And the other half

I suggested this because I thought maybe if we wrote some of these arguments down, we wouldn't have to have the same ones over and over again. Plus it gives us the chance to have the kind of more heavy-duty talks that we have face to face, but which are not well-supported by facebook, AIM, and phone calls to harried graduate students.

As with many political/cultural matters, I'm not sure where on the spectrum to peg myself. I have a wide range of friends and associates and some consider me wildy feminist while others consider me a grunting testosterone dinosaur. I guess we can sort that out as we go.

But I am always interested and sometimes appalled by the models that our culture provides for men and women, though I'm also reluctant to apply to much weight to them. I am a big fan of strong women and well-told stories, so the tradition of a woman as a whining sack of potatoes with breasts used to suspensefully encumber the hero doesn't do much for me (eg View to a Kill). And while I'm not the forbidding type, if I were the parent of a teenaged girl, I'd be tempted to forbid any contact with the Twillight books/movies.

I don't have a lot of response to the first four films listed because

1) Sunshine I've seen exactly once and I was too busy navigating the narrative weirdness of it to notice anything else.

2) Juno I've seen exactly once and the incredibly affected dialogue was monumentally distracting to me. Nor did I believe for more than ten seconds that these characters were actual high school students. When I'm in the middle of all that, it's hard to notice Juno's feminist credentials. Though I do get that the lack of a mommmy epiphany at the end of the flick is a plus.

3) Jane Austin is hard not to love.

4) Haven't seen this. It will the first of my assigned viewings, since it is such a touchstone film for you.

I'm going to make two suggestions. One is that we just talk to each other here. The other is a rating system. I don't know what we can use exactly -- five ovaries is Sigourney Weaver in Aliens? But something that will let us quantify these characters on a continuum.