Call For Comments: Sex and the Disney Princess

From Mav: There’s an article that appears in the textbook I use when teaching Freshman Composition 101 that I find quite fascinating. It’s called “Little girls or little women? The Disney princess effect” and was written by a woman named Stephanie Hanes in 2011 and is reprinted from the Christian Science Monitor. I use it to…

Episode 20: Monster Mash

“The Monster” and “The Monster Hunter” may be among the oldest figures in popular culture. It is the most basic of stories. Some great evil is threatening the community. Someone go kill it! It is a theme that has played out in countless books, movies, tv shows, comics and video games. The monster is a…

Episode 16: Sex in Video Games

Way back on episode 3, Mav, Katya and Abby discussed violence in video games and the conversation segued into talking about video games with sex in them. We promised to do a follow up episode exploring that. Well, Wayne is away doing cool kid stuff this week like going to bars and listening to concerts,…

Call For Comments: Sex, Gender and Video Games

From Mav: Way back on our third show, we talked about violence in video games. It was a fascinating show. Neither Wayne or I are experts, so that was the first time we called in both Katya and Abby to run the discussion. It was great. I learned a lot. Chief among the things I learned…

Episode 6: Sex & Drugs & Riverdale

When we started this podcast, one of our first goals was to make sure we did and episode about the CW reboot of Archie comics, Riverdale. The show reimagines the classic Archie characters in a adolescent soap opera world of mixed genres: hardboiled detective, film noir, goth horror, teen romance, erotic thriller. To us it is…

Episode 4: Losing My Religiosity?

Never argue about politics or religion on the internet! Well, really, they’re the same thing. But so are arguments about atheism. And comics. And sports. And movies. And unix text editors. It’s not really religion; it’s religiosity! Wayne and Mav are joined by Danny Anderson of The Sectarian Review Podcast to discuss the way in…

Episode 3: Violence in Video Games

Do video games make you violent? Probably not, but if so why is there so much controversy surrounding them? This week, Mav is joined by Katya and Abby — both of whom are far more knowledgeable than him on the subject — to discuss video games, mass shooters, psychology, the military industrial complex, headshots, zombies…

Call For Comments: Pop Culture and Religiosity

One of the fun things about doing a dissertation on comic books is that I get to spend some time lurking in random forums on the internet (Facebook groups, Redit, Tumblr, that sort of thing) just observing subcultural behavior in fan culture. Anyway, one particular group I monitor had a very odd interaction about a week ago…