Can you make a feminist 'Snow White'?

[boston bean]

Snow White is Hollywood's current favorite candidate for a makeover. This weekend's release of "Snow White and the Huntsman" casts quite a different light on that fair princess most of us came to know in the animated Disney film. Struggling against the terrifying Queen Ravenna, the modern Snow White portrayed by Kristen Stewart is an empowered warrior. In the ABC show "Once Upon a Time" and in Tarsem Singh's rendition "Mirror, Mirror," too, Ms. White is again no damsel in distress. But as much as these works have attempted to make the character of Snow White more closely resemble the modern, independent female, there remains an anti-feminist message at the story's core.

The Snow White story has always been about the rivalry between stepmother and daughter -- which pits an older woman against a younger woman, with men almost entirely absent from the conflict.

Professor Jack Zipes, author of several books on the topic of fairy tales, including this year's "The Irresistible Fairy Tale," says that making a woman an exceptionally evil villain is an anti-feminist statement of its own.

"If we look at the world, [it] is really in the control of men -- and they're pretty g--d-- evil. But in these films, the dominant force is an evil queen, who is vicious and nasty and contemptible. To my mind, it's part of what I call the backlash against feminism," he explains. "Whether it's done consciously or not, if you look at these films, they really say something pretty terrible about women. These films are so reactionary. They react to the fact that women have asserted themselves for more equal rights and great progress has been made."

http://www.metro.us/newyork/entertainment/article/1144480--can-you-make-a-feminist-snow-white

[seabeyond]

1. ya. i read this on cnn... not from this perspective

more how the step mom gives it spine, or whatever.

the thing that i am so gd tired of is

"We're trying so hard to value these higher ideas about all of the wonderful things that age brings you -- knowledge, experience, serenity. Our animal instinct is still really going strong in the background, at the same time thinking, 'Yeah, that's a bunch of bologna.'"

we are talking all the way back to beginning of time. this "instinct" that we cannot shake is such pure bullshit. that any reasoned person not only buys it, promotes it, but says it out loud.

who the fuck ever figure when we were at the very beginning of exsistence it was a young womans looks that got the man to do her. who decided that it was not a mans looks that allowed a woman to do him. our whole worth, all of who we are, is this guessing game of the very beginning of time, creating it as a fact. truly, fuckin beyond the mind amazing.

[TalkingDog]

2. Not pure bullshit. Just facts twisted to suit an agenda.

http://www.livescience.com/20630-male-touch-woman-flush.html


Being touched by a man really gets the ladies hot, new research suggests. When physically touched by a male experimenter, women actually did get "hot and bothered" — their skin temperature increased, specifically in the face and chest.

"Women showed a temperature increase when they were involved in social contact with the male experimenter," study researcher Amanda Hahn, of the University of St. Andrews, in the United Kingdom, told LiveScience. "In some women they changed by almost a whole degree" Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit.

These changes were subconscious in many of the participants. Figuring out how skin temperature changes in response to stress and other emotional factors could help researchers study arousal non-invasively and develop hands-off lie detectors.

The face heats up when under stress, or when scared, or angry (hence the term hot-headed). The researchers wanted to find how other emotions impact facial temperature, so they took heat-showing pictures of two groups of young heterosexual women during a standard interaction with an experimenter, which included touching the arm, palm, face and chest (using a light probe that they were told measures skin color).

When an experimenter (of either gender) touched a participant, the participant's average skin temperature jumped about a tenth of a degree Celsius. The effect wasn't as large when considering only touches to the participant's arm or palm, and the skin of the face and chest regions changed the most.

The jump was about three times larger when the experimenter was male, the researchers found. The facial and chest skin of a young female, when touched in those areas by a male experimenter, got about 0.54 F (0.3 C) hotter.

This increase is pretty large for a facial temperature change, the researchers said. "This is the sort of magnitude of change you would see when you are doing an explicit emotional stressor," like inducing fear or stress, Hahn said. "We weren't manipulating their emotional or affective state, it was a subtle social interaction with the experimenter … but they had pretty large reactions."

/snip

Everyone (male or female) has instinctual, subconscious reactions. Denying it is to, in part, deny your very humanity.

Where "bullshit" comes into play, is when it is assumed that instinct or subconscious reactions are always the driver behind motivations and reactions. They are sometimes, as science proves everyday. But they are not ALWAYS.... for either gender.

[boston bean]

3. The temperature guaged a postive response?

Is that what the study concluded?

[redqueen]

4. This is so telling.

"This is the sort of magnitude of change you would see when you are doing an explicit emotional stressor," like inducing fear or stress...

Gee, why on earth would women have developed a natural fear/stress reaction to being touched by males. Ooooh, what a mystery. A real puzzler. We'll have to spend millions figuring that out.

And they have the absolute GALL to refer to this using the term 'hot and bothered'.



So. Much. Rage.

[seabeyond]

6. the bullshit is in the story telling. not science

the story telling is given the label of science.

that is an interesting study, though, i really should have read the whole article instead of only what you provided, before posting. i will do that in a minute.

my argument is with the new cult science of evolutionary psychology, it is all guess and the intent is always to strengthen patriarchy. that alone is a clue in that there is a problem.

it isnt science. it is story telling. and that is what i addressed in the article. and people not only buying it as fact but furthering as a norm without much thought.

there was a study done in the 80's. a questionairre with no controlling factors. asking if a person got turned on by naked pictures. the men answered as societal conditions allowed. hell yes, the men said. the women answered as societal conditions allowed. no.

it then became fact, fact i tell you, that men are visual, women are not, ergo men has gotta have their porn. no one considered how ridiculous it would be to suggest women were not visual. take it beyond the porn. really? women not as visual? so, women dont enjoy the beauties of the world the same as men. women dont enjoy art the same as men? anything to do with visual.... then is diminished for women? really?

a study where the brain was hooked up was done in 2008.

http://sexuality.about.com/b/2006/06/19/new-brain-research-challenges-the-myth-that-men-are-more-visual-than-women.htm

It is considered an almost forgone conclusion across research disciplines, among pop psychologists of all stripes, and in the general population that men are more “visual” than women when it comes to the way they get turned on. Men, we’re told, are visually aroused, whereas women just need a good sense of humor, and possibly a strong jaw, and they're on board.

This misguided, but pervasive belief can be linked to a host of other gender stereotypes which are further complicated by sexual politics and differences in social power. So arguments which should be challenged, such as the “fact” that men leer more than women do, that they objectify women’s bodies more than women do men’s bodies, and that they just can’t stop watching porn, are explained as somehow being related to a mix of genetics, patriarchy, and simple mindedness.

Challenging these ideas can be a monumental task. Researcher bias being what it is, science rarely offers support for these "counter-intuitive" ideas. What's worse, when research does start to complicate matters, the media, and even smart bloggers who should know better, distort the findings beyond recognition.

Nonetheless, a recent study published in the journal Brain Research is offering the first preliminary but important evidence to dispel the age old myth that visual imagery is more important to men than it is to women. And it's worth considering without hyperbole.

not only are women as visual as men, they are more so in that they will be sexually aroused by man on man, woman on woman, man on woman, woman on man. they dont care. and men aroused only with the sexuality they are inclined toward.

first, we can argue that makes women more sexual. as the evolutionary psychologists would. i wouldnt argue that, though. i would argue that women are more fluid in their sexuality cause society allows us to be. and men are more set cause society demands that of them. conditioning. hence, the patriarchy society that uses sexist and homophobic terms to lessen a man in his manhood/masculinity. what evolutionary psychologist do is refuse to count or even consider societal conditioning and nurturing conditioning. and that, i refuse to buy into. i would readily consider the day to day conditions of life over a zillion years ago, hands down.

second, regardless of the scientific study with a brain hooked up, with controllled factors, you cannot get people to shift from the view that men are simply visual creatures and women are not.

a damn questionairre vs neurological hook up of the brain.

i have had discussions with men that tell me they are more visual. i give them the study. they reject it, ignore it, dismiss it.... but certainly do not talk about it and say, .... it is a known fact that men are more visual.

men are mathmatical/science oriented and women are language/communication. beginning of time. hunter/gather. proof. science. reality.

The students came from Western and Asian democracies and developing countries, as well as Muslim countries notable for their sex-segregated classes. But the really surprising finding was that the more equal the societies were around gender, the better everybody did in math. As the researchers conclude, "gender equity and other sociocultural factors … are the primary determinants of mathematics performance at all levels for both boys and girls."

The news about girls' increasingly better performance in math has been trickling in for years. But the findings were often dismissed by those who claimed that boys were inherently better at math and science. One argument was that the countries studied were cherry-picked to find girls doing well and therefore the results were not representative. If you buy that argument, putting resources into improving girls' math and science abilities is a waste of time because you are going against "nature."

As Ethan Siegel, a theoretical astrophysicist in Portland, Ore., notes on his blog, Starts With a Bang: "You know how prejudices and confirmation biases work: If you think things are a certain way for a certain reason, then when your reasoning is shown to be incorrect because your premise is flawed, what do you do? Do you question your conclusions, or do you just find a new explanation that brings you to that same conclusion? Most recently, the argument goes something like, 'Even though men and women are equal on average in math ability, men have a greater variance in their abilities. So there are more very dumb men, but also more very smart men, and those are the ones who become scientists, etc.'"

*

But if this "variance " argument were true, you'd find boys at the higher end of the distribution across all countries because we're talking genes here. Kane and Mertz found no evidence to support that claim. In some countries, as predicted, boys' variance was higher than girls'. In other countries, there were no differences, and in yet others, girls' scores showed more variance than boys.

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/24/opinion/la-oe-rivers-gender-equity-20120124

damn, evolution works fast, when it is proven wrong.

and still, people will continually hold this up as a difference in gender, even though there is no truth to it.

when we stop using science to prove the superiority of one gender, and the inferiority of another, is when i will be more willing to buy into this shit. but, that is not what evolutionary psychology is today. and this is what i will reject, and continue to argue and reject.

[redqueen]

5. Claiming that this obsession with youth is some primitive drive is bullshit.

Plenty of cultures have valued older people.

Also these fairy tales have not been influenced by any backlash against feminism, they've been around for hundreds of years. The terrible things said about women aren't reactionary, they're prescriptive.