Most disturbing is the message the film conveys (or fails to convey) about rape and war. Artemisia herself presides over the sacking of Athens, during which we see several Athenian women stripped, raped, and hacked to death with short blades. Does Artemisia see this as suitable retribution? Does the memory of her mother’s suffering cause her to feel any empathy for these women? We do not know, because she makes no comment. This was a huge missed opportunity.

Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

After years of special-effects heavy, testosterone-infused, end-of-the-world dramas, your Roland Emmerichs and your Michael Bays, lately there’ve been a lot of apocalyptic comedies. Still though, not much has changed. These comedies take place on the larger scale, with big effects and big death tolls and more disconcerting, a lack of prominent or believable female characters. ‘This Is the End’ was a bro-fest, ‘The World’s End’s lone female was a love interest, and ‘Seeking a Friend for the End of the World’ delivered another Manic Pixie Dream Girl to the list.
‘It’s a Disaster’ is a quiet, low-budget comedy about four couples, friends gathered for a monthly brunch, who become trapped in a house together when they hear that a terrorist attack nearby has spread deadly nerve gas in the air and they will all soon experience excruciating deaths.

“…Do young women want to be feminists, or not?” It’s a complicated question, without an easy answer. Because young women, of course, don’t speak with a single voice or share a common attitude. Some are quick to embrace the term feminist. Others despise it. And many – sadly, for the mothers and grandmothers who opened doors for them – no longer really have a sense of what the word implies.

When the show started, things were very different than they were even a few years later — it was a time of very fast change in gender politics. When they were pitching the show, the one female executive who championed it was such an anomaly that they had no executive restroom for women.

‘Broad City,’ which first appeared as a web series in 2009, shows us two women who lack ambition in a way that is almost radical—if only because we rarely see women acting irresponsibly without being punished for it.

However, we did our analysis to counter the recurring popular narrative that abortion is totally absent from media representations. Abortion stories are there, and they’ve always been there. Now that we know that, and we’ve identified them, we can begin delving into more detailed analyses of these stories.

Consider this a late addition to the Women and Work Week, if you like. This plot line aired on ‘Rescue Me’ almost ten years ago, but it was so interesting and so frustrating that I haven’t forgotten it since.

Green’s intimate reporting and the incredible cinematography and editing that makes the film stand out accomplish the goal of respecting, questioning, and empowering these women activists. Green, in examining those fighting against the patriarchy, exposes and dismantles the patriarch who was running the show.

Continually insisting that rapists can only be unfathomably monstrous Others and virtual strangers who physically brutalize their victims serves to hide who the real rapists are: brothers, sons, fathers, husbands, friends, and colleagues. Anna’s bruises serve to delegitimize the experiences of survivors who don’t bear a physical mark of the absence of their consent. We need a wider representation of the range of survivor experiences when it comes to rape and sexual assault so that we can begin to dismantle rape culture and develop a system that is capable of identifying rapists and that values the stories of survivors.

The HBO series ‘Looking,’ which focuses on the lives of gay men (co-created by the gay writer-director Andrew Haigh who made the art-house film ‘Weekend’; two of the main cast members, including the lead, are also out gay men) occupies a ground somewhere in between, in which women do exist, though only in supporting roles–but those roles are cast and, written with an acuity that transcends their brief time onscreen.

Since paganism revolves around the ideas of female and male deities, with special emphasis placed upon the role of women’s bodies and their natural connection to the earth, its accessible and inspiring.

In the end, most of these films and shows end up being a tangled dichotomy of supernatural darkness and violence, contrasted with very standard aspects of career and love; also, usually a lot of “girl talk” about boys and shoes.

Therefore, it begs the question, do women ask for these shows? Or are they merely consuming what media executives think they want?