveloped in scandal because it showered lavish trips on its sponsors and paid outrageous salaries to its executives. It, too, will likely remain a part of the process.

Virginia Tech, a public university, lost $420,000 playing in the 2011 Orange Bowl. Were it not for Tech’s conference payout, its losses would have exceeded $1 million. Over a three year span, schools lost an average of $331,000 playing in BCS games. The Orange Bowl? Still a part of the process.

Bowl games — charities, they insist — that gave just 1.5 percent of their revenues to actual charities in 2009 and are increasingly dishonest about how much they pay back to schools? Still a part of the process.

And by bidding out the championship game to cities that will spend millions to host it, the BCS managed to throw in another sweet deal to pad its pocketbooks even more.

Under the BCS, bowls and their executives got rich while schools lost money. Your tax dollars paid for it. This playoff, however welcome a development college football fans think it is, doesn’t change that one bit. If anything, it makes it worse.

“That’s the beauty of the new agreement. It works within the bowl system, not outside of it,” ESPN college football columnist Gene Wojciechowski wrote. “Seriously, what’s there not to like? The bowl system lives. The regular season isn’t compromised. Tradition survives.”

Welcome to college football, where the tradition of blatant corruption is a thing of “beauty.”

Lauren Greenfield’s Queen of Versailles was one of the first movies to sell at the Sundance Film Festival, and one of the best documentaries I saw there. The movie follows timeshare mogul David Siegel and his wife Jackie as they seek to build the largest house in America, a palatial mansion they’ve dubbed Versailles. In addition to exploring America’s consumption addictions, Queen of Versailles is also a concise explanation of the roots of the financial crisis: the Siegels’ business relies on cheap credit, both to fund the construction of new timeshare developments, and to get customers to take out loans so they can afford the second homes that are, for them, an embodiment of the American dream. The movie follows the Siegels as they overextend themselves on their home, and as they experience the consequences of their customers’ defaults. It’s a sharp, surprisingly sympathetic story. I spoke with Greenfield about her relationship with the Siegels, American consumption, and how the fate of the 1 percent impacts the 99 percent. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you first get interested in the Siegels’ story?

I’m a photographer also, and I had been working on a project about wealth and consumerism. My last film had been a short called Kids + Money. I was photographing Donatalla Versace. Jackie was one of Donatella’s best customers at the time. I made a picture of Jackie’s gold, blingy purses that ended up being in Time’s 100 Best Pictures. Jackie told me about building America’s biggest house. In [another] picture [Jackie showed her], there were 7 kids on the steps of her private jet. I was also working a project about women and aging, and the fact that she had all of these kids, I was just interested in her as a subject…I was interested in her character as a billionaire. She didn’t act like we expect rich people to act, she didn’t have this protective veil that we expect to come with wealth. There was that dichotomy that, eventually, spoke to me about the American dream and the connection between this house and the American dream.

You mentioned that Jackie was different from other rich people you’d encountered. What was the difference?

In my own work on wealth, when I photographed rich kids in Los Angeles for example, there was a jadedness that I never saw in Jackie. She loves the stuff. She wasn’t part of upper-class society. She didn’t use the money as a way to join a country club with other rich people. She would socialize with people from her family, which was all kind of part of the entourage, and they’re not rich. Her relationship with the domestic staff was non-traditional and non-heirarchical in a way. She didn’t have the protective barriers of wealth. She’s very open, very generous. I saw in her a way to document an inside view of wealth…The thing about Jackie and David is they kind of embody our virtues and our flaws of the American scene…As over the top as Jackie is, I’ve gone to Costco and loaded up on a cart of stuff I did not intend to buy because it’s two for one or bigger is better. I started out with this inside view of the rich, but at a certain point, it turned, and that turned for me when they had to put their house on the market. A lightbulb went on, and I realized they were similar to people that I’d photographed in foreclosure cities, in the crash in Dubai. It became an allegory for the overreaching.

What do you see as David and Jackie’s virtues? Much of the movie is about their mistakes.

I guess what I mean by the virtues is they’re both rags to riches stories. Jackie came from humble origins, was really smart, and then, a flaw of American culture, realized that her beauty would get her further than her engineering degree. David also came from nothing and is totally devoted to his work. In a way, they are success stories. But what they did with their success was build bigger and bigger. As they fall financially, you do see them finding other values. And for Jackie, it wasn’t until the hardships came, that I really saw her as a survivor. In the beginning, with all the stuff, you wonder if you love him for money.
Read more

The bridge is yours.

-Why Louis C.K. cast a black woman to play his character’s ex-wife on Louie.

-I will never understand why people fake sources and quotes and think they can get away with it.

-Aaron Sorkin has words for women of my generation.

-Ten forgotten rules for making a good blockbuster.

-Nora Ephron could direct the hell out of a scene as well as write one:

I feel like I’ve been kind of hard on comedians on the blog over the past couple of weeks. So bless Louis C.K. for his appearance on the Tonight Show this week, in which he delivered a terrifically funny riff about why he’d like to be a gay man:

Of course, what the riff is really about is what heterosexual men lose and lose out on in the process of vigorously reinforcing their heterosexuality for the general public: the chance to be enthusiastic, to be affectionate, to wear what you want. It’s a critically important conversation, and I’d love to see more men in positions of power in media engage in it, or even who seemed comfortable enough to stop reinforcing their masculinity for a minute.

I caught up on Avatar: The Legend of Korra, the sequel to the critically acclaimed and totally awesome Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon, about a world where certain people can manipulate the elements, yesterday. Overall, The Legend of Korra is a fantastic second series, and does an excellent job of moving the concepts that the original series laid out so well—that there are benders who can manipulate one element and an Avatar who can control them all—from a feudal setting into an industrialized future, and in giving the original characters descendants who share some of their characteristics while standing fully on their own as characters. One real standout for me was Lin Beifong, the chief of Republic City’s police force. And her arc at the end of the season embodied what I’ve seen as a small trend in female action stars: sacrifice, and a recognition that not everyone can get out alive.

That arc is as follows: Lin, having started the season skeptical of Avatar Korra, who’s been a somewhat disruptive presence in Republic City, has become Korra’s strong ally. After the forces controlled by Amon, a radical who wants to forcibly eliminate the powers of all benders, take over the city, Lin flees with Master Tenzin’s family, determined to protect the last surviving airbenders. And when it becomes apparent that Amon’s forces will overtake them, Lin sacrifices herself. She takes down one of Amon’s ships in a colossal act of metalbending, and when she’s captured, she refuses to compromise. In one of the quietest sequences in the show, Amon takes Lin’s bending from her, the lull in the soundtrack a powerful representation of the sudden absence that has made Lin much of who she is.

The sequence actually reminded me of what I thought was one of the most misunderstood elements of Zack Snyder’s fantasy action movie Sucker-Punch. That film, about girls confined to a 1960s mental institution where some of them are forced to undergo transorbital lobotomies, contains two major sacrifices. In one, Rocket (Jenna Malone) suffers a double death, protecting her sister Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish) from the blast of a bomb in the movie’s fantasy world, and stepping in front of a cook’s knife to save her in the world in which the girls are actually living. And in the movie’s conclusion, Baby Doll (Emily Browning), submits to the lobotomy she’s loathed and feared so that Sweet Pea can escape the asylum. It struck me at the time that there was something uniquely female about recognizing how tightly the jaws of the system were clamped around these girls, the tremendous effort it would take to free just one of them, and the decision by the main characters to prioritize the love between sisters and friends rather than themselves. The uniqueness of that perspective seems to have gotten lost in other critiques of Sucker-Punch, but it’s stayed with me, a specific rebuke by Snyder to the rather manly idea that competence and bravery will see all the main characters through to the end of most action movies, no matter the odds.

Lin has a happier fate in Korra: after communing with her past lives, the Avatar is able to restore her lost powers, and to a certain extent her lost self. But there was no such guarantee when she lept from her safe perch to go up against a system more powerful than she was, and in defense of something other than herself.

I called my mother on my way home from a dinner party last night to let her know that Nora Ephron had died. Or at least, if she already knew Nora Ephron had died, to reassure her that I still had her copies of Crazy Salad and Wallflower at the Orgy, books that I’d sneaked off her shelves years beforehand, and that followed me to college and to Washington, DC. Lots of people are remembering Ephron’s movies, and I’m watching Sleepless in Seattle as I write this, but I knew Ephron as a writer and reporter on media and the women’s movement before I knew her as a screenwriter and director, and it’s hard for me to see her movies in any other context than that writing and reporting.

Ephron wrote powerfully about the culture of politics and the politics of culture. Doing the former, covering the activities of the National Women’s Political Caucus at the 1972 Democratic convention in Miami, she captured something about the subordinate position of women in left politics that persists to this day when she wrote that “In a sense, the major function for the N.W.P.C. was to be ornamental—that is, it was simply to be there. Making its presence it felt. Putting forth the best possible face. Pretending to a unity that did not exist. Above all, putting on a good show: the abortion plank would never carry, a woman would not be nominated as Vice-President this year, but the N.W.P.C. would put on a good show.”

She could turn anecdotes into a powerful litany, as she did when writing about the feminist self-help movement in health, which in some cases advocated for untested technologies Ephron found unnerving, even as she said that women had legitimate cases against the doctors who treated them. “Ever week, it seems, I hear a new gynecological atrocity tale,” she wrote. “A friend who asks specifically not to be sedated during childbirth is sedated. Another friend who has a simple infection is treated instead for gonorrhea, and develops a serious infection as a side effect. Another woman tells of going to see her doctor one month after he has delivered her first child, a deformed baby, born dead. His first question: ‘Why haven’t you been to see me in two years?’”

She gutted executives who made dangerous so-called feminine hygiene sprays for injuring women when they couldn’t even say the word vagina. Her assessment that “Washington is a city of important men and the women they married before they grew up” is still one of the most cutting one-line portraits of the nation’s capitol, and one that remains more than a little true. And her profile of Barbara Mandel, the wife of the governor of Maryland who, when her husband decided to leave her for another woman, refused to depart the governor’s mansion in an act of defiance is an amazing meeting point of the domestic, the political, and cultural theater.

One of the reasons I write about culture is because of the way Ephron did it. She profiled the first woman to get close to becoming a professional baseball umpire, in a piece that begins, “Somewhere in the back of Bernice Gera’s closet, along with her face mask and chest protector and simple spiked shoes, is a plain blue man’s suit hanging in a plastic bag. The suit cost $29 off the rack, plus a few dollars for shortening the sleeves and pants legs.” The rest of the piece examines the real price of that mostly unworn outfit. In a visit to the Pillsbury Bakeoff, she wrote about a dated institution’s attempt to jump generations: “There was a lot of talk at the Bake-Off about how the Bake-It-Easy theme had attracted a new breed of contestants this year, younger contestants—housewives, yes, but housewives who used whole-wheat flour and Granola and sour cream and similar supposedly hip ingredients in their recipes, and were therefore somewhat more sophisticated, or urban, or something-of-the-sort than your usual Bake-Off contestant. There were a few of these—two, to be exact: Barbara Goldstein of New York City and Bonnie Brooks of Salisbury, Maryland, who actually visited the Los Angeles County Art Museum during a free afternoon.” In Ephron’s remembrance of reading The Fountainhead, she recalls that “I spent the next year hoping I would meet a gaunt, orange-haired architect who would rape me. Or failing that, and architect who would rape me. Or failing that, an architect.”She understood that cultural details didn’t mean everything, but as with New York Post publisher Dorothy Schiff’s stinginess with Christmas bonuses and preference for serving dry roast beef sandwiches to guests, they signified something, and were worth examination.
Read more