Hail Mhairi
Congrats to the country’s youngest new MP: 20-year-old Mhairi Black, who had the odds stacked against her to win the Paisley and Renfrewshire South seat for the SNP. As Ewan MacAskill and Rebecca Ratcliffe summed it up:
She was up against one of the best-known Labour MPs left in Scotland, Douglas Alexander, who was defending a majority of more than 16,000. He was not only shadow foreign secretary but had lots of election experience in abundance, enough to secure him the job of Labour’s UK campaign coordinator.
... Making Black’s win that much more extraordinary.
Brought up in a socialist household, she turned to the SNP – like much of Scotland, it seems – after becoming disillusioned with the Labour party. What else do we know? Black loves football, has been on Twitter since she was 14 and had all her old tweets pored over for potential gaffes. The Observer’s Tracey McVeigh went to meet her last month.
Though the final result will see nothing like parity, this parliament is set to include a record number of women – about 30% of MPs, compared with fewer than 25% in the last parliament. Whether this is a victory for feminism depends on whether you think it’s merely cosmetic to get female bums on parliamentary benches ... or whether you think this will truly deal a blow to the Westminster boys’ club.
Chasing Amy
Over in the US, a funnier triumph for feminism: comedian and actor Amy Schumer’s parody of the 1957 film 12 Angry Men went viral this week. In it, Jeff Goldblum, Paul Giamatti, Kumail Nanjiani and Vincent Kartheiser debate Schumer’s “fuckability” and whether she’s “hot enough” for TV, allowing Schumer to neatly “expose the absurd, and sometimes horrifying, double standards that women have to live with”. Here’s a clip of the moment the men descend into a dildo duel.
“Every generation gets the hero it deserves,” wrote Amanda Taub this week in Vox. “The suffragettes had Susan B Anthony. Women’s lib had Gloria Steinem. And we have Amy Schumer.”
Iron women
We also have laudable feminist superheroes, right? Wrong, according to Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter, because they’re all rubbish and not worth the paper they’re printed on. In an email leaked by WikiLeaks this week, an exchange between Perlmutter and Sony CEO Michael Lynton, dated 7 August 2014, with the subject line “Female Movies”, sets out to outline why female-centric superhero movies are no good, full stop:
Michael,
As we discussed on the phone, below are just a few examples. There are more.
Thanks,
Ike
1. Electra (Marvel) – Very bad idea and the end result was very, very bad.
2. Catwoman (WB/DC) – Catwoman was one of the most important female characters within the Batman franchise. This film was a disaster.
3. Supergirl – (DC) Supergirl was one of the most important female superheros in Superman franchise. This Movie came out in 1984 and did $14m total domestic with opening weekend of $5.5m. Again, another disaster.
These films might have been panned but no less than various incredibly shoddy superhero films. It’s worth emphasising, as Mother Jones does, that studios “don’t generally dedicate equivalent creative and financial resources to female-centred superhero films, because they don’t want to ‘waste’ them … Thus the vicious cycle continues.”
Storm in a Twitter cup
To Joss Whedon: the American screenwriter, TV producer, director and the person responsible for bringing one of the more rounded female superheroes to our screens (though there is, of course, also contention there) in the form of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Whedon left Twitter this week. To blame? Apparently, it was the feminist backlash that did it: Whedon has been roundly criticised for his take on the superhero character Black Widow (played by Scarlett Johansson), in his new film Avengers: Age of Ultron.
Writing in The Daily Beast, Jen Yamato points out: “Even Marvel’s most badass female characters keep getting exploited – and utterly wasted – just to prop up the men around them.” While in Indie Wire, in an Open Letter to Whedon from a Disappointed Feminist Fan, Sara Stewart added: “Did we really need Natasha to have a mini-breakdown over the fact that she can’t have children? Haven’t we gotten to a point where the one lonely female superhero in our current landscape can just pursue the business of avenging without having to bemoan not being a mother?”
Wherever you come down on the feminist superhero debate, Whedon says that claims he fled Twitter because of feminist trolling are “horseshit”. Whedon was once the subject of congratulatory column inches, culminating in him giving a speech where he discussed an imagined exchange with a reporter: “Why do you write these strong female characters?” says the journalist. “Because you’re still asking me that question”, was Whedon’s answer to a question he had, presumably, been asked endlessly in real life.
Maxing out on cool points
Will the upcoming instalment of Mad Max involve some much-needed portrayals of stronger women on our screens? In an unlikely casting curveball, activist, feminist, and Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler was recruited by the film’s director George Miller in the role of “feminist consultant”. Filmgoers will have to wait until 15 May to find out what this means, but might it become something we see regularly on the end credits of more films? Or maybe, films where one male director and his three male writers are in charge of scripting half a dozen women in a story about female exploitation and survival will become a thing of the past – you can but hope. Carey Mulligan, for one, seems to in her discussion of why there aren’t enough complex roles for women in film.
ICYMI:
Shit People Say to Women Directors blog spotlights Hollywood’s blatant sexism
Danny Leigh on the film dubbed ‘a skateboarding Iranian Vampire Diaries’
Miu Miu ad is banned for appearing to sexualise a child
Jessica Valenti: There’s no need for women to hide their nipples behind padded bras
Girlhood: the film that busts the myth of conventional French femininity
