This post goes out to a special someone out there who suggests that I find better things to do than whine about the misogynistic plot devices in Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 book, American Psycho, and the “toned down” violence against women in it’s 2000 film companion.  Clearly Bret doesn’t hate women or use objectification and violence towards them for attention.  Feminists just don’t get it.

Woman Taunted in Promotion for Bret Easton Ellis’ New Book [adrants]

Bret Easton Ellis fans are now directed to The Devil in You where they can step into the shoes of Clay, a Hollywood producer, as he runs a seedy casting session somewhere in LA. You direct the actress; you tell her what to do. You can encourage her, fill her with booze and drugs, make her dance for you or take things to a whole new level. Although the levels are quite tame. There’s no nudity, no sex, no elicit behavior. Which is too bad because, well, we thought there’d be more from a dude like Ellis.

Bret Easton Ellis Markets Book With Painful Subservient-Woman Game [jezebel]

At the bottom of each screen is the choice to “Let her go.” It’s kind of like “Choose Your Own Adventure” but less entertaining since no actual story emerges — as soon as each segment is done you’re back to the choice screen. When you realize how boring the “game” is and click “Let her go,” you’re taken to a screen that gives you a percentage meant to show how much you have “the devil in you.” You can then send the special meaningful score of exactly how bored you are at work to Twitter or Facebook and promote Ellis’s book to your friends.

Oh how I hate football.  I hate that athletics are more highly valued than academics from the time that kids start little league.  I hate that the football team gets more attention and funding than the art club, science club, and literary guild combined in high school.  I hate that football players are held to different academic and social standards in college.  And I hate the bullshit that professional football players get away with (check out my new favorite blog, nflcrimes.blogspot.com).  And I hate how much they’re paid.

And then there’s this:

Which, according to the Orlando Sentinel “has a chance to be the most successful professional women’s “sport” from a business perspective.”

Let’s all take a minute to think about what that says about the way that our country views women, women’s athletics, and men’s interests.  Because the LFL is an insult to all three. Women are more than their bodies, women’s athletics is more than women’s bodies, and dear God men must have interests beyond women’s bodies.

Also, the comments over at the OS are enough to make you puke.

Fess up. You’re not really indignant about this, but jealous. I know that you know that if you looked as hot as these girls and were just as fit, you’d be out there proudly flaunting it like they do.

My guess would be the writer of this piece is a frusterated former athlete or simply an unattractive or mis-informed women [sic] who never received 1/2 the attention the LFL is garnering.

Now I feel stabby.

Splice is a sci-fi horrorish film that is in many ways a modern retelling of the story of Frankenstein.  What Splice does differently from most sci-fi horrorish films is to incorporate complex, intelligent female characters and examine (both directly and indirectly) female emotional and sexual development in an extreme situation.  Until it blows it at the end.

Also, I have never seen so many people stand up and exit the theater so quickly when the credits started rolling, but that might be a Utah thing (more on that later).  If anything, the strong reactions of my fellow theater-goers only made me more thoughtful about this unusual movie.

Here’s what you need to know: Clive and Elsa are a couple (literally) of scientists who have been working on splicing together DNA from different animals to create new species in the hopes of developing cures for livestock diseases.  They think it would be a good idea to take this to the next level – the human level – in order to find cures for human diseases, and pretty much just to test their theory about how awesome they are.  They’re told no, but they do it anyway.  What they end up creating is first a creepy slimy thing, which evolves into a cute rabbitish thing, and finally into a human chimera thing.  Although Clive was recently trying to talk Elsa into kids, she wasn’t interested.  Now she has become very attached to their creature, Dren, and he’s the one with serious second thoughts.  Spoilers ahead.

There are a few themes to examine here, including the development of the creature, the relationships between the creature and her creators, the choices of the creators, and the overall messages of the film (if we can figure them out). And yeah, there are a lot of scientific inconsistencies in the film and things that just didn’t quite make sense (like a creature with the ability to breathe underwater, fly, and shift sexes but no capacity for vocalized language), but I’m going to set all of that aside for the purposes of this review and just concentrate on the story.

Although Dren started out slimy and creepy and weird (which one could possibly argue for all babies), as she ages she continually develops more human looking features.  Elsa grows attached, particularly when Dren begins developing associations between objects and names as well as the ability to spell with Scrabble letters (but not to speak or write…). Meanwhile Clive consistently views Dren as an experiment (through the first half of the film anyway), and is unsure that they have done the right thing.  He intends to kill her soon after she is born, but is prevented by Elsa’s attachment.  He tries again when she is older and has become sick, but his attempts to drown her lead to the discovery of her aquatic lungs as well as her recovery.  Elsa convinces herself that he knew he was saving her all along, and refuses to acknowledge his fear and loathing for her beloved creation.

When Dren grows too big for the lab, they move her to a barn.  Here we begin to learn more about Elsa’s childhood, giving us some insight to her relationship with Dren as well as her treatment of the child.  It’s insinuated that Elsa was the victim of child-abuse by her mother, and was kept in a small dark room without much more than a mattress – a child hidden away and neglected.  Throughout Dren’s development, she is kept secret, hidden, and spends who knows how many hours a day alone in small observation labs, storage areas, and finally the locked barn.  She doesn’t receive the nurturing, attention, stimulation, or instruction that human children need for healthy development.  Despite her attachment to Dren, Elsa seems to forget that this creature is part human, not just part animal.  Dren finally makes a friend, a barn cat, which Elsa takes away from her as soon as she discovers it.  Her isolation is complete, and her perceived powerlessness begins to drive her to act out.  Which is pretty serious business once you start to get an idea of her adaptations (apparent super-strength, super-agility, super-speed, underwater-breathing, flight, and a poisonous stinger at the end of her tail).  Elsa catches on to this quickly, and in one of the most heartbreaking scenes of the film she ties Dren to a table, strips her, and cuts off her stinger without anesthetizing her once beloved pet.

By this point in the film, Dren has become a young woman.  Elsa has noticed and given her a makeover (a symbol of her budding womanhood, not the She’s All That type thing).  Clive has noticed and given her a dance lesson, which he ended abruptly after recognizing a little too much of Elsa in Dren (in fact, it was Elsa’s DNA that was spliced to make the creature – something she didn’t tell Clive at the time).  The dudes behind me in the theater noticed, too, commenting on her nice thighs.  My hunch is that this is where people start having strong reactions to the film – where they can’t understand what they are seeing or feeling and they begin to dislike it.  Strongly.  Dren is sexy.  She’s beautiful in a very Bratz-esque giant-eyed way.  She’s shapely, graceful, and vulnerable.  We see her womanly thighs as she dances.  We see her pubescent breasts as she cowers.  We see her fully exposed on Elsa’s operating table.  And we have been conditioned by the media industry to see all of this in a very sexual way.   But we saw Dren’s birth, we saw her as a hoppy little rabbit thing, we saw her as a sick child, and now we see her as a monster of some kind.  And none of that is supposed to be sexy.  Sounds a little bit like being 15 again.

But here the film begins to fall apart.  Clive is “seduced” by Dren – a painfully confusing scene for those dudes behind me – and caught in the act by Elsa.  If we look at this event considering Dren as a maturing creature, it makes sense.  She is essentially taking the next step in her personal development and the perpetuation of her new species – mating.  If we look at this event considering Clive as Dren’s creator and parent figure, this is a serious misuse of power and influence – it is the equivalent of incestuous sexual abuse.  How Elsa just gets over this and the film keeps going as though this was a minor event is beyond me.  Dren soon comes down with a mysterious illness, and thinking that she has died, the couple buries her behind the barn.  In fact, she is experiencing a sex-change and comes back violently, for what I suppose is reasonable revenge.  A fair amount of people die, and Dren, now fully male, rapes Elsa (a painful and in my opinion seriously unnecessary scene).  We learn that Elsa has become pregnant from this encounter and will keep the baby as her next step in the science experiment.

In my opinion, the film shot itself in the foot following Dren and Clive’s intimate encounter.  Here’s how I think it should have ended: Dren’s mystery illness is not a sex-change, but pregnancy.  Considering how rapidly her life-span seems to be progressing, and how short her gestation period was (she essentially grew as a fetus outside of the womb following her “birth”), she could pop out Dren, Jr. in a day or two.  She could even give birth to an army of little Dren’s at this rate, and as an entirely female species they could quickly begin shifting the balance of power in our little world.  This would mean that the ultimate climax of her evolution is to become a Queen Bee of sorts.  Instead, a film that said “women are smart, powerful, and can be focal points in a non-romantic film” up until the final fifteen minutes turned around and said “but the almighty penis is the ultimate evolutionary symbol of power and control.”

So why did everyone hate it?  Well, you know my theory on Dren’s sexual influence on the audience.  I also suspected that the sex-change was not a big hit with the conservative population out here and did nothing for the cause of transgender acceptance, which was irritating.  Furthermore, I find it hard to believe that there was anyone in that theater that thought that Elsa should keep her monster-rape-baby, but thinking about abortion as a reasonable solution would tend to make a lot of people out here pretty uncomfortable.  So I loitered a bit to hear what people’s complaints were after they evacuated the theater like a stink bomb just went off.

The consensus seemed to be that there were “a lot of f-words and sexual content.”

Check out this other great review over at i09.  And of course, the always insightful Roger Ebert.

Today our links go out to all the self proclaimed geeks, nerds, and dorks among us.  Be it sci-fi, comics, science, or some combination, peruse the following links and embrace your inner geek.

Representations of Women in (Mostly Superhero) Comics [Threat Quality] via [jezebel]

This is a thing that comes up periodically: what happens is, someone says, “Jesus $&^#, could there be one comic in which all the women don’t have their tits sticking out all the #$^@#%* time?” Inevitably, at least one person responds to these criticisms with the following argument (and occasionally a few supplemental ones):

“Comics have always been an exaggerated ideal, just like in movies and other forms of media, and besides, they exaggerate men and women equally, so it’s not sexist.”

For example:
Disney’s Princesses Reimagined As Comic Book Heroines [io9]

To celebrate this news, check out another take on the Disney princesses, drawn up comic-book style by J. Scott Campbell. In keeping with the “comic book art” style [Note the quotes], they can barely keep their seashells on — oh no wait she’s not wearing any seashells. At least Maleficent looks bad-ass, as usual.

Thinkgeek’s nerdlady tees: Ada Lovelace and Marie Curie [wonderland] via [io9]

Thinkgeek have a new Heroine series, in which they’ve made up two teeshirts celebrating two wonderful ladies: Marie Curie (discovered radioactivity) and Ada Lovelace (invented computer programming).  They’re not only very lovely teeshirts, but the sale of each also donates a dollar to The Girl Effect, an organisation dedicated to helping girls out of the cycle of abuse, poverty and second-class citizenship.

The Planned Parenthood feed on facebook brought this chart to my attention today.  The chart is pretty big, so it’s hidden behind the jump.  The diagrams are pretty clear (and shocking, and saddening) on their own, but what I’d like to talk about are the ways that some of the findings were illustrated.  Let’s start with basic STD rates.

One in five people in the US has an STD.  One in four high school girls has an STD.

Question: What is a little off about these images?

Answer: The first, generic finding is represented with the universal male.  “People,” we can assume, refers to human beings: male, female, or any other label one chooses to apply.  But all of these people are represented by the male silhouette.  We know this is the male silhouette because the female silhouette, as displayed in the high school girls illustration, is pink rather than gray, wears a cute little triangle dress, and holds hands with her neighbors rather than keeping her arms to her sides.

.

One in two sexually active youth will contract an STD by age 25

Then there are the youth of the US.  Like “people,” we’ll assume that “youth” is intended to refer to individuals of any gender, likely under the age of 18.  We have returned to the universal male figure, but now the non-infected figure is pink rather than gray.  Who knows what to make of this.

.
Fifteen new STD cases are reported every week from porn actors and actresses

Ah, then we bring porn into this and our gendered but sexless little figures bust out the hip-out, blowing hair, stiletto-heeled pose.  Suddenly the generic leaps from male imagery to female imagery, and a very sexualized female at that.  Because this is the image that porn brings to mind.

What else did you notice in these illustrations?  Any other hidden stereotypes or assumptions that I didn’t pull out?  (Hint: One statistic on race?  Really?)  Click to Enlarge

Happy Easter all!  Enjoy some of these goodies from the blogosphere along with your marshmallow chicks and chocolate bunnies.

Hip(pity) Hop(pity) Chocolate Bunnies for Kids [sociological images]

“Nibbles”: Sexualizing Easter Candy [sociological images]

I Can Haz Feminizm Fun Easter Links [bitch]

Cylon Easter Bunny Will Kill By Your Command [i09]

I’m struggling with what to think of Lipstick Jungle, NBC’s failed primetime soap chronicling the lives of three of New York’s wealthiest women.

The show was based on a book by Candace Bushnell, the same author behind the book that inspired Sex and the City. The show is different from SATC, however, if only in the fact that it was produced for network television, limiting some of the content and requiring constant breaks for commercials.

The three women in the show are Wendy Healy, President of Parador Pictures; Nico Reilly, editor-in-chief of Bonfire magazine; and Victory Ford, fashion designer. Each of the women struggle with running their own companies, maintaining their friendships, and dealing with the men in their lives.

Where Sex and the City had a more revolving cast of love interests, each of the women of Lipstick Jungle has more-or-less one man. Shane is Wendy’s musician husband who was essentially a house-husband until Wendy’s professional situation changed. Joe Bennett is an incredibly wealthy businessman that pursues and financially invests in Victory Ford. And Kirby Atwood is Nico’s younger, poorer, flame who, despite being featured prominently in every episode, only joins the main cast in season 2 (methinks they weren’t expecting him to stick around so long).

Only 20 episodes were produced, so it didn’t take me too long to make it through the entire series, but I don’t know that I ever fell in love with it. I never outright hated it either.

The thing that bugged me most continuously was the appearances of the various female characters. Just about every woman in the show wears way too much make-up. I think they could have saved a bundle if they had invested in making the women look human rather than coating their faces in many, very noticeable layers of make-up. Secondly, they all dress crazy nice, and in heels, at all times. Now I know I haven’t met a lot of women in the social strata these women occupy, but one thing I have noticed about pretty much all New Yorkers is a sense of practicality. Sure people try to look nice, but not at the expense of their health and sanity. There’s one scene where two of the women are moving a piece of furniture and talking about how difficult it is to do it in heels. If they knew they were going to be moving something, why wouldn’t they dress appropriately? Because they totally would. Or do they only own $1000 pumps?

That aside the whole show was like a roller coaster. My feelings towards different characters and stories evolved throughout the show, making it difficult for me to offer a generalized critique.

For example, I really wanted to like Nico. She’s strong, independent, and fiercely concerned with feminist ideals (often spouting them out like a mini-lesson) and yet she makes ridiculously inappropriate and unprofessional choices which lead her to be on the defensive end of a sexual harassment suit.

Similarly I actually did really like the character of Wendy. Her character often struggled with feeling like an inadequate mother because she worked so much, but for much of the show she lets her daughter treat her incredibly disrespectfully in a way that seemed uncharacteristic and just plain annoying.

Lastly Victory, who I think was my favorite character by show’s end, fell in love with a guy that essentially treats her like an object. The first time Joe meets Victory he rambles on his phone (in part about her physical appearance) while she just sits and listens. When he does eventually speak with her he informs her he can’t waste his time because it’s worth $5,000/minute. Apparently he’d rather spend $5,000 worth of time talking about Victory than actually spending time with her. Classy, dude.

Most of those complaints were more-or-less done away with by the end of the show: Nico’s personal and professional lives were made more distinct, Wendy starts actually parenting her daughter, and Victory gains more independence and Joe loses some of his arrogance, but even as that happened I never felt able to truly like the show.

I think the biggest thing is how false so much of the show feels. The stories revolving around Parador Pictures and Bonfire often reference real people, but more often they make them up. It’s necessary, but it makes some of the other things, like unprofessional behavior and the many happy coincidences and quick fixes, stick out more. These women live in a completely different world than any of us do.

The show is clearly aspirational. These women deal with exaggerated versions of problems some real women might actually encounter, but they do so in a world where nothing can ever go too wrong. They’ll still have perfect little apartments, and plenty of free time to go cavorting in Central Park and eat at fancy restaurants. And they’ll always have plenty of time to do their hair and make-up. While that can be fun to watch, I don’t know that it does anything to further the feminist cause, and I think NBC made the right choice in canceling it.

Yes when it comes to the world of Lipstick Jungle, it’s far less of a “jungle” than the real world I live in, but there certainly is more lipstick.

So it’s a day late and a little bit blurry, but I think you still get the picture (badum-cha!).  No one is safe from the sexualization of holiday costumes (not just for Halloween anymore!), not even the Irish Leprechaun folk.  Here’s hoping you had an excellent St. Patrick’s day, and weren’t reduced to wearing your nightie to the bar.  Or wearing sexy stockings if you’re not yet old enough to go to the bar.

And remember: Friends don’t let friends turn childhood icons into sexual objects.

Lady Gaga’s new video for Telephone has set of quite the firestorm online.  Gaga appeared (pantsless) on my radar about a year ago as I noticed her being ripped apart by women-targeted fashion and gossip blogs, and the occasional feminist blog.  Over time, things seemed to improve: she developed a reputation for being subversive, outspoken, gay-friendly, and arguably feminist.  Her latest video has put a lot of us back at square one, wondering if we were kidding ourselves, if she’s messing with our heads, if this was just a fluke, if she jumped the shark, or (!!!) if it’s just a (NSFW) music video.

It appears as though this is Gaga’s (first) attempt at a Michael Jackson-esque mini-movie music video.  Other videos of hers (Paparazzi, Bad Romance) have had semblances of story lines, occasional dialogue, and extended cuts, but this one is clearly a step beyond anything that she’s done before (or yet).  My attempts to make sense of these ten minutes after the jump.

The first three minutes are lost on me and left me confused, offended, and too pissed off to appreciate the next few minutes.  Had the video started when the song started, I might (might) have been able to stomach the rest of the prison scenes.  However, after the objectification, glamorizing of lesbian fetishism, and excessive girl-on-girl violence I was too pissed to rationalize sitting through the first dance routine, which could have just as well been the Pussycat Dolls (whom Gaga has written for in the past).   Feminist Gaga fans can try to justify this as another example of how she subversively turns what we usually find hot into something that leaves a nasty taste in our mouths and therefore makes a statement, but if any other artist (particularly any male artist) incorporated this much objectification and violence against women we would be outraged.  Is it any different just because it’s a woman, or because it’s specifically Gaga?

The dialogue after Gaga is bailed out by Beyonce is flat out lost on me.  Okay, so they’re going for kitsch – Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill! and Kill Bill influences are (blatantly, painfully, obviously) clear.  It was bizarre and random and poorly acted enough to force me to laugh out loud (“You know what they say.  After you kill a cow, you gotta make a burger.”).  Beyonce’s contribution succeeds only in making it clear that this song and this video are a horrible mismatch.  Maybe the song had a chance with a different video.  Maybe the video had a chance with a different song.  Somewhere, something got lost along the way.  And things went terribly, terribly wrong.  But, I found myself thinking, this is Gaga after all.  Maybe now that she has hooked us with her crappy stereotypical female-objectifying intro she’ll turn things on their heads and redeem herself.

And it is quite possible that that’s exactly what she did, although I still can’t be sure.  Either way, Gaga in the kitchen fixing a sandwich is…  Awesome?  What sets Gaga apart from other sexpot pop stars for me is that I just can’t imagine men being honestly turned on by her – not because she isn’t gorgeous (she is), but because she is so avant-garde, aggressive, and self-driven which takes that arousal and turns it into something atypical, uncomfortable, and threatening.  This isn’t Britney writhing on the floor in a nude suit in Toxic, this isn’t Xtina mudwrestling in assless chaps in Drrty, and this isn’t Jessica Simpson in her patriotic Daisy Dukes.  This is a strong, openly bisexual woman turning all those “Hillary make me a sammich” facebook groups into the ultimate sabotage, leaving misogynists and innocent bystanders alike lying dead in an all-American truckstop diner.  Is it empowering?  Is it man-hating?  Is it irresponsibly violent?  Is it just a music video?

Finally, I can’t discuss this video without talking about product placement.  The first time around product placement slapped me in the face shot by shot.  I needed 24 hours to recover from the video in general, and when I finally got around to watching it the second time I was able to ignore the majority of it, as we Americans have been conditioned to do.  When I did notice things like the pop-can hair-rollers and Miracle Whip and Wonder Bread I typically though “oh, how kitschy.”  The cell phone carrier placement was the only really irritating example, but Gaga isn’t the first to go there (Fallout Boy, I’m looking at you).  For a reason I can’t quite put my finger on, the moment that the product placement becomes poignant for me is immediately after all the diners are murdered and Gaga, Beyonce, and the backup dancers are decked out in patriotic ensembles.   And I ask myself what Beyonce is doing here in her Sgt. Pepper leotard: if she’s in on it, if she’s along for the ride, if she’s missing the joke (is there a joke?), if she’s just making a buck.

So what’s the verdict?  The jury’s still out.  There is a part of me that wants to find the deeper message in the video, that wants this to mean something, that wants to redeem Gaga.  There is another part of me that thinks she doesn’t deserve to get off the hook easy just because she’s Gaga, and there are a lot (lot) of problems with this video, from sexual objectification of women to feeding lesbian fetishism to excessive violence.  Part of me wants to minimize and ignore the video because it doesn’t fit with my schema of Gaga as an avant-garde performance artist and it doesn’t fit with the other videos that I’ve seen of her lately (ex. the living dress).  Part of me wants to keep watching it until I figure it out.

For more discussions on the Telephone video, check out Jukebox Heroines, Feministe, Femunity, Bitch, Bust, and Jezebel (x2).  You can also find a radio interview with Gaga discussing the video at amp97.  Regardless of opinion, you have to admit that Gaga’s got us talking, and that must say something about her influence and power in our culture at the moment.  Please leave your thoughts in the comments as well!

SciFi originals are one of my weaknesses, and although they’re a little embarrassing from time to time, they are so fun that I am not ashamed to share with you another of my newest (Netflix Instant)  obsessions: Primeval.  The show is essentially about a merry band of scientists who are investigating anomalies in the space-time continuum which have allowed dinosaurs to slip through into the modern world (along with the occasional future monster).  I know what you’re thinking – AWESOME!  Even better is the rock score that accompanies the action scenes.

Fantastic, right?  But what is it doing on a feminist review site?  SciFi’s attention to female characters is often a double edged sword: female characters are intelligent, competent, and typically hold their own with the manfolk – just in less clothing.  Primeval is no exception to this rule.  There are three primary female characters in the series: Abby, Claudia Brown/Jenny Lewis, and Helen Cutter.  Let’s break them down across the seasons:

Abby Maitland – Abby is pretty much the coolest battler of monsters since Buffy,* although she would rather care for and protect most of the animals she comes across.  She is an intelligent zoologist and lizard specialist, and has mad self-defense skills which often result in her coming to the aid of the dudes in the show, including that cutie, Conner, standing behind her (yes, Alice fans, that is Andrew-Lee Potts of Hatter swoon).  However, she spends an inexplicable amount of time in her panties and tank top in season 1 under the pretenses that she must keep her apartment uncomfortably hot in order to keep her reptiles healthy.  Okay, I can buy that much, but I don’t know any woman who answers the door or entertains coworkers in such a getup.  Actress Hannah Spearitt apparently didn’t either, and although Abby still spends much of her time in form fitting gear, there is much less flesh in the following two seasons.

*Incidentally, Conner, Abby’s are-they/aren’t-they sometimes infatuation confesses early in season 1 that he understands that people can have feelings for people they hardly know, citing his love for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Claudia Brown/Jenny Lewis – Claudia Brown is a government official working with the team.  She’s essentially doing damage control and trying to keep the dinosaur appearances out of the public eye (which seems impossible, but this is fiction after all).  She becomes the love interest of the team leader, Nick Cutter, just in time to be eliminated from history due to a change that occurs on the other side of an anomaly.  However, she is serendipitously reincarnated as PR manager Jenny Lewis in season 2.  Jenny takes longer to adjust to the Land of the Lost than Claudia did, refusing to believe what is going on and running about in short skirts, high heels, and all around unlikely dino-chasing attire.  However, as the team begins losing members and facing pressure from the government, Jenny shows her true colors stepping into leadership in the team and supporting the cause, even at the risk of her own career.

Helen Cutter – Helen is the primary antagonist of the series (badder if not bigger than the t-rex itself).  She was team leader Nick Cutter’s long lost wife at the beginning of the series, until it was revealed that Helen wasn’t dead – she had spent the last seven years traveling through anomalies conducting her own research.  She wants to control time and keep her findings to herself, even cutting out her own husband.  When she propositions him to come with her, he refuses, furious that she had abandoned him for so long.  She then reveals that she had been having an affair with her student and Nick’s right hand man Steven prior to her disappearance, and asks him to join her since Nick won’t.  Steven chooses his friend and his team over Helen, and from here on out her wrath knows no bounds.  She determines that humans are responsible for the destruction on the world and sets out on a mission to not only change the future, but eliminate the human race altogether by exterminating all pre-human primates.  Helen is happy to use her sex appeal to manipulate the men in her life (particularly Steven) and often wears Tomb Raider-esque gear that just doesn’t seem functional for a woman spending most of her time with dinosaurs.

Although each of these characters have their fair share of strengths and weaknesses, we are still seeing thin, attractive, white characters (male and female) throughout.  Not a lot of diversity when it comes to ability, sexual orientation, body shape, or ethnicity (unless the jump from British to Scottish counts).  They throw us a bone on this one in season 3 with Sarah Page, although that’s not to say she isn’t problematic, or that it’s a fully satisfying bone.

Sarah Page – Sarah joins the team at the beginning of season 3 as the team’s mythology specialist.  This is actually a cool and sensible addition to the team – many of the monsters in folklore and mythology seem to have a lot in common with dinosaurs and other creatures from earlier eras, in which case anomalies would provide a good explanation for cases like the Loch Ness Monster.  Sarah is recruited when an ancient Egyptian artifact opens an anomaly, releasing a wild crocodile that can walk on two legs.  Sarah is intelligent and helpful, but it seems like too great a coincidence that our exotic and mysterious new creature leads us to our exotic new teammate.  Although it is certainly not inconceivable that Sarah would specialize in mythology, it seems a little like “look, our diversity specialist brings diversity to the team!  Now we have diversity!”  But, it’s still probably better than nothing, and with lives on the line regularly due to the beasts and creatures involved, I’m sure there will be more opportunities to diversify the cast/team.

Despite it’s flaws, Primeval depicts women as equally intelligent, capable, adventuresome, and complex as their counterparts.  Not to mention that it’s just plain fun.  Also good news – it was recently renewed for two more seasons.  Season 4 begins shooting in March 2010.

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