Thursday, December 16, 2010

From Echidne's Mailbag



Stuff you might want to know about.

First, a new website is putting together movies/films which are directed by women. Less than one percent of movies on Netflix have female directors. From the blurb I got:

Female directed movies are important because they help women [and men] to see the world from the female perspective. As you probably know, most movies we watch are almost entirely created by men (at least the men are in the most powerful positions - director, writer, producer), and we don't realize how this affects our world view. We believe men and women should be able to recognize both points of view in their entertainment experience, so we created this website to help out.

Second, Gail Collins writes about the tears of the speaker of the House. We knew this experiment would never work! (Thanks to ProfWombat for the link)

Third, Feminist Frequency has put together a list of many articles which discuss the treatment of Assange's accusers on the Internet. The attacks vary but some of them certainly fall into the category of general misogyny.

As I have written many times before, what is ultimately damaging about the focus on rape or sexual violence accusations are fake is that very focus. The actual number of false accusations is a small percentage of the whole but you might not think so if you read the popular media on these things.

The damage this does is to any woman who has been raped and then tries to decide if she should go to the police or not. Will she be believed? Or in a wider sense, the non-stop focus on fake reports works to the advantage of real rapists.