Feminist Fred

Just a short note to celebrate TCM paying tribute to Kay Francis on Thursdays all next month. I love Kay Francis. She often played strong women, had an unconventional beauty, and was a top box-office draw at Warner Brothers for most of the 1930s. Watching her pre-code movies reveals a Hollywood that catered to what women thought about and felt, even if they did mostly end with the woman in her place where she belongs. Some of the Kay Francis movies I’ve seen, like Stranded (1935), actually have Kay not submitting to the man in the end, but actually show him admitting what a fool he’s been all along, something that must have thrilled her fans.

Twisty Faster nails some hard truths about Sex-Positive Feminism. She also linked to a blog called Pervocracy where the young woman writes posts detailing her sexual pleasures, which don’t sound too pleasurable to me.

Between the two of them you should get a good idea about what the rift might be between two women who both are basically feminists with different ways of dealing with our hypersexualized world.

Age makes a huge and terrible difference in how you see oppression.

First, there’s this list of facts about the state of women in the world today, Thanksgiving, Life and Death, and Anti-feminism. I feel the need to direct any readers I might have to this because I don’t say much about the indisputable need for everyone, especially men, to understand that being pro-feminist is just plain normal and being anti-feminist is morally corrupt and soulless.

Blue Milk informs me that today is White Ribbon Day. I grimace at the dutiful and sanctimonious wearing of ribbons and suchlike demonstrations of solidarity that are better expressed through actions than gestures, but I applaud the idea that we should all support any consciousness-raising efforts. The idea that much of the world supports violence towards women, rather than deploring it, makes these two posts must reading for those who might not understand why I go to the effort of trying to blog about feminism at all.