So I’ve been watching the new season of “Degrassi: The Next Generation” and as usual, they’re dealing with interesting issues. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, “Degrassi” is a Canadian show about a group of teens in Toronto who go to a school called Degrassi, and the crazy stuff that happens to them. The tend to deal with a wide range of social issues, and the tagline for the show is “Degrassi: it goes there.” So far this season we’ve had street-racing, jail, dating a co-worker, teen mothers, and the sexual problems faced by paraplegics. They just finished a two-part episode dealing with teens and internet safety and privacy, which I found really interesting. The premise of the story was that goody-goody Christian cheerleader Darcy (with the help of resident creep and all-around jackass Peter) starts posting sexy pics of herself on her blog in order to raise money for the cheerleading team. Peter tells Darcy that he has a friend who likes to read her blog, and this friend ends up being their benefactor of sorts. Although the pictures were password protected, some students hacked in and downloaded them, plus it turns out Peter’s friend was just some random guy he met in a chatroom, who later shows up at Darcy’s house, scaring the hell out of her.

Within the context of this class and this blog, it seems that the real time, face to face interaction of in-class discussion is best for the development of a collaborative discourse on the readings, whereas this blog, by virtue of it's participants and the constraints placed upon it, seems to priveledge or atleast reward insubstantial and incomplete musings on unrelated or only tangentially related topics.

Therefore, I will herein discuss, not the salient points of the reading, but a stylistic element that stuck out to me, namely Manovich's use of "she" as the generic pronoun. I am not sure if Manovich is a man/woman/other/unspecified, I had the impression that Lev was a male name, but I'm not totally sure, but I find the unmarked use of "she" as the generic to be an interesting one.

On top of the (very poor) representation of bi-sexuality in the Black Dahlia, the film’s portrayal of women in general was far from pretty. Of the four main female characters, not one is someone I would want to emulate. We have Scarlett Johansson, who plays the unfaithful, money-hungry sweater, dependent on men from start to finish. Then there’s Madeleine - perverted, incestuous, manipulative - completely lacking of moral rectitude. Our third leading lady, and perhaps scariest of them all, Madeleine’s mother, is a stunning pillar of deranged hysteria. And lastly, there is the “Black Dahlia” herself, basically a prostitute that gets sliced in two, drained of her blood, etc. etc. Empowering, no?

For those who wanted to see, here's the percentages I calculated (sorry it took forever, I can do the rest if people show interest but for now I'm stopping with these)

Our class has created an estimated:
4 songs per woman
142 songs per man

1035 stories per woman (one 10,000 estimate skewed it a little)
141 stories/man

843 poems per woman
29 poems per man

11 dances/woman
.8 dance/man

8 videos/woman
17.5 videos/man

One of my main motivations for doing this survey came from something written a leaflet in my first Propagandhi album:

"Go look at your record collection. Your television. Your bookshelf. If you're like me, chances are that between 75 and 100 percent of the artistic expression you consume is made by white, heterosexual, middle to upper-class males. Maybe we should be asking ourselves: AREN'T WE BEING CHEATED?? White heterosexual middle-class males make up a miniscule portion of the people on this planet! Think of all the emotions and thoughts we're missing! The incredible variety of voices that are lost due to our society's sexism! Feminism's primary concern is social justice, and wrapped up in that concern is the potential of every individual to be more complete, more informed and, well... happy."