Blogging While Female

Wow. This is fascinating.

Sexism, Strength and Dominance: Masculinity in Disney Films

It's not exactly groundbreaking subject matter - Disney's portrayals of masculinity warp boys just as much as their depictions of femininity warp girls - but the fact that it's the equivalent of an academic paper...on Youtube is fascinating. It allows the argument to really work on multiple levels: the ethos of facts and examples and the pathos of seeing these films that we grew up with. To me, the argument is greatly enhanced by showing Simba and Scar fight rather than just saying "The movie's climax is a brutal battle between Simba and his evil uncle."

That being said, I think there's some criticism that can rightfully be leveled at this piece, namely with the references to Beauty and the Beast. Does Gaston thinking the beast is weak and unmanly truly support the argument that Disney is teaching our boys to behave this way? Gaston is the bad guy, and clearly has been throughout; everyone that we are sympathetic to thinks he's an idiot. I always thought it was obvious that we shouldn't be like Gaston? And I'm sure that somewhere in Disney cartoons we get a good guy implying that one needs to be aggressive in order to be manly (Mulan, anyone? Or maybe there's something in Aladdin? Certainly Mufasa and Simba, in all their light color, muscular strength, are better than thin, dark Scar).

But shortcomings of the actual argument aside: I want to post academic work on Youtube! Appropriate mindless Web 2.0 (I don't even know what that phrase actually refers to, but I think Youtube is probably part of it) applications for something useful! VIVA LA REVOLUTION!

So people with too much time and money on their hands have once more decided to study the phenomenon that is MySpace. Yes, that dangerous haven for the dark and depraved monsters of the world that want nothing more than to get their hands on tender young flesh.

Except that it turns out that those who posses said flesh are a lot smarter than grown ups give them credit for.

Allow me to reiterate: no. Fucking. Shit.

Also, apparently there is room to argue with MySpace's claim of 100,000,000 users. Extra! Extra! Water is still wet!

Of course most teenagers know to keep their profiles, or at least select portions of it, private. Not everyone in the school needs to know what you were doing on Saturday night. I'm not surprised that more IM usernames were revealed than e-mail addresses: the spambots don't troll for AIM names (yet); my e-mail address is rarely displayed in a non-mangled format. And guess what? I've been doing that for years, even back in the days when I was a teenager.

And do you have any idea how many profiles on any social site are created as just a way to check on friends or as a duplicate site? I can't tell you how many people on LiveJournal (or, I'm sure, InsaneJournal) have multiple journals for different uses (if LJ hadn't turned into a bunch of idiots I'd be hosting this particular journal over there as well).

We really need to start giving teenagers some credit where it's due. I know back in those halcyon days I hated being lumped in with all of the dumb kids, internet users or not. Know why? Because I knew that I, and (most) of my friends, were smart enough to avoid the really dangerous situations. I can't think of a time when I received unwanted sexual advances from someone I didn't know. I certainly never gave out my phone number/address to someone that I didn't know extremely well (I actually can only think of one person that I ever gave out my home address to. I'm not sure if I ever gave out my phone number because I'm an awkward enough conversationalist in writing). It's silly to think that kids who've grown up with the Internet (I didn't get it until 7th grade, but "kids today" have had it for a much longer portion of their lives) make bigger and dumber mistakes than the rest of us did.

Yes, there are always going to be kids who put themselves at risk. Kids will run out in front of ice cream trucks or take candy from strangers. Setting the MySpace profiles of 14 and 15 year olds to default to "private" is a smart, unobtrusive way to protect as many kids as possible. Thinking that every single person on MySpace is out to kidnap those kids is just unfounded paranoia.