Girls and gays on film
This video from feministfrequency.com (via boingboing) asks a question I've never considered before, about the portrayal of women in films.
It also makes me think about the report that Stonewall released today, Unseen On Screen. That came to the not very surprising (if methodologically flawed) conclusion that gay men and lesbians talking about gay and lesbian issues positively were under-represented on the TV programmes most watched by young people.
Hmmm, sure, but I wonder if that is the point. Just as the video above highlights the importance of women in films not only appearing, but being presented as whole people with whole lives, surely it's not a question simply of the appearance or not of gay men and lesbians on TV. And certainly not that they appear to be talking about things which Stonewall thinks concern gay men and lesbians. Surely, a real test of whether gay men and lesbians are represented on TV appropriately, is that they can appear on all sorts of TV shows, and not talk about gay and lesbian issues. There are all sorts of examples of this every day, from the news to sports programmes, from drama to soaps, from reality shows to game shows.
I'm sure the teenagers interviewed were genuine in their belief that gay people on TV need to talk about gay things, but I wonder why Stonewall didn't challenge this perception of what being gay means?
Back to basics
What with Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Last.fm, Spotify and this blog, I've got quite a lot going on online. I hadn't recognised until today quite how stressful that was, mostly because of the links and interdependencies between all of those channels, constantly feeding each other. I'm not any less in love with being online than I was, I just realised that I needed to pull back and rationalise, if only to make it a little bit easier to manage.
So, I've uncoupled Facebook and Twitter. Partly this is because my use of Facebook is changing, becoming less about broadcasting news and more about keeping in touch. Consequently, having Twitter post every update to my Facebook wall was annoying to me, and annoying to my friends, especially though who object to @twitter #punctuation.
I've also slimmed down and simplified the theme I was using for this blog. Having let my blog languish for a while, I'd given it a lick of paint with the quite beautiful The Morning After magazine-style theme, which I loved, and still love. The only problem is that it is difficult to keep updated, partly because of the hassle of featured posts, special icons and multiple categories. All a bit difficult to manage, especially if you want to blog on the fly, which I often do. I realised that overcomplicating the delivery mechanism had actually stopped me doing any writing, because it was all to complex.
This new BlogTheme, also via the fantastic Woo Themes, is easy to use and well designed. I'll make a couple of tweaks when I get round to it - like the fact that the logo top right isn't a clickable link back to the homepage - but it will do more than adequately for now.
Follow me
- My week on twitter: 1 retweets received, 6 new followers, 3 mentions. Via: http://t.co/svNalNPp 1 day ago
- What the hell kind of websites have I been looking at to be blessed with this Google advertising gem?! http://t.co/572jun3o 1 day ago
- RT @paulprentice: Government refuses pardon to Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing: http://t.co/3w9eURR1 1 day ago
- Woman next to me on the train is sorting out her home decoration plans. 'Hang disco ball' is on her to do list. 1 day ago
- @Mariettaxx sniffly still. But wrapped up very well! 3 days ago