See Jane

• In the 101 studied films, there are three male characters for every one female character.
• Fewer than one out of three (28 percent) of the speaking characters (both real and animated) are female.
• Fewer than one in five (17 percent) of the characters in crowd scenes are female.
• More than four out of five (83 percent) of the films’ narrators are male.

from “Where the Girls Aren’t.”

See Jane

Here’s one of those things that are so obvious that we have all forgotten about it in our rush to be post-feminist. Movies are fully dominated by men, in several different senses, even if women are increasingly powerful behind the scenes.

Gina Davis co-founded See Jane last year. “By making it common for our youngest children to see everywhere a balance of active and complex male and female characters,” Davis writes, “girls and boys will grow up to empathize with and care more about each others’ stories.”

I wonder if this sort of advocacy would have been possible if there were no women in power to listen. Or, perhaps, there will no change of this sort until there is a critical mass of women and men sympathetic to these sorts of issues. Either way, the research SeeJane sponsors is worth a look.

Safe2pee.org

Welcome to safe2pee.org. We’re taking web innovations and applying them to a very real problem facing many in our society — harassment, violence and discrimination in public restrooms.

The goal of the project is to create a resource where people who do not feel comfortable with traditional public restrooms can find safe alternatives, and to support advocacy and research to further the cause of gender free, inclusive bathrooms. The service aims to be accessible from a variety of mediums (computer, cell phone browser, maybe even a call-in number?).

Safe2.Pee.org

This probably will seem a stretch for Friday, when I usually post something having to do with writing or language, but I like this mash-up so much to make it a special exception. I not at all sure how to write about this, it’s both strange and wonderfully progressive simultaneously. It’s good writing, too; they get the tone just right, which is pretty rare in many leftist circles.

I guess it is only strange if you have never had this problem, or never thought of it. Come to think of it, I did have this problem back in the 70s and early 80s when I had long hair. “This project was put together by and is often maintained by a genderqueer hackers collective,” the website says, “with a sense of humor and some anarchist tendencies.” Exactly.

I found the site by reading Annalee Newitz’s article, “Peeing By Design,” on AlterNet. Her blog is Techsploitation. Lots of good writing over there too.

Conservapedia

Conservapedia is an online resource and meeting place where we give full credit to Christianity and America. Conservapedia is student-friendly. You will much prefer using Conservapedia compared to Wikipedia if you want concise, clean answers free of “political correctness”.

Contributions that comply with simple commandments are respected (and improved) to the maximum extent possible. Please improve this website as you use it, and please cite your sources. With your help, Conservapedia will continue to be an online encyclopedia you can trust. This is also a meeting place, and appropriate questions may be posted at Ask questions.

from the Conservapedia

File this under the “poor poor pitiful Conservative Christians.” We live in a country that is overwhelmingly Christian by almost any measure, and yet these bozos are constantly complaining about the so-called anti-Christian bias they see behind every tree.

(Granted, by one measure we have gone from 86% to 77% self-identified Christian in the last decade or so. Something must be leaving a bad taste in folks’ mouths.)

Still, that is a pretty high concentration of Christians and it seems unlikely that the the 23% who do not identify as Christians just happen to be the most influential and powerful voices. It seems obvious that a small proportion of well organized and well funded right-wing Christian groups have created effective media campaigns to serve their needs.

One need, apparently, is to propagate this wacky sense of persecution. Our media is freakishly concentrated in just a few corporate conglomerates and yet these same groups also see liberal bias all over the media. Katie Couric is, apparently, some sort of communist. Now, apparently, they have found these same problems in Wikipedia, of all places, and in response created their own wiki-encyclopedia, which they call Conservapedia.

Just what we need: a ‘public encyclopedia’ in which racism is over, immigrants are swamping our public health and educational resources, and global warming is just Al Gore’s public relations stunt. Of course, they are too chicken to allow full open editing: you have to create an account, and I imagine they will vet participants carefully.

They certainly don’t want to encourage that (sometimes) contentious debate nonsense. That’s a little too democratic, too Wikipedia. I wonder if they do some sort of political litmus test on you, like Gonzales with his Prosecutors.