I understand her point but this *is* Hollywood we're talking about. Comfortable, conservative, racist, sexist Hollywood.

And choose better examples to make your point - Shawshank Redemption? Really?

Anyway just off the top of my head I thought of a few films that passed (or I assume they do as I haven't seen them all - correction, I've not seen Charlie's Angels but have seen the rest)

Charlie's Angels
Ghostworld
Kill Bill 1 & 2
Monster (the one about Aileen Wuornos)
Thelma and Louise

So in the context I've described maybe things aren't as bad as you might be led to believe. I'd also imagine that some of her other examples (think I saw Jolie there as Lara Croft) would be seen as models of empowerment despite lacking dialogue with another woman.

[T]he only known cure for poverty, [...] is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.

-Christopher Hitchens


Go girls, go!

>> ^hpqp:
^word, what could possibly make this NSFW?
Also, excellent talk. There is abuse in almost all industries, as well as at home, sadly.
@<A rel="nofollow" class=profilelink title="member since May 3rd, 2010" href="http://videosift.com/member/Lawdeedaw">Lawdeedaw's pathetic and thinly veiled nostalgia for patriarchy (or does the sarcasm cover for simple misogyny?), did you know that one of the leading causes of death in women aged 15-65 is domestic violence and spousal abuse?
As for statistics, the top "happiest countries" are also the top "gender empowerment" countries?



Actually, I think women who ran their houses had more power than they do now. I think men are the helpless sex. We try and be the "strong" ones and destroy our personal lives and such for crap we don't need. We war, we slay, we fight in the business world until our souls are shadows.

I think it funny women wanted that... No offense.

Oh, and men who beat women should be capped at the knees. But, since my brother is abused by his wife (who has been arrested for her criminal act,) I find no sympathy for women who beat men either. Although women do it far less and to a lesser degree.

Soooo, my views are actually anti-patriarchy and I have no clue how you deemed them otherwise. I also have no clue where you note sarcasm. Women got what they wanted, good for them. I hope the costs are worth it...

^word, what could possibly make this NSFW?

Also, excellent talk. There is abuse in almost all industries, as well as at home, sadly.

@Lawdeedaw's pathetic and thinly veiled nostalgia for patriarchy (or does the sarcasm cover for simple misogyny?), did you know that one of the leading causes of death in women aged 15-65 is domestic violence and spousal abuse?

As for statistics, the top "happiest countries" are also the top "gender empowerment" countries?

So, I got this e-mail from Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty group, literally today. The first paragraph was as follows:

Dear NetRunner,

I'm not sure if you saw my email last week warning you about how dangerously close Congress is to empowering the Fed. Due to a backroom deal between Senator Reid and Senator McConnell, Republicans in Congress have ended their filibuster of Dodd's "Fed Empowerment" Act.

Time is running out to kill this legislation that would dramatically expand the powers of the Federal Reserve.

I sincerely hope you will take a few moments to read my message and take action to demand that your senators kill the Dodd "Fed Empowerment" Act.

The e-mail goes on to implore people to call their Senator to vote against the bill.

You might wonder why I quote this. It's because the "Dodd 'Fed Empowerment' Act" is the exact piece of legislation they're hoping to amend with the Audit the Fed language.

That's either hypocrisy or incompetence.

For comparison, here's an e-mail I got from Alan Grayson's campaign, also today:

Dear NetRunner,

Last year, I asked the Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board who received $1 trillion in funds that the Fed handed out to domestic banks and financial institutions. He said, essentially, "I'm not going to tell you." More recently, I asked the Chairman of the Fed who received the half trillion dollars - that's $500,000,000,000 - that the Fed handed over to foreign central banks. He said he didn't know. Half a trillion dollars, and he doesn't know!

That kind of ignorance and arrogance must end. We need to audit the Fed. And now we're closer than ever.

The House passed our bill to conduct the first independent audit of the Fed in its 96-year history. Now it's time for the Senate to act.

A bipartisan group of Senators is pushing for an amendment to audit the Fed. This amendment is similar to the legislation that we passed in the House last year. It's called the Federal Reserve Accountability Amendment. It will ensure that the American people know to whom the Fed is lending our money.

The e-mail goes on to implore me to call my Senators and ask them to support the Audit the Fed amendment.

This is part of why all warm feelings I once had for Ron Paul are long since gone. I'm on his e-mail list, so I know what he's asking people to call their representatives about. I know that he parroted Republican scare stories during the debate on health care. Now he's literally asking people to phonebank against reforming Wall Street, even while he's going on TV to blow his horn about how he hopes to amend the bill he's campaigning to keep from being brought to a vote (aka filibuster).

He should be embarrassed.

I hate things like this. They take obesity and try to dress it up as self empowerment. "You don't need to slim down for society, you're beautiful the way you are"

Um... you're killing yourself being that fat. That is not sexy, that is not healthy, that is not worth 'creating a riot' over.

This really gets my goat because it's taking one thing, the media's obsession with being very skinny, which should be scorned, and killing it by trying to suggest the only other option is being obese.

Properly, healthy sized women's bodies should be praised and adored. Curves are sexy, (although some people are just naturally skinny as well, so shouldn't be 'hated' for being very skinny and a bit shapeless) and there is not enough natural body shapes and sizes being shown in the media.

BUT

THESE women are not healthy, they are not 'natural', they are not to be praised. They are fat, they are overweight, they are morbidly obese (not all of them are all of these things, but some of them certainly are). This thing of 'just be happy with what you are' thing seems, in these cases, to be a cop out and a way of not trying to be a healthy size. Which is wrong.

The western world is getting stupidly fat on average, and this needs to be halted, not praised. You don't just give up on trying to get people to be healthy by shifting the goal posts of what we're supposed to find attractive or healthy. It doesn't work like that, you can't just say 'OK, morbid obesity is not a problem anymore, as long as you feel sexy'.

BAH!

@dag
nah no way, let me clarify that
i see this video as parody, and i dont like it either, i downvoted it.
the original video (the one the video is parodying) was about feminine empowerment, and im cool with that, though embracing it means something completely different in my generation.

my point was that because i see sex differently, i dont really see the line between videos whos only redeeming quality was their ability to be sexualized (mostly in the minds of straight men, and not that thats bad or wrong or anything, its just what happens) and this. i know its graphic and stupid. but the line being drawn is kind of vague from that perspective, and i also feel much more strongly about that point as it relates to the eroticise video. but 2 threads is too much to keep track of.
does that make more sense?

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I feel you're making this into an issue of feminine empowerment- and I think that is over reach. We don't allow graphic sexual content on the Sift- that's all. If this was a bunch of guys sitting around stroking it - my response would be the same.

>> ^peggedbea:
@Shepppard
i never said this wasn't the most graphic display,it most likely is, just that this video is meant as parody, not as porn, also i fail to see where the great leap is between this and the dozens of videos that get sifted only because the content was sexualized and so we should let the voting mechanism determine what should be here.
i think the problem we are having relating to each other on this issue is that as girl, i do not regularly sexualize the female body. and i'm making the reasonable assumption that you are a straight male, and the assumption that as a straight male you do regularly sexualize the female body. we most likely view all content sexual in nature very differently. old ladies masturbating together as some hippie ritual, shedding the bondage of their repressive upbringing doesn't set my porn flag flying, it sets my feminist flag flying, so my perspective is totally different.
DISCLAIMER: in absolutely no way am i saying that i think you only sexualize females, i do not think that is true at all. but it is inherent with straight male brain to think about females and sex in combination, and probably fairly regularly.

drunken gyrating spunkyness has got me confused

Isnt that always the way? That my favourite new phrase and I'm gonna see how often I can work it into conversation during the Christmas party season

In reply to this comment by Raaagh:
I hope she goes to prison. Lesbian prison.

( Not a bad Lesbian prison where they rape, but rather one where they find empowerment through homo-erotic exploration...I dont know what Im saying, her drunken gyrating spunkyness has got me confused.)

I hope she goes to prison. Lesbian prison.

( Not a bad Lesbian prison where they rape, but rather one where they find empowerment through homo-erotic exploration...I dont know what Im saying, her drunken gyrating spunkyness has got me confused.)

I wish this had been posted in its entirety so as to stimulate the discussion it was meant to stimulate.
I agree completely to the reasoning that it was made. Rap used to be a bold cultural statement that was uniquely that of it's creators.

The music industry had bastardized it into marginalized pop music at best. It became the trend to use the music to rise up out of the poverty. Once this trend started, The industry started to engineer it's own studio created blase crap and as long as money was involved, every one went along with it.

I miss the days of Run DMC, Kurtis Blow, Grand Master Flash, Shinehead, Big Daddy Kane, Ice-T, Roxanne Shante and rest of the artists who pioneered the movement. I can't stand the stuff they call Rap now, the mainstream crap that flaunts a big bass, naked girls and MTV style.

It's like if U2 sold out and started making Pop albums and sat back and waited to get paid!
The Empowerment these artists garnered for themselves is all but gone. Sucked into the void of MTV and money sucking "soulless" big business, just like every other fresh music style to come along.

But that's just my opinion....
For some interesting reading - look here:
Kurtis Blow Presents: The History Of Rap
http://www.rhino.com/features/liners/72851lin.html

I dunno about this Lucky - I considered posting this as well.

This vid was produced by Nas, in response to how hip-hop went from empowerment to ridiculously stereotypical silliness. He recruited Nick Cannon and (I believe) Affion Crockett to don blackface and perform as Shuck & Jive.


This particular embed doesn't have the explanatory message (voiced by Nas) that the original vid did (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgRAgJI7aoc), and out of context this vid would seem to be totally racist. It is, however, a commentary about the degree to which *hiphop has lowered itself, and the extent to which 'artists' are whoring themselves out to corporate 'slave masters' in the name of money & fame.

See here:
http://www.ampradio.com/2009/08/nas-nick-cannon-eat-dat-watermelon/
http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/videos/id.3430/title.nas-nick-cannon-affion-crockett-eat-that-watermelon-psa

Yeah, it gets a little boring sometimes, Enoch, but what doesn't? The place is what you make of it for the most part. Lots of people, including me have their complaints and things they'd like to change. Still I'm fairly convinced it's the Best Little Town on the Internet as far as community goes. I'm still convinced that the work we do here is pretty groundbreaking for how communities organize themselves on the Web. I haven't hung out in many forums, but VideoSift seems to me to have more user empowerment and self-moderation than any I've seen. Dag and Lucky keep a very loose hand on the reins. Things often run amuck because of it, but we learn a lot when that happens.

So don't say goodbye, say "see ya later", and take a break. Come back and post some videos because I appreciate you're unique perspective and it adds to the diversity of thought, even if you think no one appreciates it. Keep in mind that there are thousands of unregistered users reading what you write. Your voice is important.

Send along some of your prose, but be forewarned that I am a ruthlessly constructive critic. I'd say that a full 80% of my waking life is spent in creative pursuits, and the process is very sacred to me.

Anyway, see ya later. I find two weeks is all it takes to make me miss the Sift.

In reply to this comment by enoch:
this place is beginning to bore me.yet i find myself reticent to leave my fave fuzzy friend who wears the funny hats.anarchist ministers are not welcome here,that has become painfully obvious.

maybe there was a point in time where stirring things up and helping people perceive things from a different view brought a twinkle to my eye,bit now it just bores me.
nobody is interested in anything different,just the same regurgitated crap.
its like watching one big group circle jerk.
some great people,just...boring.

ill still post some videos.i know some will appreciate them,but i dont feel any urge to participate in giving free reach-arounds.
i been spending much of my time writing anyways,and i have been having a pretty good discussion with iamtheblurr.he seems a decent sort.
if you are interested i can throw ya a link to some of my material.its not half bad,for a hack like me.
keep fighting the good fight brother,you a cool cat.
stay cool brother..stay cool.

>> ^demon_ix:
I'm sure we can argue all day about the finer points of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but that's really unrelated to this particular video


These aren't irrelevant details. The whole point of Yousuf al-Qaradhawi's speech is that being proactive and economically modern, rather than being victimists, is the path to empowerment.

Oh, you women and your "empowerment." I only upvoted cause I want to bone you, cupcake.