Guest post: they define female prettiness as an absence of features

Originally a comment by zibble on First rule: make them insipid.

I think the problem isn’t even that they have to keep the characters pretty.  The problem is that they define female prettiness as an absence of features.

It’s like the bad-anime face.

The total lack of identifiable human features forces you to project idealized features onto their void of a face.  There are enough face-like qualities for the mind to recognize that a face is supposed to go there – but with no specific information, your brain picks all the features it likes the best.  Whereas if they tried to make a female character actually modeled off of a real female face, like Angelina Jolie, they have to deal with the fact that not everyone finds that specific face attractive.

I think that’s the core problem with objectification.  It’s not just that women are sexualized – when you watch cartoon films like Hercules or anything by Don Bluth, the men are designed to be sexualized and pretty too.  It’s just done in a radically disparate way, in which women are sexualized not according to their individual characteristics, but by having their individuality covered up.  It’s essentially the same mentality as a burqa – an attempt to define women as only being one particular set of things through a campaign to hide their actual attributes.

First rule: make them insipid

It’s sad being a Disney animator if you have to animate women, we’re told. Fortunately the problem doesn’t arise much because hey – Toy Story? Lion King? But when it does arise, damn, it’s difficult.

Lino DiSalvo, the head of animation on Frozen, claimed that it was “really, really difficult” to animate women because they have to be kept pretty while expressing emotions:

“Historically speaking, animating female characters are really, really difficult, because they have to go through these range of emotions, but you have to keep them pretty and they’re very sensitive to — you can get them off a model very quickly. [Read more…]

But what if the teachings are totally against Islam?

Al-Madinah school in Derby is even worse than everyone thought. The Independent reports:

A Muslim free school has been warned it faces closure if it does not take action to eradicate practices which discriminate against girls and women within a week.

The blunt warning was delivered yesterday in a letter from Lord Nash. the Minister with responsibility for free schools and academies in a letter to the chair of its governing body.

Lord Nash warned the Al-Madinah free school in Derby that the trust running it had “manifestly breached the conditions of its funding agreement by failing to ensure the safety of children at the school: delivering an unacceptably poor standard of education, discriminating in its policies towards female staff and failing to discharge its duties and responsibilities”.

An unacceptably bad standard of education? Like under the heading of Books and teaching resources for example?

In each and every department, all efforts will be geared
towards ensuring the books and resources conform to the
teachings of Islam.

Sensitive, inaccurate and potentially blasphemous material
will be censored or removed completely. If and when
teachers are required by the curriculum to convey teachings
that are totally against Islam¹ , the Director of Islamic Studies
will brief the relevant teachers and advise accordingly. [Read more…]

We shan’t say unless you force us

In case we’re not already sufficiently fed up with the Catholic church today, we learn that

The Catholic Church tried to strike an agreement with New South Wales Police that would have helped shut down investigations into paedophile priests and placed police in breach of the Crimes Act.

Police records, accessed under freedom of information laws by Greens MP David Shoebridge, show two attempts were made to finalise memorandums of understanding (MOUs) between police and the church over how to deal with complaints of sexual and physical abuse by Catholic Church personnel.

 

 

 

Disgusting, isn’t it. “Church authorities shall cover up crimes committed by church employees unless prevented by court order.” Because after all it’s just child rape, nothing that matters.

Barrister Geoffrey Watson SC says the agreement would have placed police in breach of the Crimes Act.

“If you become aware of a serious criminal offence, you’ve got to tell the police,” he told the ABC’s Lateline program.

“When I looked at the MOUs they were really in effect trying to get the police to condone the failure to comply with that law, or even perhaps worse, get the police to participate in that.”

Dear police, can we please break the law? Thank you very much, the Catholic church.

In June 2003 Michael McDonald from the Catholic Commission for Employment Relations wrote to the Child Protection Squad: “I, therefore, seek your confirmation that the unsigned memorandum of understanding with the police remains in place.”

The Catholic Church could not tell Lateline why Mr McDonald was writing to the police, but Kim McKay from the Child Protection Squad was unequivocal in her written response to Mr McDonald.

“Please note that his (sic) draft unsigned MOU has not been approved by the NSW Police Service, and the arrangements proposed by the MOU are not currently in place,” she said.

“The arrangements proposed by the draft MOU appear to be in direct conflict with the explicit legislative requirement of section 316 of the Crime Act.”

Before this letter was sent by Superintendent McKay, the church was under the assumption the agreement was in place.

It’s so unfaaaaaaair.

After Superintendent McKay had made it clear in her letter that the unsigned agreement would have breached the Crimes Act, the church and police started negotiations to draft another agreement.

The second draft agreement, dated August 2004, includes a clause that states: “The Catholic Church or (additional party) shall make available the report of an assessment and any other matter relevant to the accused’s account of events only if authorised in writing by the accused or if required to do so by court order.”

Mr Shoebridge says the second draft agreement goes even further than the first one.

“The church wanted to effectively give the accused priest a veto power about whether or not to provide crucial information to the police – utterly extraordinary when you think that that’s less than a decade ago.”

It is, isn’t it. Just jaw-dropping.

H/t Leonie Hilliard.

 

More on forced pregnancy in Nebraska

Pteryxx collected more material on this and it’s damning, so I’m just going to add it all. Commentary Pteryxx’s.

The Nebraska Supreme Court refused to hear the girl’s appeal.  Here’s the decision she was appealing.

After advising the girl that “when you have the abortion, it’s going to kill the child inside you,” lower court judge Peter Bataillon denied her request for a waiver. Bataillon, who according to RH Reality Check, had been an attorney for extremist anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, found that the girl was not mature and informed enough to make the decision to have an abortion. He also found that the girl should have sought consent from her foster parents, even though the girl’s foster parents are not her legal guardian and the state regulations governing the Department of Health and Human Services gives minors in its custody the right to consent to abortion, without seeking permission from the Department. [Read more…]

She’s not in purdah

Kamila Shamsie talks to Malala for the Guardian.

Learning from her parents is something Malala knows a great deal about. Her mother was never formally educated and an awareness of the constraints this placed on her life have made her a great supporter of Malala and her father in their campaign against the Taliban’s attempts to stop female education. One of the more moving details in I Am Malala, the memoir Malala has written with the journalist Christina Lamb, is that her mother was due to start learning to read and write on the day Malala was shot – 9 October 2012. [Read more…]