by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 10/13/17

The New Inquiry has a fascinating piece on the “American monomyth” of good outsiders saving the American community from “bad” outsiders, and how Wonder Woman critiques it even though it eventually upholds it.

Joss must be so happy. Harvey Weinstein made him look like a feminist hero again (but only comparatively).

  • The New Yorker‘s article, after the explosive New York Times one started the whole thing, included stories of actual rape.
  • Word to the wise: If you’re a mid-level, garden-variety creeper, it’s probably best to just stay quiet when the really big, dramatic creepers (that you probably DID already know about) get caught. Here’s video of Ben Affleck assaulting Hilarie Burton, and Salon’s write-up of how the internet called him on his many hypocrisies after he got sanctimonious about Harvey Weinstein.
  • Twitter keeps digging its own grave: after letting our president, an admitted sexual predator, harass and threaten people on Twitter with impunity, they’ve suspended Rose McGowan’s account after McGowan bravely spoke out against her rapist.
  • Just as a fun bonus, here’s an interview with Tom Hanks that delves into Weinstein a little. Isn’t it crazy that Tom Hanks has a book coming out? TOM HANKS, you guys! (via the NYTimes)

Hallie’s plotline on Nashville kind of annoyed us (until we just stopped covering it altogether), but we are super psyched that the talented Rhiannon Giddens won a MacArthur. (article on Billboard)

by Janes

How should we reevaluate Buffy in light of the Joss Whedon allegations?

How did Buffy spring from the mind of a misogynist? That is the question Joss Whedon fans have been grappling with for the last month, and it’s a worthy one. The allegations against Joss are impossible to ignore, and disturbing enough that it’s difficult to view his work in the same way. So how do we continue to watch and love Buffy in light of the personal misogyny of its creator? How do we reinterpret this beloved feminist anthem as the brainchild of a toxic fake ally?

The short answer is: we don’t. Joss doesn’t own Buffy anymore, but even if he did, any problems with its feminism have already been discussed by its fandom (and/or Buffy Studies scholars) at length. Buffyheads have known for a long time that Buffy sprung from a very flawed creator–we just didn’t know how flawed.
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by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 10/6/17

The new Off-Broadway staging of A Clockwork Orange holds little interest for us here at Adversion, but the New York Times reviewer was so hilariously distracted by the hot actors and their sixpacks that it made for entertaining, if mystifying, reading nonetheless. (For once it’s the male actors being unnecessarily objectified, not the women. Progress? Regress?)

Speaking of profiles that are overly focused on female actors’ looks, this profile of Kate McKinnon is certainly guilty, but if you’re like us you probably can’t get enough of reading about Kate McKinnon and reliving her Hillary impressions from a more optimistic time. (via Vanity Fair)

We are 100% for sure going to be covering Josh Schwartz’s remake of Dynasty, which premieres next Wednesday. How could the creator of The OC and Gossip Girl not get our full attention? Here are some links to whet your anticipation:

  • Bustle visited the set and heard that the show is super feminist. Yay! (Although, to be clear, it’s “Lean In” feminism, not actual, destroy-the-kyriarchy feminism). Apparently it’s quite diverse, too.
  • Obviously the show can’t fill the hole Gossip Girl left in our hearts unless the costumes are fabulous. According to Fashionista, they are.
  • CW posted a silly and undeniably fun trailer on Youtube this spring.

Speaking of Josh Schwartz, ICYMI (since we haven’t done a links post in like two months), Vanity Fair published a great oral history of Gossip Girl, which if you can believe it is having its tenth anniversary.

Mary staring through the castle gates.
by Nerdy Spice

Who’s the Dawson? And Other Deep Thoughts On Reign, Season 1

A friend of mine has been urging me to watch Reign, a CW teen soap revolving around a heavily fictionalized Mary Queen of Scots and her betrothed, Prince Francis of France, for almost two years now. My response was that of course I would get around to it eventually: “It’s basically everything I want in a TV show: a campy romantic drama with an out-of-control costume department starring familiar faces from the girly movies of my youth.”

Boy, was I right.

(spoilers behind the cut)

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by Nerdy Spice

Women Upstairs: On Claire Messud’s The Burning Girl

“My mother assures me that it happens to everyone, sooner or later,” says Julia, the narrator of Claire Messud’s new novel The Burning Girl; “…everyone loses a best friend at some point.”

Julia is quiet, cautious, and sensitive; her soon-to-be-lost best friend is Cassie, a fragile-looking, “troubled” girl, much more daring and eventually more popular. As Dwight Garner observed in The New York Times, “This pairing is a familiar one”–so many other novels about female friendships, from my favorite YA novel Someone Like You to recent literary phenom My Brilliant Friend, seem to feature the same general contrast. And it seems to be the universal inclination of writers (many of whom are quiet and sensitive) to narrate from the point of view of the less daring, the less dynamic friend—the friend with less story to tell. The narrator then spends so much time looking at her friend, watching her, resisting her stories rather than driving forward her own, that the novel’s center of gravity rests between narrator and friend, rather than centering on the narrator.

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Screenshot from "Look What You Made Me Do" music video - Taylor Swift sits in bathtub, covered in diamonds, pointing fingers like a gun.
by Nerdy Spice

Eight Genres of Garbage Polemic About Taylor Swift

Cultural criticism is great, isn’t it? There are so many really smart pieces of longform writing floating around that present nuanced, enlightening discussions of our response to successful female businesswomen, the nature of celebrity, white feminine victimhood, the commercialization of feminism, the line between country and pop music, the role of authorial intent in interpreting art, the reasons why the colonialist fantasy of Africa as a giant theme park empty of humans still persists so strongly in the American imagination, and many other interesting issues as they relate to Taylor Swift.

WAIT JUST KIDDING. Some days it seems like the entire Internet is actually a Dumpster full of faux-intellectual schlock that stakes out a narrow yet vehement, take-no-prisoners position on Taylor Swift because somebody had a deadline that day and, well, Taylor was there. Here’s a tour of the trash heap.

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by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 8/26/17

I could not be more excited for Claire Messud’s next book, coming out on Tuesday. Here’s a post from her about her mother’s library, on Lithub.

In other news, James Cameron (who once claimed his white-savior Fern Gully ripoff didn’t win Best Picture over his ex-wife’s gritty war film because he was… too famous and well-financed?) is still an idiot, but at least now we have Patty Jenkins to call him out.

In light of the “fake feminist” allegations against Joss Whedon, a sensitive essay from Indiewire about the need for fandoms to listen to women first and their idols second.

Lilith’s Brood by Octavia Butler is finally coming to TV, courtesy of Selma‘s Ava DuVernay! Read our review of the trilogy here.

by Nerdy Spice

Q: A Cult Novel about the Protestant Reformation

Over in Italy this summer I picked up a book totally at random called Q. It’s a fat historical novel about the Protestant Reformation, written by four anonymous authors under the name Luther Blissett. Its protagonist is an Anabaptist theology student who becomes involved in various movements during the Reformation. The antagonist, a papal informer, is simply named Q.

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by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 8/11/17

Vulture has a list of Taylor Swift’s best comebacks from her testimony in a sexual assault trial (for those who missed it, she is accusing a man of reaching under her skirt and groping her butt during a photo shoot). I think my favorite is when someone asked her why the front of the skirt doesn’t look mussed: “Because my ass is located in the back of my body,” she answered.

Here’s an interesting article in the Washington Post about the culture of songwriting, competition, and collaboration in real-life Nashville. Makes you wonder what might happen if Scarlett and Gunnar’s best early songs had been put on hold by Rayna or Juliette in the first season and never released!

The New York Times has a long, in-depth profile of one of my very favorite living authors, Claire Messud, who writes about angry and disappointed women in a beautiful and precise prose style. I learned that like me, she’s never learned to cook, which just makes me more sure that she is my hero.

The new season of Rick and Morty is shaping up to be truly incredible, and Film Crit Hulk has a wonderful meditation on/appreciation of the devastating third episode.