Here is some stuff in the news today...
[Content Note: War; death—covering next four paragraphs] In news from Israel and Gaza: "Israel's military incursion in the Gaza Strip showed no signs of abating on Wednesday, with a slew of fresh military strikes killing at least 14 people in an open-ended operation that is said to be in response to Palestinian rocket fire from the Hamas-controlled territory. Since the airstrikes began Tuesday, the Israeli army says it has attacked more than 400 sites in Operation Protective Edge. At least 41 Palestinians have been killed since the strikes began. During Israel's operation, more than 225 rockets have been fired at Israel from Gaza, some reaching as far as Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, which caused several minor injuries. ...Israel's military operation is likely to continue in the coming days, as its leadership aims to deal a major blow to Hamas. 'The operation against Hamas will expand in the coming days, and the price the organization will pay will be very high,' said Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon."
Meanwhile, "hospitals in Gaza are struggling to cope, according to a senior aid worker in Gaza City. Fikr Shalltoot, director of programmes for Medical Aid for Palestinians...says hospitals have less than a week's worth of fuel and that a further escalation of attacks will completely overwhelm Gaza's already fragile health system. Hospitals were facing an acute shortage of supplies before the air strikes, Shalltoot said."
Israel asserts to be making targeted strikes, but, as we've seen over and over in US wars, where the US government has been making exactly the same claims, targeted strikes effectively means nothing. There are always civilian casualties, and at least eight of the dead in Gaza are children, and people as old as 83 have been killed. Again, this is what I mean when I talk about the need to be honest about the costs of war. "Targeted strikes" is dangerously sterile language. Hamas' military wing, on the other hand, does not make such a claim, instead openly admitting they target civilians. Which is, of course, just terrible in a different way.
I know it's trite as shit to say that people without any meaningful control over political decision-making always suffer the most during wars, but people without any meaningful control over political decision-making always suffer the most during wars.
[Please note: We have always managed to have thoughtful and civil threads in this space on previous skirmishes between Israel and Hamas, and I trust that can happen again. If the thread gets ugly, it will just be closed. Please comment thoughtfully—and bear in mind that neither Israelis nor Palestinians are monolithic groups; among Israelis are people who agree with the Netanyahu administration's actions and people who condemn those actions; among Palestinians are people who agree with Hamas' leadership's actions and people who condemn those actions. There is not consensus among diaspora populations, either.]
[CN: War; death] In Afghanistan, civilian casualties are increasing: "Afghanistan's war is getting deadlier for its civilians with the toll from crossfire and ground battles rising sharply, the United Nations has said in a report. The number killed or injured in the first six months of the year rose by a quarter from 2013 levels to nearly 5,000 people, the bloodiest total since the UN began keeping records in 2009. Women and children are particularly badly affected." Which is a particularly bitter irony, given that US intervention in Afghanistan was routinely justified by the Bush administration as bringing freedom to women. Never mind whether those women wanted our "freedom."
[CN: Extreme weather; death] Typhoon Neoguri continues to batter Japan, "leaving two dead and threatening widespread flooding as the storm headed for the nation's main islands."
In good news: "Starting in September, all students in the Chicago Public Schools system, regardless of income, will be given free school meals, WBEZ reports." YES!
Secretary of State John Kerry says: "We are convinced that the United States and China do not have to be rivals, but can be partners and find things to cooperate on that are important to the security of the region."
[CN: Homophobia; Christian Supremacy] LGBT Groups Pull Support for ENDA in Wake of Hobby Lobby Ruling: "After the the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force dropped its support for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act over concerns the Hobby Lobby decision opened a door to abuse of the bill's religious exemption on Tuesday, additional equality groups followed suit. The American Civil Liberties Union announced on Tuesday that it would pull its support as it is currently written, along with the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, Lambda Legal, the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the Transgender Law Center. The groups cite concerns over the broad religious exemption included in the bill passed by the Senate in November. They worry that it could be used for companies to continue to discriminate against LGBT people due to religious beliefs, especially considering the exemption the Supreme Court allowed in its Hobby Lobby decision."
Former Democratic Indiana Governor Evan Bayh is mulling over running again for his old office. No thanks!
George R. R. Martin has a message for the people who publicly hand-wring about his age and health (which is a codeword for his weight) and fear that he will never finish the Song of Fire and Ice series: "I find that question pretty offensive. So fuck you to those people." Right on.
Zooey Deschanel is tired of being asked if she's going to be a mom and general reproductive choice policing: "Like every woman is dying to give birth! I don't think so. Nobody asks guys that. And you go into a supermarket and every tabloid is like, 'Pregnant and Alone!' Stuck in the 1950s ideal of how a woman should live her life. This brings out the fiery feminist in me." Right on.
In the News
Zooey
First of all, I'm happy to report that since I began my enthusiastic campaign of liking Zooey Deschanel out of spite, we are now best friends and we totally play the most epic games of lasertag with the feral kittens in the Unicorn Forest every Thursday. I know you are way too busy to be jealous, because you're spending all your time having coffee with the guest lecturer at your university, Professor James Franco, so everything is great for all of us.
Zooey Deschanel, actress, singer, activist, and not at all my friend,
but definitely a human being who seems pretty neato and not in a sarcastic way.
Anyway! Actress Zooey Deschanel did a new interview with Marie Claire magazine, and I really kind of hate the way the article is framed—the way it starts with a description of a younger, chubbier Zooey Deschanel getting bullied, which is the way lots of stories about her start, and the ubiquity of this frame begins to suggest to me it's a way of magazines almost apologizing for or justifying interviewing Deschanel, despite the fact she is a super popular actress in a very popular show, because there's all this backlash about how she is SO TERRIBLE because she has bangs and likes cute things.
Which makes it kind of ironic that the reason I am recommending the interview is because of the smart things Zooey Deschanel says about that very backlash:
Out there, too, is the mini backlash that once briefly threatened her. TV critics mocked her "adorableness" in the blogosphere. Then in 2011, she was hanging out with actor Ben Schwartz (Parks and Recreation) and her business partner, Sophia Rossi, with whom she cofounded a TV production company and a humor website for girls, HelloGiggles.com [where snark, gossip, and cursing are not allowed]. Deschanel was a Twitter neophyte (she has 4.5 million followers now) when she noticed that cutesy things like a kitten hugging a baby were what got the most retweets. She bet Schwartz and Rossi that if she tweeted "I wish everyone looked like a kitten," she would get 100 retweets in 10 minutes. "I did, and then a lot of people were like, 'What the fuck! Who said that? How stupid you are.'" Comedian Julie Klausner denounced the tweet on Tumblr, declaring that Deschanel's girlish image was bad for women. (Klausner later toned down her remarks.)Women who have "girlish images" (and that's not how I'd describe Deschanel, but okay) are not "bad for women." People who are hostile to women with "girlish images" because they reflexively associate girlishness and/or traditional femininity with a humanity that is inherently less than are bad for women.
"My theory is that people in this day and age want to dismiss things. So they want to be able to dismiss you," Deschanel says. "They say, 'You don't belong, you don't deserve this because here's why, and let me find an intellectual argument for why you wearing pink or cuff sleeves or a bow makes you not worthy of your accomplishments. Everything you've done doesn't matter because you wore the wrong thing or you speak in a way that's feminine or you identify yourself as feminine.' And I just think that's bullshit. And smart people are doing it, and that's surprising to me. I'll give them being smart, but they're being very shortsighted.
"It's just attacking who I am," she continues. "A lot of times it doesn't have to do with what I get paid to do. It has to do with, 'Oh, you stupid person.'" Part of the reason she started her website was to create a positive place online for girls. "Even I get slammed and overwhelmed by how negative the Internet can get, and I'm an adult."
Also, I like this:
Is having children on her priority list? "I'm not going to answer that question. I'm not mad at you for asking that question, but I've said it before: I don't think people ask men those questions."Boom. She's in fine company with that one.
Cool Priorities
[Content Note: Racism; Islamophobia; terrorism.]
Amidst the stellar journalism that was happening all over the place during coverage of the bombing in Boston, Caption Solutions TV captioning service erroneously captioned Dallas-Fort Worth Fox network affiliate KDFW's coverage with: "...marathon Bombing, he is 19-year-old Zooey Deschanel." How Zooey Deschanel showed up instead of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a mystery lost to the sands of time incompetence.
Anyway. Caption Solutions has apologized to Deschanel for the error.
Meanwhile, the NY Post, which featured teenager Salah Barhoun and another young man on its cover under the headline "BAG MEN," despite the fact they had nothing whatsoever to do with the bombing, still has not apologized to Barhoun.
So, just to be clear, Zooey Deschanel gets an apology for a captioning mistake, but the NY Post still hasn't apologized to Salah Barhoun for its cover photo. COOL.
For the record: I'm not saying that Zooey Deschanel didn't deserve an apology. I'm saying that Salah Barhoun DOES.
And, yeah, I realize the NY Post is a mountainous heap of fetid garbage, but I don't believe a habit of indecency is a justification for continued indecency. I expect more.
Lucky Dogs
My thanks to Shaker catvoncat for alerting me to this important piece of news: My BFF Zooey Deschanel has rescued two dogs from the Bill Foundation, a Los Angeles nonprofit rescue group. Deschanel tweeted this adorable picture of her two rescues:
They are named Dot and Zelda. You know, I happen to think that Zelda is a terrific name for a dog.
Congratulations to Zooey Deschanel, and her lovely and lucky pups!
New Girl!
[SPOILER WARNING: There are all kinds of major spoilers from last night's episode of New Girl in this thread, so if you haven't seen it yet, you might want to skip it.]
Who wants to talk about last night's episode of New Girl with me? Because OMG NEW GIRRRRRLLLLL!!!!!! There were so many things I loved about this episode! Let us discuss ALL OF THE THINGS!
{ That is a bulletpoint of Nick's turtleface. I know it's really small, but I hope you will just enjoy that a Nick's turtleface bulletpoint exists in the world.
True American is the greatest game of all time, right? What are the rules? WHO KNOWS! There is definitely not a print-out of the rules, though, so don't even ask!
"Damn it! I've been trying to get something going with myself for a full hour. It's like a taffy pull on a hot summer's day!"
"Pipe talk's boring!"
"Holly, he's really happy! He's got a 401k and a six pack!"
I know I have said this before, but I love Jess' and Cece's friendship. I also love how even though they are the primary ladies on the show, all the other ladies are still treated as human beings, even the weird ones. I really liked Winston's date in last night's episode; I hope she sticks around.
Jess running around the apartment bored. THE ROBOT! Amazing.
Melon head Nick!
Love the way Sam reacted to Jess' and Nick's predicament when he arrived at the party. So not threatened. In a good way. But also kind of in a bad way? It felt like a perfect navigation of that space in which someone is so cool for deservedly trusting their partner, but is also just that little bit too detached to see some truth about their partner they should probably be able to see. Sam is doomed, but it's not because he's terrible, or because Jess is terrible; they're just not quite right.
[Seriously. I'm warning you about the spoilers! Last chance!]
Love the way the show has handled the relationship between Jess and Nick. It's been so thoughtful and so honest. The characters have been allowed to talk bluntly about their attraction to one another, and it's been this thing that is part of their friendship. It's so refreshing to see an arc like this one (and who knows where it's going; WHERE IS IT GOING?!) that avoids the typical stupid conceit that one person is COMPLETELY UNAWARE that the other is mooning desperately over them, and then there are all these absurdly implausible circumstances that keep them apart interminably. The narrative of their relationship has been natural, and, crucially, both of them are equally invested in it.
THIS. ♥
Discuss!
There's Something About Critics
[Content Note: Misogyny.]
First of all, I'm happy to report that since I began my enthusiastic campaign of liking Zooey Deschanel out of spite, we are now best friends and we have superfun vegan picnics with our kitten friends at Unicorn Park every Tuesday. I know you are way too busy to be jealous, because you're spending all your time having coffee with the guest lecturer at your university, Professor James Franco, so everything is great for all of us.
Zooey Deschanel, actress, singer, activist, and not at all my friend,
but definitely a human being who seems pretty neato and not in a sarcastic way.
Anyway!
This is just a perfect story in Entertainment Weekly—and what follows is literally the entire story—about Zooey Deschanel:
Critic asks Zooey Deschanel to explain her nameNow, obviously, James Hibberd, author of this piece, is on the side of the kitten picnics, because YES LIKE HER NAME IS A RIDDLE OR A TRICK SHE'S PULLING.
by James Hibberd
[picture of Zooey Deschanel shrugging and looking perplexed]
Something about Zooey Deschanel throws off TV critics. At last year's press tour panel for her Fox hit New Girl, a reporter wanted to know when did she realize that she's "adorable."
This time at the semi-annual event, she was asked to explain her name. That was the question — can she "explain her name." Like it's a riddle. Or a trick she's pulling.
"My name?" the actress replied, confused. "My first name or my last name?"
Critic: "Both."
"My name on the show?"
The critic explained (… sort of … not really): "Zooey. Zooey Deschanel."
"I was named after [the J.D. Salinger novel] Franny and Zooey," she said. "My last name is French."
And her last name is French.
With that finally settled, her fellow panelists and other reporters applauded.
But James Hibbard! Maybe start instead with the observation that there's "something" about the dingalings who ask these dipshit questions, like the fact that they're possibly being misogynistic (I add "possibly" only because I can totally imagine that Goran Visnjic has been asked to explain his name fully one million times) and definitely being unprofessional and should never be invited to any picnics ever, except the ones with all the ants.
It might seem like a small thing, to make sure the blame for such foolery is placed squarely on the fools, but it's these small things, like the unfortunate if unintended implication that there's something Zooey Deschanel is doing to cause industry critics to condescend to her, that add up to create a culture in which women, especially women who are quirky and silly and cute, are summarily dismissed as unserious, even if they are also smart and talented and fierce.
And that the summary dismissals are their own fault.
Important Announcement
[Content Note: Violence; misogyny.]
I am really grossed-out by the intense, aggressive, irrational hatred of Zooey Deschanel. By which I don't mean people who just aren't fans for whatever reason or people who have valid criticisms about her manic pixie dream career choices, but the people who have responded to her popularity with a seething backlash of epic proportions that manifests in disproportionate levels of ragey hostility.
NO YOU DON'T WANT TO MURDER HER BECAUSE OF HER BANGS, AND IF YOU DO, YOU ARE A MONSTER!
So I'm having a backlash of my own. The more incidents I see of intense, aggressive, irrational hatred of Zooey Deschanel, the more I like her. That's right! I LIKE ZOOEY DESCHANEL OUT OF SPITE! So there.
We'll probably be best friends soon, so WATCH OUT, WORLD!
Zooey Deschanel, actress and not at all my friend, but definitely a human being who seems all right.
Impossibly Beautiful
One of the basic (but unspoken) tenets of the Beauty Standard is that famous women (and men) must mask all indication of their humanity. No laugh lines, no frown lines, no blemishes, no evidence of aging, no having too much hair there or too little hair here, no fat, no sag, no varicose veins, no moles, no marks, no crooked toes, no imperfections no flaws no scars no errant freckles even if they are beautiful because no deviation from the arbitrary standards of Perfection.
It's a heinous enough expectation for the cover of a magazine, when an intern with Photoshop will be tasked with clumsily erasing all trace of documentation that a mortal human being exists behind the carefully constructed veneer. But these days, when half the population's walking around with an HD camera and a high-speed internet connection in their pockets, suddenly celebrities are expected to not be human even in person, even in extreme close-up.
Hence: BuzzFeed's "10 Scary Celebrity Close-Ups." I'm not going to provide a direct link, because fuck giving them traffic for that; you can find it easily enough if you're so inclined. It's a gallery consisting of extreme close-up images of nine women, with one close-up of Iggy Pop, as if everyone's holding Iggy Pop and the latest Hollywood ingenue to the same beauty standards.
This picture of Zooey Deschanel—whose indefatigable service as every hipster dude's Manic Pixie Dream Girl is now being rewarded with the predictable sneering backlash once the dudes who drooled over her discovered she had the temerity to not, as it turns out, be their private property—is typical of the gallery:
Granted, the grey bits rattling 'round my brainpan have been freed from The Matrix, so my perspective is very
I also, for the record, see a beautiful woman. But my opinion of Zooey Deschanel is irrelevant. What matters is that there's no such thing as an objective beauty standard.
And then there's this: It's incomprehensibly fucked up that evidence of a woman's humanity is considered "scary," by any means of observation. But this contempt for visible humanness in close-up reveals something extremely ugly about the nature of objectification: People who want to fuck Zooey Deschanel express repulsion at seeing her face up close. "Eww—you got intimacy all up in my remote objectification! Gross!"
The real problem with these images, and their insistent revelation of humanness, is not that they are "scary." It is that they challenge the viewer to embrace the humanity of women.
Which I suppose might be terrifying, if you're not used to thinking of women as human.
Enough already. Enough.
What a Difference a Score Makes
[Trigger warning for stalking.]
Below is a trailer for the film 500 Days of Summer reimagined as a "thriller," i.e. a film in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character is recast as a nefarious stalker who targets Zooey Deschanel's character after she dumps him. What's interesting about it, of course, is that the scenes aren't really recut to look like a totally different movie; it's just got a creepy score instead of some charming indie single laid over it. And that makes it a pretty awesome commentary on the oft-discussed stalking-as-courtship trope, which features centrally in so many romantic comedy films.
[A transcript really wouldn't be of any use here, since the video is almost entirely free of dialogue. The paraphrase is as above: Scenes of a romance, a break-up, and the commencement of stalking by a profoundly unhappy jilted dude.]
[Related: If you have not read Sady's post on 500 Days of Summer, you should, and it is here.]
