Category: Editorials

JEBUS Coming to a Theatre Near You

For those of you who haven’t heard, “Income Tax Act (Bill C-10) would allow Canada’s Heritage Minister Josee Verner, or a government committee, to deny tax credits to productions deemed offensive and “contrary to public policy.”” While the Canadian Film and Television Production Association and members of the Canadian film and television industry condemn it as censorship, Josee claims that it’s just to ensure that Canadian Tax Payers won’t be funding child pornography, because we all that’s exactly what the Canadian film industry loves to produce.

There is also speculation of the Bill being propped up by the Canada Family Action Coalition, an organization founded in early 1997 “with a vision to see Judeo- [surprise, surprise] Christian moral principles restored in Canada.” A visit to its website will bring up titles such as “Seemingly Innocuous Homosexual Promotion”, and the advocacy of bills such as Bill C537, one that would allow medical practitioners to follow their faith-based values and refuse referrals for abortions and birth control solutions.

Its president, Charles McVety, who is also the president of Canada Christian College in Toronto, has actually claimed credit for the specific provision in Bill C-10, arguing that “films promoting homosexuality, graphic sex or violence should not receive tax dollars.”

Josee says “Child Pornography”, Charles says “Homosexuality.” While it has been rumoured that Evangelical Christians have difficulty in distinguishing between homosexuals and pedophiles, it appears our present government is also unable to do so.

Scariest of all, is this little tidbit I picked from Wikipedia:

In November 2006, former Conservative Garth Turner claimed that McVety had once boasted to him of his influence with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, saying “I can pick up the phone and call Harper and I can get him in two minutes.” McVety flatly denied saying this, after which Turner firmly reiterated his claim.

Sends chills down your spine, doesn’t it? Bill C10 is in its third reading in the Senate.

 
Just Be Yourself. Stay to the Script!

All political parties in Canada provide phone numbers on their websites to local radio call-in shows. But Harper feels that their supporters need a little leg-up in the debate department and have offered “speaking points” on what to say while on air. They are supposed to pass off these little info bites as their own. There is even a “Speaking Tips” section on what to expect and how to act while on air. One tip advises the speaker to “Stay conversational – do your best to have a conversation with the talk show host instead of just reading your notes on the radio.”

No, this is not a joke. You can click here to see for yourself. My guess is that years of quoting from the Bible is a real detriment to one’s spontaneity in conversation.

ONTARIO IS IN A RECESSION!!

Or very soon. Apparently. And under the revamped equalization formula, Ontarians will soon be able to kick back and reap the rewards for years of heavy investment into the rest of Canada. Yep after years of dolling out billions of dollars to the kids, they’re gonna hafta take care of Mom and Dad for a change. Remember kids, that’s the Ultra Depends kind, and don’t spare the talcum powder.

 
Dion a Dork, Harper still a Twit.

A Canadian Press-Harris-Decima survey found Canadians view Stephan Dion as weak, uninspiring and unintelligible.

But still, they like him better than Harper. You can read the results here.

Poor Conservatives, this kind of reminds me the episode from Night Court, when Dan runs as a candidate for the state assembly and loses to a dead guy.

It’s been two years guys, and I hate to tell you (well, actually no, I don’t hate to tell you) that this is as good as it’s gonna get. If only you had a few more mega-churches north of the border…

I can now say that I completely understand what it is like to be a woman. After what I have just seen online, I feel the fury, the humiliation of the often-objectified. As a man, I have always wondered what it’s like to feel like a piece of meat, candy for the lurid and leering eye. During my life, there have been many, but only brief instances where I was the object of the male gaze.

Once, in my mid-twenties I was whistled at while rollerblading along Isabella Avenue. At the time I was a little shocked by this unwanted cat-call, and to this day I am adamant about the kind of signals given off by rollerblades.

A few years later, just before a trip to Indonesia, I was hoping to get a free Hep-B vaccination at the Hassle-Free Clinic downtown. While in the waiting room another patient told me that I had rather “nice legs”. At the time I was a little annoyed. I thought to myself, “doesn’t this gentleman know that my legs, though rather nice, aren’t here for his entertainment?”

Now I could go on giving you other examples of myself as the unwilling sexual object, but I don’t want to come across as being vain… but I really should mention the time I stayed at a hostel out west.

After showing me my room, the owner patted me on my left bosom, remarked that I “had a nice chest”, then quickly left the room. I was aware that the owner was married and so thought nothing of the incident. Until the next day when he asked myself and a group of young guys if we had ever been “skinny dipping”. It was only then I realized I had been molested!

But what could I do? He was the owner of the hostel, and I was merely a young, straight male, strapped for cash. He had the power.

It is precisely this situation that led me to my recent discovery, and the revelation that ensued. You see, though I am making a lot more money these days, a healthy disposable income always seems to be just out of reach. And though I am no longer young, I am still straight, male, and pretty much strapped for cash. After an exhaustive but fruitless search for jobs online, I decided to try a shot in the dark and google the three adjectives that describe my situation. And lo and behold what misandry did I find!

I won’t give the owners of the website the satisfaction of more hits; its name already says enough:

Broke Straight Boys.

If that name alone doesn’t resonate with many of my male artist friends, just read the “testimonial” of one its powerless victims:

“End of the months are hard! After i pay my rent, my cell, and gifts for my girlfriend…I got nothing left for me! So well…i gotta do what i gotta do!!”

You are reading correctly. Poor straight men coerced into performing lurid acts for the delight of thousands of gay men. The manly cadence of the victim’s words and the fact that he admits to having a girlfriend should dispel any suspicions that he is just a gay actor, pretending to be a helpless straight male off the street.

I had always thought my personal experiences with sexual objectification were isolated incidents. After all, I’ve always been taught it is men who hold the power in society. It is men like me who wield the “male gaze”, and it is women who are the sole subject and object of all the amateur cameras filling the internet with porn. But with my discovery of popular websites like Broke Straight Boys, Straight Boys Caught on Tape, and derogatory slang words like “moose knuckle”, I as well feel the heated gaze burning through my clothes. I too have to ask my better half if my underwear line is showing and if my jeans are too tight.

You see, now I understand what Susan Falludi and Gloria Steinem were going on about. And so, I’ve told my wife that I’d better not find any pictures or videos of lithe young males on the computer, and that she shouldn’t make any more misandric comments about Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt, who are after all, just poor, powerless victims of the Gay-Triarchy. Besides, it is me she should be gazing at!

Men, burn your boxer-briefs!!

In the Showtime program Weeds, 16-year-old Silas Botwin pokes holes in his condoms in order to get his girlfriend pregnant and prevent her from going away to college. In the fourth season of The Sopranos, Ralph Cifaretto’s character is beaten to death on his kitchen floor by Tony Soprano, and in the same season Adriana’s character is strangled by her fiancé Christopher Moltisanti and then dragged out of a car and shot by a fellow goomba. The horrible behaviour doesn’t end there. In the first season of Deadwood, brothel and bar owner Al Swearengen attempts to have a child witness killed, and in the final episode of the acclaimed TV show, he slits the throat of one prostitute in order to save the life of another.

As far as anti-heroes go, the behaviour of these men are a far cry from Hannibal Smith, the leader of The A-Team, a popular 1980’s “modern-day outlaw” TV program where in every episode the damsel was rescued, the stolen money was returned, and justice was meted out on the bad guys who would crawl out of flaming car-wrecks unscathed. In the reality of The A-Team you could spray a crowded room with bullets and never hit a target. And at the end of every episode, following the downfall of the local villain, Hannibal would flash a smile, light a cigar and say, “I love it when a plan comes together.” The idea of this man even striking a woman, let alone cutting her throat, is utterly unfathomable.

It does seem odd then that the underlying values evoked in the today’s graphically violent, anti-hero TV shows like The Sopranos, remain closer to our own. But by watching even an episode of The A-Team, The Dukes of Hazard, and Knight Rider today, it becomes evident how the average viewer could be offended by its portrayal of women and minorities.

Daisy Duke contributes little more than her breasts, buttocks and legs to the scene. Bonnie Barstow and April Curtis of Knight Rider and Amy Amanda Allen of The A-Team do nothing more than smile and blush and give the rundown for each episodic crisis. When any of these women actually participate in the plot of an episode it is to either be rescued or to use their feminine wiles to get the keys from a jailor. Other than that, you’ve got Dynasty!’s affluent meddling trophy dolls Alexis and Krystle slapping each other around the pool. Today’s Carmela Soprano or Weeds’ Nancy Botwin, or Deadwood‘s Trixie, not only take a dominating role in the plot of their prospective shows, but like their male counterparts, they do not shrink from getting their hands dirty.

As for minorities, when it comes to stereotyping, not much has changed since the old days. African- and Latin-Americans on HBO and Showtime are still predominantly drug dealers and housekeepers, but their positions of power, as portrayed in Heylia James and U-turn’s characters in Weeds is equivalent to or rivals that of their white counterparts. The stereotypes evoked the shy, pasty-faced serial killer Dexter or the canoli-eating, drug-dealing Mafiosos in The Sopranos are no less colourful. It seems that someone, somewhere along the line discovered that according to viewers, portraying every stereotype is just as acceptable as portraying none.

Stereotyping, graphic sex and violence which rivals that of the programs of yesterday? Where did all this come from? Hasn’t TV become more civilized? A little too civilized it seems.

It is important to remember that the shows of today which I mentioned above are all on select/pay channels like HBO and Showtime. Though critically acclaimed and popular, they are not the mainstream. Examples of such programs would be Two and a Half Men, Grey’s Anatomy, House, and the now-kaput Friends. The characters on these shows are for the most part polished and wholesome people. Even Gregory House, who always pushes the politically correct envelope, always reveals his good heartedness at the last second, and pushes the envelope no further than his working class predecessor Archie Bunker did twenty-five years before. It is highly unlikely that any of these characters will end up in a maximum security prison, in carefully packaged pieces, or as a late night snack for farm pigs. No one will be graphically raped or set on fire. In this sanitized mainstream world, especially during prime-time, the worst that will happen is someone will lose their job, a grandparent, or a pair of nice shoes.

We can then look at recent events on Sesame Street, where the latest DVD release of the original episodes has been deemed not suitable for today’s children. As reported by Virginia Heffernan in her article for The New York Times:

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

From pre-school to prime time, TV reality, despite the acid tongue of Simon Cowell, has been polished up and made to look presentable. But the dirt and grime has got to end up somewhere. In 1974, Jay G. Blumler and Elihu Katz, created a list of uses and gratifications with which media texts provide the audience. The list can be readily applied to today’s TV.

1. Escapism — A bar where everyone knows your name, or a cosy little cafe by Central Park.

2. Personal relationships — Got teary-eyed when Tony Soprano came out of his coma? Well, there you go.

3. Personal identity — For any woman who’s had the “Jennifer Anniston” haircut, and for any man who’s worn a “Joey Shirt”.

4. Surveillance — CNN, The Discovery Channel and Fox News.

As television approaches the second decade of the new millennium, I believe that a new gratification should be recognized, called “Lurid Fascination”. In the past the need was meagrely satiated by the graphic nature and often horrible behaviour on TV shows like COPS, NYPD Blue, and even earlier ones like Miami Vice. But since mainstream television has cleaned up its act, the filth has gathered on the pay channels, and our need for the lurid has found an almost inexhaustible supply in characters like Tony Soprano and Al Swearingen and the worlds they inhabit. Who would have known that our need to slow down and look at a traffic accident would not only find a home on TV but have a hand in the inspiration behind ground-breaking, award-winning programs? It seems that the more we try to shield ourselves from horrible realities, the more we search them out and cherish them.