Of Pantsuits and Burqas

This photo is so mindblowing I can’t even begin to parse it:

Whether in the fundamentalist Muslim feminine garb or the Western corporate feminine garb, at least the women of the world all love plush pink velvet rooms.

Via/More

Let’s Overthink: Albus Dumbledore

Yes, I know I’m approximately one hundred Internet years late on this one, but I am nothing if not unhip. And much has been said on this topic already, generally along one of the following lines: 1) Down with authorial intent, 2) This is a backdoor-diversity cop-out, 3) Great, all my kids are going to turn gay now, or 4) I’m off to edit my slashfic. (Personally, I’m officially a Dumbledore/Snape shipper now).

Let’s Overthink: Notre Dame Football

Here we go, the post that makes my (scant) feminist/tv nerd audience delete their bookmarks. Uh, if it helps you stick around, we can subject a few tight-pantsed dudes to the female gaze in the comments, for a change, or we could discuss the intricacies of ND’s NBC contract.

Notre Dame football occupies a strange cultural place, a place it shares with perhaps just the New York Yankees. Few cultural institutions are so loved by their fans (if in fact you can call the weird mixture of obsessiveness, fickleness, and entitlement “love”) and so hated by almost everyone else. First of all, there’s the Catholic Factor (I’d argue that this is a huge motivation for, say, the collective desire for the state-schooled UNC boys to beat Duke every year). And of course any wealthy private school is always going to attract it’s share of haters (yawn) and its share of you’re-no-better-than-us-ers (they’ve got a point).

Let’s Overthink: Nerdiness, Part 2

So if we’re seeing sitcoms change their minds about what “the masculine” means, what does that mean? That depends who you ask. If you ask The Big Bang Theory, it means that pretty girls are to be chided for their “shallowness” if they don’t immediately take off their clothes for the socially awkward. If you ask Chuck, it means that the nerdy guys ought to butch up, while somehow still keeping their nerdy inner sweetness. The former is the insane, but durable fantasy that all men are entitled to a wife who looks like a supermodel, regardless of appearance, personality, or social status. Nice guys routinely whine about how hotties won’t do them, but women aren’t allowed to care about those things without being “shallow.”