Sometimes academic terms bleed over into the popular lexicon and gets used by people almost as second nature without anyone really bothering to think about what it means. “The Male Gaze”, is one of those terms. It gets used in both academic and popular pop culture criticism, but often without definition. There’s simply a vague…
Category: Sex and Gender
Call for Comments: She’s Not Like Other Girls! Introducing the Fanboy Gaze
From Mav (with Matt Linton): We’ve talked a lot on our show about Laura Mulvey’s theory of the “the male gaze”. In short, the male gaze describes the tendency of narratives to position female characters primarily as objects of desire to be consumed by male protagonists and readers. It argues that regardless of the reader’s…
Call for Comments: The Male Gaze and its Discontents
From Katya: This week we’re revisiting the Male Gaze. I know we’ve been here before but we have a string of guests coming up offering their own spin on various “gazes” and related subjects so we thought it was worth a revisit. (If you’d like to check out our previous conversations, check out some of…
e151. Yet More Bridgerton! and other good things
A few weeks ago when we did our Bridgerton recap show we found ourselves with way more to talk about than we could possibly fit in a single episode. That happens a lot, really. And as we often do, we said back then that we’d have to do another episode and discuss more Bridgerton. Well,…
e150. Sexy Cartoons: You Know… for the Kids!
Have you ever noticed how sexy cartoons are? On last week’s Valentines Day show we talked about sexuality in superhero comics and other media. In that case we were largely talking about the kinds of media that really is targeted at adults or at least teens. Comics that are clearly trying to tackle sexual issues,…
e149. Let’s Talk About SuperSex
Happy Valentine’s Day! If you had a podcast devoted to pop culture with a penchant for discussing comics with some bit of regularity and a holiday came up that was devoted to beauty of love and dating and you wanted to do something nice and sweet to commemorate the holiday, what would you do? Obviously…
Call for Comments: Seduced by Bridgerton?
From Hannah: Yes, we basically just released our episode discussing the first season of Bridgerton. But there’s a lot to talk about we didn’t cover! (And I’m turning thirty in … this world … so I used the pity of my co-hosts to get them to agree to release a sequel episode on my birthday.)…
Call for Comments: Sexy Cartoons and the Kid Gaze?
From Mav: As we approach Valentines Day this year I started thinking about our Valentine’s special from last year about “fictional celebrity crushes.” One of the things we drifted into talking about on that episode was characters like Lola Bunny and Harley Quinn — characters that despite originating in children’s cartoons, were clearly created explicitly…
Call for Comments: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love F9
July 1, 2021
From Mav: I’m a guy who loves movies. I really love going to the movies… A LOT! Not being able to go out to the movies was actually one of the things I missed most during the last year and a half of lockdown. I remember a time early on when Chris Nolan decided that…