Sixteen Candles Does Not Age Well

From http://www.savagechickens.com

ABC Family ran Sixteen Candles a few weeks ago, so I recorded it. I just watched it, and, wow. That is some crap movie right there.

The plot is juvenile, the characters are stereotypical and there’s racism. Oh, and super obnoxious TV kids, why must there always be super obnoxious kids? I admit, it was very amusing in places, but others made my jaw drop. There were plenty of things that just were not funny to me. It alarms me that the whole theater was probably hooting.

So why was this film so popular? What made it a seminal movie of the 1980s? And what impact might it have had on the kids then, and kids now?

Sixteen Candles focuses on Samantha (played by Molly Ringwald), who is turning sixteen in the midst of turmoil. Her sister is getting married, the grandparents are coming to stay, they have to meet the in-laws, oh, and her younger siblings are brats. Her mother can’t even remember to make her lunch, let alone that it’s her birthday. On this same Friday, there’s a dance at school, followed by a senior after-party where everyone goes wild.

Gratuitous Man Pics: Sean Biggerstaff

Way back in the dark ages (2001-2002), when F and I were in high school, the first Harry Potter movies came out. A friend of ours immediately picked out the only male of acceptable age and attractiveness, in a sea of otherwise ineligible ten year olds and old men.

He was Oliver Wood, captain of Harry Potter’s Quiddith team (that game where they fly on broomsticks). For girls not interested in slogging through the books, he was one of the only reasons to watch. Sadly, Oliver graduated from Hogwarts when Harry was in his third year.

BUT! We’ve just learned that Oliver Wood, played by Sean Biggerstaff (Yes, you’re reading that right, his names are Wood and Biggerstaff. ) will have a “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it part in the last Harry Potter.” I remembered our days of yore, sitting around the lunch table making crude jokes about big wood. So of course I looked him up again.

Oh, my god, Sean Biggerstaff has gotten hotter. Like, way hotter.

Things that can’t be magicked away.

Afshan Azad

If you haven’t read this already, do it now:

Harry Potter Actress’s Brother, Father Allegedly Attempt to Kill Her.

The father and brother of a Harry Potter actress has been charged with threatening to kill the 22-year-old at her Manchester, England, home, prosecutors said Friday.

Afshan Azad, who appeared in four Potter movies as Harry’s classmate Padma Patil, was allegedly attacked May 21 because her family, who are Muslim, did not approve of her relationship with a Hindu man, according to a spokesman for the Crown Prosecution Service.

Update: a very sketchy report by the Daily Mail alleges that Afshan dropped the charges, but it’s important to note that it’s not a good idea to trust the Daily Mail if it’s only available source.

The first thing I noticed about this case — and this is about Afshan in particular, and not about the horrific larger issue of “honor” killings — is that Afshan is so young. Really, she’s not much older than my younger brother. She’s a kid. And she starred in the Harry Potter movies. That’s second only to being a candied Disney teen music-making money machine like Miley Cyrus … (wait, whoops!)

I mean, Afshan’s not a kid in the legal sense of the term, but please. I know parents. I have a couple of them. They don’t consider me grown and probably won’t until, at the very least, I start running my own household. Though Afshan Azad is a very successful young woman, she’s from a close-knit Bangladeshi family, so financial solvency may not have translated into actual independence for her. And when she did something that was against her social mores — ie, dating a Hindu — her father tried to kill her.

Wonder Woman – Should we just move on?

"Booth, I don't actually squint."

Something about Wonder Woman sticks in the public consciousness. She’s part of the DC’s big three–Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman. Plenty of little girls like her–even literalist Dr. Temperance Brennan on Bones likes her enough to dress up as her for Halloween. There are TV shows, animated movies, comics… and yet she’s never really caught on.

The reasons why are enough to make a feminist despair. Over on Topless Robot, Alicia Ashby has made a top ten list that sums it up all too well. To summarize, she’s basically Superman with boobs, a skimpier costume, crappy tools, and no iconic story. Even worse, her creator had a thing for bondage; the early comics are full of fetish material.

Women are dogs, says woman.

F is too upset to write about this coherently, so it falls to me. As mentioned, she often surfs the far side of the ideological pool. I don’t like to go there too often, and I’m reminded why every time something particularly egregious comes up and she passes it along.

Political thought is often depicted along a single line, left to right. This is an oversimplified diagram, as is “feminist vs. anti-feminist.” For instance, you can be a woman who thinks women should be meek helpmates, or you can be a man who thinks all women are worthless. On this, they agree:

Women are animals.

This goes well beyond my atheistic, scientific acknowledgement that humanity is just one of many animals on this planet. No, MarkyMark and Laura Grace Robbins believe that women should be treated like animals.

Robbins: The major theme that Cesar Millan tries to get across is that as a dog owner you need to show that you are the leader of the pack and that you want your dog to be in a “calm and submissive” state. Hmmmmm, sounds familiar, huh? Discussions from my post, Submitting Love, got me to thinking if only there was a ‘wife whisperer’ who could come in and teach husbands how to get a handle on their wives.

Mark: Thank you, Laura.  That’s great stuff!

Robbins has a post all about this Wife Whisperer concept. She literally takes a a WikiHow article called How to Control Your Dog’s Behavior By Becoming a Pack Leader and replaces ‘dog’ with ‘wife.’ Her comments are in parentheses. This results in phrases like:

Is your wife doing a behavior that you don’t approve of? Does she pull you around? Do you feel that you can’t control her? Is it hard to take items (pretty things) away from her without being bitten (not literally of course)?

Respect?

This past Tuesday, after a bout of wild monkey sex, W and I lay on his awful mattress, naked and glowing. I don’t remember what we were talking about, or even if we were talking. The AC churned on, making delicious cool whip from the stale air.

Then he turned to me and asked, “Are you happy with me?”

I wish I could’ve seen my own jaw-drop. It felt epic.

Maybe if he had asked if I liked my unicorns well-done or rare — or if I wanted to kidnap baby seals and club them over the head with anvils — or whether I wanted to join a John Edwards fan club, I’d have been less perplexed. Am I happy with him? He’s been the best part of my life for five years. I love him more than I can ever imagine loving anything else. More than I regard myself. Am I happy?

Our first Special Correspondent Post: Background Noise I Could Do Without

Hi, Subterfuge readers. Today we welcome our first special correspondent, T.
❤ your editors, D & F

I started dating a great new guy this week, let’s call him P. I’ve been talking to him for over a month, and we finally met in person the past week. He’s nice, sweet, and speaks with an accent. The accent isn’t from some exotic locale, but because P is deaf. He can hear with the use of hearing aids and fills in what he can’t catch with lip reading. This doesn’t bother me at all: just an excuse to learn some sign language on top of being around someone wonderful. To me, it’s just another interesting thing about him.

While talking about P, I mention that he is deaf/hard of hearing, that he can hear using hearing aids, and that he has an interesting accent because of it. I don’t really think much of it because it’s just a basic, interesting fact about him. Sometimes people have a question or two about it, I answer them, and the conversation goes its merry way. However, something I’m noticing is that some people /pity/ me for this, and they feel bad that this guy I’m seeing is marred significantly by the fact he has trouble hearing. I can’t stand it.

Plan Bashful

So here’s a story D found for me on the intarwebz while I enjoyed my wild Tuesday.

It astonishes me that Plan B use is so widespread in India. I know it shouldn’t, given the billion-plus sex drives. The cavalier attitude toward sex does bother me, but I can’t see that it is any of my business. Most worrisome is that these women seem to confuse the morning-after pill with normal contraceptive methods. (Overuse causes uterine infections and irregular periods.)

According to Ms. Rai, advertisements claim the pill is a safe alternative to abortions. I find this a reprehensible practice as it is misleading. This pill will only stop a pregnancy if the fertilized egg has not yet attached itself to the uterine wall. If it has, this pill can do nothing. It’s possible — though not probable — that the morning after pill will not work in some cases. So this doesn’t stop or even prevent abortions from needing to take place.

However irrational and sometimes downright dumb this Plan B frenzy might seem, I almost admire the boldness of the new Indian woman. Yes, she knows about plan B. And, most tellingly, she’ll ask for it.

Hills Like White Elephants, the Sequel

I met my sorority sister for lunch at the old alma mater. I had a great time. If you’re reading this, T — thank you!

Since I overspent on food, I wanted to get home cheaply. (Damn you, delicious ABP black bean sandwich!) Actually I had no choice  — I couldn’t afford a train ticket. Those were $5.25, up 35% from just a few months ago. Instead, I tried the coach bus that runs between the college and the P library, where I do my work.

(When I graduated from college in ’08, I thought I tried every mode of transportation the city of NB had to offer. Clearly not. A few days ago, W told me about the suburban NB-PSquare coach. PSquare is much closer to the library than the Transit’s dinky station.  Total win-win. I saved $3 — and I didn’t have to transfer two trains and then walk a half-mile up steep sidewalk.)

Today, I learned two things.

Marrying for Money

Today, when I was browsing through The Frisky‘s archives I read the following article. It’s made me think seriously about women and money, I hope the ladies at BAL (and the four other people who read this blog) can help me out.

Jessica Wakefield — a Frisky contributor & the author of this piece — writes about her desire to marry a man for his money. Or, as she writes, “Bank accounts—and debts—do matter. And acknowledging that doesn’t make me a gold digger akin to Anna Nicole Smith—it makes me smart.”

Her post reacts to a book that I haven’t read. It’s called Smart Girls Marry Money. Based on the product description I’ve read on Amazon, I don’t want to read it. It looks like post-feminist shockumentary nonsense. If it were in my power to get rid of every book in the genre I would. I swear. But since I can’t, I just pretend these books don’t exist.

(So here I am, breaking my own cardinal rule. Yay.)