From Wayne: Superheroes are sexy, right? Skin tight costumes, rippling muscles, big boobs, and a near total lack of genitalia… what’s not to like? But for all of the suggestiveness of their idealized physiques, actual sexuality was a taboo topic in comics for a very long time. Some of this was due to a generally…
Category: Sex and Gender
Call for Comments: “The Queen’s Gambit,” or Chess is a Virus now
From Katya: The world, it seems, has lost its collective mind over The Queen’s Gambit. Released in October, it quickly became the most-watched limited scripted series ever and hit number 1 in 63 countries, according to Netflix. I’m not going to lie, I fell into the binge too. Give me an aesthetically pleasing show with…
Call for Comments: Cheesy Christmas Movies: Part II
From Hannah: Two years ago, I somehow convinced everyone to let me do a show on cheesy Christmas movies. And by wanting to talk about “cheesy” holiday films, what I really meant was “let’s talk about all these really ‘bad’ (but also sometimes kind of really fun and good in their own way) romantic comedies…
e131. Cuties: Eroticizing the Innocent and Infantilizing Sexuality
It’s rare that a tiny little foreign market indie film gets any mainstream media attention at all. It’s even rarer that it actually trends on social media, creating calls for the public to boycott the world’s largest streaming service and results in court investigations of that company. And yet, Netflix’s new film Cuties managed to…
Call For Comments: Is This The Darkest Timeline?
From Mav: It’s 2020, and the world is on fire. We all know how bad things have been. Some of the things are obvious, longterm, and we’ve done shows on them before. Some of them are new: There’s a deadly pandemic that has killed over 213,000 people in the United States (and over a million…
Call for Comments: Pretty Creepy Sexy Baby – Sexualizing Infantilization
From Mav: A few weeks ago, we did a show called “twentysomethingteen” where we talked about the phenomenon of casting fully grown adults as teens in TV shows for practical reasons (they can work longer hours) and the effect that had of creating characters who did not reasonably look like teenagers, especially compared to actual…
e129. Corsets: Enhancement, Imprisonment, Empowerment, & Empresses
The corset might be one of the most fascinating garments in the history of fashion. On one hand, it’s simply underwear. It is a garment that provides a specific function. On the other hand popular culture has made it a symbol forever associated with everything from the Victorian Age to 80s pop music to burlesque…
e128. 9 Popular Culture Pet Peeves We Hate and Why
Pop Culture is a double edges sword. The more we love a certain type of media, the more of it we absorb. But the more we absorb, the more we notice some of the tropes that are frequently repeated. And the more we notice those tropes, the more likely we are to eventually get annoyed…
Call for Comments: Why Do We ƒµ¢&ing Love Charts?
January 20, 2021
From Mav: I love charts. I fucking love charts! Am I alone here? I’m a nerd, when I was a kid, I used to play with this computer program called Harvard Graphics, just for fun. All it did was make charts. Last week, working on the final chapter of my dissertation, I got to a…